Blood on Fraser's hands

IT is usually impossible to avoid hearing the former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser apportioning blame for the world's problems on his most recent Liberal successor or the Great Satan - the United States - but in recent days he has held his counsel.

The fate of his former friend Robert Mugabe, the Butcher of Zimbabwe, hangs by a stolen ballot box or two, and Fraser, who more than any other Western leader helped the dictator to power, has been strangely silent. As the former PM's biographer, Philip Ayres has written: "The centrality of Fraser's part in the processes leading to Zimbabwe's independence is indisputable. All the major African figures affirm it." Further, he quotes Mugabe, no less, as saying of Fraser: "I got enchanted by (Fraser), we became friends, personal friends . . . he's really motivated by a liberal philosophy." Shows it takes a bloody-handed murderer to know a supportive liberal when he sees one. While Fraser, lately beloved of the latte Left, was an early Mugabe backer, he was not responsible for sustaining him in power for the past 28 years. The surviving unfortunate Zimbabweans can thank that Great Power China for providing their hated leader with the capital and weapons which he used to ruthlessly keep them suppressed. Fraser, like current Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, was enamoured of himself and most particularly so when he was strutting the world stage. But as a small-l liberal Fraser was moved more by emotion than sense and, in pandering to the warmer, wetter side of the political divide, sacrificed Zimbabwe's millions to the monstrous Mugabe. Liberals such as Fraser don't like to make judgment calls - except when they are on safe ground. Internationally, there is no safer place to sit than on that lofty moral plateau from which one can shower indignant tirades against nations like the US and the UK - and Australia, under the previous government of John Howard - for trying to make the world a better place for all. Few among the current crop of living dictators can match Mugabe's record for destroying a prosperous people through a constant series of deliberate actions designed for the most part to keep him in power. As has often been said, Mugabe transformed Zimbabwe from the bread basket of Africa into the continent's basket case. He did so to the applause of Western liberals, who cheered his land reforms which saw efficient white farmers driven from their farms. Less fortunate Zimbabweans were sometimes tortured and murdered, while their properties were handed over to so-called "veterans" of the guerilla war which saw the end of Ian Smith's post-colonial rule of the former Rhodesia. In small-l liberal eyes, white is always bad and black is always good, a perception still preached by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the outspoken pastor and spiritual adviser to US Democratic hopeful Barack Obama. Hence, Mugabe's actions in stealing land from white farmers while burning their homes around them was seen as bringing a form of crude justice to those who would perpetuate colonial exploitation. That black Zimbabweans would later starve without work or shelter because the white farmers who had supported and sustained their families had been murdered was not part of the liberal equation. Throughout the rape of Zimbabwe Mugabe and his upper echelon of cronies flaunted their power - indulging in public extravagances to which they were driven in fleets of new Mercedes cars at their command. In Mugabe's own case, he had the national Zimbabwean airline at his beck and call. According to the most generous UN estimates, the exodus of white farmers triggered by Mugabe's anarchic land redistribution campaign, which began in 2000, crippled the economy, and ushered in widespread shortages of basic commodities. After rigging the 2002 presidential election to ineffectual international condemnation, his ruling ZANU-PF party used fraud and intimidation to win a two-thirds majority in the March 2005 parliamentary election, allowing it to amend the constitution at will and recreate the Senate, which had been abolished in the late 1980s. Mugabe's Operation Restore Order, embarked upon in 2005, resulted in the destruction of the homes or businesses of 700,000 mostly poor supporters of the Opposition. Price controls placed on basic commodities last year sent inflation to the world's highest level - more than 100,000 per cent - while an HIV/AIDS epidemic contributed to a steep drop in life expectancy. Those who examine the record and ask how this all came about will find that Fraser, and those who share his impractical view of this imperfect world, had a prime role and have a lot to answer for. As what are to be hoped are Mugabe's final days if not hours are played out, and Opposition Leader Morgan Tsvangirai considers the enormous task of rebuilding the shattered nation of Zimbabwe while managing the expectations of its desperate people, Mugabe's own future must be considered. The hated Ugandan despot Idi Amin found a spiritual haven in Islam and a temporal sanctuary in Saudi Arabia. Perhaps Malcolm Fraser could offer Mugabe the hospitality of his home here in Australia. After all, he owes the shattered Zimbabweans something beside an apology for assisting their torturer on his rise to power.