Didymus Mutasa Hero Turned Villain

Part 11

Yesterday ZimJournalists Arise published Part One of an article by Trevor Grundy of the Zimbabwe Independent on Security Minister Didymus Mutasa.

Mitchell, a campaigner for Rhodesia's short-lived multiracial
Centre Party, said Mutasa was a beacon of hope half a century ago when he,
Clutton-Brock, Michael and Eileen Haddon, white liberals who donated their
land for the creation of Cold Comfort Farm, and two renowned blacks
nationalists, James Chikerema and George Nyandoro, worked together to
improve African farming methods and then form the African National Congress.
The ANC campaigned for an extension of the franchise, but was banned within
two years of its birth.

Mitchell said that in those days Mutasa was "a man of gentle
demeanor, distinguished and fine-chiselled in appearance" who sank his own
money into Cold Comfort Farm after receiving a "golden handshake" when he
quit his job as a civil servant.

While working in partnership with Clutton-Brock to teach black
people modern agricultural techniques on small-scale farm units around Cold
Comfort Farm, Mutasa also became deeply involved with the World Council of
Churches. His cleverness at fund-raising was recognised by various of the
emerging post-ANC nationalist parties.

In 1970, as racial tension grew and as the war against white
rule began, the Cold Comfort Farm Society was disbanded by the white
government. Mutasa was arrested and held for two years in solitary
confinement at Chinhoyi Prison before being transferred to Salisbury Remand
Prison where he rubbed shoulders with Mugabe and the fiery nationalist Edgar
Tekere.

After his release, Mutasa studied in the central England city of
Birmingham on a British Council scholarship and in 1976 joined Mugabe and
Tekere as a member of the Zanu liberation forces based in Mozambique.

He returned home shortly before Zimbabwe's Independence in 1980
to organise the February elections, which saw Mugabe come to power and
Mutasa's appointment as speaker in the new black-dominated parliament.

Though most Zanu ideologues will no longer admit it, Zionism
greatly influenced the nationalist movement during the 1960s and 1970s and
Israel provided the exiled Zanu with some funding.

Between 1980 and 1990, Mutasa maintained his reputation as a
fair man, full of charm and integrity as parliamentary speaker.

A major transformation was apparent by 2000 when Mugabe, furious
that white commercial farmers had funded the opposition MDC, incited his
supporters to invade farms and drive off their owners, triggering a
catastrophic and continuing economic collapse.

In that same year, Mutasa was appointed Anti-Corruption
minister. He stayed in the job for three years watching and doing little as
a wave of alleged corruption swept higher and higher through government and
the top reaches of the judiciary, defence forces, police and civil service.

Once profitable commercial farms confiscated from whites were
among the main prizes taken by the new elite. Mutasa appropriated one of
these farms in eastern Zimbabwe for himself and independent newspapers
documented extensively how he and other ministers looted other farms of
billions of Zimbabwe dollars worth of expensive equipment for resale or use
on their own properties.

In May 2004, this once "kind and gentle" man kicked opposition
MP Roy Bennett in parliament after Bennett was involved in a scuffle with
Justice minister Patrick Chinamasa.

Bennett, who was loved by his black constituents in the Eastern
Highlands town of Chimanimani in much the same way as Clutton-Brock had been
loved half a century earlier, had seen workers on his coffee estate killed
and raped by soldiers and by supporters of Mugabe's ruling party.

He therefore became incensed when Chinamasa called his forebears
"thieves and murderers" and rushed across the floor of the house and knocked
the minister to the ground. The Zanu PF-dominated parliament sentenced
Bennett to 15 months imprisonment in prison, where he lost 27 kilogrammes in
weight before his eventual release.

Mutasa went unpunished for his counter-assault and less than a
year later he became the second most powerful man in the land when Mugabe
appointed him Minister of National Security and Land Affairs, positions that
made him chief of the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) and gave him
responsibility for the country's controversial, chaotic and violent land
reform programme.

In May 2005, in one of the earliest exercises of his new powers,
Mutasa launched Operation Murambatsvina, in which soldiers, police and
government militias used extreme violence to destroy the homes of hundreds
of thousands of poor people on the outer edges of the country's towns and
cities.

Mutasa presented Murambatsvina as a regeneration and renewal
scheme to "clean up" urban areas. But most people who lost their homes were
opposition supporters, and nearly a year-and-a-half later virtually nothing
has been done to provide new homes for the estimated 700 000 to a million
people who watched their houses being bulldozed, sledgehammered and set
ablaze.

Anna Tibaijuka, the special envoy of United Nations
Secretary-General Kofi Annan, lambasted Mutasa's operation as inhuman and a
breach of national and international human rights laws.

Emboldened by the "success" of Murambatsvina, Mutasa, with the
power of the much-feared and ubiquitous CIO as his weapon, began threatening
to "physically eliminate" government opponents. To this end, he was accused
by the remaining independent press in Zimbabwe of slapping a police officer
in his home constituency of Rusape and of assaulting a man who dared to
challenge his nomination as the Zanu candidate for Rusape.

When Walter Marwizi, a reporter for the independent weekly
Standard, investigated alleged corruption in the national security minister's
home province, Manicaland, Mutasa threatened the journalist: "I will deal
with you ruthlessly if you don't tell me your source (of the corruption
story). Make no mistake. I am sending my operatives and they will do a clean
job."

Quietly, in recent weeks, Mutasa has relaunched Operation
Murambatsvina, with yet more humble homes being torn down in urban suburbs
by powerful organs of state.

Mutasa, who had once worked with Clutton-Brock, the Haddons and
other devout white liberal Christians, to carve out an island of tolerance
in a sea of bigotry and and small-mindedness, regularly describes the handful of remaining white farmers as "filth" and recently vowed, "I will rid the country of remaining whites."
But when venting his ire he does not discriminate racially. Nobel Peace Prize winner and South African national icon, Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, accused the Zimbabwe government of "making a mockery of African democracy." The CIO chief spat back, "Tutu is a puppet of the West, a vassal of imperialism and a lost soul."
Mutasa dismissed as another lost soul the Zimbabwean most widely tipped to succeed Tutu as a Nobel Peace Prize winner - Pius Ncube, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Bulawayo, who has said the greatest service Mugabe can perform for his country is to let "the Lord take him away".
When Archbishop Ncube protested against the government for neglecting families who were starving to death in and around Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second city, Mutasa replied, "A heathen man who lies through his teeth …The cleric has a psychological disease and needs to have his head examined because he is a liar."
Mutasa's most recent exploit was to launch his CIO and other security services against the country's trade union leaders as they prepared to demonstrate on the streets in September this year for living wages and proper anti-retroviral drug support for the millions of Zimbabweans facing death from AIDS. National trades union chief Wellington Chibebe and his top lieutenants sustained broken limbs when they were assaulted, without being charged, in a notorious police station and torture centre on the outskirts of Harare.
Terence Ranger, Emeritus Professor of History at Oxford, a close friend of both Clutton-Brock and Mutasa in Rhodesia in the 1950s and 1960s, recently appeared as an expert witness in a British appeal court hearing by an exiled Zimbabwean seeking not to be returned forcibly to his country. Professor Ranger, arguing against deportation, described Mutasa as "a ruthless and acquisitive politician who is notorious for using violence against political opponents".
Which all leaves open the question whether the spirit of Mutasa's old friend Guy Clutton-Brock rests easy any longer in Heroes Acre.

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