HARARE, ZIMBABWE — When Ishmael Dube got his own small plot of land, it felt like justice. He'd grown up a black child under a racist white regime when this country was called Rhodesia. Half his youth was gobbled by darkness: war and prison.
He got the farm in 2000, two decades after Zimbabwe's independence from Britain, when President Robert Mugabe urged liberation war veterans to invade white farms. For the war veterans, it was a time of exhilaration and violence. For white farmers, it was a time of bitterness and terror.
"When the land invasions started happening, people were excited," Dube said. "When we were fighting, land was one of the things that we were fighting for."
But Dube lasted just one year; farming was much more difficult than he had expected. After 12 months, the veterans were evicted from the land by a ruling party heavyweight.
Mugabe, who has ruled since 1980, often draws on land, history, blood and race in the bitter liberation rhetoric that peppers his speeches. He called the March 29 elections a new phase in the war over land, describing the opposition as British puppets poised to give back property to white farmers.
But the dire warnings are no longer working. Even many of the war veterans, who helped Mugabe oust the British and stay in power for nearly three decades, aren't listening. And that could mean the end of the liberation hero's long reign.
"People have seen through that kind of cheap propaganda," Dube said.
Mugabe's rhetoric about land and the liberation war now has a tiny, but extremely powerful, circle of supporters: the cronies who still have farms, mainly Mugabe relatives, ministers, generals, judges and intelligence, police and security chiefs. Many of them own several farms, most of them unproductive.
"Mugabe is now losing, because of his greed," said Percy Gombakomba, 53, a war veteran and former bureaucrat in the president's office. "I believe that if Mugabe walked in the streets, he would be stoned.
"People ask, 'Why did you go to war? What were you fighting for?' If you say you were fighting for the land, they will laugh at you."
So few have benefited from the redistribution that Mugabe's broader support has been undermined among traditional allies such as the war veterans. But he was careful to ensure that the top military and security commanders, on whom he relies for protection and survival, got one or more farms.
