'Your people will stone you in the streets'

'Your people will stone you in the streets' - what Cook told Mudenge

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Posted to the web: 15/12/2008 22:11:49
FORMER British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told a Zimbabwean minister that his people would suffer “until they stone you in the streets” if land was not returned to white commercial farmers, according to a new book by Reserve Bank Governor Gideon Gono.

Gono says Zimbabwe’s land reform programme “angered Tony Blair’s Labour Party government which responded by stepping up its opposition to the ruling Zanu PF in general, and President Robert Mugabe in particular”.

In the book, Zimbabwe’s Casino Economy: Extraordinary Measures for Extraordinary Challenges, Gono reproduces “a chilling recollection” by former Foreign Affairs Minister Stan Mudenge of his encounter with Cook, who died last year.

Mudenge, according to his recollection, was sent by Mugabe to New York in 2001 “to see if it was possible to bring conciliation between Zimbabwe and the United Kingdom”. The Commonwealth’s Secretary General Don McKinnon is said to have been present during the discussions.

“After an hour and a half in which we were trying to find how we can resolve the question of the land acquisition that was the basis of our conversation, we discovered that the differences were so wide.

"The British wanted us to give back the land we had taken and I said it was not possible any more to return – we can talk about acquisition and other things but the question of giving back the land is no more practical politics in my country,” Mudenge remembers.

"Robin Cook said unless we can find some common ground on returning the land, there is no basis of going back, such that after an hour and half we realised the gap between us was so wide.

“We decided it was necessary to change the topic and discuss other issues. Before we finished, Cook said, and he did not say Honourable Mudenge, he said 'Stan, you have just condemned your people to suffering’. These were his exact words: “They will suffer until they stone you in the streets.'”

Gono uses Mudenge’s encounter with Cook to argue that a combination of sanctions and an international freeze in long-term capital projects in Zimbabwe were a British-driven plot to turn Zimbabwe’s economy into Mugabe’s most formidable opposition.

“Thus in 2001,” Gono says, “Zimbabwe’s relationship with powerful Western countries dramatically changed, and ordinary Zimbabweans started suffering, principally because some powerful western countries led by Britain decided to seek illegal regime change in Zimbabwe in order to halt and reverse the historic land reform programme that was implemented in 2000.

“Meanwhile, the propaganda behind the illegal sanctions has remained to be that they are aimed at the elite who are allegedly harming democracy and human rights in Zimbabwe and the sanctions are therefore allegedly not meant to hurt ordinary Zimbabweans. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. It is now clear the objective of the sanctions is to make the economy the real opposition to the government.”

The Zimbabwe government has not succeeded in persuading some of its domestic and international critics who insist that corruption and mismanagement are the real reasons for the country’s economic decline, and not western sanctions.

(Zimbabwe’s Casino Economy: Extraordinary Measures for Extraordinary Challenges is published by ZPH Publishers Pvt Ltd. E-mail sales@zph.co.zw or call +2634497007 to order a copy)
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