THE resolution of the United Nations Security Council condemning violence in Zimbabwe, carried with both China and Russia voting for the motion, opens up the way for the imperialist powers to try to resolve the crisis of Zimbabwe in their own interests, by engineering the intervention of South African and southern African troops to overthrow the Mugabe regime.
The WRP and the News Line is opposed to any such imperialist intervention in Zimbabwe, either through open imperialist forces or through South African and other proxies.
In South Africa, Jacob Zuma, the ANC president responded to the UN resolution by saying that he ‘could not agree with what the ZANU-PF was doing at this time and that it was out of control.’ He called for urgent intervention by the UN and the regional SADC (Southern African Development Community).
Zuma is expected to take Mbeki’s place as the next President of South Africa. Mugabe’s former allies in Rwanda, Uganda and Zambia have meanwhile also condemned his regime.
The former UN High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina Paddy Ashdown, the ex-Liberal Democrat leader, has also intervened in the situation to urge the imperialists forward.
The former dictator of Bosnia ‘warned’ that Zimbabwe’s violence could descend into genocide like that in Rwanda in 1994, a situation that the western powers had vowed that they would never allow to happen again, and would prevent with pre-emptive military action.
Such an intervention would have the same outcome as the US attack on Iraq, which was also launched to replace a ‘dictator’ with ‘democracy’, but which actually destroyed the entire country, and killed hundreds of thousands of people.
We are for the Zimbabwean working class, through its trade unions and political organisations, backed up by the workers of southern Africa, organising a socialist revolution to overthrow the completely bankrupted nationalist regime of Robert Mugabe, replacing it with a workers and small farmers government.
This will expropriate the industries and banks and nationalise the land, thus transforming the Zimbabwe revolution, which was temporarily halted by the Lancaster House settlement in 1979, into a socialist revolution.
The Lancaster House agreement in 1979, saw the bourgeois nationalist Mugabe dancing with Margaret Thatcher, and also politically dancing with the white farmers of Zimbabwe and their leader Ian Smith, who were allowed to keep their ownership of the land, the crux of the Zimbabwe revolution.
For almost 20 years the Zimbabwe white farmers called Mugabe ‘comrade’, served in parliament and in the judiciary and gloried in the settlement that had been made for them, with the black workers and rural poor making only minimal gains.
The death knell for this settlement came when the IMF and the World Bank turned the screws on the Mugabe regime, demanding the repayment of the considerable loans that they had made, and that Mugabe settle the country’s debts by attacking the working class and the trade unions.
This Mugabe did. With the trade unions in opposition, Mugabe became very unpopular. To save his regime he was forced to turn on the white farmers and expropriate a number of them distributing the land to his supporters.
As the capitalist crisis worsened the Zimbabwe economy that had previously featured as a major grain exporter crashed, while inflation rocketed upwards.
Now the imperialist powers are seeking to make their comeback, and are seeking to organise puppet forces to overthrow the regime and restore the land to its former owners.
The working class of Zimbabwe does not want the imperialist powers back running the country.
It is more than obvious that the the bourgeois nationalist movement led by Mugabe is incapable of taking Zimbabwe forward and can only hand it back to the imperialist powers.
What is required in Zimbabwe is the building of a section of the Fourth International to lead the Zimbabwean workers and the rural poor to transform the nationalist revolution into a socialist revolution by the taking of power and nationalising the land and the basic industries.
