All he wants, insists Comrade - his official party title - Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe is to right an ancient wrong by returning land, expropriated by white settlers, to its rightful black owners. Most of beneficiaries, being war veterans, happen to support his party, Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front, or ZANU-PF, and its profligate largesse:

"We must deliver land unencumbered by impediments to its rightful owners. It is theirs by birth; it is theirs by natural and legal right. It is theirs by struggle. Indeed their(s) by legacy." - he thundered in a speech he made to Central Committee of his party in March 2001 in response to mounting multi-annual pressures from war veteran associations.

It was Margaret Thatcher of Falklands fame who, after two decades of fierce fighting, capitulated to rebels, headed by Mugabe. The Iron Lady handed to them, in Lancaster House agreement, an independent Zimbabwe - literally, "Great Stone House". The racist Rhodesia was no more. But agreement enshrined property rights of white farmers until 1990 and has, thus, sown seeds of current chaos.

Many nostalgic white settlers in Zimbabwe - mostly descendents of British invaders at end of 19th century - still believe in their cultural - if not genetic - superiority. Their forefathers bought indigenous land from commercial outfits supported by British Crown. The blacks - their plots and livestock confiscated - were resettled in barren "communal areas", akin to Native-American reserves in USA minus gambling concessions.

Starting in 1893, successive uprisings were bloodily suppressed by colonizers and British government. A particularly virulent strain of apartheid was introduced. By 1914, notes Steve Lawton in "British Colonialism, Zimbabwe's Land Reform and Settler Resistance", 3 percent of population controlled 75 percent of land. The blacks were "harshly restricted to a mere 23 per cent of worst land in designated Reserves. There were only 28,000 white settlers to nearly one million Africans in Zimbabwe at this time."

Land ownership hasn't changed much since. The 1930 "Land Apportionment Act" perpetuated glaring inequality. At independence, according to "Zimbabwe's Agricultural Revolution" edited by Mandivamba Rukuni and Carl Eicher and published in 1994 by University of Zimbabwe Publications, 6000 white commercial farms occupied 45 percent of all agricultural land - compared to only 5 percent tilled by 8500 black farmers. Another 70,000 black families futilely cultivated infertile remaining half of soil.

As black population exploded, poverty and repression combined to give rise to anti-white guerilla movements. The rest is history. The first post-independence land reform and resettlement program lasted 17 years, until 1997. It targeted refugees, internally displaced people, and squatters and its aims were, as Petrunella Chaminuka, a researcher at SAPES Trust Agrarian Reform Programme in Zimbabwe, summarizes a 1990 government discussion paper in "Workers' Weekly":

"To redress past grievances over land alienation, to alleviate population pressure in communal areas and to achieve national stability and progress. The programme was designed to enhance smallholder food and cash crop production, achieve food self-sufficiency and improve equity in income distribution."

Land reform was an act of anti-colonialist, ideologically-motivated defiance. The first lots went to landless - and utterly unskilled - blacks. Surprisingly, theirs was a success story. They cultivated land ably and production increased. Certified farmers and agronomists, though, had to wait their turn until National Land Policy of 1990 which allowed for compulsory land purchases by government. There was no master plan of resettlement and infrastructure deficiencies combined with plot fragmentation to render many new farms economically unviable.

As ready inventory dried up, price of land soared. Droughts compounded this sorry state and by late 1980's yields were down and squatting resurged. Unemployment forced people back into rural areas. Egged on by multilateral lenders, white farmers, and Western commercial interests, government further exacerbated situation by allocating enormous tracts of land to horticulture, ostrich farming, crocodile farming, ranching and tourism thus further depleting anyhow meager stock of arable acreage.

International outcry against compulsory acquisitions or targeting of c. 1600 farms forced Zimbabwean government and its donors to come up in 1997-9 with a second land reform and resettlement programme and Inception Phase Framework Plan. Contrary to disinformation in Western media, white farmers and NGO's were regularly consulted in preparation of both documents.

In what proved to be a prophetic statement, aptly named Barbara Kafka of World Bank, quoted by IPS, gave this warning in September 1998 donor conference:

''We are delighted that government has called this conference as a key step in our working together to make sure that Zimbabwe reaps results it deserves from its land reform programme ... Nevertheless, we must not be naive. The downside risks are high. There is abundant international experience to show that poorly executed land reform can carry high social and economic costs ... For instance, a programme that does not respect property rights or does not provide sufficient support to new settlers, is underfunded or is excessively bureaucratic and costly, or simply results in large numbers of displaced farm workers, can have very negative outcomes in terms of investment, production, jobs and social stability."

This apparent schism is, indeed, merely an apparition. The differences between reformed left and new right in both parts of continent have blurred to point of indistinguishability. French socialists have privatized more than their conservative predecessors. The Tories still complain bitterly that Tony Blair, with his nondescript "Third Way", has stolen their thunder.

Nor are "left" and "right" ideologically monolithic and socially homogeneous continental movements. The central European left is more preoccupied with a social - dare I say socialist - agenda than any of its Western coreligionists. Equally, central European right is less individualistic, libertarian, religious, and conservative than any of its Western parallels - and much more nationalistic and xenophobic. It sometimes echoes far right in Western Europe - rather than center-right, mainstream, middle-class orientated parties in power.

Moreover, right's victories in Western Europe - in Spain, Denmark, Netherlands, Italy - are not without a few important exceptions - notably Britain and, perhaps, come September, Germany. Nor is left's clean sweep of central European electoral slate either complete or irreversible. With exception of outgoing Czech government, not one party in this volatile region has ever remained in power for more than one term. Murmurs of discontent are already audible in Poland and Hungary.

Left and right are imported labels with little explanatory power or relevance to central Europe. To fathom political dynamics of this region, one must realize that core countries of central Europe (the Czech Republic, Hungary and, to a lesser extent, Poland) experienced industrial capitalism in inter-war period. Thus, a political taxonomy based on urbanization and industrialization may prove to be more powerful than classic left-right dichotomy.

THE RURAL versus THE URBAN

The enmity between urban and bucolic has deep historical roots. When teetering Roman Empire fell to Barbarians (410-476 AD), five centuries of existential insecurity and mayhem ensued. Vassals pledged allegiance and subservience to local lords in return for protection against nomads and marauders. Trading was confined to fortified medieval cities.

Even as it petered out in west, feudalism remained entrenched in prolix codices and patents of Habsburg Austro-Hungarian empire which encompassed central Europe and collapsed only in 1918. Well into twentieth century, majority of denizens of these moribund swathes of continent worked land. This feudal legacy of a brobdignagian agricultural sector in, for instance, Poland - now hampers EU accession talks.

Vassals were little freer than slaves. In comparison, burghers, inhabitants of city, were liberated from bondage of feudal labour contract. As a result, they were able to acquire private possessions and city acted as supreme guarantor of their property rights. Urban centers relied on trading and economic might to obtain and secure political autonomy.

John of Paris, arguably one of first capitalist cities (at least according to Braudel), wrote: "(The individual) had a right to property which was not with impunity to be interfered with by superior authority - because it was acquired by (his) own efforts" (in Georges Duby, "The age of Cathedrals: Art and Society, 980-1420, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1981). Max Weber, in his opus, "The City" (New York, MacMillan, 1958) wrote optimistically about urbanization: "The medieval citizen was on way towards becoming an economic man ... ancient citizen was a political man."

But communism halted this process. It froze early feudal frame of mind of disdain and derision towards "non-productive", "city-based" vocations. Agricultural and industrial occupations were romantically extolled by communist parties everywhere. The cities were berated as hubs of moral turpitude, decadence and greed. Ironically, avowed anti-communist right wing populists, like Hungary's former prime minister, Orban, sought to propagate these sentiments, to their electoral detriment.

Communism was an urban phenomenon - but it abnegated its "bourgeoisie" pedigree. Private property was replaced by communal ownership. Servitude to state replaced individualism. Personal mobility was severely curtailed. In communism, feudalism was restored.

Very like Church in Middle Ages, communism sought to monopolize and permeate all discourse, all thinking, and all intellectual pursuits. Communism was characterized by tensions between party, state and economy - exactly as medieval polity was plagued by conflicts between church, king and merchants-bankers.

In communism, political activism was a precondition for advancement and, too often, for personal survival. John of Salisbury might as well have been writing for a communist agitprop department when he penned this in "Policraticus" (1159 AD): "...if (rich people, people with private property) have been stuffed through excessive greed and if they hold in their contents too obstinately, (they) give rise to countless and incurable illnesses and, through their vices, can bring about ruin of body as a whole". The body in text being body politic.

Workers, both industrial and agricultural, were lionized and idolized in communist times. With implosion of communism, these frustrated and angry rejects of a failed ideology spawned many grassroots political movements, lately in Poland, in form of "Self Defence". Their envied and despised enemies are well-educated, intellectuals, self-proclaimed new elite, foreigner, minority, rich, and remote bureaucrat in Brussels.