SACW - 15 Dec 2017 | Afghanistan’s ‘American Idol’ / Nepal Elections / Bangladesh: Five years after deadly factory fire / Pakistan After Faizabad / India: Hindutva in Rajasthan; Kashmir / Mugabe in Context

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 15 Dec 2017 - No. 2965 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. Nepal: A New Democracy or a New Oligarchy? | David Seddon
2. Five years after deadly factory fire, Bangladesh’s garment workers are still vulnerable | Rebecca Prentice & Geert De Neve
3. Return of a spectre called blasphemy - Farzana Shaikh / What’s behind the Islamist protests in Pakistan? - Niloufer Siddiqui / After Faizabad – what is to be done ? Ammar Rashid
4. India: Uprising and Repression in Kashmir, 2016 - a citizens’ report
5. India: Migrant worker hacked to death in Rajsamand by Hindutva extremist - Joint statement by Civil society groups in Rajasthan
6. India: Glimpse Of Violence After Babri Masjid Demolition - ABVA Releases Digitized Version of Its Citizens’ Report Titled ’Victims’ Version’
7. India: Audio Recordings from 32nd Dr. Ramanadham Memorial Meeting - A Critique of UID Project & implications for Welfare, Surveillance, Privacy and Democratic Rights
8. Dividing Rivers and the Making of India and Pakistan | Rohan D’Souza
9. India: Rural Workers Demand Their Rights - Ranchi Sit-in Press Release of 13 December 2017
10. Recent on Communalism Watch:
 - Fear Nepal, Mr Modi, Pakistan is passé | Jawed Naqvi
 - Padmavati - Power of Historical fiction
 - India: Gujarat Assembly elections - BJP masterclass in religious polarisation ...
 - India: No country for non-Hindus? | Dushyant
 - India: When Even Memory of a Riot Dies [1992–93 Mumbai riots] | Jyoti Punwani
 - Babri Masjid and Its Aftermath Changed India Forever​ | Thomas Blom Hansen in The Wire
 - Rajasthan: inflammatory communal rant against "love jihad" while killing a man (NDTV report)
 - India: The demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992, has a past, distinct from the history of the dispute over it | Ajaz Ashraf
 - India: When Even the Supreme Court Let Down the Nation | Manoj Mitta
 - 25 blighted years: Constitution offers a better India than anything in our past. Make it an article of faith - Editorial, The Times of India
 - India: Gopal Gandhi on An assassination, a demolition and a portrait’s unveiling together spelt the polarisation of India 

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
11. An Election in Nepal, Decades in the Making | Brad Adams
12. Afghanistan’s ‘American Idol’ is the voice of a new generation — and Muslim clerics aren’t happy about it | Pamela Constable
13. India: It’s not about one Ram temple | Harsh Mander 
14. India: The Silence Of Bollywood | Bhaskar Chawla
15. India - Pakistan: Geopolitical Problem of Water War | H S Mangat 
16. India: Power and insecurity | Pratap Bhanu Mehta
17. India: The Babri Masjid Demolition Was Impossible Without RSS Foot-Soldiers Like These | Lalit Vachani
18. [From the Archives] Mugabe in Context | Mahmood Mamdani
19. Big Man Walking | Neal Ascherson
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1. NEPAL: A NEW DEMOCRACY OR A NEW OLIGARCHY? | David Seddon
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Recent elections in Nepal may further entrench divisions that have stalled democratic progress for a decade.
http://www.sacw.net/article13582.html

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2. FIVE YEARS AFTER DEADLY FACTORY FIRE, BANGLADESH’S GARMENT WORKERS ARE STILL VULNERABLE | Rebecca Prentice & Geert De Neve
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Exactly five years ago, in November 2012, a fire in the Tazreen Fashions factory in Bangladesh killed at least 112 workers. Probably caused by a short circuit on the ground floor of the building, the fire rapidly spread up the nine floors where garment workers were trapped due to narrow or blocked fire escapes. Many died inside the building or while seeking an escape through the windows.
Just five months later, the collapse of the Rana Plaza building killed 1,134 garment workers and injured  (...)
http://www.sacw.net/article13580.html

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3. RETURN OF A SPECTRE CALLED BLASPHEMY - FARZANA SHAIKH / WHAT’S BEHIND THE ISLAMIST PROTESTS IN PAKISTAN? - NILOUFER SIDDIQUI / AFTER FAIZABAD – WHAT IS TO BE DONE ? AMMAR RASHID
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The current turmoil in Pakistan is a rerun: The elected government has again failed to assert its authority against unconstitutional forces claiming to act in the name of Islam.
http://www.sacw.net/article13586.html

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4. INDIA: UPRISING AND REPRESSION IN KASHMIR, 2016 - A CITIZENS’ REPORT
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This report is based on a team visit to Kashmir in October 2016. The team consisted of V. Suresh, Kavita Srivastava, Ramdas Rao and Pragnya Joshi, all PUCL members. (Jean Drèze, also a PUCL member, joined for one day and contributed to the report). The report has been prepared by the team members in their individual capacity, for internal discussion within PUCL, and is not to be considered as an official report of the PUCL.
http://www.sacw.net/article13588.html

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5. INDIA: MIGRANT WORKER HACKED TO DEATH IN RAJSAMAND BY HINDUTVA EXTREMIST - JOINT STATEMENT BY CIVIL SOCIETY GROUPS IN RAJASTHAN
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All organisations of Rajasthan are shocked at the recent developments of what is happening in the State in terms of lynching of Muslims, the latest one being carried out on the 25th anniversary of Babri Masjid demolition, a murder in cold blood of Mohammed Afrazul a 48 year old migrant from West Bengal in Rajsamand, Rajasthan. There is only one demand that Vasundhara Raje, should resign now. She does not deserve to hold on to the post even for a day in the context of the absolute impunity provided to these killers and their supporters.
http://www.sacw.net/article13584.html

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6. India: Glimpse Of Violence After Babri Masjid Demolition - ABVA Releases Digitized Version of Its Citizens’ Report Titled ’Victims’ Version’
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Twenty five years after the Babri Masjid was demolished and violence unleashed on Muslim community in various parts of the country, AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan (ABVA) is releasing the digitized version of its 58-paged citizens’ report on the violence committed primarily against the Muslims in Seelampur, Delhi on 11 December, 1992.
http://www.sacw.net/article13583.html

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7. INDIA: AUDIO RECORDINGS FROM 32ND DR. RAMANADHAM MEMORIAL MEETING - A CRITIQUE OF UID PROJECT & IMPLICATIONS FOR WELFARE, SURVEILLANCE, PRIVACY AND DEMOCRATIC RIGHTS
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Development economist Reetika Khera and Legal scholar Usha Ramanathan speak about their criticism of the Adhaar UID project in India. PUDR organised this event in Delhi on 16 Sept 2017 to discuss the implications of the Unique Identification (UID) project for democratic rights.
http://www.sacw.net/article13585.html

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8. DIVIDING RIVERS AND THE MAKING OF INDIA AND PAKISTAN | Rohan D’Souza
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The Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) signed between Pakistan and India in 1960 continues to cut both ways. While several contemporary analysts have heralded the treaty for establishing protocols that somewhat evenhandedly enable the two basin stakeholders to harness the waters of the Indus system, others have bitterly criticized the very same arrangements for causing discord.
http://www.sacw.net/article13589.html

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9. INDIA: RURAL WORKERS DEMAND THEIR RIGHTS - RANCHI SIT-IN PRESS RELEASE OF 13 DECEMBER 2017
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Close to 1,000 NREGA workers and other rural labourers converged to Birsa Chowk [in Ranchi city] from 12 districts of Jharkhand today and sat on dharna to protest against repeated attacks on their right to food and right to work. The event was jointly organised by Right to Food Campaign Jharkhand and NREGA Watch.
http://www.sacw.net/article13587.html

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10. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
======================================== 
 - Fear Nepal, Mr Modi, Pakistan is passé | Jawed Naqvi
 - Padmavati-Power of Historical fiction
 - India: Gujarat Assembly elections - BJP masterclass in religious polarisation ...
 - India UP Chief Minister Adityanath Hails Karsevaks Who Demolished Babri Masjid in 1992
 - India: No country for non-Hindus? | Dushyant
 - Hindi Article- Attacks on Film Padmavati
 - India: 2017 Gujarat Assembly Elections Defy Easy Predictions - Radhika Ramaseshan
 - India: When Even Memory of a Riot Dies [1992–93 Mumbai riots] | Jyoti Punwani
 - Babri Masjid and Its Aftermath Changed India Forever​ | Thomas Blom Hansen in The Wire
 - Rajasthan: inflammatory communal rant against "love jihad" while killing a man (NDTV report)
 - India: The demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992, has a past, distinct from the history of the dispute over it | Ajaz Ashraf
 - India: When Even the Supreme Court Let Down the Nation | Manoj Mitta
 - India: Babri Masjid demolition - Denying the plurality of the Ramayana is a tool for fostering hate | Imran Ali Khan
 - 25 blighted years: Constitution offers a better India than anything in our past. Make it an article of faith - Editorial, The Times of India
 - India: Did BJP scupper negotiated settlement of Ayodhya dispute? Rasheed Kidwai
 - India: No longer ashamed - Ayodhya at 25 | Sankarshan Thakur
 - India: Gopal Gandhi on An assassination, a demolition and a portrait’s unveiling together spelt the polarisation of India 

 - > available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::

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11. AN ELECTION IN NEPAL, DECADES IN THE MAKING
by Brad Adams
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(Foreign Affairs, December 7, 2017)

An Election in Nepal, Decades in the Making
Can It Bring Stability When the Country Has Yet to Heal From the Wounds of War?

When Nepalis head to the polls today for the final round of parliamentary elections, the country’s first since 1999, it will be hailed as a historic step forward—the start of a new democratic era for a country that has suffered from years of violence, instability, and government ineptitude. That step is worth celebrating, since there is reason to hope that better governance will come. But hope for the future should not obscure the challenging legacies of the past. The wounds of Nepal’s long civil war are not yet healed, and if the new political leadership does not do more to deliver justice for the war’s victims, new friction is likely to emerge.

Addressing the legacies of Nepal’s past won’t be easy with the massive challenges that lie ahead: deep-seated political rivalries; ethnic, class, and regional divisions; and a lack of justice for victims of war crimes. But attempting to simply move forward won’t make them go away; it will ensure that they bring greater problems down the road.

Since the end of its decadelong civil war in 2006, the country’s main political parties have let Nepalis down, spending more time bickering about their roles in the country’s many interim governments than on addressing crippling poverty and strengthening broken institutions. The country lacks electricity, roads, and critical infrastructure such as hospitals and schools. Its police, courts, and civil service are often unable to function at even a basic level. After the April 2015 earthquake, which killed more than 9,000, injured tens of thousands, and destroyed much of the country’s already poor infrastructure, the government was so dysfunctional that the delivery of life-saving foreign aid was delayed and in some cases even refused.

The country’s biggest parties—the Nepali Congress, the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Maoist-Leninist, or UML), and the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Center)—share the blame for the failed governance. They have functioned in various coalitions since the end of the civil war, but have focused more on political feuding than on running the country. Decisions on key issues such as the development of hydropower, for example, have been delayed for years because the Maoists, which have close ties with Beijing, advocate for Chinese investment, while the Nepali Congress, with long historical ties to India, prefers that such projects remain domestic, citing concerns that a large Chinese role will lead to a loss of sovereignty.

This dispute is but one example of how Nepal grapples with the fierce competition between China, the regional superpower, and India, with whom it is united by shared history and culture. Beijing is also concerned with how Nepal deals with bordering Tibet—it has insisted that Kathmandu arrest Tibetan activists within its borders and has even stationed Chinese police on the Nepalese side of the Tibetan border to seize political refugees.

Another challenge for Nepal is addressing the grievances of its long-marginalized communities, which if left unaddressed could lead to renewed civil conflict. This problem is particularly acute in the Terai, a large region in the foothills of the Himalayas along the Indian border. Marginalized groups in the Terai, including Madhesis and Tharus, live in what are known as the plains. They have long been pushed out by the wealthier people of the hills, who dominate in the government, the army, and society at large. People in the Terai rightly complain of systematic discrimination and a lack of historical representation in national government and politics. This dynamic has created the biggest fault line in Nepali politics, as people in the Terai expect the new federal state to devolve real powers to the local government to address underrepresentation at the federal level and in the civil service, as well as to devote significant public resources to improve the region’s economy and its health and education systems.

Many in the Terai are still unhappy with the way the country has been carved up into seven new states, saying that they have been gerrymandered to ensure control by people from the hills. They also strongly resent the national government, especially after protests erupted in 2015 over provisions in the new constitution that many in the Terai claimed would perpetuate discrimination in favor of the elites in Kathmandu. The government responded to the strikes by ordering curfews and declaring certain areas off limits, causing intense economic hardship. Cross-border trade with India plummeted, leading to severe shortages of fuel and other essentials across the country. In the end, after Nepali authorities responded to the demonstration with force, 45 people were killed, including some police officers and children. As with most serious human rights abuses in Nepal, the security forces were not held accountable.

Such official impunity risks upending Nepal’s stability and political progress. But it is a problem that dates back to the civil war. During the brutal conflict, both sides committed atrocities and systematic abuses. The military and police were determined to crush the Maoist rebellion, which they considered a terrorist movement. The insurgents would target anyone who worked for or was seen as collaborating with the government. The United Nations, Human Rights Watch, brave local human rights groups, and others documented widespread extrajudicial killings, rapes, disappearances, abductions, and torture by both government soldiers and rebels. By its end, the conflict had claimed the lives of at least 13,000.

Despite repeated promises, the government has held almost no one on either side accountable. Most victims have yet to receive the reparations that they have been promised. One former Minister of Home Affairs, who at the time oversaw the police force, told me that he personally felt that members of the Maoists and Nepalese army should be held accountable for the atrocities they committed during the war. But, he lamented, “I have no power. The parties have all the power. I am just sitting here until the parties resolve their differences or one of them defeats the others. But even then, you should know that none of them care about justice for victims.”

That is because since the end of the war, the army and Maoists have worked jointly to block effective and impartial investigations and prosecutions of war crimes, seeking, instead, to give amnesty to leaders and combatants on each side. Nepalese Supreme Court rulings in 2014 and 2015 deemed amnesty illegal, but the government has ignored those judgements. In May 2016, in a cynical political move designed to protect the human rights abusers, then Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli of the UML signed an agreement with the other main political parties, agreeing to withdraw all wartime cases before the courts and to grant amnesty to alleged perpetrators, including political leaders, members of the security forces, and former Maoist combatants.

In May 2017, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein expressed concern about the state of the reconciliation process. In particular, he criticized the government’s neglect of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Commission on Investigation of Enforced Disappeared Persons, both of which were promised under the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2006 to address accountability for human rights violations and abuses that took place during the conflict. He noted, for example, that the commissions “suffer a considerable lack of resources, knowledge, and credibility.” The UN Human Rights Committee has also repeatedly held that Nepal was in breach of its human rights obligations. Most recently, in July 2017, it called upon the Nepali authorities to investigate and prosecute those responsible for rape in the case of Purna Maya, the pseudonym for a woman who was raped and tortured by Nepalese soldiers in 2004.

The new government should expect a strong and renewed push for justice from victim groups. There is a huge demand for it. Despite the time and cost of filing complaints, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has received nearly 60,000 complaints and the Disappeared Commission has received about 3,000. The first step requires the government to establish an independent office to prosecute crimes that are referred to it by the two justice commissions. Then it must repeal or amend its current law regarding amnesty in order to comply with the Supreme Court’s directives. The government should offer victims witness protection so that more will come forward; this will enable the police to identify perpetrators. It should also adopt legislation to prosecute cases of torture, enforced disappearances, and similar atrocities. Meanwhile, it should lift the statute of limitations on the investigation and prosecution of such crimes, including for rape and gender-based and sexual violence. Finally, the government should pay full reparations to all victims and their families. If it does not honor promises to victims, such as taking action against the many violent criminals still in the security forces, Nepal could return to conflict should its fractious politics break down again someday.

Elections give hope for a better future. But to take advantage of that promise, Nepal needs to account for the many wrongs of its past—or else that better future may never arrive.

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12. AFGHANISTAN’S ‘AMERICAN IDOL’ IS THE VOICE OF A NEW GENERATION — AND MUSLIM CLERICS AREN’T HAPPY ABOUT IT
by Pamela Constable
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(The Washington Post, December 1, 2017)
 
A contestant auditions in a Kabul TV studio for "Afghan Star," the most popular show in Afghanistan, which has been attacked by some clerics as un-Islamic. (Pamela Constable/The Washington Post)

KABUL — The TV studio was full of young men in their mid-20s, most wearing trim beards, stylish haircuts and jeans — the uniform of Afghanistan’s new generation. In a country ravaged by war and hardship, they are dreaming of stardom. 

Their path to fame is “Afghan Star,” a wildly popular prime-time show that has become the voice of their generation: Afghans born in an era of religious conflict and raised in a conservative Muslim society, but exposed to Western culture and eager to join the modern world.

“Music has always been in the blood of Afghans, but it was silenced for a long time,” said Massood Sanjer, program manager for Tolo Television and a founder of the show, in its 13th season. “ ‘Afghan Star’ has created a revolution in music at the same time the country has moved to democracy.”

But not everyone is thrilled by the show’s success or message — especially the exposure of young women as performers on national TV. To some conservative Muslim clergy and elders, “Afghan Star” represents a threat to the country’s religion and values, and is part of what they see as a broader cultural trend of abusing democratic freedoms to promote vulgarity.

In recent weeks, public protests against the show have been held in Kabul and Herat, a large city near the border with Iran. In Herat, several hundred Muslim clerics and others rallied to stop auditions from being held. After negotiations with the help of local officials, Sanjer said, the tryouts were conducted in a room at the airport. 

In Kabul, a group of clerics and Muslim scholars rallied recently at a large mosque and unsuccessfully petitioned the government to stop the show. Auditions were held as planned this week inside the Tolo TV studios, a block-long, tunnel-like compound that is heavily guarded to protect against terrorist attacks or other violence. 

“We respect the media and appreciate their work. It is a big achievement for our country,” said Abdul Basit Khalili, a religious scholar at the rally. “But some media run programs that are not sound, and one of them is ‘Afghan Star.’ It seduces the youth and pushes the country into a deeper crisis. We want programs that teach science and technology, not ones that deviate them from the right track.”

Similar protests have been held against other entertainment events, most recently a performance at a Kabul hotel in August by Afghan pop singer Aryana Saeed, who lives in London and is known for her revealing stage costumes. Religious protesters tried to block the hotel driveway, saying Saeed was promoting immorality, but fans in the audience called her a courageous pioneer. 

Such incidents are part of a cultural conflict that is playing out across this traditional Muslim country as it bursts into the 21st century after decades of war and isolation. Much of the tension surrounds gender mingling, which is forbidden in Afghan society. Parents try to prevent their daughters from talking to boys on cellphones; young men download European porn; and elopement is becoming more common.

Afghan television has become a lightning rod for attack, with denunciations of female newscasters wearing scarves that fail to cover all their hair, and of foreign soap operas and movies that depict women in alluring dress, performing sensual dances or entangled in illicit affairs. 

Tolo has been at the forefront of such controversy, and it has been a target for terrorist violence. In January 2016, a suicide bomber attacked a bus carrying Tolo employees, killing seven people and injuring 26. Last month, another TV station in Kabul, Shamshad, was targeted by a suicide bomber and gunmen, leaving one person dead. The Islamic State claimed both attacks.

One of the critics’ main complaints against “Afghan Star” is that it shows women performing on stage. But Sanjer said that most of the contestants sing traditional Afghan songs and that the show is popular with people of all ages. At night, he said, “entire families sit together and watch it, and they vote for their favorite contestant.”

During an evening of auditions in Kabul last month, one nervous young man sang a melodic Sufi poem in Afghan Dari, accompanied by musicians playing the harmonium and drums. Another young man performed a more confident, amusing song but was slightly off-key. A panel of judges commented after each act. 

Contestants watch auditions for "Afghan Star" as they wait their turns. The show is a symbol of emerging modern culture among Afghan youth. (Pamela Constable/The Washington Post)

Several contestants waiting their turn to go on stage said that they thought the criticism of ­“Afghan Star” was misplaced and that the country faces far more important issues of concern. All said that they were excited about performing and that they did not see how it conflicted with their faith.  

“We have a lot of serious problems, like bombings and kidnappings. If the mullahs were demonstrating against them, I’d be at the front of the line,” said Usman Jaheri, 24, a contestant from Herat. “I love music because it expresses emotions. This show should be at the bottom of their list.”

Only one woman was waiting to audition that evening — Sohaila Haidery, a 23-year-old fashion retailer who lives in London. She said she passed her preliminary audition online and was flown to Kabul for the elimination round. The station brings all finalists here and lodges them in guest rooms in the Tolo compound. 

“I have a passion for music,” said Haidery, who planned to perform traditional Afghan folk music. “I believe women should be able to do what they want, and I am here because I want to be a reason for others to come out and perform.”

A contestant auditions for the "Afghan Star" show on Tolo TV, a popular program that has come under fire from conservative Muslim clerics. (Pamela Constable/The Washington Post)

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13. INDIA: IT’S NOT ABOUT ONE RAM TEMPLE | Harsh Mander 
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(The Indian Express, December 7, 2017)

The campaign to demolish the Babri Masjid had a sub-text: Muslims should know their place, that of second-class citizens.

Written by Harsh Mander

If indeed the BJP government builds a Ram temple at the site of the demolished mosque, India’s secular Constitution will be shredded to tatters.

Twenty-five years ago, three domes of a medieval mosque in a UP town came crashing down. Throughout the 20th century, Hindu supremacists had fought a long battle to change the character of the nation. This was their first moment of decisive triumph. They have not looked back since then.

Their idea of India was that of a nation of and for the Hindus. People of disadvantaged castes and Hindu women would find a place in this nation but on subservient terms. Converts to other “Indian faiths” like Buddhism and Sikhism would also be accommodated but not converts to “foreign” religions — Islam and Christianity. Their adherents would either have to leave India or to live here as second-class citizens.

For long, the supporters of this alternate idea of India were a minority. They rarely fought the British rulers, preferring instead to combat the humanist pluralism of the Congress led by Mahatma Gandhi. Matters came to a head when the country was torn into two along religious lines, and a million people died in Hindu-Muslim riots on both sides of the border. Hindu nationalists were convinced that since Pakistan was a Muslim nation, India should be a Hindu nation.

But Mahatma Gandhi defended the idea of secular India with his life. Meanwhile, many supporters of the idea of Hindu India joined the Congress. Therefore, there were many contestations to the granularity of the uniquely Indian secularism when India’s Constitution was drafted. But leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru, B.R. Ambedkar and Maulana Azad — and the Constitution — upheld the right of every Indian to practise and propagate their faiths, even as the Indian state had no religion.

The RSS withdrew from public life in the first two decades of India’s freedom, sullied as it was with the taint of the ideology that led to Gandhi’s assassination. Its political front, the Jana Sangh, never attracted a majority of Hindu voters. However, sympathisers of Hindu nationalism penetrated the Congress, resulting in the party playing a partisan role during episodes of communal violence. The state was often tacitly complicit in the persecution of minorities, in denying them equal development chances, and in the passage of cow slaughter ban laws.

In the battle against what many believed to be the growing corruption and authoritarianism of Indira Gandhi’s government, the socialist leader Jayaprakash Narayan built a large anti-Congress front, into which he invited the Jana Sangh. This was the moment that the RSS was waiting for, to wash off the tarnish of Gandhi’s murder and acquire the political respectability to enter the mainstream of India’s political life.

In the 1980s, the RSS sought a new symbol to stir Hindu nationalist fervour. It found this in the movement to build a grand temple to Ram at the exact site where a mosque built by the Mughal emperor Babur stood. The sub-text of the campaign was to paint Indian Muslims as inheritors of a historical tradition of violence by Muslim kings. The inaccuracies of this version of history did not matter to the RSS. It also ignored the fact that most Muslims in India did not descend from the Muslim aristocracy, which came from other countries and made India their home. About nine out of 10 of them are converts from low-caste Hindus who were attracted to Islam’s message of equality.

As the movement for the Ram temple gathered support, the Congress floundered. It sought to appease both Hindu and Muslim communal sentiment by opening the locks of the Babri Masjid for Hindu worship and passing a law to bar divorced Muslim women from maintenance. BJP leader L. K. Advani travelled across the country in a chariot from Somnath Temple, which had been plundered by the Turk invader Ghazni in 1024. Anti-Muslim communal sentiments were roused to a fever pitch throughout this journey, peaking at levels unsurpassed since the Partition riots.

I was posted in a district in Madhya Pradesh at that time and watched India change before my eyes as Advani’s chariot cleaved the country, leaving a trail of blood everywhere it passed. The Union governments that followed, led by V.P. Singh with the support of the BJP, and then a Congress government led by P.V. Narasimha Rao, were weak-kneed when it came to discharging their constitutional duties. The day came when, cheered by senior leaders of the BJP and RSS, the mosque was demolished by a frenzied mob.

But this battle was never about one more temple for Ram. Many such temples exist in Ayodhya itself. In any case, few would object to the temple if it was built adjacent to the mosque. The demand was to build the temple at the very site where the mosque stood. This demand was a powerful symbol of the terms on which Muslims could be “allowed” by the Hindu majority to live in India. As minorities, the Muslims must know their place — that of second-class citizens — and if they resist, they must be violently taught their place in the country.

This Hindu supremacist triumphalism paved the way for the political rise of the BJP. What was unthinkable 50 years earlier came to pass when the BJP-led coalitions formed the government at the Centre in 1996 and 1998. In 2014, led by an even more openly hard-line Hindu nationalist leader, Narendra Modi, the party was voted to office with a comfortable parliamentary majority.

Since then, we have witnessed a surge of hate speeches by BJP leaders and an increase in attacks on Muslims, Dalits and Christians. It is open season for the BJP leaders to question the secular pledges of the Constitution. RSS head Mohan Bhagwat has declared that a Ram temple alone will be built at Ayodhya with the same stones that people had gathered from around the country a quarter century earlier. If indeed the BJP government builds a Ram temple at the site of the demolished mosque, India’s secular Constitution will be shredded to tatters.

Mander is a human rights worker and writer.

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14. INDIA: THE SILENCE OF BOLLYWOOD - INDUSTRY BIGWIGS HAVE NO STAKES IN FREEDOM OF SPEECH, THEY PUSH NO BOUNDARIES
by Bhaskar Chawla
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(The Indian Express - December 4, 2017)

What Bollywood creates, by and large, isn’t really cinema, and is definitely not art.

When a Rs 10-crore bounty on the heads of Deepika Padukone and Sanjay Leela Bhansali was announced, barely a word of protest was heard from their peers in Bollywood. A question being posed in the media, both traditional and social, is: Why?

The perceptible logic behind this is the oppressive environment in the country. Bollywood’s silence can even be attributed to the de facto power that so-called fringe organisations enjoy in India. One tends to excuse this silence by assuming that it is very risky for even celebrities to speak against organisations that openly threaten violence.

However, India is still a democracy, even if it doesn’t seem like one at the moment. It is not unreasonable to expect at least a few powerful Bollywood celebrities to condemn brazen death threats against their own. To understand why they haven’t done so, one must look at what exactly Bollywood is, and whether it really has a strong incentive to defend art and freedom of expression.

A portmanteau of “Bombay” and “Hollywood,” Bollywood is an apt name for the Hindi film industry, as it has always adhered to Hollywood’s philosophy of treating cinema as a business. India’s tryst with colonialism also left scars that manifest themselves through an innate desire to be more like the West, which has always reflected in Bollywood’s cinema.

However, Bollywood differs greatly from Hollywood in one crucial aspect. While the Los-Angeles based industry is controlled by large studios — corporations that do not function according to the wishes of a few individuals — Bollywood is almost entirely run by individuals who inherit their positions.

Hollywood’s capitalistic set-up ensured that there was enough competition for the industry to grow and evolve. It ensured that there was enough space for both art and commerce and that the line between the two wasn’t rigid. Artists could be stars and vice versa. To come from nowhere and rise to the top wasn’t just a possibility, but a regular occurrence. Talent mattered, art mattered.

Even in the dark days of the Cold War, when communists in Hollywood were persecuted by the government and blacklisted in their own industry, there was resistance from artists. Today, even relatively less well-known Hollywood personalities speak out against, and even publicly mock, their own president. They speak up for freedom of speech, and against inexcusable conduct, as in the case of Harvey Weinstein and many others accused of sexual assault and harassment.

Some of this definitely owes to the cultural milieu of the United States. But it’s also about how Hollywood is a film industry made up of actual artists who genuinely care about freedom of speech because their livelihood depends on it. It is also relatively more egalitarian, as even smaller celebrities are empowered to voice controversial opinions.

This contrasts sharply with the clan-based system of Bollywood. As power and wealth have always been concentrated in the hands of a few families, the industry has remained small and insular and guards its borders firmly. Those who control the industry care less about art than their pockets. With the reins of the industry being passed down along family lines, talent is obviously scarce.

What Bollywood creates, by and large, isn’t really cinema, and is definitely not art. While many good artists and craftspersons are involved in the making of films, the most powerful people in the industry, who get most of the credit for its product, are producers and, even more so, stars. Ironically, these very people are generally the least qualified to be working in cinema, and cannot be called artists by any stretch of imagination.

In such an environment, when other films or film personalities are under attack, like in the case of Padmavati, Padukone and Bhansali, industry bigwigs have no reason to speak out. They’re not artists, and art isn’t their livelihood. Film stars and producers don’t really have a stake in freedom of speech because they have never pushed any boundaries. Their primary commitment has always been to their pockets and their public image, not to cinema or art. Self-preservation matters more to them than preserving artists’ right to free speech.

Since the powerful have no incentive to defend art, and the artists aren’t really empowered enough to do so, it is completely natural that when a member of the ruling party offered a bounty to anyone who chopped off the heads of two of the industry’s own, all that was heard from Bollywood was deafening silence.
Chawla is a writer and a student of screenwriting

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15. INDIA - PAKISTAN: GEOPOLITICAL PROBLEM OF WATER WAR | H S Mangat 
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Indus Divided: India, Pakistan and the River Basin Dispute by Daniel Haines, Gurgaon: Viking and Penguin Random House, 2017; pp xi + 264, ₹599.

The title of the book under review, Indus Divided: India, Pakistan and the River Basin Dispute, is quite attractive for the scholars interested in the study of water resources and their utilisation within the Indus drainage basin, particularly when it has become a bone of contention due to the emergence of an artificial international boundary bifurcating it into two halves. The partition of India divided the Punjab province, known as the “land of five rivers” constituting theIndus basin.
http://www.epw.in/journal/2017/46/book-reviews/geopolitical-problem-water-war.html

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16. INDIA: POWER AND INSECURITY | Pratap Bhanu Mehta
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(The Indian Express, December 13, 2017)
http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/power-and-insecurity-prime-minister-narendra-modi-gujarat-elections-communal-innuendos-4979986/

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17. INDIA: THE BABRI MASJID DEMOLITION WAS IMPOSSIBLE WITHOUT RSS FOOT-SOLDIERS LIKE THESE | Lalit Vachani
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(The Wire, 8 December 2017)

In studying the Sangh parivar for my film, I encountered the disciplined manner in which the December 6, 1992 operation was planned.

Filming the boys in the RSS Nagpur branch in September 1992. Courtesy: Lalit Vachani

Twenty five years after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, The Wire, through a series of articles and videos, captures how the act of destruction changed India forever.

In September and October 1992, the Wide Eye Films team and I filmed The Boy in the Branch at the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) headquarters in Nagpur. Commissioned by SOUTH, a documentary and current affairs programme on UK’s Channel 4 television channel, the film looked at the process of indoctrination and recruitment of young Hindu boys by the RSS shakha system.

Prior to this, in December 1990, I had observed my first RSS shakha while working with journalist Lindsey Hilsum on a BBC radio documentary about the Ram janmabhoomi movement.

We visited the RSS headquarters at Jhandewalan in Delhi where we interviewed K.S. Sudarshan, who was sah sarkaryavah (joint general secretary) of the RSS at the time. Sudarshan organised an ekatrikaran (a gathering of shakhas in a show of RSS strength) for us to document, and seeing the two of us arrive with just a tape recorder and a few microphones he seemed visibly disappointed that there were no cameras or a TV crew.

Subsequently, I began my research on the shakha at the RSS headquarters in Delhi, secured permissions and a year later, found myself in Nagpur filming The Boy in the Branch.

K.S. Sudarshan at the RSS headquarters in Mahal Karyalaya, Nagpur. September 28, 1992. Courtesy: Lalit Vachani

Juxtaposing the activities of two different RSS shakhas or branches, my film documented the stories and the games, the rituals disciplining the body and the mind, and the social worlds and sense of community that the young RSS initiate inhabits. In the process, I hoped to reveal how the shakha regime enabled the RSS to revitalise, reproduce and replicate itself and spread its Hindutva ideology to newer areas.

The Boy in the Branch never had the Ram janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid issue as its central focus – yet, it was impossible to escape the mandir-masjid discourse that was at the core of RSS activity at the time in Nagpur.

When we talked to the young boys at the RSS shakha, six-year-olds would tell us about the need for Hindu unity, how the Muslims were not letting the Ram temple be built in Ayodhya and why the mosque should not be there.

At proudh (adult) RSS shakhas, swayamsevaks read and discussed journalist Arun Shourie’s writings on the Ram janambhoomi movement. Later, Shourie would make an appearance in Nagpur on October 5, 1992, as the chief guest for the RSS founders’ day.

In his speech as the chief guest, Shourie praised the RSS for highlighting symbols and transforming them into national issues, as they had done with the Ram Janmabhoomi Andolan:

    “We will have to achieve the aims of this movement.

    If you were to present the average Muslim in UP with the archaeological evidence and the historical proof of the temple’s destruction, the Muslim would realise that leaders like Shahabuddin are giving him false information.

    … They say that Islam will be destroyed by breaking a mosque… Prophet Mohammed had himself broken mosques. It is written in the Koran… Allah approved it in the Koran. Mosques would be shifted routinely…”

The third RSS sarsanghchalak Balasaheb Deoras (c) watches Arun Shourie speak as chief guest on RSS Founders Day, October 5, 1992.  Courtesy: Lalit Vachani

At the time, the RSS and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) were promoting the Ram Paduka Poojan Abhiyan (worship of Ram’s slippers) as a way of enlisting support for the Ram mandir. The padukas would be blessed at a central temple from where they would be taken to neighbouring districts and villages. The aim was to raise finances and enlist volunteers for karseva at the end of November and December. We documented the puja at the Durga mandir in Pratapnagar and filmed ‘our’ volunteers taking the padukas to different neighbourhoods in Nagpur.

I was aware of the sleight-of-hand by which the Kalyan Singh-led UP state government had acquired 2.77 acres of land around the Babri Masjid for purposes of ‘promoting tourism’. Subsequently, the area around the masjid had been built up to lay the foundation for a temple, even though the UP government claimed this was merely a platform for ‘performing bhajans‘.

There had also been assaults on the Babri Masjid on October 30 and November 2, 1990, and police firing on karsevaks by the Mulayam Singh administration in UP. While official accounts claimed that 16 karsevaks were killed, the RSS and VHP suggested that thousands had died, and in a highly emotive and communally charged atmosphere, volunteers carried the asthi kalash (urns with the ashes of the dead karsevaks) in a national campaign to accelerate the mobilisation of volunteers for the December 1992 karseva.

As we began editing the film in mid-October, I had an uneasy sense that something was going to happen at Ayodhya in the coming weeks. I expected there would be unrest, and perhaps some violence and clashes between security forces and the karsevaks. But I had also come to believe the Hindutva propaganda that all of the mobilisation of personnel and resources we were witnessing was towards a symbolic karseva – at best a political tool to pressure the courts to allow the building of the temple in the distant future.

When the Babri Masjid was demolished, we were near completion of our film.

As I watched the images of the demolition, I was stunned. How had this been achieved? How spontaneous was this movement? What was the RSS’s role in all of this? Had the RSS volunteers in my film any part to play in the mobilisation and the demolition?

Eight years later, in 2000, as the RSS-BJP reaped the benefits of the mosque demolition and moved from the opposition and the periphery of Indian politics to the centre, I returned to Nagpur to meet the boys in the branch – Sandeep, Sripad and Purushottam – to renew my engagement with the RSS and to talk with them about their role in the Ram janmabhoomi movement. This journey was to result in a sequel and my second film on the RSS – The Men in the Tree.

The 1992 film was made with official RSS permission and therefore we had to negotiate a system of constraints and an informal system of surveillance. There was always an appraisal of the questions we asked and the inquiries we made, along with pressure to project and promote certain RSS social service initiatives. The current sarsanghchalak of the RSS – Mohan Bhagwat – was All India Sharirik Pramukh in 1992 and was in constant touch with the RSS volunteers during our filming.

In contrast, my visit to Nagpur in 2000 was a personal one just to meet the characters from my earlier film and it happened largely under the radar of the RSS.

I traveled alone on my first two filming trips in August and October 2000, and was accompanied by cameraman Ranjan Palit on a third shoot in April 2001.

Cameraman Ranjan Palit films Sripad at the Telecomnagar shakha in October 1992. Courtesy: Lalit Vachani

When I met Sandeep, Sripad and Pururshottam, they were eager to tell me about what had happened in their lives in the intervening years. But most of all, they wanted to talk about the demolition of the Babri mosque, their contribution to the movement, and “how they made history”. There was absolutely no holding back and I was surprised at how outspoken they were.

Sripad described the Ram janmabhoomi movement planning as a “war strategy where some are sent to the front while others man the base camp”.

Both Sripad and Purushottam were at the front lines, while Sandeep was one of the RSS volunteers who was deputed to “stay behind and work on the foundation”.

They explained that there was detailed, meticulous organisation and deployment of personnel for months before the karsevaks were to arrive in Ayodhya. As Sandeep said, “there was micro-planning”. Groups of five karsevaks were formed and sent to Ayodhya under a leader. Purushottam was one of the group leaders. Sripad was one of ten RSS swayamsevaks from Nagpur especially selected to do ‘a job’, which he was proud to have accomplished.

Both Sripad and Purushottam climbed onto the dome of the Babri mosque and took turns with the other karsevaks breaking it. Sripad told me proudly that they were able to accomplish their mission of breaking the mosque in just five hours.

But what about the ordinary Ram bhakts unconnected to the RSS family of organisations who spontaneously ventured to Ayodhya to perform karseva out of a sense of personal devotion and enthusiasm?

Sandeep told us that there might have been a few volunteers who arrived in Ayodhya independently, but they would have had to report to RSS workers at the centre who made all local arrangements and effectively controlled the activity of such persons.

It was a movement – there was planning and discipline. It wasn’t possible for just anyone to land up there as a temple volunteer.

Sandeep, Sripad and Purushottam’s accounts suggested that there was nothing spontaneous about the Babri mosque mobilisation. It was a highly controlled, disciplined and secretive operation carried out with months of prior planning and premeditated calculation.

A persistent strain in Sangh parivar discourse about the Babri Masjid demolition is the spontaneous nature of the mobilisation, as an assemblage of angry, outraged Hindu victims congregates. This is invariably followed by a significant rupture as the mob gets unruly and breaks the rule of law in an outburst of emotional outrage and indisciplined excess.

Ten years later, we would be witness to a re-enactment of the same performance programme of ‘spontaneous mob combustion’ during the horrific Gujarat pogroms that would catapult Narendra Modi to the centre-stage of the Indian polity.

In studying RSS and Sangh parivar movements, there is an urgent need to look beyond the manifest and performative dimensions of an action that often involves the staging of events to create the illusion of spontaneity.

After painstakingly compiling its evidence over 17 years, the Liberhan Commission indicted the Sangh parivar in 2009:

    “Prognosis of the evidence leads to the conclusion that the mobilisation of the kar sevaks and their convergence to Ayodhya and Faiziabad was neither spontaneous or voluntary. It was well-orchestrated and planned. In conformity with the army-like discipline of the organisations like the RSS, the manner in which the arrangements and mobilisation was carried out does not corroborate the theory that the convergence or the mobilisation of such a large number of karsevaks was for symbolic karseva alone.” (pg 917)

In 2016, I stop by Nagpur to meet the RSS men from my two films. It has been 15 years since we met last. Today, both Sandeep and Sripad have successful careers and shakha-going children. Although they are not full-time activists, they continue to be involved peripherally in RSS work. They continue to feel great pride in their involvement in the Ram janmabhoomi movement and their ‘historic achievement’ of December 6, 1992 – the day the ‘dhancha’ – or ‘structure’ – was destroyed.

But when I meet them this time, there is an embellishment to the story:

“Lalitji, woh jo aapne gift diya tha, woh Bangali shirt to bahut kaam aaya! (The Bengali shirt that you gifted was very useful)”

‘Bangali shirt’?

Sripad reminds me that at the end of our shoot in October 1992 we had given gifts of ‘Bangali shirts’ (long, knee-length khadi kurtas) to the five main characters in the film.

Sripad tells me with a laugh:

    “Jab hum Babri dhanchey par aakraman karne ja rahe the, ek vichaar tha ki hamein ganvesh mein nahin jaana chahiye. Par hum to RSS knicker pahen rakhe the. Phir hamne uske upar woh Bangali shirt pahen liya… aur issi tarah dhanchey par kaam karte rahe, todte gaye kaam karte rahe, todte gaye…

    Lalitji, aapka tohfa toh bahut hi kaam aaya…

    (When we were going to attack the Babri mosque, one thought was that we must not go in our uniform. But we were wearing the RSS knickers, so we wore the Bangali shirt over that.. and that’s how we worked on the structure, we kept breaking it and working on it..

    Lalitji, your gift was very helpful indeed).”

Lalit Vachani makes documentary films and teaches at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS) at the University of Göttingen, Germany.

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18. [From the Archives] MUGABE IN CONTEXT | Mahmood Mamdani
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(London Review of Books, 4 December 2008)

It is hard to think of a figure more reviled in the West than Robert Mugabe. Liberal and conservative commentators alike portray him as a brutal dictator, and blame him for Zimbabwe’s descent into hyperinflation and poverty. The seizure of white-owned farms by his black supporters has been depicted as a form of thuggery, and as a cause of the country’s declining production, as if these lands were doomed by black ownership. Sanctions have been imposed, and opposition groups funded with the explicit aim of unseating him.

There is no denying Mugabe’s authoritarianism, or his willingness to tolerate and even encourage the violent behaviour of his supporters. His policies have helped lay waste the country’s economy, though sanctions have played no small part, while his refusal to share power with the country’s growing opposition movement, much of it based in the trade unions, has led to a bitter impasse. This view of Zimbabwe’s crisis can be found everywhere, from the Economist and the Financial Times to the Guardian and the New Statesman, but it gives us little sense of how Mugabe has managed to survive. For he has ruled not only by coercion but by consent, and his land reform measures, however harsh, have won him considerable popularity, not just in Zimbabwe but throughout southern Africa. In any case, the preoccupation with his character does little to illuminate the socio-historical issues involved.

Many have compared Mugabe to Idi Amin and the land expropriation in Zimbabwe to the Asian expulsion in Uganda. The comparison isn’t entirely off the mark. I was one of the 70,000 people of South Asian descent booted out by Idi Amin in 1972; I returned to Uganda in 1979. My abiding recollection of my first few months back is that no one I met opposed Amin’s expulsion of ‘Asians’. Most merely said: ‘It was bad the way he did it.’ The same is likely to be said of the land transfers in Zimbabwe.

What distinguishes Mugabe and Amin from other authoritarian rulers is not their demagoguery but the fact that they projected themselves as champions of mass justice and successfully rallied those to whom justice had been denied by the colonial system. Not surprisingly, the justice dispensed by these demagogues mirrored the racialised injustice of the colonial system. In 1979 I began to realise that whatever they made of Amin’s brutality, the Ugandan people experienced the Asian expulsion of 1972 – and not the formal handover in 1962 – as the dawn of true independence. The people of Zimbabwe are likely to remember 2000-3 as the end of the settler colonial era. Any assessment of contemporary Zimbabwe needs to begin with this sobering fact.

Though widespread grievance over the theft of land – a process begun in 1889 and completed in the 1950s – fuelled the guerrilla struggle against the regime of Ian Smith, whose Rhodesian Front opposed black majority rule, the matter was never properly addressed when Britain came back into the picture to effect a constitutional transition to independence under majority rule. Southern Rhodesia became Zimbabwe in 1980, but the social realities of the newly independent state remained embedded in an earlier historical period: some six thousand white farmers owned 15.5 million hectares of prime land, 39 per cent of the land in the country, while about 4.5 million farmers (a million households) in ‘communal areas’ were left to subsist on 16.4 million hectares of the most arid land, to which they’d been removed or confined by a century of colonial rule. In the middle were 8500 small-scale black farmers on about 1.4 million hectares of land.

This was not a sustainable arrangement in a country whose independence had been secured at the end of a long armed struggle supported by a land-hungry population. But the agreement that Britain drafted at Lancaster House in 1979 – and that the settlers eagerly backed – didn’t seem to take into account the kind of transition that would be necessary to secure a stable social order. Two of its provisions, one economic and the other political, reflected this short-termism: one called for land transfers on a ‘willing buyer, willing seller’ basis, with the British funding the scheme; the other reserved 20 per cent of seats in the House of Assembly for whites – 3 per cent of the population – giving the settler community an effective veto over any amendment to the Lancaster House terms. This was qualified majority rule at best. Both provisions had a time limit: 1990 for land transfers based on the market principle, and 1987 for the settler minority to set limits on majority rule. The deal sustained illusions among the settlers that what they had failed to achieve by UDI – Smith’s 1965 declaration of independence from the UK – and force of arms, they could now achieve through support from a government of ‘kith and kin’ (as Smith called it) in Britain. In reality, however, the agreement drew a line under settler privilege.

The inadequacy of the Lancaster House provisions for the decolonisation of land ensured that it remained the focus of politics in independent Zimbabwe. The course of land relations and land reform in Zimbabwe has over the years been meticulously documented by Sam Moyo, a professor who directs the African Institute of Agrarian Studies in Harare. Transfers during the first decade of independence were so minimal that they increased rather than appeased land hunger. The new regime in Harare, installed in 1980 and led by Mugabe and his party, Zanu, called for the purchase of eight million hectares to resettle 162,000 land-poor farming households from communal areas. But the ban on compulsory purchase drove up land prices and encouraged white farmers to sell only the worst land. As the decade drew to a close, only 58,000 families had been resettled on three million hectares of land. No more than 19 per cent of the land acquired between 1980 and 1992 was of prime agricultural value.

As the 1980s wore on, land transfers actually declined, dropping from 430,000 hectares per annum during the first half of the decade to 75,000 hectares during the second. The greater land hunger became, the more often invasions were mounted; in response, Mugabe created local ‘squatter control’ units in 1985, and they were soon evicting squatters in droves. At this point Zimbabwean law still defined a squatter in racial terms, as ‘an African whose house happens to be situated in an area which has been declared European or is set apart for some other reason’. By 1990, 40 per cent of the rural population was said to be landless or affected by the landlessness of dependent relations.

When the Lancaster House Agreement’s rules on land transfer expired in 1990, the pressure to take direct action was intensified by two very different developments: an IMF Structural Adjustment Programme and recurrent drought. Peasant production, which had been a meagre 8 per cent of marketed output at independence in 1980, and had shot up to 45 per cent by 1985, declined as a result of the programme. Trade-union analysts pointed out that employment growth also fell from 2.4 per cent in the late 1980s to 1.55 per cent in the period 1991-97. The percentage of households living in poverty throughout the country increased by 14 per cent in five years. There was now widespread squatting on all types of land, from communal areas to state land, commercial farms (mainly growing tobacco), resettlement areas and urban sites.

The demand for land reform came from two powerful groups at extreme ends of the social spectrum yet both firmly in Mugabe’s camp: the veterans of the liberation war and the small but growing number of indigenous businesses, hitherto the main beneficiaries of independence under majority rule. At the end of the liberation war in 1980, 20,000 guerrillas had been incorporated into the national army and other state organisations, and the rest – about 45,000 – had had to fend for themselves. They found it difficult to survive without land or a job, which is why land occupations began in the countryside soon after independence.

Mugabe and the Zanu leaders tended at first to dismiss complaints from veterans as expressions of resentment on the part of the rival liberation movement, Joshua Nkomo’s Zapu, which had been marginalised in 1980. But after Zanu and Zapu signed a unity accord in 1987, former fighters from both groups became involved in land agitation. Their most significant joint initiative was to form a welfare organisation, the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans Association (ZNLWVA) in 1988, which called for pensions to be paid and land redistributed. It soon gained a large membership drawn from most sections of Zimbabwean society and from the two ethnic groups – the Shona majority and the Ndebele – which had defined Zanu and Zapu respectively. Its members, about 200,000 of them, came from a variety of classes, employed and unemployed, urban and rural, with positions in different branches of the state and party and the private sector. Although their strength lay in the countryside, the war vets formed the only alliance that was both independent of Mugabe and Zanu-PF, and could claim to have national support, giving them a decisive advantage over the better organised but urban-based trade-union federation in the power struggle that would shortly tear the country apart.

War vets were among the first targets of Structural Adjustment, when its effects began to be felt in 1991. Entire departments and ministries that had been heavily staffed by ex-combatants were disbanded and the stage set for a series of high-profile confrontations between veterans and government. Mugabe accused the vets of being ‘armchair critics’ at the inaugural conference of the ZNLWVA in April 1992; they went on to organise street demonstrations, lock top government and party officials in their offices, interrupt Mugabe’s Heroes’ Day speech in 1997, intervene in court sessions and besiege the State House.

After the Lancaster House Agreement had expired, the government tried to occupy the middle ground by shifting from the ‘willing buyer, willing seller’ formula with a new law, the Land Acquisition Act of 1992, which gave the state powers of compulsory purchase, though landowners retained the right to challenge the price set and to receive prompt compensation. By the late 1990s, market-led land transfers had dwindled to a trickle. So had British contributions to the fund set up to pay landowners, with a mere £44 million paid out between 1980 and 1992, much less than anticipated at Lancaster House. When New Labour took over in 1997, Clare Short, the minister for international development, claimed that since neither she nor her colleagues came from the landed class in Britain – ‘my own origins are Irish and as you know we were colonised not colonisers,’ she wrote to the Zimbabwean minister of agriculture and land – they could not be held responsible for what Britain had done in colonial Rhodesia.

This effective default coincided with a rise inside Zimbabwe of demands for compulsory acquisition. Veterans led land occupations at Svosve and Goromonzi in 1997, clashing with Mugabe and Zanu-PF. They were joined by local chiefs and party leaders, peasants and spirit mediums (who had played a key role in the liberation war against Ian Smith). The next year, a wave of co-ordinated land occupations swept across the country, with veterans receiving critical support from the Indigenous Business Development Centre (IBDC), an affirmative action lobby set up in 1988 by members of the new black bourgeoisie. From now on, two very different elements huddled under the war vets’ banner: the landless victims of settler colonialism and the elite beneficiaries of the end of settler rule.

It was largely for his own purposes, but also as a response to pressure from squatters, occupiers and their local leaders, as well as from sections of the new black elite, that in 1999 Mugabe decided to revise the constitution drafted at Lancaster House. Two major changes were envisaged: one would allow him to stay in power for two more terms and would ensure immunity from prosecution for political and military leaders accused of committing crimes while in office; the other would empower the government to seize land from white farmers without compensation, which was held to be the responsibility of Britain. The proposals were put to a referendum in February 2000 and defeated: 45.3 per cent of voters were in favour. But only a little more than 20 per cent of the electorate had cast a vote. The urban centres of Harare and Bulawayo were three to one against adoption; voting in the countryside was marked by large-scale abstentions. Post-colonial Zimbabwe had reached a turning point.

Very early on, the colonial bureaucracy had translated the ethnic mosaic of the country into an administrative map in such a way as to allow minimum co-operation and maximum competition between different ethnic groups and areas, ensuring among other things that labour for mining, manufacture and service was not recruited from areas where peasants were needed on large farms or plantations. These areas, as it happened, were mainly Shona and so, unsurprisingly, when the trade-union movement developed in Rhodesia, its leaders were mostly Ndebele, and had few links with the Shona leadership of the peasant-based liberation movement (Mugabe belongs to the Shona majority). I remember listening to the minister of labour in Harare in 1981 complain that workers had failed to support the nationalist movement. When I suggested that it might be useful to turn the proposition around and ask why the nationalist movement had failed to organise support among workers, there was silence.

The Shona-Ndebele divide so conspicuous in the two guerrilla movements produced great tension after independence between the mainly Shona government and the mainly Ndebele labour movement, with Mugabe’s ferocious repression in Ndebele areas in 1986 remaining the bloodiest phase in post-independence Zimbabwean history. The slaughter in Matabeleland was followed by a ‘reconciliation’ that paved the way for a unity government in 1987, but Zanu-PF leaders thereafter suspected all protest – from whatever source – of concealing an Ndebele agenda.

The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, formed in 1981 with the blessing of the government, had by the end of the decade distanced itself from its Zanu patrons, purged internal corruption and elected an independent leadership. In the 1990s it spearheaded the national agitation against Structural Adjustment and the one-party state that acquiesced in it. Yet its organisation in the countryside was confined to workers on commercial farms. The ZCTU had at first been an umbrella body for private sector unions. The spectacular growth of ZCTU, its organisation of public sector workers, has been written about by two Zimbabwean social historians, Brian Raftapolous and Ian Phimister. After independence, workers in the rapidly Africanised public sector had retained close links to the government. But this began to change when the Structural Adjustment Programme led to public sector job losses and many African workers – especially veterans – were dismissed. When government workers came out on strike in 1996, the ZCTU was able to establish a base in the public sector. A general strike in 1997 and mass stay-aways the following year set the trade unions against the government. Civil servants – including teachers and health workers – who had declared allegiance to the ruling party and the state now began to affiliate to the ZCTU. In 1998, it organised a National Constituent Assembly, with the participation of civic, NGO and church groups.

By the time Mugabe put forward amendments to the Lancaster House constitution, an impressive alliance of forces – not only trade unions, churches, civic and NGO groups, but white farmers and Western governments – was arrayed for battle. The Movement for Democratic Change was formed a few months before the 2000 referendum, to campaign for a ‘no’ vote. The coalition was diverse, containing, on the one hand, public sector workers trying to roll back the tide of Structural Adjustment; on the other, uncompromising free-marketeers such as Eddie Cross, the MDC secretary of economic affairs and a senior figure in the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries, who was intent on privatising almost everything, including education.

The veterans reacted to the defeat of the constitutional proposals by launching land occupations in Masvingo province. This prompted a split in the ruling party. With Mugabe out of the country, the acting president, Joseph Msika, told the police to torch the new squatter shacks. This was consistent with Zanu-PF policy: in the early days, Mugabe had been praised as a ‘conciliator’ by the international community for ensuring the security and property of those whites who remained in Zimbabwe, and evicting black squatters. Two decades later the position had changed: the support of the whites was no longer so important to Mugabe, and he was under enormous pressure from the veterans. With much to gain from casting his lot in with the rural insurgency, he returned from his trip and announced that there would be no government evictions. As land occupations spread to every province – 800 farms were occupied at the height of the protests – the split in the government and party hierarchy deepened. Inevitable tension between the executive and the judiciary undermined the rule of law; the executive sacked a number of judges, replacing them with others more sympathetic to land reform, and enacted pro-squatter legislation.

‘Fast-track’ land reform was now underway. The types of land that would be acquired compulsorily were specified by the government: unused or underutilised land, land owned by absentees or people with several farms; land above a certain area (determined by region) and land contiguous with communal areas. The white owners of around 2900 commercial farms listed for compulsory acquisition and redistribution were given 90 days to move out. Government directives specified that ‘owners of farms marked for redistribution will be compensated for improvements made on the land, but not for the land itself, as this land was stolen from the original owners in the colonial era.’

The closing date for ‘fast-track’ land acquisition – August 2002 – came and went, but occupations continued unimpeded until mid-2003, and on a diminished scale for a year or so after that. Chiefs fought for land for their constituents and for themselves, and so did their counterparts in the state bureaucracy and the private sector. In Matabeleland, a minority of pro-MDC chiefs were sceptical of land reform, but later submitted claims. The black elite made a brazen land grab in direct contravention of the ‘one person, one farm’ policy, provoking a hue and cry in society at large and within the ruling party; the government set up a presidential commission to determine the facts. Crucially, in 2005 the government passed an amendment declaring all agricultural land to be state land. Land was seized from nearly 4000 white farmers and redistributed: 72,000 large farmers received 2.19 million hectares and 127,000 smallholders received 4.23 million hectares.

What land reform has meant or may come to mean for Zimbabwe’s economy is still hotly disputed. Recently there have been signs that scholarly opinion is shifting. A study by Ian Scoones of Sussex University’s Institute of Development Studies – in collaboration with the Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape – challenges some of the conventional wisdom in media and academic circles within and beyond Zimbabwe. The problem with this wisdom is that certain highly destructive aspects of reform – coercion; corruption and incompetence; cronyism in the redistribution of land; lack of funds and an absence of agricultural activity – have come to stand for the whole process. In particular, Scoones identifies five myths: that land reform has been a total failure; that its beneficiaries have been largely political cronies; that there is no new investment in the new settlements; that agriculture is in ruins; and that the rural economy has collapsed. Researchers at PLAAS have been quick to point out that over the past eight years small-scale farmers ‘have been particularly robust in weathering Zimbabwe’s political and economic turmoil, as well as drought’. Ben Cousins, the director of PLAAS and one of the most astute South African analysts of agrarian change – who had previously argued that the land reform would destroy agricultural production – now says that the future of Zimbabwe lies in providing small farmers with subsidies so that food security can be achieved. According to researchers at the African Institute for Agrarian Studies in Harare, new farms need to receive subsidised maize seed and fertiliser for a few seasons before achieving full production. Some might give up during this period, but not many – partly because the land tenure system doesn’t allow land sales; only land permits or leases can be acquired.

Zimbabwe has seen the greatest transfer of property in southern Africa since colonisation and it has all happened extremely rapidly. Eighty per cent of the 4000 white farmers were expropriated; most of them stayed in Zimbabwe. Redistribution revolutionised property-holding, adding more than a hundred thousand small owners to the base of the property pyramid. In social and economic – if not political – terms, this was a democratic revolution. But there was a heavy price to pay.

The first casualty was the rule of law, already tenuous by 1986. When international donors pressured the regime in the run-up to the parliamentary elections of 2000 by suspending aid and loans – a boycott favoured by the MDC and the unions – the government simply fixed the result in its favour. In the violence that followed, more than a hundred people died, including six white farmers and 11 black farm labourers. Some of the violence was government-sponsored and most of it state-sanctioned. The judiciary was reshaped, local institutions in rural areas narrowly politicised, and laws were passed which granted local agencies the powers necessary to crush opponents of land reform. Denouncing his adversaries in the trade unions and NGOs as servants of the old white ruling class, Mugabe authorised the militias and state security agencies to hound down opposition, as repression and reform went hand in hand. In 2003, the leading independent newspaper, the Daily News, was shut down. While jubilant government supporters applauded the sweep of the revolution in agrarian areas, the opposition denounced the repression that accompanied it. Land reform had been ruthless, but in 2004, the violence began to abate. There was noticeably less violence surrounding the parliamentary elections of 2005.

In retrospect, it is striking how little turmoil accompanied this massive social change. The explanation lies in the participation of key rural figures in ad hoc but officially sanctioned land committees. When first introduced in 1996, these committees had mixed fortunes, some not functioning at all, others becoming instruments of this or that group of squatters. But a radical change occurred in 2000, when the committees were expanded to include centrally appointed security officials, ruling party representatives and local government personnel, as well as local veterans and traditional leaders. Charged with implementing fast-track land reform, these committees sidelined the old local administrative structures. They also had a national impact, since they reported to similarly constituted provincial committees, which in turn reported to the Ministry of Local Government. It was the infusion of veterans that gave the new semi-bureaucratic committees the edge over their wholly bureaucratic counterparts. Local committees usually comprised between 15 and 30 members. The veterans formed ‘base camps’ represented by ‘committees of seven’ which took the lead in identifying land for acquisition as well as finding prospective beneficiaries (mostly from veterans’ waiting lists and rosters in former ‘communal areas’). They also judged disputes, punished petty criminals and allocated farm equipment, seeds and so on. In a word, the committees co-ordinated everything, thus constituting new centres of power.

The second casualty of the reform was farm labourers. There were about 300,000 in all, around half of them part-time. Fast-track reform resulted in a massive displacement of these workers, who were traditionally drawn from migrant labour. Nearly a fifth came from neighbouring states and were regarded with suspicion by peasants in communal areas; even if they’d been born locally, they were often seen as foreigners and denied citizenship rights. Migrants and women (many employed as casual labour) were the weakest links in the rural mobilisation for land reform. Many were thought to have been encouraged by landowners to vote against the government’s constitutional proposals, and the anti-land-reform lobby certainly tried to organise farm workers, ostensibly to protect their jobs, but really to protect the white ownership of farms. When the workers rallied by the MDC, civil society activists and white farmers clashed with veteran-led occupiers, they came off badly. Occupiers held meetings to explain to workers what was at stake and eventually came themselves to distinguish between white farms, not only on the basis of size, proximity to communal areas, and the amount of unused land, but also on the basis of the farmer’s attitudes, particularly on race and towards his workers, and whether he had participated in the counter-insurgency during the independence struggle.

Some of the 150,000 full-time farm workers threw in their lot with the occupiers, though usually not on the farms where they had been employed. About 90,000 kept their jobs on sugar and tea estates, and on new or already established tobacco and horticulture farms. About 8000 were granted land, but most were denied it on the grounds that they or their elders had come from foreign countries, though some were given citizenship. Many went from steady employment to contract or casual work; many others were forced to supplement their meagre incomes through fishing, petty trading, theft and prostitution.

The best publicised casualties of the land reform movement were the urban poor who hoped to benefit from extending land invasions to urban areas. The veterans spearheaded occupations of urban residential land in 2000-1. Housing co-operatives and other associations followed their lead and set up ‘illegal’ residential or business sites. But the state feared that it would lose control over towns to the MDC if the land reform movement was allowed to spread and met these occupations with stiff repression, including Operation Restore Order/ Murambatsvina, a surprise military-style intervention in 2005 in which tens of thousands of families were evicted. Not surprisingly, those who opposed land reform in rural areas were the strongest critics of government efforts to stifle occupations in urban areas.

The final casualty was food production: Zimbabwe, once a food surplus country, is today deficient in both foreign exchange and food. In 2002-3, half the population depended on food aid: this was a drought year and the figures improved in 2004-5. The UN now estimates that nearly half the country’s 13.3 million inhabitants will once again be dependent on food aid in 2009, after another drought year. A million of these are poor, urban residents who can’t afford imported food. The rest are peasants, most of them hit by drought. Climate change is clearly a factor here, its role most obvious in marginal land: the communal areas worked by millions of small farmers. A 2002 World Food Programme study noted that there had been three droughts in Zimbabwe since 1982 and that the 2002 drought, which also affected several neighbouring countries in Southern Africa, was the worst in 20 years. The WFP estimated that 12.8 million people in the region would require assistance as a result of that drought and that in Zimbabwe alone, overall production would decline by 25 per cent, with cereal production down 57 per cent and maize, the staple in the diet of ordinary Zimbabweans, down by a devastating two-thirds.

To separate out the effect of drought and that of reform – and thus to understand how land reform has hit production – one needs first to distinguish between three groups of agricultural producer: local white farmers, who were the target of the land reform; peasants with farms in communal areas; and foreign corporations, whose large farms (except for small tracts of unused land) remain intact. Harry Oppenheimer, for example, lost most of his private land, but his firm, Anglo American, kept its sugar estates, which it then sold to Tongaat Hulett, a South African firm with 15,000 hectares in Zimbabwe. In a nutshell, white commercial farmers focused on export crops, whereas communal farmers were the major source of food security. The production of tobacco, hitherto the main source of foreign exchange, is concentrated in large-scale commercial farms; it has seen the most severe decline, almost entirely as a result of land reform. Maize and cotton are peasant crops and have not really been directly affected by land reform, but have suffered badly from prolonged drought – maize production was down by 90 per cent between 2000 and 2003. In contrast, the production of crops – sugar, tea, coffee – grown mainly by the large corporate plantations has remained steady.

Besides drought and reform, there is a third cause of declining production: the targeted donor boycott. Zimbabwe has been the target of Western sanctions twice in the last 50 years: once after UDI in 1965 (very ‘soft’ sanctions, which did not stop the country becoming the second most industrialised in sub-Saharan Africa by the mid-1970s) and again after Zimbabwe’s entry into the Congo war in August 1998. Zimbabwe’s involvement in the war was not well received in the West. Participants in the donor conference for Zimbabwe that year were decidedly lukewarm about committing funds. Britain announced a review of arms sales to Zimbabwe and, after the conference, again disclaimed any responsibility for funding land reform. The following year the IMF suspended lending to Zimbabwe, while the US and the UK decided to fund the labour movement, led by the ZCTU, first to oppose constitutional change and then to launch the MDC as a full-fledged opposition party. Its enemies have claimed that, by the late 1990s, the ZCTU was dependent on foreign sources for two-thirds of its income. Once ‘fast-track’ land reform began in 2000, the Western donor community shut the door on Zimbabwe.

The sanctions regime, led by the US and Britain, was elaborate, tested during the first Iraq war and then against Iran. In 2001 Jesse Helms, previously a supporter of UDI, sponsored the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery bill (another sponsor was Hillary Clinton) and it became law in December that year. Part of the act was a formal injunction on US officials in international financial institutions to ‘oppose and vote against any extension by the respective institution of any loan, credit or guarantee to the government of Zimbabwe’. In autumn 2001 the IMF had declared Zimbabwe ‘ineligible to use the general resources of the IMF’ and removed it from the list of countries that could borrow from its Poverty and Growth Facility. In 2002, it issued a formal declaration of non-co-operation with Zimbabwe and suspended all technical assistance. The US legislation also authorised Bush to fund ‘an independent and free press and electronic media in Zimbabwe’ and to allocate six million dollars for ‘democracy and governance programmes’. This was fighting talk, Cold War vintage. The normative language of sanctions focuses less on the issues that prompted them in the first place – Zimbabwe’s intervention in the Congo war and the introduction of fast-track reform – than on the need for ‘good governance’. In citing the absence of this as a reason for its imposition of sanctions in 2002, the EU violated Article 98 of the Cotonou Agreement, which requires that disputes between African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries and the EU be resolved by the joint EU-ACP Council of Ministers.

Clearly, the old paradigm of sanctions – isolation – has given way to a more interventionist model, which combines punishment of the regime with subsidies for the opposition. So-called ‘smart’ sanctions are intended to target the government and its key supporters. In 2002, the US, Britain and the EU began freezing the assets of state officials and imposing travel bans. Only four days after the EU imposed sanctions, the US expanded the list of targeted individuals to include prominent businessmen and even church leaders, such as the pro-regime Anglican bishop, Nolbert Kunonga.

Nonetheless, sanctions mainly affect the lives of ordinary people. Gideon Gono, governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, wrote recently that the country’s foreign exchange reserves had declined from $830 million, representing three months’ import cover in 1996, to less than one month’s cover by 2006. Total foreign payments arrears increased from $109 million at the end of 1999 to $2.5 billion at the end of 2006. Foreign direct investment had shrunk from $444.3 million in 1998 to $50 million in 2006. Donor support, even to sectors vital to popular welfare, such as health and education, was at an all-time low. Danish support for the health sector, $29.7 million in 2000, was suspended. Swedish support for education was also suspended. The US issued travel warnings, blocked food aid during the heyday of land reform and opposed Zimbabwe’s application to the Global Fund to Fight Aids – the country has the fourth highest infection rate in the world. Though it was renewed in 2005, the Zimbabwe grant is meagre. Agriculture has been affected too: scale matters, but no one disputes that subsidies are vital for agriculture to be sustainable, and sanctions have made it more difficult to put a proper credit regime in place.

Despite the EU’s imposition of sanctions in the run-up to the parliamentary elections of 2002, Mugabe polled 56.2 per cent of the vote against Morgan Tsvangirai of the MDC’s 42 per cent. There were widespread allegations of Zanu-PF violence and last-minute gerrymandering, with polling stations in urban areas – Tsvangirai’s electoral base – closing early and extra stations being set up in rural areas, where Mugabe’s support was assured. Nonetheless, it was clear that support for Zanu-PF was higher than in the pre-fast-track elections of 2000. Bush and Blair refused to recognise the outcome, but Namibia, Nigeria and the South African observer team, which had monitored the elections, concluded that the result was legitimate. Whatever the truth of the matter, the Africans could do little in the face of mounting Western pressure, from Britain especially: a three-member panel of Commonwealth countries – Australia, Nigeria and South Africa – was convened to consider the question of Zimbabwe. There were reports of intense pressure from Tony Blair on Thabo Mbeki. The panel suspended Zimbabwe from the Commonwealth for a year. Zimbabwe withdrew from the organisation.

The experience of land reform in Zimbabwe has set alarm bells ringing in South Africa and all the former settler colonies where land shortage is still an issue. In South Africa especially, the upheaval and bitterness felt in Zimbabwe seems to suggest that the ‘Malaysian path’ to peaceful redistribution and development is not inevitable. An anxious South Africa and less powerful members of the Southern Africa Development Community tend to feel that sanctions, along with other destabilising policies pursued by the West against Zimbabwe, have only made matters worse. SADC states have long tried to reconcile the need to resist Western influence with the fact that they serve as a bridge between Africa and the wealthy Western economies, but South Africa’s non-confrontational policy vis-à-vis Mugabe – which Mbeki pursued despite mounting criticism from the ANC and the unions in South Africa – along with its provision of fuel and electricity to its northern neighbour, set it at odds with Western governments. South Africa and the SADC states describe their approach as one of ‘non-interference’, ‘stabilisation’ and ‘quiet diplomacy’, but the West sees it as a deliberate effort to undermine sanctions, and critics in South Africa – most recently Mandela – have found the Mbeki line much too conciliatory.

In 2007, SADC called for an end to sanctions against Zimbabwe and international support for a post-land-reform recovery programme, but earlier this year Western countries brought their influence to bear on key SADC members – Botswana and Zambia – to split the organisation. Ian Khama, the president of Botswana, went so far as to announce publicly that he would not recognise the results of the 2008 elections. The pressure on SADC came not only from Western countries, but from trade-union movements in the region, in particular Cosatu of South Africa, which has strong links with the ZCTU. Here is another striking aspect of the current Zimbabwe crisis: it is not just Western and pro-Western governments that have joined the sanctions regime, but many activists and intellectuals, for the most part progressives, have aligned themselves with distant or long-standing enemies in an effort to dislodge an authoritarian government clinging to power on the basis of historic grievances about the colonial theft of land. Symbolic of this was the refusal by Cosatu-affiliated unions to unload a cargo of Chinese arms destined for Zimbabwe when the An Yue Jiang sailed into Durban in April.

The arguments, which are not new, turn on questions of nationalism and democracy, pitting champions of national sovereignty and state nationalism against advocates of civil society and internationalism. One group accuses the other of authoritarianism and self-righteous intolerance; it replies that its critics are wallowing in donor largesse. Nationalists speak of a historical racism that has merely migrated from government to civil society with the end of colonial rule, while civil society activists speak of an ‘exhausted’ nationalism, determined to feed on old injustices. This fierce disagreement is symptomatic of the deep divide between urban and rural Zimbabwe. Nationalists have been able to withstand civil society-based opposition, reinforced by Western sanctions, because they are supported by large numbers of peasants. The tussle between these groups has even greater poignancy in former settler colonies than it had a generation earlier in former colonies north of the Limpopo, for the simple reason that the central legacy of settler colonialism – the land question – remained unresolved and explosive after independence. Southern African leaders have tried, with some success, to put out the fires in Zimbabwe before they spread beyond its borders. It is worth noting that the agreement between Zanu-PF and the MDC signed in September and brokered by Mbeki accepts land redistribution as irreversible and registers disagreement only over how it was carried out; it also holds Britain responsible for compensating white farmers. In the wake of Mbeki’s resignation as president of South Africa it is vital that this agreement remains in place. Few doubt that this is the hour of reckoning for former settler colonies. The increasing number of land invasions in KwaZulu Natal, and the violence that has accompanied them, indicate that the clock is ticking.
Bibliographical Note

Moyo, Sam & Paris Yeros (2005b), ‘Land Occupations and Land Reform in Zimbabwe: Towards the National Democratic Revolution’, in Reclaiming the Land, edited by Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, London: Zed Books; Moyo, Sam and Paris Yeros (2007), ‘The Radicalised State: Zimbabwe’s Interrupted Revolution’, Review of African Political Economy, 111; Moyo, Sam & Paris Yeros (forthcoming), ‘After Zimbabwe: State, Nation and Region in Africa’, in S. Moyo, P. Yeros & J. Vadell (eds.), The National Question Today: The Crisis of Sovereignty in Africa, Asia and Latin America; Chambati, W. and S. Moyo, Fast Track Land Reform and the Political Economy of Farm Workers in Zimbabwe, Harare: AIAS Monograph Series, forthcoming For a critical point of view, see, Lloyd Sachikonye, “The Land is the Economy: Revisiting the Land Question,” African Security Review 14(3), 2005; and, Raftopoulos, Brian & Ian Phimister (2004), ‘Zimbabwe Now: The Political Economy of Crisis and Coercion’, Historical Materialism, 12: 4; Patrick Bond and Masimba Manyanya, Zimbabwe's Plunge – Exhausted Nationalism, Neoliberalism and the Search for Social Justice, Merlin Press, 2002; Henry Bernstein, ‘Land reform in Southern Africa in World Historical Perspective,’ ROAPE 96, 2003

On the non-Zimbabwean debate on the land reform, see, http://www.lalr.org.za/news/a-new-start-for-zimbabwe-by-ian-scoones.html (accessed on 27 September, 2008); IRIN, “Small Scale Farming Seen As the Only Alternative to Food Insecurity,” 22 September 2008. For a contrary point of view, see, Henry Bernstein, ‘Land reform in Southern Africa in World Historical Perspective,’ Review of African Political Economy 96, 2003

On war veterans, see, Sadomba, W (2006) War veterans and the land occupation movement in Zimbabwe, forthcoming, Harare;

On climate change and the impact of drought, see, C.H. Matarira, J.M. Makadho, F.C. Mwamuka, "Zimbabwe: Climate Change Impacts on Maize Production and Adaptive Measures for the Agricultural Sector," Interim Report on Climate Change Country Studies, 1995, www.gcrio.org

On sanctions, see, Gregory Elich, ‘Zimbabwe Under Siege,’ Swans Commentary Zimbabwe Under Siege, http://www.swans.com/library/art8/elich004.html; Dr. Gideon Gono: How sanctions are ruining Zimbabwe, opinion piece, African Business, 2007.

On the debate among progressive intellectuals in Zimbabwe, see, Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, ‘The Zimbabwe Question and the Two Lefts.’ Forthcoming in Historical Materialism, vol. 14, no. 4, 2007

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19. BIG MAN WALKING
by Neal Ascherson
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(London Review of Books, Vol. 39 No. 24 · 14 December 2017, pages 3-8 | 6167 words)

Gorbachev: His Life and Times by William Taubman
Simon and Schuster, 880 pp, £25.00, September, ISBN 978 1 4711 4796 8

You are invited to read this free book review from the London Review of Books. Subscribe now to access every article from every fortnightly issue of the London Review of Books, including the entire LRB archive of over 13,500 essays and reviews.

It was the spring of 1990, and the train from Warsaw to Vilnius had crossed the frontier. The carriage had been lifted off European rails onto the broad-gauge Russian chassis, and the fresh green forests of what was still Soviet Lithuania were flowing past the windows. I had not been in the Soviet Union for a few years – not since the advent of Gorbachev and perestroika. Behind lay Poland in crazy convulsions of freedom and inflation, where a return first-class ticket to Vilnius with sleeper cost less than a double espresso in the Holiday Inn.

There was a crowd round the iron stove at the end of the corridor. A dozen passengers pressed about the young uniformed conductress who normally gave out glasses of tea. But they were not there for the stove or the tea. Her radio was on, full blast, and they were listening to a voice.

It was saying, loudly and confidently: ‘Kto za?’ (Who’s in favour?) Then it counted and read out a number. Then it asked: ‘Kto protiv?’ (Who’s against?) And again a number. And then: ‘The motion is passed’ or ‘The motion is rejected.’ The Congress of People’s Deputies, the new parliament of the Soviet Union, was in session and we were hearing its elected members voting freely, unpredictably, without fear. The voice – strong, lively – belonged to the man in the chair, Mikhail Gorbachev.

I remember leaning back against the window, my heart suddenly too big for my chest. So it was real. So this democracy was actually taking place, at the core of the empire, and a whole planet – rusted to its axis for generations – was beginning to rotate again.

Anything could happen now. But what actually happened was that the stove burst, flooding the corridor with boiling water and smoking cinders. As the attendant kneeled to dab at the floor with a towel, an older train-woman in a gaudier uniform stamped in and screamed abuse at her until she began to cry. One Russian tradition – keeping order by humiliation – was still in place here.

Gorbachev grew up and was formed among those traditions, in their Soviet mutation. He came to detest them, the dialectic of bullying and toadying, the rule that an opponent must be left not just defeated but destroyed, abject and whining for forgiveness. He detested those habits, and yet they were the style, the instinct, of the party he never quite ceased to love, and sometimes he found himself using those habits himself. More often, he restrained himself, leaving enemies injured but not terminated. Those enemies, when they got over their astonishment, never forgave him for showing such ‘weakness’. Neither did his friends.

It took William Taubman almost twenty years to complete his wonderful Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. This Gorbachev biography took a mere 11. And yet it is in some ways an even more heavyweight product. The research is vast; the tracking down of published and unpublished sources is tireless. The willingness of sometimes reluctant individuals to talk – family, old staffers, half-forgotten comrades from the early days – represents many triumphs of tact and patience. Much of this success, as Taubman takes care to point out, comes from the decision of Anatoly Chernyaev – one of Gorbachev’s most loyal and yet most critical aides, whose diary often shows Boswellian sharpness about his boss – to put all his influence and contacts behind the biography project. So much so that I would expect neo-Stalinists in Russia today to dismiss the whole book as ‘Chernyaev’s slant’ on the perestroika years. There may be something in that. But then, as slants go, it would be hard to imagine a more vivid and intelligent one.

And the big man himself helped. ‘Gorbachev is hard to understand,’ he said to Taubman at the outset. Two reflections can follow those words. One is about the problem of doing a ‘definitive’ biography of a man still alive. But admitting, as Taubman repeatedly does, that some Gorbachev decisions remain too ‘hard to understand’ lets a biographer off any final – impudent – verdict on a whole life. The other reflection is that the man joins a worrying category: public figures who talk about themselves in the third person. (I grew anxious about one of my own heroes when he started saying: ‘Jimmy Reid would never agree to this or that.’ And why is it men, almost never women, who do this?) Gorbachev has – or had then – a hot affection for the public image that walked at the head of his procession.

Not many people change the world. Fewer still are thanked for it. Adolf Hitler changed the world on 22 June 1941: by invading the Soviet Union, he delivered ‘Hitler’s Europe’, the divided continent we lived in until 1989. We were not grateful for that. Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev changed the world, as so many adoring millions saw it at the time, by ending the threat of their extermination by nuclear war and by allowing Europe’s ‘captive nations’ to liberate themselves. But then, a Samson already blinded by his enemies, he brought down the gigantic temple of the Soviet Union on his own head, and his own power perished with it.

He was born in 1931 in the village of Privolnoe, not far from Stavropol in the far south of Russia. His parents were peasants. He worked hard in the fields as a barefoot teenager and drove a combine harvester with his father, Sergei, winning a Red Banner of Labour award and developing the heavy muscles which his future wife, Raisa, would admire. These were origins shared by a striking number of Soviet leaders in his generation: village boys who knew about hunger and poverty and how their parents forgot them with vodka. Unlike the old Bolshevik elite, many of whom had been urban intellectuals, they were ‘Stalin’s children’ in the sense that Soviet education rescued them from ignorance (Gorbachev’s mother was illiterate), taught them loyalty to the ‘building of socialism’ and offered them careers.

The family was lucky, as luck went in those times. Two uncles and an aunt died in the famines around the time of his birth. Both his grandfathers were arrested and sent to the Gulag during the purges of the late 1930s, but both were eventually released. The Germans occupied the village, but retreated again after only a few months. When the next famine came, his mother packed Sergei’s suit and two pairs of boots and walked to the Kuban region, where she traded them for a sack of corn. Against the odds, his beloved father returned wounded but alive from the front, muttering to his son: ‘We fought until we ran out of fight. That’s how you must live.’
Give a gift for the mind

Mikhail Sergeyevich went to school at 14, a clever boy who soon showed a talent for acting and a bossy taste for leadership. He discovered books and let Pushkin, Belinsky, Gogol and above all Lermontov blow his adolescent mind, while winning approval in the Komsomol youth movement. A girlfriend remembered that ‘he was too energetic, too serious, so organised’. The Red Banner award contributed to his ascent, and so did the fact that, as combine drivers, he and his father were classed as ‘workers’ at the local machine tractor station. Aged 19 and already a candidate member of the Communist Party, he was accepted into Moscow University and – coming from a village with no electricity, radio or telephone – encountered a great city for the first time.

He also encountered young people as talkative and politically excitable as he was. Two of them, both fellow students, changed his life. Zdenĕk Mlynář, then a fiercely dedicated young Stalinist who was increasingly shocked by the hypocritical realities of Soviet life, came from Czechoslovakia. The other person was Raisa Maksimovna Titarenko. A philosophy student one year ahead of Gorbachev, Raisa also came from a poor, scarred background: a kulak grandfather who vanished into the Gulag, a childhood spent in boxcars and temporary shacks as the family moved back and forth across the Soviet Union with her father, a railway worker.

There was a long, fearfully earnest courtship. Raisa was ‘a prestige object’, as Mlynář put it: ‘each word was a labour to which she had to give perfect birth.’ She was always held to be the firmer character of the pair, insistent on giving her opinion on everything with pedantic accuracy (Nancy Reagan, thirty years later, couldn’t stand being constantly corrected by her). Taubman makes clear that the combination of her outspokenness and her unshakeable loyalty held her husband together through terrible times, when without her he might have surrendered to his enemies. In return, Gorbachev became – it’s the right word, in that Russia – notorious for treating his wife well. It made his in-laws wonder if he might be a Jew.

They finally married in September 1953. Stalin had died in March, and already there was hope of a more open future. People began to talk. Mlynář heard the apparently dumb students around him suddenly relating their memories of purges, famines, the mass murder of the kulaks. Gorbachev, whose essay entitled ‘Stalin Is Our Wartime Glory, Stalin Gives Flight to Our Youth’ had been held up as a model by the university, went to see the dictator’s embalmed corpse. ‘I searched his face for any sign of greatness but something disturbed me, evoking mixed feelings.’

After university, he returned to Stavropol and, as a full party member, began to make a career in the local Komsomol. Stavropol’s apparatchiks resented his college education, and were suspicious of Raisa’s intellect (she eventually found work in the philosophy department of the Stavropol Agricultural Institute). Here, for nearly twenty years, Gorbachev became both spectator and actor in the slow pantomime of Soviet provincial life: the corruption, the envious intrigues, the helpless squalor of villages, the tribal feasts of food and vodka that local bosses were expected to lay on.

In 1956, Khrushchev launched serious ‘de-Stalinisation’ with his famous denunciation of Stalin’s crimes at the 20th Party Congress. The speech electrified the outside world, but went down badly in places like Stavropol. The local party accepted the new line, as they had to, but were unable to understand it. A district secretary told Gorbachev: ‘I’ll be frank with you … the people just refuse to accept the condemnation of the personality cult.’ Many peasants were dismayed by the condemnation of the rural Terror; for them, the purge had ‘liquidated’ the hated collective farm bosses who had seized their land in the first place. When men came to remove the statue of Stalin in Stavropol, a crowd tried to stop them.

By now, Gorbachev was committed to ‘reform’, setting up independent discussion groups in the region. His main task, he thought as he slowly rose through the party apparatus, was to find new local leaders who could at least make the existing system work. Fyodor Kulakov, Stavropol’s first secretary, made an unsuccessful pass at Raisa, but he appreciated her husband’s energy and steadily promoted Gorbachev.

In 1964, Khrushchev was deposed and de-Stalinisation went into reverse. But daring things were being plotted in Czechoslovakia, and in 1967 their old friend Mlynář came to stay with the Gorbachevs in Stavropol. Mlynář had by now become a bold advocate of what, under Alexander Dubček, would be named ‘socialism with a human face’. He had been in Moscow pleading for understanding of the coming changes, and Gorbachev listened, fascinated, to the plans for democratisation. But he said to Mlynář: ‘In your country all that might be possible, but in our country it simply could not be done.’ As Taubman comments, this was ‘a view that he would later change’. But when Leonid Brezhnev ordered the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, Gorbachev chaired a meeting that ‘fully and entirely approve[d] the decisive and timely measures’. Earlier, he had signed party appeals for the Soviet Union to ‘come to the defence of socialism in Czechoslovakia’. He felt uneasy about this. But if he had rebelled at this point, his ability to work for change and reform would have ended: the classic moral dilemma in a decaying totalitarian state. He kept his radical views private, and in 1970 was made first secretary in Stavropol and then an ex officio member of the Central Committee.

In the stagnant Brezhnev years, those views developed further. He had supposed that the ‘weakness of the cadres’ was the Soviet problem: the backwardness and incompetence of party and state bureaucracy. Now he began to see that the fault was far larger: the root of evil was the maniacal centralisation of every decision down to the smallest detail – precisely what democratisation and market reforms in the economy had tried to correct during the Prague Spring. More than a year after the invasion, Gorbachev went to Czechoslovakia as part of a delegation. He was not allowed to meet Mlynář, now in disgrace, but he saw the open hatred in workers’ faces when they recognised Soviet visitors.

He still kept his feelings to himself. In charge of his region, he repeated obsequious praises of Brezhnev, allowed the repression of a local writer who had published views much like his own and acquired medals for his work on ‘the Great Stavropol Canal’. Privately, he was reading books of heretical Marxism: the works of Roger Garaudy and Gramsci, among others. In public he was ‘mouthing the party line while inwardly recoiling from much of it’.

The decisive turn in his career came in the late 1970s, when he became the protégé of Yuri Andropov, the elderly head of the KGB. Andropov was well aware that the Soviet system was seizing up: he and Gorbachev could agree on that. But he suffered from a ‘Hungarian complex’: the conviction that reform from below would inevitably burst out of control, as – in his view – it had done in Czechoslovakia. Asked about human rights, as defined in the Helsinki Accords which he had somehow persuaded Brezhnev to sign, Andropov remarked that ‘in 15 to 20 years, we will be able to allow ourselves what the West allows itself now, freedom of opinion and information, diversity in society and in art. But only in 15 to 20 years, after we’re able to raise the population’s living standards.’

*

Every so often Taubman’s book halts, and unleashes a jostling, barking pack of questions. Most have real bite. Why did Gorbachev do this, why didn’t he do that, when a different decision might have avoided a defeat or hastened progress? But the question raised by Andropov is one of the biggest, and now overshadows all reflections on Gorbachev’s six years in power. Deng Xiaoping in China was to share broadly the same priorities as Andropov: let us first build an economy that works, enriching both state and people – and only then turn towards political transformation (some day, if we feel it’s safe). So why did Gorbachev do the opposite after he reached the leadership in 1985? No perestroika without glasnost: he was convinced that free, uncensored discussion was the precondition for breaking down massive resistance to economic reform, not the outcome. And China was not Russia: the Chinese Communist Party could call on traditions of obedience and discipline that were already disintegrating in the USSR after Stalin.

Three funerals later, an anxious and geriatric Politburo chose Gorbachev as first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Brezhnev had died in 1982, Andropov in 1984 and Konstantin Chernenko in 1985. Russians were at first delighted with the new man: he was only in his fifties, he sparkled with energy and humour, he dived cheerfully into crowds. Raisa and he had already begun to travel: first to Italy and then to London, where he and Margaret Thatcher had famously hit it off (‘We can do business together’). But in Moscow he began his changes only slowly, uncertainly.

Another rush of Taubman questions: why didn’t he launch a crash programme for consumer goods, why didn’t he go straight into economic reform, why didn’t he privatise agriculture? Instead, he went back to reading Lenin to discover where the Soviet system had gone wrong (revisionist communists all over Europe were doing the same), and decreed an anti-alcohol campaign that ended in painful failure. His grand plan for ‘accelerating’ industry, rather than introducing market forces, slowly fizzled out in a welter of shortages and official lies. Gorbachev hurled himself about the land, urging managers to adjust their minds to new thoughts. ‘Can’t you see that socialism itself is in danger?’

Then, on 26 April 1986, the number four reactor at Chernobyl exploded. An eruption of lies and evasions followed the poison cloud spreading over Europe, ‘rampant incompetence, cover-ups at all levels, and self-destructive secrecy at the top’. Gorbachev said nothing for weeks until his outburst to the Politburo: the industry was ‘dominated by servility, bootlicking, cliquishness and persecution of those who think differently’. Chernobyl had ‘really opened my eyes’, he said later. From now on, no scheme for transforming Soviet reality was too revolutionary or wild for him to discuss with his growing team of supporters.

But talk was not the same as deed. ‘Exceptionally daring in words and how he evaluates the situation, but cautious in action’, Chernyaev noted. Later that year, his adviser Aleksandr Yakovlev wrote an astonishing memorandum proposing that the party abandon its sacred ‘leading role’ and divide into two competing movements: ‘socialist’ and ‘national-democratic’. Yakovlev also suggested workers’ control in industry and a genuinely independent judiciary. Stalin would have had him shot for it. Now Gorbachev merely commented: ‘Too early, too soon.’

Talks with the Americans about disarmament began within months of his accession. Geneva, where Reagan and he achieved little but discovered that they liked working together, was the first of the summits. The series ran on through Reykjavik (the total renunciation of nuclear weapons missed by a hair’s breadth), Washington, Moscow, New York and finally Moscow again in July 1991, where the Start Treaty reducing strategic nuclear weapons was signed by George H.W. Bush – only weeks before the putsch which effectively brought Gorbachev down. Taubman details every move, and reveals the intricate weaving of preparations between these summits. Occasionally he overdoes it. His account of the Washington meeting in December 1987, for instance, runs into pages of guest lists, of suits, dresses and jewellery worn at each function.

But as usual Taubman asks good questions. The domestic reason Gorbachev went into this mutual disarmament process is clear: he wanted to shift resources from the military into the civilian sector. At the outset, in 1986, he told Soviet diplomats that the Americans were attempting to block that shift, by forcing the USSR to keep up its level of defence spending. But why, then, did Reagan and Bush negotiate for arms reduction? Taubman’s answer is that American motives were mixed. While Reagan and to a lesser extent Bush were genuine in their interest in disarmament, and – as time passed – were concerned to help Gorbachev stay in power, hawks in Washington still hoped to see the USSR bankrupted by military costs and argued that success for Gorbachev’s policies would give Soviet communism a new lease of life. The hawks lost that argument, but they seem to be the victors in the subsequent mythology. Most Americans, apparently, now believe that the Soviet Union collapsed because it couldn’t keep up with the cost of Western war technology: a nonsense Taubman’s book should help to dispel.

For his part, Gorbachev was accused by hardliners at home of conceding far too much to the Americans, selling out the very security of the Soviet Union. By early 1987, he was fighting for reform every inch of the way against entrenched ‘conservatives’ on one flank and impatient radicals on the other. Many ‘leading comrades’ in the Politburo and the Central Committee backed his proposals in public, as party discipline required, but ‘sabotaged him in silence’. Boris Yeltsin, brought from his Siberian fiefdom into the Central Committee, began his long, wild series of attacks on Gorbachev.

Taubman’s account of these spectacular public quarrels is at once fascinating and shocking. Yeltsin several times disrupted Central Committee sessions, complaining that reform was moving too slowly and that perestroika had done nothing for the Russian people; he accused Gorbachev of nursing his own ‘cult of personality’. In return, Gorbachev twice released the ‘loyal delegates’ to behave in the sinister way that was still their gut instinct: obediently taking turns to pile murderous abuse on Yeltsin for disloyalty to the party line. They reverted to a pack of Stalinist hyenas, while Yeltsin reverted to an abject Stalinist victim confessing his sins and begging for forgiveness. And Gorbachev? He certainly didn’t want to revert to anything. He ignored those who assumed that Yeltsin would be sent into exile, and he sought repeatedly to rebuild some relationship between them. And yet the way he handled this and other challenges shows that, in the end, he remained a party man. He could contemplate transforming the Communist Party, abolishing its ‘leading role’, opening it to inner democracy and even to multi-party competition. But mentally he never quite emerged from the party box, as Yeltsin eventually did.

Fatally, Gorbachev never realised, or admitted to himself, that the party couldn’t be his instrument to carry through change. By the 1980s, it was simply too late. The gigantic structure had become so rotten and demoralised that attempts to infuse it with democracy only hastened its death. And Gorbachev could find no other instrument. As Taubman puts it, ‘by gutting the party’s ability to run the country, he was undermining his own power.’

*

Taubman’s account of Gorbachev’s career reveals another truth, one which a European must find difficult to digest. Mikhail Sergeyevich (‘Gorby! Gorby!’) is thought of as the liberator of the ‘captive nations’ in the ‘socialist camp’. That’s true, but mostly in a negative way. In reality, Gorbachev didn’t much care what happened to the Warsaw Pact nations, as long as events there didn’t get in his way in Washington and Moscow. Arguing with Mrs Thatcher, swapping ideas with Andrei Sakharov or with heretical Italian communists – that was fun. Remaining patient with stupid old dinosaurs like Erich Honecker or evil goblins like Ceaușescu was a penance. Gorbachev seems to have regarded the ‘fraternal ruling parties’ as, on balance, a liability holding the Soviet Union back on its progress towards modernisation.

The so-called Brezhnev Doctrine – that all socialist countries must intervene when ‘socialism’ in one of them is in peril – had effectively been shelved long before Gorbachev became Soviet leader. The Politburo minutes for 1980-81 show that in late 1981, at the height of the Solidarity crisis in Poland, the Soviet Union told General Jaruzelski that Soviet troops would on no account be sent into the country, and that if Jaruzelski’s planned imposition of martial law went wrong, he would not be rescued. (So much, incidentally, for Jaruzelski’s defence that he declared martial law only to avert a Soviet intervention.)
Give a gift for the mind

Ordinary people in East-Central Europe watched perestroika and glasnost with rising excitement. So did many younger activists in their ruling communist parties. All the more striking, then, that Gorbachev never seriously tried to persuade their leaders to imitate his Soviet experiments. While crowds outside chanted his name, he merely told their rulers: ‘It’s your business.’ Taubman tries to guess what was in his mind then: ‘Even if, as is likely, he neither foresaw nor wished the collapse of East European communism, what he was counting on to avoid it was utopian – the triumph of perestroika in Eastern Europe without his intervening directly to promote that outcome.’

In his great speech to the UN General Assembly in December 1988, Gorbachev announced enormous unilateral cuts to Soviet conventional forces in Europe, and said that a society’s ‘freedom of choice’ should be respected without exceptions. The frightful suspicion that Soviet power might no longer stand between them and their angry populations began to seep into the skulls of the smarter East European leaders: others, as in East Germany, still dismissed that as unthinkable. Dissidents and ordinary people calculated that there was now a fair chance – no better than that, yet – that Soviet tanks would not invade if they took matters into their own hands. The outcome was the multiple liberations of 1989.

Gorbachev clearly hoped that the overthrow of Communism would be followed by some form of democratic socialism. But when that looked increasingly unlikely, he didn’t panic. He simply didn’t care enough about that part of the world. One of his finest legacies was that he precisely didn’t bring about revolutions in East-Central Europe. By standing aside, he allowed a generation of Poles and Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians and Germans to create the nourishing myth that their freedom had been won by their own courage on the street. When they woke Gorbachev one November morning to tell him that East Germany had opened the Wall, he merely said: ‘They did the right thing.’

He was preoccupied with struggles nearer home. The Soviet Union itself was cracking up. Ukrainians were talking about independence; the Baltics – especially Lithuania – were openly defying central control; special forces had murdered twenty Georgian demonstrators in Tbilisi in April 1989. Most ominous of all, the Russian Republic – egged on by Boris Yeltsin – demanded and won its own Communist Party in June 1990. The media used their freedom under glasnost to attack Gorbachev on both fronts: either for throwing away all that had been won by the sacrifices of the Soviet people, or for hesitating to smash down the bastions of the Soviet system itself. For a silent but increasingly hate-filled majority in the party’s guiding bodies, the familiar world was ending. For the Russian people, especially, chaos and shortages were becoming reasons to turn against Gorbachev, whose popularity rapidly shrank in the course of 1990.

Unable to muster reliable backing in the party, he cut back its responsibilities and transferred his own power base to new parliamentary institutions. The Congress of Peoples’ Deputies appointed him president. But the manoeuvre only deepened his political isolation. The 1990 May Day parade degenerated into noisy protests under his nose. Yeltsin’s popularity meanwhile soared. In July he stormed out of the Soviet Communist Party, announcing that from now on he answered only to the Russian people. When Gorbachev backed away from the ambitious ‘500 Days’ plan for conversion to a market economy, drawn up by his brightest advisers, Yeltsin said that he had missed his ‘last chance for a civilised transition to a new order’.

He was right about that. There was a smell of burning in the Moscow air, and in December 1990 Eduard Shevardnadze, the Georgian leader who had become Gorbachev’s foreign minister, suddenly resigned. ‘A dictatorship is coming. I declare this with total responsibility. No one knows what kind of dictatorship it will be.’ Gorbachev, who had been given no warning of this speech, played it calmly. To the horror of his democratic supporters, he was now deliberately tilting policy and appointments towards the hardline faction in the party. This was part of a ‘zigzag’ strategy designed to reassure each hostile camp in turn, but nobody was reassured and both sides were further antagonised. He made Gennady Yanayev his vice president and left Vladimir Kriuchkov in charge of the KGB. A few months later, in August 1991, both men took leading parts in the failed putsch against him.

With Gorbachev acting simultaneously on three separate stages – the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and global peacemaking – there is a fair amount of ‘meanwhile’ in this book. Taubman has to break off one narrative to go back and catch up on another, and the order of events can get muddling. In 1990, while establishing the presidency and fending off Yeltsin, Gorbachev was also coping with the enormous new question of Germany’s future. The West, including Chancellor Kohl, assumed that he would oppose German reunification, but he accepted it. Then they thought that he would probably refuse to allow a united Germany to remain in Nato, and would certainly veto the extension of Nato into what had been East Germany. But in May he came to Washington and suddenly agreed with Bush that ‘united Germany … would decide on its own which alliance she would be a member of.’ The Americans couldn’t believe what they were hearing. Gorbachev’s own staff were thunderstruck.

Why did Gorbachev not drive a much harder bargain over Germany, when he clearly had the chance? Taubman isn’t the only one to ask that question. The moment was so dramatic and desperate that if Gorbachev had asked for German neutrality as the price for recognising German unity, there was at least a possibility that the West might have agreed. He says now that his own respect for democracy made him leave these decisions to the German people. But Taubman speculates, without providing much evidence, that Gorbachev may have shared old Anglo-French anxieties about a huge German state unrestrained by membership of any pact, which could lean on its neighbours and blackmail the rest of Europe.

Whatever his motives, Gorbachev’s reluctance to put up a fight over Germany had enormous consequences. Some were domestic: in abandoning the Soviet foothold in Germany, won at the price of such bloodshed, was he not betraying all that the Soviet people had gained in the Great Patriotic War? As one of many abusive letters to him put it, ‘Mr General Secretary: congratulations on receiving the imperialists’ prize for ruining the USSR, selling out Eastern Europe, destroying the Red Army, handing over all our resources to the United States and the mass media to the Zionists.’

The other consequences are still with us. Though Taubman doesn’t put it like this, the West took Gorbachev’s co-operation for weakness. He expected an economic and financial reward for his concessions: it didn’t come. Crucially, in February 1990, James Baker, the US secretary of state, and Chancellor Kohl assured Gorbachev that Nato wouldn’t expand eastwards, certainly not towards the Soviet frontiers. But Gorbachev failed to make them write it down and Bush later told Kohl that he and Baker had gone too far. ‘To hell with that! We prevailed. They didn’t. We can’t let the Soviets clutch victory from the jaws of defeat.’ A few years later, by 2004, all the ex-Warsaw Pact nations, including the Baltic republics and Poland, had been brought into Nato. After their triumphant experience with Gorbachev, Western leaders reckoned that they could get away with it. But the ‘broken promise’ grievance smoulders under Putin’s European policy to this day. Most Russians, whatever their view of Putin’s autocracy, still look on Nato’s surge up to their borders as the treacherous breach of an international agreement.

*

The coup took place on 18 August 1991. Gorbachev, Raisa and their family were in their Crimean villa when it was surrounded by armed men. Announcing that the president had been taken ill, the plotters proclaimed that they had taken control of the Soviet Union as a State Committee on Emergency Rule. Taubman’s wonderfully cinematic narrative gives us every detail of what took place and how the Gorbachevs reacted: Mikhail Sergeyevich furious, contemptuous and unyielding, Raisa so appalled that she suffered a minor stroke. Suddenly they were back in Russian history, where anything could happen. How could they be sure that men with guns wouldn’t force their way in and treat them and their children as Nicholas II and his children had been treated 73 years before?

Why did the coup fail? Taubman’s account confirms the incredible bungling of the plotters, who almost from the outset seemed terrified by their own audacity. But they had a chance. I was there, and saw how – outside Moscow and Leningrad – ordinary people and local apparatchiks instantly accepted that the perestroika holiday was over: it was back to censorship, silence and the ‘normal’ post-Stalinist grind. A friend of mine said afterwards: ‘A handful of good, brave people saved Russia.’ I like to believe that she was right. The plotters’ worst and ultimately suicidal error was failing to arrest Yeltsin. But before he even arrived at the National Parliament building, mounted a tank and famously roared defiance, ‘good, brave people’ were already barricading the building. A line of women linked hands across the Kalinin Bridge, proposing to stop the tanks of the Taman armoured division. ‘We are mothers!’

Away in Leningrad, the mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, was doing the same as Yeltsin. But before those two took charge, there was a moment – perhaps 36 hours – when the conspiracy controlled the army and murderous ‘special forces’ and could easily have drowned opposition in blood before it had time to spread. They faltered while the ‘handful’ became a human sea, then they collapsed. Several plotters flew to Crimea to whine for Gorbachev’s pardon, but Yeltsin’s men were soon on their way in their own plane to free Gorbachev and arrest them.

From the moment of the coup’s failure, Yeltsin and his team were effectively running not only Russia but all that was left of the Soviet Union. It took Gorbachev a long time to realise it. Taubman inserts a startling ‘why’ here. Why didn’t he drive straight to the National Parliament from the plane bringing him back from Crimea, to greet the ecstatic crowds awaiting him there and restore his authority? The answer seems to be simply that he was worried about Raisa’s health and wanted to take her home. But his time was over anyway. He sacked the plotters and three of them killed themselves for shame. But only two days after his return, Gorbachev was jeered as he addressed the Russian supreme court. And when he claimed that the Soviet cabinet had resisted the coup, Yeltsin thrust in his face a paper showing that almost all of his ministers had gone along with it.

He spent the next months negotiating towards a new ‘union treaty’, granting the Soviet republics wide autonomy. But Ukraine refused to take part, heading for full independence, and in November Yeltsin suddenly vetoed any Russian participation in the treaty. A few weeks later, he went behind Gorbachev’s back and – at a secret meeting in a Belorussian forest – set up the Commonwealth of Independent States with the leaders of Belarus and Ukraine. The Soviet Union was over. So was Gorbachev’s power. He made his televised resignation speech in the Kremlin on 25 December 1991. Yeltsin switched off his own screen halfway through, and sent two colonels to take the ‘nuclear briefcase’ from Gorbachev and bring it to his own office.

Taubman sometimes quotes too many overlapping sources (his Khrushchev benefited from the relative scarcity of material), but the final sections, recounting the first decades after Gorbachev’s retirement, are wise and clear. The story of Raisa’s illness and her death from leukaemia in 1999, taken mostly from her husband’s unsparing memoir, reveals her courage and his own combination of warmth and hardiness in the worst moments. After his fall, he set up the Gorbachev Foundation and settled down to comment on world politics and – increasingly – to imply harsh verdicts on Yeltsin. Abroad, he was still a hero, almost a saviour. In Russia, he found it hard to accept how unpopular and then irrelevant he had become. ‘His overconfidence in himself and his cause,’ Taubman writes, ‘gave him the courage to reach so high that he overreached … When the results clashed with his idealised self-image as a great statesman, he too often reacted by denying reality.’ In 1996, he ran for president but came in seventh, with 0.5 per cent of the vote.

Not much of his dream is left. A democratic Russia as a partner in a ‘common European home’ reaching to the Atlantic? According to a friend of his, Gorbachev now grants that it may take a hundred years for democracy to take hold in his country. But he is proud that he was the one who opened the way. The great Russian intellectual Dmitry Furman called him ‘the only politician in Russian history who, having full power in his hands, voluntarily opted to limit it, and even risk losing it, in the name of principled moral values’.


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South Asia Citizens Wire
Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
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