Africa's Saddam

...Inflation and unemployment were high...

...Groups calling themselves "war veterans"—a nod to the struggle against the British two decades earlier—marched on a number of farms, pulling down fences, "pegging" their property claims, setting up makeshift huts, and ordering the owners out...

...And fittingly, the case rests on the testimony of Canadian resident Ari Ben Menashe, a self-styled political consultant—Buckley's favorite protagonist...

...Canadian police had arrested Ben Menashe himself on charges of threats and assault filed by his wife and mother-in-law...

...Soon five competing groups were claiming the property, each clamoring at the gate...

...Mugabe came to power in 1980 as a revolutionary leader who brought down the white-dominated regime in what was then Southern Rhodesia...

...Anxious to shore up his popularity, Mugabe determined to press ahead with land redistribution, legally or otherwise...

...Repeatedly called for help, they would respond that it was "a political matter...

...Ben Menashe admits that he planned to gather evidence Tsvangirai was plotting to kill Mugabe, but the effort was something out of Inspector Clouseau...

...There Mugabe, along with his henchmen, was installed in a thirty-three-room hotel wing and reportedly dined on black truffles, caviar, and filet of pigeon...

...Many other farmers were beaten, maimed, shot, hacked to death...

...In May 2002 Mugabe's officials dumped on the property 700 "new farmers," evicted by the government from fertile farms they had earlier seized...

...Hutchinson read a transcript of the tapes presented at the trial and found it was Ben Menashe who said Mugabe would have to be "eliminated," while Tsvangirai kept talking of a "transitional government" and Zimbabwe's constitution...

...official corruption was endemic...

...Unluckily for Morgan Tsvangirai, his Movement for Democratic Change became Dickens and Madsen's first client...

...The facts are that Iraqi-born Ben Menashe was a translator for the Mossad who was deemed delusional, denied a security clearance, and resigned...

...That's how Ari's mind works—one measure of reality and nine measures of unreality?' In March of this year, journalist Brian Hutchinson did an in-depth report on Ben Menashe in Canada's National Post...

...Legault had been indicted in the United States on fraud charges in 1986 and again in 1997...

...JUNE/JULY 2003 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 51...

...The Movement for Democratic Change wound up giving Ben Menashe $100,000...

...the family grazed sheep and cattle...

...Even the date of the disaster can be fixed: February 26, 2000...

...Indeed he proposed outdoing the original: "If that is a Hitler, then let me be a Hitler tenfold:' In April, the UN Human Rights Commission—chaired by Libya—voted 28 to 24 to reject a U.S...

...Commercial farms that came up for sale—and 80 percent did so during the period the program was in force—had to be offered first to the government...

...One woman was raped with a rifle butt...

...Making a new start, the pair reconstituted themselves as a political consultancy with the confidence-inspiring name of Dickens and Madsen (Canada) Inc...

...The squatters "liberated" so much of it that soon the Buckles had only two small fields on which to graze 200 cattle and sheep...

...When Buckle insisted that her complaint at least be recorded, the police would claim they could not even find their report book...

...mid-meeting she discovered that the tape recorder wasn't working...

...This is my fields...

...Both Zimbabwe-born, they had bought the farm in 1990, ten years after Mugabe came to power, obtaining a Certificate of No Interest (in the property) from the government prior to purchasing it...

...He planted a homing device in the Osirak reactor that enabled the Israeli Air Force to hone in on the target in 1981...

...A land-reform program was already under way, funded by the national treasury and European governments including Britain, Zimbabwe's former colonial ruler...

...For his part, Tsvangirai sees this all as a ploy to have his party abandon its chief lever against the regime...

...In fact, the assistant had fallen from a bicycle...

...Realistically, though, even with Mugabe gone, the country once known as "the jewel of Africa" will be the recipient of international food aid for years to come...

...In response, the Mugabe government arrested 600 people...

...And small wonder that Mugabe fears the court challenge...

...Bank notes are in short supply...

...Money poured in...

...Farmworkers and their families forced out by the war veterans—half a million people in total—were destitute, many of them living by the roadside or in the bush...

...He has been in power twenty-three years—just one short of Saddam—essentially unchallenged since he put down a tribal rebellion in the 1980s, in which 20,000 Ndebele civilians were massacred...

...In 1980 he was with vice presidential candidate George Bush and other Reagan team members in Paris arranging a deal with Iran to hold the American hostages until after the presidential elections (the so-called "October Surprise" theory, which sparked two congressional hearings before being labeled bogus...

...But Mugabe refuses to negotiate unless the MDC acknowledges the legitimacy of his "victory" in last year's elections...

...The squatters also "liberated" the dams that supplied water, forcing the Buckles, at enormous cost, to water the livestock by pumping from their only well...

...he was accused in Florida of participating in a Ponzi scheme in which 200 mainly elderly people were defrauded of $8 million...

...What happened to Cathy Buckle's Stow Farm is instructive...

...But with an additional 30 appointed members, Mugabe retained a lopsided majority...

...Once again there was massive electoral fraud, with outlying rural villages, for example, reporting thousands more votes than previously registered voters...

...One drunken leader shrieked: "This is my farm...

...This is my cows...

...Baghdad Bob to the last, he says it's "laughable" to say his land reform failed...

...He could declare victory—he has said that land reform, his great achievement, is nearly complete...

...Most of the farmers he pillaged are gone, starting over in Mozambique and Zambia, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada...

...The general brutality was such that some of the torturers fled along with many of their victims to neighboring South Africa...

...Old people, young people, our own aunts and uncles...

...Nor for that matter had their land been acquired under white rule...

...The UN hopes it can go back to buying food in Zimbabwe...

...Outside the courtroom, Zimbabwe's disaster deepens daily...

...But the pressures became too much...

...Though his chief accomplice in the scheme is already serving a twenty-two-year jail sentence, Legault has managed to avoid extradition by claiming refugee status in Canada, insisting that the charges against him were "fabricated by the CIA...

...I had to run away...

...But the war veterans, with their pegged domains, have themselves been speedily evicted, by police, army units, and hired thugs working on behalf of a Who's Who in Zanu-PF, from the chief justice to Mugabe's sister to the police commissioner and a host of lesser notables...

...In short, the trial would be the stuff of farce were it not that Tsvangirai and two associates could be hanged if the verdict goes against them...

...Those involved have since been duly rewarded with formerly white-owned farms...

...Farm workers were forced to attend party rallies, recite slogans for hours, threatened and beaten if it was suspected they might vote for the opposition...

...According to Hutchinson's National Post reporting, in 1994 Ben Menashe and Legault formed Carlington Sales Canada Corporation to sell commodities...

...By 2002 the food and fuel shortages had grown acute...

...Although Mugabe is the subject of European so-called "smart sanctions," which ban him from travel to EU countries, in February—over the protests of England, Holland, Sweden, and Germany—Chirac insisted on those sanctions being "suspended," to allow Mugabe to come to Paris for a three-day Franco-Africa summit...

...With a presidential election looming, Mugabe saw the handwriting on the wall and came up with an imaginative ploy...

...Buckle's land was not fit for agriculture...

...Ben Menashe, dazzled his prospective client with the promise of raising $2 million for the MDC in the United States, in exchange for a payment of $500,000...

...Asked by defense lawyers why he had failed to disclose this explosive information in his statement to police, Ben Menashe said he had told an assistant police commissioner Moses Magandi...

...This is my ostrich...

...With all this, the opposition MDC took 57 of the 120 contested seats, winning almost all the contests in urban areas...

...But first some background...

...JUNE/JULY 2003 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 49 The response of Mugabe's government was to deny reality...

...At the edge of bankruptcy, their prize poultry killed by the squatters, some of the cattle brutally butchered, their timber and much of their land burned in fires set by the invaders, the Buckles threw in the towel, sold off the remaining animals, and left the farm...

...head of the trade-union federation...

...Zanu-PF did manage to eke out a legislative majority in the 2000 elections through a combination of vote fraud and massive intimidation...

...In a sense they were lucky...

...Thanks to its large, mainly white-owned commercial farms, the country produced a surplus of wheat and corn and was the world's second largest exporter—after Brazil—of flue-cured tobacco, providing a healthy measure of foreign exchange...

...The referendum also proposed a novel mode of "land reform": the large commercial farms would be seized without compensation and divided among landless peasants...

...Whatever happens—and the outcome is more likely to be decided in the streets than in the courts—Mugabe's legacy, the ruin of his country, is likely to stand...

...By his own claims, Ben Menashe is a man of many roles...

...But Mugabe's regime chose to buy very few, and it later came to light that more than half of those it did purchase went not to landless peasants, but to governors, judges, members of Parliament, and high police officials...

...The MDC has obtained documents (some leaked to the London Daily Telegraph) showing that at Mugabe's direction, five days before the voting, military officers loyal to him seized control of the election machinery from the civilian authorities...

...International observer commissions from the commonwealth and the South African Development Community described the elections as fundamentally flawed...

...Though a government employee—and a prosecution witness—Magandi testified that Ben Menashe told him no such thing...

...the central bank cannot print more because it lacks therequired special paper, ink, and security seals...

...Mugabe responded with a constitutional referendum that would have expanded his powers and extended his term of office by ten years...

...Mugabe's police did nothing...

...Bizarrely, Zimbabwe presented a paper to the commission admitting soldiers had committed "atrocious human rights violations" but adding, "Whose soldiers...

...The director of the World Food Program has called the humanitarian crisis "almost beyond comprehension?' Government thugs monitor food lines, beating anyone who is not a card-carrying Zanu-PF supporter...

...What made the experience especially devastating was that it was a long, drawn-out process...

...It was an emotional roller coaster with hope, anguish, anger, despair, and terror rapidly displacing one another...

...But that turned out to be chump change compared to the million dollars he would collect from another client—the government of Robert Mugabe...

...Hope was fueled by court rulings against the seizures (which the government ignored) and by occasional statements from government officials that the squatters would be evicted...

...The commonwealth suspended Zimbabwe's membership...

...businessman Alexander Henri Legault...

...There was too much beating," said one...

...Nonetheless, dissatisfaction with Mugabe's rule grew in the 1990s...

...motion to condemn Zimbabwe for human rights abuses...

...Teenaged "Green Bombers," trained in special "youth education" camps to beat, rape, and murder suspected opposition supporters, told their story to the South African press...

...Buckle drove out for a look and could not believe what she saw—her once serene property was the scene of incredible squalor, a shanty town with no water, no electricity, no sanitation, the ground covered in feces...

...According to the World Bank, 7.2 million Zimbabweans faced starvation by 2002, unemployment stood at 80 percent, and a third of the population suffered from AIDS, with the death toll reaching 2,000 people a week...

...The government passed Draconian laws limiting press freedom and public assembly...

...He turned down appointment as head of the Mossad...

...Paddington Garwe, the judge in the case, had been appointed to Zimbabwe's second highest judicial post two years earlier, following Mugabe's purge of what had been an independent judiciary...

...today the figure is 97 percent...

...Buckle's farm became the veterans' regional headquarters, with hundreds of activists gathering for weekly meetings...

...Nevertheless, in May, Canadian authorities finally agreed to deport him to face fraud charges in New Orleans...

...After settling in Canada ten years ago and marrying a Canadian citizen, Ben Menashe went into partnership with former U.S...

...He was a senior political adviser to Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir...

...Buckle and her husband, their seven-year-old son, and their workers would live on the farm for six months, trying to continue their normal pursuits, while the veterans camped on their land, cut down their timber, killed their animals, brutally attacked workers—one was maimed by a burning hot steel rod shoved against her mouth—and threatened Buckle at gunpoint...

...Neither Cathy, her husband Ian, nor her son Rich, was physically harmed...

...In this respect the most recent round of "land reform" has been very similar...

...In 1999 for the first time his ruling African National Union-Patriotic Front—Zanu-PFfaced a serious challenge from the new Movement for Democratic Change led by Morgan Tsvangirai, formerly Rael Jean Isaac is coauthor with Virginia C. Armat of Madness in the Streets: How Psychiatry and the Law Abandoned the Mentally Ill, published by The Free Press...

...250 were admitted to hospitals with injuries...

...The Movement for Democratic Change filed a suit with the High Court calling for nullification of the results and new elections...

...On the stand, Ben Menashe also dropped a bombshell, announcing that Britain and the CIA had helped plot Mugabe's death, with the former offering $10 million for the assassination...

...He planned and led Israel's famed Entebbe raid that rescued hijacked passengers in Uganda...

...Mugabe himself explained gasoline and diesel shortages by saying the British followed tankers laden with fuel destined for Zimbabwe on the high seas, offering to pay double the price for the fuel in order to deprive Zimbabwe of its normal supplies...

...Ironically, when the Buckles left in September 2000, their farm had still not appeared on the progressively longer lists published in the newspapers of farms the government planned to seize...

...It is a Mugabe-made famine: in a mere three years he has transformed Zimbabwe from the breadbasket of southern Africa into its basket case...

...They made a likely pair...

...Ben Menashe's assistant, Tara Thomas, was supposed to make an audiotape of a meeting in London...

...Two weeks before the scheduled voting, he announced that Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the MDC, would be tried for treason...

...A big reason was South Africa, whose president Thabo Mbeki has been Mugabe's most steadfast supporter...

...Thus, in a mere two years, Zimbabwean agriculture—and with it the country's economy—disintegrated...

...In African Tears, Cathy Buckle, among the first white farmers to be invaded, has written a fine account of the ordeal...

...By March 2002 the government had seized 95 percent of commercial farmland...

...Meanwhile back home, two-thirds of his nearly 12 million remaining countrymen (2 million are estimated to have fled) teetered on the edge of starvation...

...On the stand, Ben Menashe shouted insults at the defense attorney and told new tall tales: thugs hired by the MDC had attacked his assistant—who appeared in court limping—and had threatened his wife and six-yearold daughter, leading to the breakdown of his marriage...

...Even as he was running interference for Saddam earlier this year, less remarked, he was also championing Saddam-lite, Zimbabwe's long-time strongman Robert Mugabe...

...50 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JUNE/JULY 2003 The director of the World Food Program has called Zimbabwe's humanitarian crisis "almost beyond comprehension...

...Most of the "veterans" were in their teens or twenties, at best infants at the time of Zimbabwe's struggle against Ian Smith's white-dominated government...

...After a particularly extensive wave of terror and destruction, Information Minister Jonathan Moyo—an unsung Baghdad Bob—claimed that British diplomats had colluded with white farmers to destroy their own farms in order to discredit the Mugabe government...

...In a stinging blow, on February 26, 2000, the referendum was defeated...

...Meanwhile a London arbitration court ruled that Ben Menashe had defrauded Zambia of millions of dollars...

...Brandishing a gun, he bragged to Buckle that he could drop her at forty paces...

...48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JUNE/JULY 2003 "We all begin to feel like the Jews who were stripped of their human rights, their property rights, and then their lives in Nazi Germany...

...When Carlington filed for bankruptcy in December 2001, it cited almost $9 million in liabilities...

...his recent decisions have favored the government, even in cases of egregious misconduct...

...Tobacco production, the chief source of foreign exchange, had dropped to 70,000 tons—a third of 2001's already dismal total...

...The treason trial of Morgan Tsvangirai and two associates, in process at this writing, requires the satiric pen of Christopher Buckley...

...Ben Menashe bought a mansion and fancy cars...

...By the time her ordeal was over, Buckle would write: "We all begin to feel more than a little like the Jews who were stripped of their human rights, their property rights, and then their lives in Nazi Germany...

...The trouble was that complaints and then lawsuits (some still pending) started to pile up from customers who never received the goods for which they had provided large down payments...

...industries and businesses are blacked out for days at a time...

...His wife (who later divorced him) told an Israeli newspaper that he lived in an imaginary world...

...Mugabe's hope that land reform would invigorate his public support proved illusory...

...As much as Iraq depends on oil, Zimbabwe depends on agriculture-75 percent of its people, directly or indirectly, make their livelihood from it...

...He also had to cope with a complaint of criminal deception made by Egyptian-born British businessman Mohammed al-Fayed, charging that he had been approached by Ben Menashe who wanted $750,000 for information he claimed to have linking his son Dodi and Princess Diana's deaths to the Mossad...

...There was not a sign of farming...

...He was Israel's top spy...

...To try to jump-start negotiations between Mugabe and the MDC, the presidents of South Africa, Nigeria, and Malawi visited Harare in early May...

...Morgan Tsvangirai is indeed guilty—of stupidity, in being victimized by a confidence man when a simple Google search would have turned up the goods on him...

...In another ominous sign, Garwe recently seized for himself the prize Mount Lothian farm owned by octogenarian C. G. Tracy, one of the first white farmers to embrace Zimbabwe's independence...

...Conflict of interest is not a term in Ben Menashe's lexicon...

...Most of Zimbabwe's foreign electric-power suppliers, owed millions, have refused to supply more...

...Now 79, Mugabe has hinted that he may be ready to resign...

...They tried again in Montreal, this time with video, but the result was barely audible...

...Mugabe, unabashed, has said he would not hesitate to act like a "black Hitler...

...and declaring they were "in the pay of foreign governments...

...In March, the MDC called for a two-day national "stayaway"—general strike—that was honored by as many as 90 percent of workers...