This week The Patriot is looking at events that led to Britain saving face by calling for a conference when it became obvious the Patriotic Front was going to shoot its way into Salisbury (Harare). This includes how the Patriotic Front had penetrated urban centres and a panicking Ian Smith created an African puppet regime led by Abel Muzorewa.

By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

THE month of September marks the anniversary of the 1979 Lancaster House Constitutional Conference on Zimbabwe which ended with the tripartite signing of the Lancaster House Agreement on December 21 the same year.
From an African philosophical viewpoint and with the benefit of hindsight, there are five considerations which should be emphasised, especially for future generations who must continue to study the African relationship, especially with Anglo-Saxon imperialism and its lingering legacy.
The first consideration has to be the real strategic and material reasons and basis for calling that sort of conference and for its ‘success’ – as opposed to the packaging and dramatisation of the same for purposes of communication.
Events on the ground in Southern Africa and inside Zimbabwe had moved fast from the fall of the Portuguese junta in Lisbon in April 1974 through the various battles which the Zimbabwe National Liberation Army (ZANLA) won against Rhodesian forces on the eastern frontier and the ZANLA bombing of the Rhodesian fuel depot in Harare (Salisbury on December 11 1978) which combined with the downing of Rhodesian Viscount aircraft in September 1978 and February 1979 by the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZPRA) near the north-western border with Zambia.
These material and strategic realities meant three things: Rhodesia and its white bastion South Africa were now strategically exposed to hostile and growing African armies enjoying growing external solidarity support; those armies had built and consolidated their capacities fast, despite the retaliatory cross-border bombing at Chimoio, Nyadzonia, Kasinga, Liberty Camp, Mavonde and elsewhere and the economy of Rhodesia could not withstand these guerilla advances for long unless Rhodesia and South Africa wished to risk a full regional/international war over the entire region.
The second consideration was that for the first time in the history of relations between native and settler in Rhodesia, the native enjoyed the upper hand both in strategic/military and moral terms.
The native could very well assert both military-material claims and ‘human rights’ claims against the white settler and his imperialist backers.
Not only was African military victory possible on the ground, but the same forces and people threatening that victory also could enjoy high moral and legal ground based on the 1973 International Convention for the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid which included Rhodesian UDI and its war on African liberation movements (aided by South Africa) as part of the crime of apartheid.
On this point the entire Anglo-Saxon establishment agreed that the native should not be allowed such a double victory: on the strategic/military front and on the legal/human rights front.
So the third, fourth and fifth considerations had all to do with how the Anglo-Saxon world, through Britain, should move to avoid an African double victory. They therefore took a ‘sunset’ approach through which much of recent history had to be suppressed (Let bygones-be-bygones) and the conference had to be purged of the usual ‘human rights’ rhetoric except in reference only to potential (foreseeable) victims of the African majority government which would emerge out of the conference.
This meant pretending that the conference was a product of goodwill and mutual persuasion rather than the result of imminent military, strategic and economic realities.
The chairman of the conference even went as far as claiming that the very same conflict which had led to the need to call for a conference was itself ‘a tragic and unnecessary political dispute’.
In this way, what the UN General Assembly had branded as ‘the crime of apartheid’ was transformed via rhetorical purging to ‘a tragic and unnecessary political dispute’.
While giving credit to the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Kenneth Kaunda’s Zambia (on the Frontline) for the initiative leading to Lancaster, the Anglo-Saxon powers nevertheless needed London, Lancaster House to be specific, as the venue.
This was critical not only for downplaying the real material reasons for the conference, but also for shifting the African’s imminent victory from a revolutionary context to a decolonisation context, that is shifting the agents(actors) from African freedom fighters to her majesty Queen Elizabeth’s Government and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
The chairman of the conference made it clear that Lancaster House as a venue meant Britain now taking direct responsibility; treating revolutionary Zimbabwe the same way as other former colonies of Britain even if these might have been reactionary and anti-revolutionary; and setting the conditions and framework within which Britain, ‘would be prepared to grant legal independence’ to natives who had already won it on the battle field.
So, in terms of ultimate objective, the Anglo-Saxons wanted an alibi in the crime of apartheid to be granted by representatives of the native in exchange for ‘decolonisation’.
In other words, the ultimate objective was to achieve the deniability of white crime accepted via signatures by representatives of the native.
‘Reconciliation’ instead of ‘justice’ became the key theme.
As a result, the Lancaster House Conference was not like the Zimbabwe Constitutional Commission of 1999-2000 or the Constitution Select Committee of Parliament of Zimbabwe (COPAC) of 2009-2013 which were overwhelmed by the rhetoric of ‘human rights’.
As the late Brigadier-General Felix Muchemwa demonstrated in his book The Struggle for Land in Zimbabwe, the legacy of Lancaster House is still with us and the native has not stopped ‘paying’ for his/her stolen land.
What we paid through the sacrificed blood of our brothers and sisters on the battlefield, we are still paying again through the effects of illegal sanctions imposed by the very same Anglo-Saxon powers behind the Lancaster strategy and settlement.
So, during the re-enactment of the land revolution long after independence, we found our own brothers and sisters being financed by the same Anglo-Saxon powers to extend the settlers and the imperialists alibi in the crime of apartheid: white theft of African land.
What was most significant was the fact that our learned lawyers within the MDC and the Lawyers for Human Rights did not tell us that the present land ownership systems in South Africa and Zimbabwe at that time were the result of some of the most important acts of the crime of Apartheid as defined by the 1973 International Convention for the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid.
What MDC lawyers and the Lawyers for Human Rights did not tell us was that RENAMO is one of the thriving and remaining products of the Crime of Apartheid and that under the 1973 Convention leaders of RENAMO would also qualify as criminal suspects required to be prosecuted for advancing the aims of apartheid as defined in the Convention.
What the MDC lawyers, Lawyers for Human Rights and the Law Society of Zimbabwe at the time did not tell citizens of Zimbabwe was that within the Judiciary in Zimbabwe at that time were individuals who qualified as suspects for criminal prosecution under the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid.
By stressing reconciliation without reparations, the Lancaster House Conference magnified the danger that the African land revolution itself would be condemned as racist discrimination against white citizens.
This would ensure that the damage inflicted on Africans through slavery, colonialism and apartheid would never be repaired or corrected.
This Pan-African and socialist insight has proved to have been prophetic.
We have heard whites such as MDC’s David Coltart make this very same argument: that the land redistribution programme was racist because all the big landlords targeted were whites.
So the people who benefited from inheriting or buying stolen property are also supposed to benefit from human rights protection against their victims, the original owners of the land!
The last group of major facts has to do with answers to two questions: Who were the criminals and what were the crimes according to the 1973 convention?
To answer the two questions, it is important to note that both South African apartheid and the Rhodesian Unilateral Declaration of (White Minority) Independence (UDI) were condemned openly and widely at international forums.
In both cases, some UN sanctions were outlined, publicised and imposed.
So none of the key personnel serving these condemned regimes can say he or she did not know of their illegality.
The convention clearly states that the criminals include organisations, institutions and individuals who helped or served to advance or maintain the objectives and effects of apartheid.
The Lancaster House Conference therefore helped to obscure these issues which have now come to the fore again with renewed interest in the long term effects of illegal sanctions against Zimbabwe and with the whiteman’s use of the ICC primarily to target Africans for alleged crimes which Lancaster ignored in the case of white leaders.