The British government's justification for this violation of Zimbabwe's national sovereignty is its professed concern about democratic elections in the country. London says that if the government of Robert Mugabe doesn't allow election observers in the country or agree to a list of other demands, it will start turning the screws. Buoyed by U.S. president George Bush's war talk against north Korea, Iran, and Iraq, the British rulers are looking for a piece of the action in order to claw their way up the imperialist pecking order.

Imperialist governments, led by Britain, have been scandalizing the Mugabe government as part of a concerted campaign to get him to leave office after nearly two decades in power. To justify their intervention, they point most often to a series of orchestrated occupations of capitalist farms by supporters of the regime, and to repression of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.

The people of Zimbabwe waged a decades-long struggle against British colonial rule. The movement against the racist white-minority regime of what was then Rhodesia, which remained an outpost of Britain despite a formal declaration of "independence" in 1965, won wide support among African working people.

Facing defeat at the hands of the rebel forces led by Mugabe and others, the racist minority government enlisted its masters in the UK to bring maximum pressure to bear in a negotiated settlement. One key provision demanded by the British imperialists was that the first elected government in what would become independent Zimbabwe could not touch the landed estates. The restriction was aimed at blocking off a deep-going land reform in the country.

Nearly all the arable land was controlled by a small number of capitalist farmers, as it still is today. A 1998 study concluded that a million black families are still settled on barren land after being forced to vacate their original fertile areas by the colonial settlers. Zimbabwe remains locked in bondage to the imperialist powers with a foreign debt of more than $4 billion. The mines and factories in the country are at the mercy of the capitalist market, as are Zimbabwe's agricultural exports.

Mugabe's government has been losing support among working people in the country, especially those in urban areas, as the economic crisis deepens. The bureaucratically organized land occupations--which often victimize the peasants who are working the land, casting them as supporters of the white farmers--have nothing to do with a true land reform. They only deal blows to an alliance between workers and peasants and open the door to imperialist intervention.

But the struggles of working people in Zimbabwe will never be advanced by such outside intervention. The British rulers' supposed concerns should not be given an ounce of credence. Instead, working people around the world can defend national sovereignty and stand on the side of the masses in Zimbabwe by opposing the imperialists' sanctions plan and calling for the cancellation of the country's foreign debt.
 
 
Related article:
EU threatens sanctions against Zimbabwe  
 
 
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