WHAT MAKES MUGABE SHUDDER?

White skin, that's what. Fergal Keane deplores

the shameful silence in response to ethnic cleansing in Zimbabwe

NAOMI RAAFF is leaving Africa. She was born on the continent, as were her children. But Naomi Raaff is no longer welcome in the land of her birth. Her problem is that she is white, and in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe this makes her an enemy of the state.

White. Not an armed rebel or a political subversive or a hater or a killer — just white. Decent, law-abiding, kind and hard-working but, alas, irredeemably white. In a few days' time she will take a plane to Britain and, with her three children, attempt to start a new life in Hampshire — that is if she can find a job and a house.

I met her in her comfortable bungalow in Harare as she packed the last boxes of her family belongings. Naomi cannot afford to transport her furniture or pay the quarantine fees for the family cat. So these are being parcelled out to friends, while the treasured essentials — old letters, copies of her children's school reports, gymkhana rosettes and photographs — are carefully packed in cardboard boxes for the journey to England.

The most cherished photograph is of Naomi and a ruggedly handsome man in his early fifties. The picture was taken at a party and both of them are beaming into the camera. He had been Naomi's best friend and lover for seven years. The man's name is Terry Ford, and I know that I have seen his photograph before.

But the photograph I saw — weeks before I met Naomi — was of a brutalised and bloody corpse. The Terry Ford in the news photographs was lying near the gate of his farm, having been battered, hacked and shot to death by Robert Mugabe's thugs. The night he was murdered Terry rang Naomi in Harare to tell her that some men had tried to break into the house. He had driven them off by firing a shot. That was the last Naomi heard from him.

The following morning a farm labourer found Terry Ford's body. A gang of 20 men had returned and murdered him. The world paid a little bit of notice to his death, only because Terry had a small terrier called Squeak, and the dog was photographed pining beside the body of his dead master. Then the world resumed its customary indifference to the terror in Zimbabwe, and Naomi Raaff decided she could take no more.

In her view there is no room left for white farmers in Zimbabwe. 'It's over,' she told me. 'The farmers who believe they can stay working are deluding themselves.' She is, of course, absolutely correct. Now. with Mugabe and his cronies threatening to expropriate white businesses, the days of white urban dwellers may also be coming to an end.

The plan is becoming clearer with every passing day: the whites are to be driven out of Zimbabwe. A despotic regime has targeted an ethnic minority and used all the powers of state to marginalise and demonise them. It has changed the law so that it can steal their property, unleashed militias to enforce its will, and turned a blind eye to murder and mayhem. (When Terry Ford called the police for help just before he was murdered, they told him their driver was asleep.) To be white is to be a target of state hatred. It is to be told that your life and livelihood have no value. In any other context we would denounce this as racism and ethnic cleansing, but when it comes to Zimbabwe there is a curious failure to call things by their proper name.

The Western nations went to war in Kosovo proudly declaring that 'ethnic cleansing' had no place at the end of the 20th century. No more Bosnias or Rwandas, they declared. Western forces are deployed in the Balkans to ensure that minorities are not brutalised. The newly inaugurated International Criminal Court has as an implicit goal the prosecution of those who target vulnerable population groups.

So why the silence over Robert Mugabe's campaign against the whites? Let us consider the more plausible rationalisation. It is undeniably the case that black Zimbabweans are enduring far more physical suffering at Mugabe's hands. While 3,000 farmers face eviction, there are 250,000 farm workers who are being made destitute; the torture and killing of Mugabe's black enemies is on a far greater scale than anything suffered by whites: and, unlike the mass of African peasantry, the whites are not facing starvation. All of this is rightly condemned by the West.

The failure to recognise the ethnic cleansing of whites has old roots. Blame it on a noxious blend of history and bigotry. In the liberal West a white African is invariably characterised as a racist buffoon, the last vestige of a colonial past that we would much rather forget. The whites of Zimbabwe are spectacularly unfashionable. Cut off from Western society, they have not learnt the arts of obfuscation and spin. They generally tend to say what they mean. Sometimes their blunt speaking offends our more cultivated sensibilities. Most Western liberals regard them with condescension and disdain. And as for their dress sense! Men in shorts, women in 1950s-style floral dresses, those strange clipped accents . .. not like us, not like us at all. People who will happily campaign for human rights in East Timor or the Middle East start to behave like the most rabid social Darwinists when you mention Zimbabwe's whites. 'Africa is a tough place and they were on top for a long time. It's their turn to be dominated now,' a friend I'd previously regarded as a liberal told me.

Certainly many, but by no means all, white landowners are the descendants of colonialists who stole African land. Some of them undoubtedly harbour racist attitudes and, yes. there was a failure to integrate with black Zimbabwe after independence. But set against this the enormous contribution made to the prosperity of post-independence Zimbabwe by the white farming community, and consider the example of people like Sir Garfield Todd, who fought the racism of Ian Smith and now finds himself stripped of his citizenship; or a farmer like Chris Shepard from Karol, who ferried black torture victims to and from hospital during the election campaign. I could cite numerous more examples of whites who have been putting themselves in the frontline to protect the human rights of black Zimbabweans. These are not racists but proud citizens of Zimbabwe. Let us compare the situation to what happened in a country to the north of Zimbabwe. When the ruling Hutu clique in Rwanda decided to destroy the Tutsi minority, they first denounced them as foreigners and invaders (the comparison with the language used by Mugabe's cronies about whites is chilling). The Tutsis had once been feudal overlords and had worked fist in glove with the colonial administration; but did anybody in the West, or even in the rest of Africa, suggest that the Hutu were justified in targeting the Tutsis because of history?

Like the Tutsis in Rwanda, the whites in Zimbabwe are being vilified because of their ethnic origin. Only whites are being told that they no longer have a place in their own country. A white who was once close to Mugabe told a Zimbabwean friend of mine recently that Mugabe 'positively shudders' with revulsion in the presence of pale skins.

He will go on shuddering until he has rid Zimbabwe of its white population. But you won't hear Africa's leaders speak up for a threatened minority, nor will the African secretary-general of the UN, Kofi Annan, rally the international community to support the beleaguered farmers of Matabeleland. And I would bet anything you like that we won't hear any of our Western leaders use the phrase 'ethnic cleansing'. That would create an obligation to intervene to protect the vulnerable, and, for all the fine rhetoric, this simply will not happen.

The whites of Zimbabwe have been abandoned. Some will try to hang on and hope that Mugabe dies of old age or is eventually overthrown; but most will eventually be driven out, the victims of Robert Mugabe's racism and our indifference. As Naomi Raaff said, it's over.

Fergal Keane has reported from Zimbabwe for the BBC's Ten O'Clock News.