Mugabe's lust for power

White and black Zimbabweans struggling to come to terms with what their president, Robert Mugabe, has done to their country often speculate that the former guerrilla leader with the Hitlerian moustache has gone mad with tertiary syphilis. But Mugabe isn't nuts. Over the past two decades he has deliberately and systematically plunged Zimbabwe into bloodshed, chaos and famine.

Worse still, he's been telling everyone since the 1979 Lancaster House agreement, which gave birth to the independent state and ended Ian Smith's racist government, that one day the whites of the former Rhodesia would pay for their sins.

And sin many did. Inspired by Cecil Rhodes in the late 19th century, whites stole most of Zimbabwe's best land from its indigenous black population and entrenched this with an act of parliament in 1931. It ruled that only the 48,000 Rhodesian whites could own 48 million acres. The country's one million blacks got 29 million acres, most of it drought-prone and riddled with tsetse fly, which made stock-rearing impossible.

Now only about 6,000 white farmers own the best land. Small wonder that Mugabe wants the land for black people. But as Meredith explains, Mugabe has never been interested in the people he rules. It is power he craves. To keep it, he lets his cronies plunder.

Farms taken from whites have not been handed over to the poor and dispossessed. They have been given to generals, cabinet ministers and other officials in the Zimbabwe African National Union who also emptied the state coffers.

On 9 and 10 March, Zimbabweans go to the polls in presidential elections. There is no chance of the voting being either free or fair. We know Mugabe will beat the far more popular Morgan Tsvangirai, a former-trade unionist, because the head of the electoral commission in charge of the elections has said so.

But if, by some miracle, Mugabe's poll rigging is thwarted, Meredith reminds us of the sort of violence that Mugabe is prepared to use.

Between 1982 and 1987, his North Korean-trained 5th Brigade, made up of loyalists from his Shona tribe, murdered 10,000 people in Matabeleland, the southern stronghold of the Ndebele then represented by the late Joshua Nkomo. Food aid was given only to supporters of the Zanu party. The same is happening today.

Back in the Eighties, whites, " dissidents" and the Ndebele were the scapegoats of Mugabe's failure to deliver prosperity or freedom. Now as Zimbabwe faces financial collapse and Mugabe is more hated than ever, the scapegoats are again being herded from their farms.

In 1982, after a wave of massacres by the 5th Brigade, Mugabe warned the Ndebele: "We have to deal with this problem (of dissent) ruthlessly. Don't cry if your relatives get killed in the process". Quite.