Zimbabwe has made a sad turn towards military rule untrammelled by the rule of law in recent days and weeks. President Mugabe, in a weekend address to the nation, repudiated the country's supreme court, which had asked him to respect and protect its authority in a case involving the arrest and torture of journalists by the armed forces. He accused the judges of meddling in politics and called on them to resign.
Yesterday, the military police were involved in confrontations with student demonstrators protesting against the President as another court rejected key elements of his plan to confiscate land from white commercial farmers and transfer it to poor black ones. In December, trade unions were banned from demonstrating against high prices and food costs for six months. The army's role has been boosted by its involvement in the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where it has been used to defend President Laurent Kabila, with hardly any democratic accountability. The journalists were arrested and tortured in an attempt to get them to reveal their sources for a report last month that 23 officers in the army had planned a coup in December.
It looks as if the President has simply lost patience with legal and popular resistance to his rule and is willing to fall back on the armed forces as the bulwark of his regime. This is a sad turn precisely because during the confident decade that followed independence in 1979, after the prolonged guerrilla war against Mr Ian Smith's Rhodesia and the triumphant emergence of Mr Mugabe's party from the elections, Zimbabwe had an independent judiciary, a relatively free press and a comparatively free political system. Health and education were the envy of other African states and Mr Mugabe maintained a high profile internationally as a post-colonial statesman.
These favourable circumstances were based largely on a strong performance by the country's 4,000 commercial white farmers, who own some 70 per cent of the best agricultural land. Land reform and redistribution were therefore limited and left as unfinished business. Over the following years the economy deteriorated and Zimbabwe, like other African states, became encumbered with large international debts. Mr Mugabe, who is well versed in the arts of postcolonial rhetoric, would regularly threaten confiscation and redistribution, but his delivery on promises was quite another matter.
When he did move to transfer 1,500 white farms two years ago, he said he would compensate the farmers for improvements but not for the land - a principle which became bogged down in long court litigation. Matters have not been helped by suspicions that much of the land will go to government supporters, bearing out reports of systematic corruption elsewhere. As elections loom this year, it looks as if things will deteriorate further. There has been a lamentable increase in the use of repressive legislation inherited from the colonial period against protesters and dissidents. It is surely time for Mr Mugabe, after 19 years in office, to depart the scene, rather than lead his country into a spiral of repression and the abandonment of hard-won democratic procedures and legal norms.