May 29, 2008 - June 26, 2008
Zimbabwe's Run-off still on: ZEC
Posted: Thursday, June 26, 2008
Herald Reporter
The Herald
THE Zimbabwe Electoral Commission yesterday unanimously agreed to proceed with the presidential run-off election tomorrow as scheduled because Morgan Tsvangirai's withdrawal has no legal force since it was filed out of time.
ZEC – which was appointed by Zanu-PF and MDC-T – and all other political parties that contested the March 29 harmonised elections, under the Sadc-brokered talks, said it has since advised Tsvangirai about the decision in writing.
ZEC chairman Justice George Chiweshe said the poll would go ahead as Tsvangirai, who claims his security is under threat, briefly left the Dutch embassy in Harare to address a Press conference at his Strathaven home in Harare.
Tsvangirai called for military intervention in Zimbabwe disguised as peacekeepers and the setting-up of a transitional government supervised by the African Union and Sadc.
Addressing journalists, Justice Chiweshe said the commission had deliberated on the content and effect of Tsvangirai's letter in which he cited various reasons and concluded that the withdrawal was a nullity.
"It was unanimously agreed that the withdrawal had, inter alia, been filed well out of time and that for that reason the withdrawal was of no legal force or effect.
"Accordingly, the commission does not recognise the purported withdrawal. We are, therefore, proceeding with the presidential run-off election this Friday as planned. The ballot papers have been printed and dispatched. We are advising Mr Tsvangirai accordingly," he said.
Justice Chiweshe said the electoral law stipulates the period during which a candidate must file a withdrawal letter.
"I do not want to go into that. We will be writing to Mr Tsvangirai on the issue," he said.
When asked whether the withdrawal by Tsvangirai would have an effect on the legitimacy of the poll, Justice Chiweshe said: "The pullout has no legal force. In fact, there has been no pullout."
Justice Chiweshe said the commission was ready for the elections and that the results of the presidential run-off would be announced as soon as they were ready.
Constitutional law experts have said Tsvangirai cannot pull out of the run-off now and even though he has written to ZEC, the decision was of no legal force.
"The strict legal position is that candidature for the run-off or second election is not a voluntary exercise; you give your consent when you contest the first election," lawyer Lovemore Madhuku said.
Political analysts have described Tsvangirai's withdrawal announcement, which was made just before the UN Security Council met to discuss Zimbabwe, as a ploy to create a bleak picture of the Zimbabwean situation.
The Dutch foreign ministry yesterday confirmed Tsvangirai returned to their embassy.
Zanu-Ndonga has joined the list of organisations that have castigated the opposition leader for his decision to withdraw from the poll.
"Boycotting without offering an alternative is not the solution. The decision to pull out does not make any political sense," said Zanu-Ndonga secretary-general Mr Reketayi Semwayo at a Press conference.
The party's national organising secretary, Mr Gondai Vutuza, said it is Zimbabweans who have the mandate to find a solution to the challenges facing the country and not outsiders as claimed by Tsvangirai.
"Zimbabweans should decide their future and not any other person. It is us who should decide.
"The two presidential candidates should engage each other for political dialogue with a view to coming up with a solution. The search for solutions should obviously include every stakeholder," said Mr Vutuza.
Late yesterday, the Sadc election observer mission said it would remain in Zimbabwe until after the June 27 run-off, and that it was not bound by the decision of the Troika on Politics, Defence and Security, which met in Mbabane, Swaziland, yesterday.
Head of the election observer mission Angolan Minister of Youth, Sport and Culture Mr Jose Marcos Barrica told journalists that the issue of whether or not there are elections in Zimbabwe is the responsibility of the Zimbabwean Government and ZEC.
"We will stay put until after June 27 be there elections or not. We may have our ideas, but that is the responsibility of the authorities," he said.
Mr Barrica said the mission was only bound by Sadc and not the troika.
He said the mission had made inroads in trying to bring the political players in Zimbabwe to the negotiating table.
"There are positive signals that can take the process forward. There is light at the end of the tunnel that can bring the two sides together. We think we have the way prepared for the leadership to go forward," he said.
Responding to questions on the mission's position following reports that members of the Sadc troika that met yesterday in Swaziland had recommended that tomorrow's run-off be postponed, Mr Barrica said the troika only deliberates on issues and does not make resolutions.
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Zimbabwe at War
Posted: Wednesday, June 25, 2008
By Stephen Gowans
June 25, 2008
gowans.wordpress.com
This is a war between revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries; between nationalists and quislings; between Zimbabwean patriots and the US and Britain.
Should an election be carried out when a country is under sanctions and it has been made clear to the electorate that the sanctions will be lifted only if the opposition party is elected? Should a political party which is the creation of, and is funded by, hostile foreign forces, and whose program is to unlatch the door from within to provide free entry to foreign powers to establish a neo-colonial rule, be allowed to freely operate? Should the leaders of an opposition movement that takes money from hostile foreign powers and who have made plain their intention to unseat the government by any means available, be charged with treason? These are the questions that now face (have long faced) the embattled government of Zimbabwe, and which it has answered in its own way, and which other governments, at other times, have answered in theirs.
The American revolutionaries, Thomas Jefferson among them, answered similar questions through harsh repression of the monarchists who threatened to reverse the gains of the American Revolution. There were 600,000 to 700,000 Tories, loyal to the king and hostile to the revolutionaries, who stood as a threat to the revolution. To neutralize the threat, the new government denied the Tories any platform from which to organize a counter-revolution. They were forbidden to own a press, to teach, to mount a pulpit. The professions were closed to them. They were denied the right to vote and hold political office. The property of wealthy Tories was confiscated. Many loyalists were beaten, others jailed without trial. Some were summarily executed. And 100,000 were driven into exile. Hundreds of thousands of people were denied advocacy rights, rights to property, and suffrage rights, in order to enlarge the liberties of a larger number of people who had been oppressed. [1]
Zimbabwe, too, is a revolutionary society. Through armed struggle, Zimbabweans, like Americans before them, had thrown off the yoke of British colonialism. Rhodesian apartheid was smashed. Patterns of land ownership were democratized. Over 300,000 previously landless families were given land once owned by a mere 4,000 farmers, mainly of British stock, mostly descendents of settlers who had taken the land by force. In other African countries, land reform has been promised, but little has been achieved. In Namibia, the government began expropriating a handful of white owned farms in 2004 under pressure from landless peasants, but progress has been glacially slow. In South Africa, blacks own just four percent of the farmland. The ANC government promised that almost one-third of arable land would be redistributed by 2000, but the target has been pushed back to 2015, and no one believes it will be reached. The problem is, African countries, impoverished by colonialism, and held down by neo-colonialism, haven't the money to buy the land needed for redistribution. And the European countries that once colonized Africa, are unwilling to help out, except on terms that will see democratization of land ownership pushed off into a misty future, and only on terms that will guarantee the continued domination of Africa by the West. Britain promised to fund Zimbabwe's land redistribution program, if liberation fighters laid down their arms and accepted a political settlement. Britain, under Tony Blair, reneged, finding excuses to wriggle out of commitments made by the Thatcher government. And so Zimbabwe's government acted to reverse the legacy of colonialism, expropriating land without compensation (but for improvements made by the former owner.) Compensation, Zimbabwe's government declared with unassailable justification, would have to be paid by Britain.
In recent years, the government has taken steps to democratize the country further. Legislation has been formulated to mandate that majority ownership of the country's mines and enterprises be placed in the hands of the indigenous black majority. The goal is to have Zimbabweans achieve real independence, not simply the independence of having their own flag, but of owning their land and resources. As a Canadian prime minister once said of his own country, once you lose control of the economic levers, you lose sovereignty. Zimbabwe isn't trying to hang onto control of its economic levers, but to gain control of them for the first time. Jabulani Sibanda, the leader of the association of former guerrillas who fought for the country's liberation, explains:
"Our country was taken away in 1890. We fought a protracted struggle to recover it and the process is still on. We gained political independence in 1980, got our land after 2000, but we have not yet reclaimed our minerals and natural resources. The fight for freedom is still on until everything is recovered for the people." [2]
The revolutionary government's program has met with fierce opposition - from the tiny elite of land owners who had monopolized the country's best land; from former colonial oppressor Britain, whose capitalists largely controlled the economy; from the United States, whose demand that it be granted an open door everywhere has been defied by Zimbabwe's tariff restrictions, investment performance requirements, government ownership of business enterprises and economic indigenization policies; and from countries that don't want Zimbabwe's land democratization serving as an inspiration to oppressed indigenous peoples under their control. The tiny former land-owning elite wants its former privileges restored; British capital wants its investments in Zimbabwe protected; US capital wants Zimbabwe's doors flung open to investment and exports; and Germany seeks to torpedo Zimbabwe's land reforms to guard against inspiring "other states in Southern Africa, including Namibia, where the heirs of German colonialists would be affected." [3]
The Mugabe government's rejecting the IMF's program of neo-liberal restructuring in the late 1990s, after complying initially and discovering the economy was being ruined; its dispatch of troops to the Democratic Republic of Congo to help the young government of Laurent Kabila defend itself against a US and British-backed invasion by Uganda and Rwanda; and its refusal to safeguard property rights in its pursuit of land democratization and economic independence, have made it anathema to the former Rhodesian agrarian elite, and in the West, to the corporate lawyers, investment bankers and hereditary capitalist families who dominate the foreign policies of the US, Britain and their allies. Mugabe's status as persona non grata in the West (and anti-imperialist hero in Africa) can be understood in an anecdote. When Mugabe became prime minister in 1980, former leader of the Rhodesian state, Ian Smith, offered to help the tyro leader. "Mugabe was delighted to accept his help and the two men worked happily together for some time, until one day Mugabe announced plans for sweeping nationalization." From that point forward, Smith never talked to Mugabe. [4]
Overthrowing the Revolution
The British, the US and the former Rhodesians have used two instruments to try to overthrow Zimbabwe's revolution: The opposition party Movement for Democratic Change, and civil society. The MDC was founded in September 1999 in response to Harare announcing it would expropriate Rhodesian farms for redistribution to landless black families. The party was initially bankrolled by the British government's Westminster Foundation for Democracy and other European governments, including Germany, through the Social Democratic Party's Friedrich Ebert Foundation (Ebert having been the party leader who conspired with German police officials to have Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht murdered, to smother an emerging socialist revolution in Germany in 1918.) Party leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who had been elevated from his position as secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions to champion the West's counter-revolutionary agenda within Zimbabwe, acknowledged in February 2002 that the MDC was financed by European governments and corporations, which funneled money through British political consultants, BSMG. [5] Today, the government of Zimbabwe charges NGOs with acting as conduits through which Western governments pass money to the opposition party.
The MDC's orientation is decidedly toward people and forces of European origin. British journalist Peta Thornycroft, hardly a Mugabe supporter, lamented in an interview on Western government-sponsored short wave radio SW Africa that:
'When the MDC started in 2000, what a pity that they were addressing people in Sandton, mostly white people in Sandton north of Johannesburg instead of being in Dar es Salaam or Ghana or Abuja. They failed to make contact with Africa for so long. They were in London, we've just seen it again, Morgan Tsvangirai's just been in America. Why isn't he in Cairo? Maybe he needs financial support and he can't get it outside of America or the UK and the same would go for (leader of an alternative MDC faction, Arthur) Mutambara. They have not done enough in Africa. [6]
A look at the MDC's program quickly reveals why the party's leaders spend most of their time traipsing to Western capitals calling for sanctions and gathering advice on how to overthrow the Mugabe government. First, the MDC is opposed to Zimbabwe's land democratization program. Defeating the government's plans to expropriate the land of the former Rhodesian elite was one of the main impetuses for the party's formation. Right through to the 2002 election campaign the party insisted on returning farms to the expropriated Rhodesian settlers. [7]
The MDC and Land Reform
These days Tsvangirai equivocates on land reform, recognizing that speaking too openly about reversing the land democratization program, or taxing black Zimbabweans to compensate expropriated Rhodesian settlers for land the Rhodesians and other British settlers took by force, is detrimental to his party's success. But there's no mistaking that the land redistribution program's life would be cut short by a MDC victory. "The government of Zimbabwe," wrote Tsvangirai, in a March 23, 2008 Wall Street Journal editorial, "must be committed to protecting persons and property rights." This means "compensation for those who lost their possessions in an unjust way," i.e., compensation for the expropriated Rhodesians. Zimbabwe's program of expropriating land without compensation, he concluded, is just not on: it "scares away investors, domestic and international." [8] This is the same reasoning the main backer of Tsvangirai's party, the British government, used to justify backing out of its commitment to fund land redistribution. The British government was reneging on its earlier promise, said then secretary of state for international development Claire Short in a letter to Zimbabwe's minister of agriculture and lands, Kumbirai Kangai, because of the damage Zimbabwe's fast-track land reform proposals would do to investor confidence. Lurking none too deftly behind Tsvangirai's and London's solicitude over impaired investor confidence are the interests of foreign investors themselves. The Mugabe government's program is to wrest control of the country's land, resources and economy from the hands of foreign investors and Rhodesian settlers; the program of the MDC and its backers is to put it back. That's no surprise, considering the MDC was founded by Europe, backed by the Rhodesians, and bankrolled by capitalist governments and enterprises that have an interest in protecting their existing investments in the country and opening up opportunities for new ones.
Civil Society
There is a countless number of Western NGOs that either operate in Zimbabwe or operate outside the country with a focus on Zimbabwe. While the Western media invariably refer to them as independent, they are anything but. Almost all are funded by Western governments, wealthy individuals, and corporations. Some NGOs say that while they take money from Western sources, they're not influenced by them. This is probably true, to a point. Funders don't dangle funding as a bribe, so much as select organizations that can be counted on to behave in useful ways of their own volition. Of course, it may be true that some organizations recognize that handsome grants are available for organizations with certain orientations, and adapt accordingly. But for the most part, civil society groups that advance the overseas agendas of Western governments and corporations, whether they know it or not, and not necessarily in a direct fashion, find that funding finds them.
Western governments fund dozens of NGOs to discredit the government in Harare, alienate it of popular support, and mobilize mass resistance under the guise of promoting democracy and human rights. Their real purpose is to bring down the government and its nationalist policies. The idea that Britain, which, as colonial oppressor, denied blacks suffrage and dispossessed them of their land, is promoting rights and democracy in Zimbabwe is laughable. The same can be said of Canada. The Canadian government doles out grants to NGOs through an organization called Rights and Democracy. Rights and Democracy is currently funding the anti-Zanu-PF Media Institute of Southern Africa, along with the US government and a CIA-linked right wing US think tank. While sanctimoniously parading about on the world stage as a champion of rights and democracy, Canada denied its own aboriginal people suffrage up to 1960. For a century, it enforced an assimilation policy that tore 150,000 aboriginal children from their homes and placed them in residential schools where their language and culture were banned. Canadian citizens like to think their own country is a model of moral rectitude, but are blind to the country's deplorable record in the treatment of its own aboriginal people; it's denial of the liberty and property rights of Canadian citizens of Japanese heritage during WWII; and in recent years, its complicity in overthrowing the Haitian government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide and participation in the occupation of Afghanistan. As for the United States, its violations of the rights of people throughout the world have become so frequent and far-reaching that only the deaf, dumb or insane would believe the US government has the slightest interest in promoting democracy and human rights anywhere.
Consider, then, the record of the West's self-proclaimed promoters of democracy and human rights against this: the reason there's universal suffrage in Zimbabwe and equality rights for blacks, is because the same forces (that are being routinely decried by Western governments and their NGO extensions) fought for, bled for, and died for the principle of universal suffrage. "We taught them the principle of one man, one vote which did not exist" under the British, Zimbabwe's president points out. "Democracy," he adds, "also means self-rule, not rule by outsiders." [9]
Regime Change Agenda
The charge that the West is supporting civil society groups in Zimbabwe to bring down the government isn't paranoid speculation or the demagogic raving of a government trying to cling to power by mobilizing anti-imperialist sentiment. It's a matter of public record. The US government has admitted that "it wants to see President Robert Mugabe removed from power and that it is working with the Zimbabwean opposition...trade unions, pro-democracy groups and human rights organizations...to bring about a change of administration." [10] Additionally, in an April 5, 2007 report, the US Department of State revealed that it had:
-- "Sponsored public events that presented economic and social analyses discrediting the government's excuse for its failed policies" (i.e, absolving US and EU sanctions for undermining the country's economy);
-- "Sponsored...and supported...several township newspapers" and worked to expand the listener base of Voice of America's Studio 7 radio station. (The State Department had been distributing short-wave radios to Zimbabweans to facilitate the project of Zimbabwean public opinion being shaped from abroad by Washington's propagandists).
Last year, the US State Department set aside US$30 million for these activities. [11] Earlier this year, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that the UK had increased its funding for civil society organizations operating in Zimbabwe from US$5 million to US$6.5 million. [12] Dozens of other governments, corporations and capitalist foundations shower civil society groups with money, training and support to set up and run "independent" media to attack the government, "independent" election monitoring groups to discredit the outcome of elections Zanu-PF wins, and underground groups which seek to make the country ungovernable through civil disobedience campaigns. One such group is Zvakwana, "an underground movement that aims to resist - and eventually undermine" the Zanu-PF government. "With a second, closely related group called Sokwanele, Zvakwana's members specialize in anonymous acts of civil disobedience." [13] Both groups, along with Zubr in Belarus and Ukraine's Pora, whose names, in English, mean 'enough', "take their inspiration from Otpor, the movement that played a major role in ousting Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia." [14] One Sokwanele member is "a white conservative businessman expressing a passion for freedom, tradition, polite manners and the British royals," [15] hardly a black-clad anarchist motivated by a philosophical opposition to "authoritarian rule," but revealing of what lies beneath the thin veneer of radicalism that characterizes so many civil society opposition groups in Zimbabwe. In the aforementioned April 5, 2007 US State Department report, Washington revealed that it had "supported workshops to develop youth leadership skills necessary to confront social injustice through non-violent strategies," the kinds of skills members of Zvakwana and Sokwanele are equipped with to destabilize Zimbabwe.
In addition to funding received from the US and Britain, Zimbabwe's civil society groups also receive money from the German, Australian and Canadian governments, the Ford Foundation, Freedom House, the Albert Einstein Institution, the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict, Liberal International, the Mott Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers, South African Breweries, and billionaire financier George Soros' Open Society Institute. All of these funding sources, including the governments, are dominated by Western capitalist ruling classes. It would be truly naïve to believe, for example, that the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict and Freedom House, both headed by Peter Ackerman, member of the US ruling class Council on Foreign Relations, a New York investment banker and former right hand man to Michael Milken of junk bond fame, is lavishing money and training on civil society groups in Zimbabwe out of humanitarian concern. According to Noam Chomksy and Edward Herman, Freedom House has ties to the CIA, "and has long served as a virtual propaganda arm of the (US) government and international right wing." [16]
Political lucre doesn't come from Western sources alone. The Mo Ibrahim Foundation awards a prize yearly for "achievement in African leadership" to a sub-Saharan African leader who has left office in the previous three years. The prize is worth $500,000 per year for the first 10 years and $200,000 per year thereafter - in other words, cash for life. Ibrahim, a Sudanese billionaire who founded Celtel International, a cellphone service that operates in 15 African countries, established the award to "encourage African leaders to govern well," something, apparently, Ibrahim believes African leaders don't do now and need to be encouraged to do. What Ibrahim means by govern well is clear in who was selected as the first (and so far only) winner: Mozambique's former president Joaquim Chissano. He received the prize for overseeing Mozambique's "transition from Marxism to a free market economy." [17] While there may seem to be nothing particularly amiss in this, imagine billionaire speculator George Soros establishing a foundation to bribe US and British politicians with cash for life to "govern well." It wouldn't elude many of us that Soros' definition of "govern well" would almost certainly align to a tee with his own interests, and that any politician eager to live a comfortable life after politics would be keen to keep Soros' interests in mind. Under these conditions there would be no question of democracy prevailing; we would be living in a plutocracy, in which those with great wealth could dangle the carrot of a cash award for life to get their way. As it happens, this kind of thing is happening now in Western democracies (that is, plutocracies.) Handsomely paid positions as corporate lobbyists, corporate executives and members of corporate boards await Western politicians who play their cards right. There are Mo Ibrahims all over, who go by the names Ford, GM, Exxon, General Electric, Lockheed-Martin, Microsoft, IBM and so on.
Threat to US Foreign policy
Why does the government of the US consider Zimbabwe to pose "an unusual and extraordinary threat to the foreign policy of the United States"? The answer says as much about the foreign policy of the United States as it does about Zimbabwe. The goal of US foreign policy is to provide profit-making opportunities to US investors and corporations. This is accomplished by pressuring, cajoling, bribing, blackmailing, threatening, subverting, destabilizing and where possible, using violence, to get foreign countries to lower or remove tariff barriers, lift restrictions on foreign investment, deny preferential treatment to domestic investors, allow repatriation of profits, and provide the US military access to the country. The right of the US military to operate on foreign soil is necessary to provide Washington with local muscle to protect US investments, ensure unimpeded access to strategic raw materials (oil, importantly), and to keep doors open to continued US economic penetration. It is also necessary to have forward operating bases from which to threaten countries whose governments aren't open to US exports and investments.
The Zanu-PF government's policies have run afoul of US foreign policy goals in a number of ways. In 1998, "Zimbabwe - along with Angola and Namibia - was mandated by the (Southern African Development Community, a regional grouping of countries) to intervene in Congo to save a fellow SADC member country from an invasion by Uganda and Rwanda," which were acting as proxies of the United States and Britain. [18] Both countries wanted to bring down the young government of Laurent Kabila, fearing Kabila was turning into another Patrice Lumumba, the nationalist Congolese leader whose assassination the CIA had arranged in the 1960s. Zimbabwe's intervention, as part of the SADC contingent, foiled the Anglo-American's plans, and earned Mugabe the enmity of ruling circles in the West.
The Zanu-PF government's record with the IMF also threatened US foreign policy goals. From 1991 to 1995, Mugabe's government implemented a program of structural adjustment prescribed by the IMF as a condition of receiving balance of payment support and the restructuring of its international loans. The program required the government to cut its spending deeply, fire tens of thousands of civil servants, and slash social programs. Zimbabwe's efforts to nurture infant industries were to be abandoned. Instead, the country's doors were to be opened to foreign investment. Harare would radically reduce taxes and forbear from any measure designed to give domestic investors a leg up on foreign competitors. The US, Germany, Japan and South Korea had become capitalist powerhouses by adopting the protectionist and import substitution policies the IMF was forbidding. The effect of the IMF program was devastating. Manufacturing employment tumbled nine percent between 1991 and 1996, while wages dropped 26 percent. Public sector employment plunged 23 percent and public sector wages plummeted 40 percent. [19] In contrast to the frequent news stories today on Zimbabwe's fragile economy, attributed disingenuously to "Mugabe's disastrous land policies", the Western press barely noticed the devastation the IMF's disastrous economic policies brought to Zimbabwe in the 1990s. By 1996, the Mugabe government was starting to back away from the IMF prescriptions. By 1998, it was in open revolt, imposing new tariffs to protect infant industries and providing incentives to black Zimbabwean investors as part of an affirmative action program to encourage African ownership of the economy. These policies were diametrically opposed, not only to the IMF's program of structural adjustment, but to the goals of US foreign policy. By 1999, the break was complete. The IMF refused to extend loans to Zimbabwe. By February, 2001, Zimbabwe was in arrears to the Bretton Woods institution. Ten months later, the US introduced the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery, a dagger through the heart of Zimbabwe's economy. "Zimbabwe," says Mugabe, "is not a friend of the IMF and is unlikely to be its friend in the future." [20]
Zanu-PF's willingness to ignore the hallowed status of private property by expropriating the land of the former Rhodesians to democratize the country's pattern of land ownership also ran afoul of US foreign policy goals. Because US foreign policy seeks to protect US ownership abroad, any program that promotes expropriation as a means of advancing democratic goals must be considered hostile. Kenyan author Mukoma Wa Nguyi invites us to think of Zimbabwe "as Africa's Cuba. Like Cuba, Zimbabwe is not a... military threat to the US and Britain. Like Cuba, in Latin America, Zimbabwe's crime is leading by example to show that land can be redistributed - an independence with content. If Zimbabwe succeeds, it becomes an example to African people that indeed freedom and independence can have the content of national liberation. Like Cuba, Zimbabwe is to be isolated, and if possible, a new government that is friendly to the agenda of the West is to be installed." [21]
The Comprador Party
If Zanu-PF is willing to offend Western corporate and Rhodesian settler interests to advance the welfare of the majority of Zimbabweans, the MDC is its perfect foil. Rather than offending Western interests, the MDC seeks to accommodate them, treating the interests of foreign investors and imperialist governments as synonymous with those of the Zimbabwean majority. A MDC government would never tolerate the pursuit in Zimbabwe of the protectionist and nationalist economic programs the US used to build its own industry. The MDC's goals, in the words of its leader, are to "encourage foreign investment" and "bring (Zimbabwe's) abundant farmland back into health." [22] "It is up to each of us," Tsvangirai told a gathering of newly elected MDC parliamentarians, "to say Zimbabwe is open for business." [23]
Encouraging foreign investment means going along with Western demands for neo-liberal restructuring. "The key to turning around Zimbabwe's economy...is the political will needed to implement the market reforms, the IMF and others, including the United States, have been recommending for the past few years," lectured the former US ambassador to Zimbabwe, Christopher Dell. This means "a free-market economy and security of property to investment and economic growth." [24]
Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown has developed an economic program for Zimbabwe to be rolled out if Western regime change efforts succeed. Brown says his recovery package will include measures to:
(1) help Zimbabwe restart and stabilize its economy;
(2) restructure and reduce its debt;
(3) support fair land reform. [25]
What Brown is really saying is that:
(1) Sanctions will be lifted, and the resultant economic recovery will be attributed to the MDC's neo-liberal policies.
(2) Zimbabwe will resume the structural adjustment program Mugabe's government rejected in the late 90s.
(3) Either land reform will be reversed or black Zimbabweans will be forced to compensate white farmers whose land was expropriated.
The reality that Brown has developed an economic program for Zimbabwe speaks volumes about who will be in charge if the MDC comes to power – not Zimbabweans, not the MDC, and not Tsvangirai, but London and Washington.
Not surprisingly, MDC economic policy is perfectly simpatico with the prescriptions of its masters. Eddie Cross, formerly vice-chairman of the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries, who became a MDC spokesman, explained the party's economic plans for Zimbabwe, in advance of 2000 elections.
"We are going to fast track privatization. All 50 government parastatals will be privatized within a two-year time-frame, but we are going to go beyond that. We are going to privatize many of the functions of government. We are going to privatize the central statistical office. We are going to privatize virtually the entire school delivery system. And you know, we have looked at the numbers and we think we can get government employment down from about 300,000 at the present time to about 75,000 in five years." [26]
Of course, the intended beneficiaries of such a program aren't Zimbabweans, but foreign investors.
The MDC's role as agent of Western influence in Zimbabwe doesn't stop at promoting economic policies that cater to foreign investors. The MDC has also been active in turning the screws on Zimbabwe to undermine the economy and create disaffection and misery in order to alienate Zanu-PF of its popular support. Arguing that foreign firms are propping up the government, the MDC has actively discouraged investment. For example, Tsvangirai tried to discourage a deal between Chinese investors and the South African company Implats, that would see a US$100 million platinum refinery set up in Zimbabwe, warning that a MDC government might not honor the deal. [27] The MDC leader, true to form, was following in the footsteps of his political masters in Washington. The United States has pressed China and other countries to refrain from investing in Zimbabwe "at a time when the international community (is) trying to isolate the African state." [28] Washington complains that "China's growing political and commercial influence in resource-rich African nations" [29] is sabotaging its efforts to ruin Zimbabwe's economy. More damning is the MDC's participation in the drafting of the principal piece of US legislation aimed at torpedoing the Zimbabwean economy: The Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act. Passed in 2001, the act instructs "the United States executive director to each international financial institution to oppose and vote against-
(1) any extension by the respective institution of any loan, credit, or guarantee to the Government of Zimbabwe; or
(2) any cancellation or reduction of indebtedness owed by the Government of Zimbabwe to the United States or any international financial institution." [30]
The effect of the act is to cut off all development assistance to Zimbabwe, disable lines of credit, and prevent the World Bank and International Monetary Fund from providing development assistance and balance of payment support. [31] Any African country subjected to this punishment would very soon find itself in straitened circumstances. When the legislation was ratified, US president George W. Bush said, "I hope the provisions of this important legislation will support the people of Zimbabwe in their struggle to effect peaceful democratic change, achieve economic growth, and restore the rule of law." [32] Since effecting peaceful democratic change means, in Washington's parlance, ousting the Zanu-PF government, and since restoring the rule of law equates, in Washingtonian terms, to forbidding the expropriation of white farm land without compensation, what Bush was really saying was that he hoped the legislation would help overthrow the government and put an end to fast-track land reform. The legislation "was co-drafted by one of the opposition MDC's white parliamentarians in Zimbabwe, which was then introduced as a Bill in the US Congress on 8 March 2001 by the Republican senator, William Frist. The Bill was co-sponsored by the Republican rightwing senator, Jesse Helms, and the Democratic senators Hillary Clinton, Joseph Biden and Russell Feingold." Helms, a notorious racist, had a penchant for legislation aimed at undermining countries seeking to achieve substantive democracy. "He co-authored the Helms-Burton Act of 1996, which tightened the blockade on Cuba." [33]
The Distorting Lens of the Western Media
Western reporting on Zimbabwe occurs within a framework of implicit assumptions. The assumptions act as a lens through which facts are organized, understood and distorted. Columnist and associate editor for the British newspaper The Guardian, Seamus Milne, points out that British journalists see Zimbabwe through a lens that casts the president as a barbarous despot. "The British media," he writes, "have long since largely abandoned any attempt at impartiality in its reporting of Zimbabwe, the common assumption being that Mugabe is a murderous dictator at the head of a uniquely wicked regime." [34] If you began with these assumptions, ordinary events are interpreted within the framework the assumptions define. An egregious example is offered in how a perfectly legitimate exercise was construed and presented by Western reporters as a diabolical exercise. Zanu-PF held campaign workshops to explain what the government had achieved since independence and what it was doing to address the country's economic crisis. The intention, according to Zimbabwe's Information and Publicity Minister Sikhanyiso Ndlovu, was to "educate the people on the illegal sanctions as some of them were duped to vote for the MDC in the March elections." [35] But that's not how the British newspaper, The Independent, saw it. "The Zimbabwean army and police," its reporter wrote, "have been accused of setting up torture camps and organizing 're-education meetings' involving unspeakable cruelty where voters are beaten and mutilated in the hope of achieving victory for President Robert Mugabe in the second round of the presidential election." [36] Begin with the assumption that Mugabe is a murderous dictator at the head of a uniquely wicked regime and campaign workshops become re-education meetings and torture camps. Note that The Independent's reporter relied on an accusation, not on corroborated facts, and that the identity of the accuser was never revealed. The story has absolutely no evidentiary value, but considerable propaganda value. The chances of many people reading the story with a skeptical eye and picking out its weaknesses are slim. What's more likely to happen is that readers will regard the accusation as plausible because it fits with the preconceived model of Mugabe as a murderous dictator and his government as uniquely wicked. How do we know the accuser wasn't a fellow journalist repeating gossip overheard on the street, or at MDC headquarters? How do we know the accusation wasn't made by the US ambassador to Zimbabwe, James McGee, or any one of scores of representatives of Western-funded NGOs, whose role is to discredit the Zimbabwe government? McGee is a veritable treasure trove of half-truths, innuendo, and misinformation. And yet the Western media, particularly those based in the US, have a habit of treating McGee as an impeccable source, seemingly blind to the reality that the US government is hostile to Zimbabwe's land democratization and economic indigenization programs, that it has an interest in spinning news to discredit Harare, and that its officials have an extensive track record in lying to justify the plunder of other people's countries. To paraphrase Caesar Zvayi, if George Bush can lie hundreds of times about Iraq, what's to stop him (or McGee or the NGOs on the US payroll) from lying about Zimbabwe? That the Western media pass on accusations made by interested parties without so much as revealing the interest can either be regarded as shocking naiveté or a sign of the propaganda role Western media play on behalf of the corporate class that owns them. If the US and British governments and Western media are against the democratization and economic indigenization programs of Zanu-PF, it's because they're dominated by a capitalist ruling class whose interests are against those of the Zimbabwean majority.
It is typical of Western reporting to attribute the actions of the Zanu-PF government to the personal characteristics of its leader: his alleged hunger for power for power's-sake; demagogy; incompetence in matters related to economic management; and brutality. The government's actions, by contrast, are never attributed to the circumstances, the conditions in which the government is forced to maneuver, or to the demands of survival in the face of the West's predatory pressures. This isn't unique to Zimbabwe; every leader the West wants to overthrow is vilified as a "strongman," "dictator," "thug," "war criminal," "murderer," or "warlord" and sometimes all of these things. All of the leader's actions are to be understood as originating in the leader's deeply flawed character. If Iran is building a uranium enrichment capability, it's not because it seeks an independent source of fuel for a budding civilian nuclear energy program, but because the country's president is to be understood as a raving anti-Semite who seeks to acquire nuclear weapons to carry out Hitler's final solution by wiping Israel off the face of the map. The same reduction of international affairs to a moral struggle between the West and what always turns out to be a nationalist, socialist or communist country headed by a leader whose actions are invariably traced by Western reporters to the leader's evil psychology applies equally to Zimbabwe. If the Mugabe government has banned political rallies, it is not because the rallies have been used by the opposition as an occasion to firebomb police stations, but because the president has an unquenchable thirst for power and will brook no opposition. If opposition activists have been arrested, it's not because they've committed crimes, but because the leader is repressive and dictatorial. If Morgan Tsvangirai is beaten by police, it's not because he tried to break through police lines, but because the leader is a brutal dictator and ordered Tsvangirai's beating because that's what brutal dictators do. If an opposition leader is arrested and charged with treason, it's not because there is evidence of treason, but because the president is gagging the opposition to cling to power because it is in the nature of dictators to do so. If the economy falls into crisis, it's not because the West has cut off the country's access to credit, but because of the leader's incompetence. If agricultural production drops, it's not due to the drought, electricity shortages and rising fuel costs that have bedeviled other countries in the region, but because the leader is too stupid to recognize his land reform policies are disastrous.
A New York Times story published three days before the March 29 elections shows how Western governments and mass media cooperate with civil society agents on the ground to shape public opinion. The aim of the March 26, 2008 article, titled "Hope and Fear for Zimbabwe Vote," was to discredit the elections that Zanu-PF seemed at the time likely to win.
Harare had barred election monitors from the US and EU, but allowed observers from Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, South Africa and the SADC to monitor the vote. The Western media pointed to the decision to bar Western observers as indirect evidence of vote rigging. After all, if Zimbabwe had nothing to hide, why wouldn't it admit observers from Europe and the US? At the same time, Western reporters suggested that Zimbabwe was only allowing observers from friendly countries because they could be counted on to bless the election results. By the same logic, one would have expected that a negative evaluation from observers representing unfriendly countries would be just as automatic and foreordained, especially considering the official policy of the US and EU is to replace the current government with one friendly to Western business interests. Indeed, it is this fear that had led Harare to ban Western monitors.
With Western observers unable to monitor the elections directly, governments in North America and Europe found themselves on the horns of a dilemma. How could they declare the vote fraudulent, if they hadn't observed it? To get around this difficulty, the US, Britain and other Western countries provided grants to Zimbabweans on the ground to monitor the vote. These Zimbabweans, part of civil society, declared themselves to be independent "non-governmental" observers, and prepared to render a foreordained verdict that the election was rigged. Cooperating in the deception, the Western media amplified their voices as "independent" experts on the ground. The US Congress's National Endowment for Democracy – an organization that does overtly what the CIA used to do covertly – provided grants to the Zimbabwe Election Support Network "to train and organize 240 long-term elections observers throughout Zimbabwe." The NED is also connected to the Media Monitoring Project through the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition, which it funds, and the Media Institute of Southern Africa, which is funded by Britain's NED equivalent, the Westminster Foundation for Democracy and Canada's Rights and Democracy. The Media Monitoring Project calls itself independent, but is connected to the US and British governments, and to billionaire speculator George Soros' Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa.
When the New York Times needed Zimbabweans to comment on the upcoming election, its reporters turned to representatives of these two NGOs. Noel Kututwa, the chairman of the Zimbabwe Election Support Network, told the newspaper that his group would be using "sampling techniques to assess the accuracy of the results announced nationally." Yet, Mr. Kututwa also told the newspaper that, "We will not have a free and fair election." If Kututwa had already decided the election would be unfair and coerced, why was he bothering to assess its accuracy? Andrew Moyse, a regular commentator on Studio 7, an anti-Mugabe radio station sponsored by the US government's propaganda arm, Voice of America, was quoted in the same article. "Even if Mugabe only gets one vote," Mr. Moyse opined, "the tabulated results are in the box and he has won."
Moyse, on top of acting as a US mouthpiece on Voice of America, heads up the Media Monitoring Project. While part of the NGO election observer team the US and EU were relying on to ostensibly assess the fairness of the vote, he had already decided the vote was rigged. Kutatwa and Moyse were the only experts the New York Times cited in its story on the upcoming elections. Yet both represented NGOs funded by hostile governments whose official policy is to replace Robert Mugabe and his government's land reform and economic indigenization policies. Both presented themselves as independent, though they could hardly be independent of their sources of foreign government and foundation funding. Both declared in advance of the election that the vote would be coerced and unfair and that the tabulated results were already in the box. Their foreordained conclusions - which turned out to be wildly inaccurate – happened to be the same conclusions their sponsors in the US and Britain were looking for, to obtain the consent of a confused public to intervene vigorously in Zimbabwe's affairs. This is emblematic of the symbiotic collaboration of media, Western governments, and NGOs on the ground. Western governments, corporations and wealthy individuals fund NGOs to discredit the Zanu-PF government, and the Western media present the same NGOs as independent actors, and provide them a platform to present their views. Meanwhile, the Western media marginalize the Zanu-PF government and its supporters on the ground, denying them a platform to present their side. To publics in the West, the only story heard is the story told by the MDC and its civil society allies, who reinforce, as a matter of strategy, the view that Mugabe is a murderous dictator at the head of a uniquely wicked regime. The MDC, civil society, the Western media, the British and US governments, and imperialist think tanks and foundations, are all interlocked. All of these sources, then, tell the same story.
Safeguarding the Revolution
After the revolutionary war, would the Americans who led and carried out the revolution have allowed loyalists to band together to seek public office in elections with a program of restoring the monarchy? We've already seen that the answer is no. When the Nazis were ousted in Germany, was the Nazi party allowed to reconstitute itself to seek the return of the Third Reich through electoral means? No. Countries that have gone through revolutionary change are careful, if the revolution is to survive, to deny those who have been overthrown an opportunity to recover their privileged positions. That often means denying former exploiters and their partisans opportunities to band together to contest elections, or constitutionally prescribing a desired form of government and prohibiting a return to the old. The US revolutionaries did both; they repressed the loyalists and declared a republic, which, as a corollary, forbade a return to monarchy. Even if every American voter decided that George Bush should become king, the US constitution forbids it, no matter what the majority wants. The gun (that is, the violence employed by the American revolutionaries to free themselves from the oppression of the British crown) is more powerful than the pen (Americans can't vote the monarchy back in.)
In Zimbabwe, the former colonial oppressor, Britain, has been working with its allies to restore its former privileges through civil society and the MDC. Britain doesn't seek a return to an overt colonialism, complete with a British viceroy and British troops garrisoned throughout the country, but to a neo-colonialism, in which the local government acts in the place of a viceroy, safeguarding and nurturing British investments and looking after Western interests under the rubric of managing the economy soundly. Britain, then, wants the MDC, for the MDC is British rule by proxy. Many Zimbabweans, however, are vehemently opposed to selling out their revolution to a party that was founded and is financed by a country to which they were once enslaved.
Western media propaganda presents Zimbabwe as a pyramidal society, in which an elite at the apex, comprising Mugabe, his ministers and the heads of the security services, brutally rule over the vast majority of Zimbabweans at the base who long for the MDC to deliver them from a dictatorship. A fairer description is that Zimbabwe is a society in which both sides command considerable popular support, but where Zanu-PF has an edge. This may sound incredible to anyone looking at Zimbabwe through the distorting lens of the Western media, but let Munyaradzi Gwisai, leader of the International Socialist Organization in Zimbabwe, a fierce opponent of the Mugabe government, set matters straight.
"There is no doubt about it - the regime is rooted among the population with a solid social base. Despite the catastrophic economic collapse, Zanu-PF still won more popular votes in parliament than the MDC in the March 29 parliamentary elections. Mugabe might have lost on the streets, but if you count the actual votes, his party won more than the MDC in elections to the House of Assembly and Senate. Zanu-PF won an absolute majority of votes in five of the country's 10 provinces, plus a simple majority in another province. By contrast, the MDC won two provinces with an absolute majority and two with a simple majority. But because we use first past the post, not proportional representation, Zanu-PF's votes were not translated into a majority in parliament. It was only Mugabe himself, in the presidential election, who did worse in terms of the popular vote." [37]
Those in the thrall of Western propaganda will dismiss strong support for Zanu-PF in the March 29 elections as a consequence of electoral fraud, not genuine popular backing. But it would be a very inept government that rigged the election and lost control of the assembly and had to face a run-off in the presidential race. No, Mugabe's support runs deep.
"According to a poll of 1,200 Zimbabweans published in August (2004) by South African and American researchers, the level of public trust in Mr. Mugabe's leadership" more than doubled from 1999, "to 46 percent - even as the economy" was severely weakened by Western sanctions. [38] Significantly, it was over this period that the government launched its fast track land reform program. Notwithstanding Western news reports that Mugabe's supporters are limited to his "cronies", Zimbabweans participated in a million man and woman march last December, where marchers "proclaimed that Washington, Downing Street and Wall Street (had) no right to remove Mugabe." [39]
Elsewhere in Africa, Zimbabwe's president is enormously popular. As recently as August 2004, Mugabe was voted at number three in the New Africa magazine's poll of 100 Greatest Africans, behind Nelson Mandela and Kwame Nkrumah. [40] The Los Angeles Times, no fan of the Zimbabwean president, acknowledges that "Mugabe is so popular on the continent...that he is feted and cheered wherever he goes." [41] That was evident last summer when, much to the chagrin of Western reporters, who had been assuring their readers that Mugabe was being called to a meeting of SADC to be dressed down, that "Mr. Mugabe arrived at the meeting to a fusillade of cheers and applause from attendees that...overwhelmed the polite welcomes of the other heads of states." [42] A European Union-African Union summit planned for 2003 was aborted after African leaders refused to show up in solidarity with a Mugabe who had been banned by the Europeans for promoting the interests of Zimbabweans, not Europeans. The summit went ahead in 2007, but only after African leaders threatened once again to boycott the meeting if Mugabe was barred. With China doing deals with African countries, the Europeans were reluctant to sacrifice trade and investment opportunities, and laid aside their misgivings about attending a meeting at which Mugabe would be present. That is, all except British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. He stayed home in protest. German leader Angela Merkel did attend, but thought it necessary to scold Mugabe to distance herself from him. Senegal's president Abdoulaye Wade sprang to Mugabe's defense, dismissing Merkel's vituperative comments as untrue and accusing the German leader of being misinformed. [43]
Opposition's Failed Attempts at Insurrection
Mugabe's popularity, and that of the movement for Zimbabwean empowerment he leads, explains Zanu-PF's strong showing in elections and why the opposition's numerous efforts at seizing power by general strike and insurrection have failed. Civil society organizations and MDC leaders have called for insurrectionary activity many times. In 2000, Morgan Tsvangirai called on Mugabe to step down peacefully or face violence. "If you don't want to go peacefully," the new opposition leader warned, "we will remove you violently." [44] Arthur Mutambara, a robotics professor and former consultant with McKinsey & Company and leader of an alternative wing of the MDC, declared in 2006 that he was "going to remove Robert Mugabe, I promise you, with every tool at my disposal." Asked to clarify what he meant, he replied, "We're not going to rule out or in anything - the sky's the limit." [45] Three days before the March 29 elections, Tendai Biti, secretary general of Tsvangirai's MDC faction, warned of Kenya-style post electoral violence if Mugabe won. [46] In the US, where United States Code, Section 2385, "prohibits anyone from advocating abetting, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying the government of the United States by force or violence," opposition leaders like Tsvangirai, Mutambara and Biti would be charged with treason (Biti has been.)
Leaders of civil society organizations which receive Western funding have been no less diffident about threatening to overthrow the government violently. Last summer, the then Archbishop of Bulawayo, Pius Ncube, said he thought it was "justified for Britain to raid Zimbabwe and remove Mugabe. We should do it ourselves but there's too much fear. I'm ready to lead the people, guns blazing, but the people are not ready." [47] Ncube complained bitterly that Zimbabweans were cowards, unwilling to take up arms against the government. This was a strange complaint to make against a people who waged a guerilla war for over a decade to achieve independence. Zimbabweans' unwillingness to follow Ncube, guns blazing, had nothing to do with cowardice, and everything to do with the absence of popular support for Ncube's position.
Recently, the International Socialist Organization, one of the founding members of the MDC along with the British government, argued in its newspaper that "the crisis was not going to be resolved through elections, but through mass action." ISO - Zimbabwe leader Munyaradzi Gwisai "said that the way forward for the Movement for Democratic Change and civil society was to create a united front and mobilize against the regime." [48] The ISO makes the curious argument that Zimbabweans should take to the streets to bring the MDC to power, recognizing the MDC to be a comprador party (one the ISO helped found). A comprador party, in the febrile reasoning of the ISO, is preferable to Zanu-PF. Gwisai's offices were visited by the police, touching off howls of outrage over Mugabe's "repressions" from the ISO's Trotskyite brethren around the world. Followers of Trotsky are forever siding with reactionaries against revolutionaries, the revolutionaries invariably failing to live up to a Trotskyite ideal. If they can't have their ideal, they'll settle for imperialism. While Gwisai wasn't arrested, Wellington Chibebe, general secretary of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, was. He too had urged Zimbabweans to take to the streets to bring down the government.
Some opponents of Mugabe's government go further. An organization called the Zimbabwe Resistance Movement promises to take up arms against the Zanu-PF government if "the poodles who run the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission," fail to declare Tsvangirai the victor of the presidential run-off election. [49] The Western media have been silent on this form of oppositional intimidation and threats of violence.
The opposition has also tried other means to clear the way for its rise to power. In April, 2007 it called a general strike, as part of the Save Zimbabwe Campaign. The strike fizzled, accomplishing nothing more than showing the opposition's program of seizing power extra-constitutionally had no popular support. The campaign "was a joint effort of the opposition, church groups and civil society... As a body...it (did) not...have widespread grassroots support," reported the Toronto newspaper, The Globe and Mail. [50] While depicted in the Western media as a peaceful campaign of prayer meetings, the campaign was predicated on violence. MDC activists carried out a series of fire bombings of buses and police stations, events the Western press was slow to acknowledge. A May 2 2007 Human Rights Watch report finally acknowledged that there had been a series of gasoline bombings, but questioned whether the MDC was really responsible. By this point, as far as Western publics knew, peaceful protests had been brutally suppressed by a uniquely wicked government. To keep matters under control, the government banned political gatherings. The opposition defied the ban, calling their rallies "prayer meetings." It was a result of this defiance that Arthur Mutambara was arrested, and Morgan Tsvangirai roughed up by police when he tried to force his way through police lines to demand Mutambara's release. The MDC took full advantage of the event to play up to the Western media, claiming Tsvangirai had been beaten up as part of a program of political repression, rather than as a response to his tussling with the police. As the Cuban ambassador to Zimbabwe explained, "What happened in Zimbabwe of course is similar to what groups based in Florida have done in Cuba. They put many bombs in some hotels in Cuba. They were trying to...generate political instability in Cuba, so I see the same pattern in Zimbabwe." [51]
Making the Economy Scream
While quislings work from within the country to make it ungovernable, pressure is applied from without. Western governments say they've imposed only targeted sanctions aimed at key members of the government, nothing to undermine the economy and hurt ordinary Zimbabweans, but as we've already seen, the US Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act has far-reaching economic implications. On top of this, other, informal, sanctions do their part to make the economy scream. As Robert Mugabe explains:
The British and their allies "influence other countries to cut their economic ties with us...the soft loans, grants and investments that were coming our way, started decreasing and in some cases practically petering out. Then the signals to the rest of the world that Zimbabwe is under sanctions, that rings bells and countries that would want to invest in Zimbabwe are being very cautious. And we are being dragged through the mud every day on CNN, BBC, Sky News, and they are saying to these potential investors 'your investments will not be safe in Zimbabwe, the British farmers have lost their land, and your investments will go the same way.'" [52]
In March 2002, Canada withdrew all direct funding to the government of Zimbabwe. [53] In 2005, the IT department at Zimbabwe's Africa University discovered that Microsoft had been instructed by the US Treasury Department to refrain from doing business with the university. [54] Western companies refuse to supply spare parts to Zimbabwe's national railway company, even though there are no official trade sanctions in place. [55] Britain and its allies are now planning to escalate the pressure. Plans have been made to press South Africa to cut off electricity to Zimbabwe if the MDC doesn't come to power. Pressure will also be applied on countries surrounding Zimbabwe to mount an economic blockade. [56] The point of sanctions is to starve the people of Zimbabwe into revolting against the government to clear the way for the rise of the MDC and control, by proxy, from London and Washington. Apply enough pressure and eventually the people will cry uncle (or so goes the theory.) You can't say Zanu-PF wasn't forewarned. Stanley Mudenge, the former foreign minister of Zimbabwe, said Robin Cook, then British foreign secretary, once pulled him aside at a meeting and said: "Stan, you must get rid of Bob (Mugabe)...If you don't get rid of Bob, what will hit you will make your people stone you in the streets." [57]
Harare's Options
Those who condemn the actions of the Zanu-PF government in defending their revolution have an obligation to say what they would do. Usually, they skirt the issue, saying there is no revolution, or that there was one once, but that it was long ago corrupted by cronyism. Their simple answer is to dump Mugabe, and start over again - a course of action that would inevitably see a return to the neo-liberal restructuring of the 1990s, a dismantling of land reforms, and a neo-colonial tyranny. Not surprisingly, people who make this argument find favor with imperialist governments and ruling class foundations and are often rewarded by them for appearing to be radical while actually serving imperialist goals.
Throughout history, reformers and revolutionaries have been accused of being self-aggrandizing demagogues manipulating their followers with populist rhetoric to cling to power to enjoy its many perks. [58] But as one writer in the British anti-imperialist journal Lalkar pointed out, "The government of Zimbabwe could very easily abandon its militant policies aimed at protecting Zimbabwe's independence and building its collective wealth - no doubt its ministers would be rewarded amply by the likes of the World Bank and the IMF." [59] If Mugabe is really using all means at his disposable to hang on to power simply to enjoy its perks, he has chosen the least certain and most difficult way of going about it. Lay this argument aside as the specious drivel of those who want to bury their heads in the sand to avoid confronting tough questions. What would you do in these circumstances?
In retaliation for democratizing patterns of land ownership, distributing land previously owned by 4,000 farmers, mainly of British stock, to 300,000 previously landless families, Britain has "mobilized her friends and allies in Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand to impose illegal economic sanctions against Zimbabwe. They have cut off all development assistance, disabled lines of credit, prevented the Bretton Woods institutions from providing financial assistance, and ordered private companies in the United States not to do business with Zimbabwe." [60] They have done this to cripple Zimbabwe's economy to alienate the revolutionary government of its popular support. For years, they have done this. Soni Rajan, employed by the British government to investigate land reform in Zimbabwe, told author Heidi Holland:
"It was absolutely clear...that Labour's strategy was to accelerate Mugabe's unpopularity by failing to provide him with funding for land redistribution. They thought if they didn't give him the money for land reform, his people in the rural areas would start to turn against him. That was their position; they want him out and they were going to do whatever they could to hasten his demise." [61]
The main political opposition party, the MDC, is the creation of the Rhodesian Commercial Farmers' Union, the British government and the Zimbabwe Democracy Trust, whose patrons are former British foreign secretaries Douglas Hurd, Geoffrey Howe, Malcolm Rifkind and whose chair is Lord Renwick of Clifton, who has collected a string of board memberships in southern African corporations. The party's funding comes from European governments and corporations, and its raison d'etre is to reverse every measure the Zanu-PF government has taken to invest Zimbabwean independence with real meaning. Civil society organizations are funded by governments whose official policy is one of regime change in Zimbabwe. The US, Britain and the Netherlands finance pirate radio stations and newspapers, which the Western media disingenuously call "independent", to poison public opinion against the Mugabe government and its land democratization and economic indigenization programs. It's impossible to hold free and fair elections, because the interference by Western powers is massive, a point acknowledge by Mugabe opponent Munyaradzi Gwisai. [62]
Guns Trump "Xs"
Zimbabweans who fought for the country's independence and democratization of land ownership are not prepared to give up the gains of their revolution simply because a majority of Zimbabweans marked an "X" for a party of quislings. There are two reasons for their steadfastness in defense of their revolution: First, Americans can't vote the monarchy back in, or return, through the ballot box, to the status quo ante of British colonial domination. The US revolutionaries recognized that some gains are senior to others, freedom from foreign domination being one of them. Americans would never allow a majority vote to place the country once again under British rule. Nor will Zimbabwe's patriots allow the same to happen to their country. Second, no election in Zimbabwe can be free and fair, so long as the country is under sanctions and the main opposition party and civil society organizations are agents of hostile foreign governments. The Zimbabwe Lawyers for Justice has called on the government "to consider the possibility of declaring a state of emergency," pointing out correctly that "Zimbabwe is at war with foreign elements using local puppets." [63] Western governments would do - and have done - no less under similar circumstances. Patriots writing to the state-owned newspaper, The Herald, urge the government to take a stronger line. "The electoral environment is heavily tilted in favour of the (MDC) because of the economic sanctions," wrote one Herald reader. "If it was up to me there should be no elections until the sanctions are scrapped. If we don't defend our independence and sovereignty, then we are doomed to become hewers of wood and drawers of water. I stand ready to take up arms to defend my sovereignty if need be." [64] The heads of the police and army have let it be known that they won't "salute sell-outs and agents of the West" [65] - and nor should they. And veterans of the war for national liberation have told Mugabe that they can never accept that their country, won through the barrel of the gun, should be taken merely by an 'X' made by a ballpoint pen." [66] Mugabe recounted that the war veterans had told him "if this country goes back into white hands just because we have used a pen, we will return to the bush to fight." The former guerilla leader added, "I'm even prepared to join the fight. We can't allow the British to dominate us through their puppets." [67] Zimbabwe, as patriots have said many times, will never be a colony again. Even if it means returning to arms.
NOTES:
1. Herbert Aptheker, "The Nature of Democracy, Freedom and Revolution," International Publishers, New York, 2001.
2. Herald (Zimbabwe) April 2, 2008.
3. "No Better Opportunity," German Foreign Policy.Com, March 26, 2007. www.german-foreign-policy.com/en/fulltext/56059
4. Times (London), November 25, 2007.
5. Rob Gowland, "Zimbabwe: The struggle for land, the struggle for independence," Communist Party of Australia. www.cpa.org.au/booklets/zimbabwe.pdf
6. Herald (Zimbabwe) May 29, 2008.
7. Guardian (UK), March 3, 2008.
8. Wall Street Journal, quoted in Herald (Zimbabwe) March 23, 2008.
9. Talkzimbabwe.com, June 19, 2008.
10. Guardian (UK), August 22, 2002.
11. Herald (Zimbabwe) May 29, 2008.
12. Herald (Zimbabwe), February 22, 2008.
13. New York Times, March 27, 2005.
14. Ibid.
15. Los Angeles Times, July 8, 2005.
16. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, "Manufacturing Consent," Pantheon Books, 1988, p. 28.
17. The Independent (UK), October 22, 2007; New York Times, October 23, 3007.
18. New African, June 2008.
19. Antonia Juhasz, "The Tragic Tale of the IMF in Zimbabwe," Daily Mirror of Zimbabwe, March 7, 2004.
20. Herald (Zimbabwe) September 13, 2005.
21. Herald (Zimbabwe) August 12, 2005.
22. Morgan Tsvangirai, "Zimbabwe's Razor Edge," Guardian (UK) April 7, 2008.
23. Globe and Mail (Toronto), May 31, 2008.
24. Response to Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe Monetary Policy Statement," Ambassador Christopher Dell, February 7, 2007.
25. The Independent (UK), September 20, 2007.
26. John Wright, "Victims of the West," Morning Star (UK), December 18, 2007.
27. Herald (Zimbabwe), July 6, 2005.
28. AFP, July 29, 2005.
29 Ibid.
30. US Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of 2001.
31. Herald (Zimbabwe) June 4, 2008.
32. "President Signs Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act, December 21, 2001. www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/12/200111221-15.html
33. www.pslweb.org, October 17, 2006.
34. Guardian (UK), April 17, 2008. Milne is also clear on who's responsible for the conflict in Zimbabwe. In an April 17, 2008 column in The Guardian, he wrote, "Britain refused to act against a white racist coup, triggering a bloody 15-year liberation war, and then imposed racial parliamentary quotas and a 10-year moratorium on land reform at independence. The subsequent failure by Britain and the US to finance land buyouts as expected, along with the impact of IMF programs, laid the ground for the current impasse."
35. Herald (Zimbabwe), June 11, 2008.
36. The Independent (UK), June 9, 2008.
37. Weekly Worker, 726, June 19, 2008 www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/726/forced.html.
38. New York Times, December 24, 2004.
39. Workers World (US), December 12, 2007.
40. Proletarian (UK) April-May 2007.
41. Los Angeles Times, December 15, 2007.
42. New York Times, August 17, 2007.
43. New York Times, December 9, 2007.
44. BBC, September 30, 2000.
45. Times Online, March 5, 2006.
46. Herald (Zimbabwe), March 27, 2008.
47. Sunday Times (UK), July 1, 2007.
48. Weekly Worker, 726, June 19, 2008 www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/726/forced.html
49. The Zimbabwe Times, May 31, 2008.
50. Globe and Mail (Toronto) March 22, 2007.
51. Herald (Zimbabwe) April 15, 2007.
52. New African, May 2008.
53. Herald (Zimbabwe), October 18, 2007.
54. Herald (Zimbabwe), January 28, 2008.
55. Herald (Zimbabwe), January 11, 2008.
56. Guardian (UK), June 16, 2008.
57. New African, May 2008.
58. See, for example, Michael Parenti, "The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History Ancient Rome," The New Press, 2003.
59. Lalkar, May-June, 2008. www.lalkar.org/issues/contents/may2008/zim.php
60. Address of Robert Mugabe to the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization, June 3, 2008.
61. New African, May 2008.
62. Weekly Worker, 726, June 19, 2008 www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/726/forced.html
63. TalkZimbabwe.com, May 15, 2008.
64. Letter to the Herald (Zimbabwe), May 6, 2008.
65. Guardian (UK), March 15, 2008.
66. Herald (Zimbabwe), June 20, 2008.
67. The Independent (UK), June 14, 2008.
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MDC-T: An unmistakable stooge
Posted: Wednesday, June 25, 2008
By Tafataona P Mahoso
June 25, 2008
By begging to be allowed to sleep in the Dutch Embassy on the eve of a Zimbabwean election in which he is supposed to be elected President, Morgan Tsvangirai has finally and openly shown where his real constituency is: in the North Atlantic states of Europe and North America.
President Mugabe does not need to say more: Morgan is indeed much more than a Zimbabwean lost child.
His constituency is in Europe and he will be elected the best Euro-American puppet of the country while having tea and Dutch cheese in the Dutch Embassy in Harare.
Unfortunately, for MDC-T and Morgan Tsvangirai, British and US foreign policy toward Zimbabwe is being led by men and women who cannot even write an undergraduate paper on African affairs.
Their success in bringing the subject of Zimbabwe’s election for discussion at the Security Council will help inflame the popular and unmistakable anger of the people of Zimbabwe which David Milliband and Jendayi Fraser are incapable of reading.
The popular anger in Zimbabwe against MDC-T and Morgan Tsvangirai, against British, US and EU foreign policy, can best be illustrated by referring back to that popular song from 1980:
Yaramba, povo yaramba,
Munyika mayo, zvemadhisinyongoro.
Yaramba, povo yaramba munyika muno,
zvemadhisinyongoro.
There is no English equivalent to this expression of Shona outrage, but the following translation may come close:
The people, the majority, condemn, reject all the sickening external attempts to confuse, manipulate, disorganise and overwhelm them.
This was used in 1980 to express the contempt and anger of the people of Zimbabwe against the role of foreign powers in the Zimbabwe-Rhodesia project of Ian Smith and Bishop Abel Muzorewa.
Coming to the on-going efforts by the UK, the EU and the US to merge their foreign policies in support of MDC-T and against Zimbabwe, the following expressions of those policies on the ground in Zimbabwe have helped to incense popular opinion:
In the first category are the acts of racist scandalisation and contempt against the war veterans of the Second Chimurenga which acts have been undertaken by MDC-T since the formation of the MDC in 1999.
The people are aware the war against the veterans of the Second Chimurenga was started by the Rhodesian settler minority in Zimbabwe, the United Kingdom, the US and the EU back in 1997, when the Government of Zimbabwe decided to pay the same war veterans a small gratuity of 50 000 Zimbabwe Dollars.
The current leaders of MDC-T were still in the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions.
They, together with the Rhodesians, the World Bank and the IMF opposed and condemned payment of the small gratuity.
The IMF and the World Bank were representing British, US and EU imperialist interests.
The bitterness of the British, EU and US opposition to the gratuity at the time seemed surprising, but it was a harbinger of future attacks.
Now, the people of Zimbabwe know that the World Bank and the US Marshall Plan in fact paid and resettled white war veterans of the Hitler wars.
Some of those were paid to settle in Zimbabwe under the Rhodesian African Land Husbandry Act of 1951.
But, as Presidential Press Secretary Cde George Charamba pointed out on radio on 24 June 2008, what has outraged the people of Zimbabwe against the UK, the US, the EU and their stooges in the MDC-T is the combined and coordinated desecration, contempt and murder directed against war veterans.
As the people who vowed to die to liberate this country, these war veterans represent the bones of arch-heroine Mbuya Nehanda who vowed before she was executed in 1896 that "My bones shall rise."
The war veterans of the Second Chimurenga are the resurrected bones of Mbuya Nehanda. How dare the UK, the US and the EU finance MDC-T to attack, desecrate and destroy those resurrected bones, the war veteran, yet again?
In the second place are the despicable, diabolic, racist and illegal sanctions which the UK, the US, the EU and their allies have tried to hide under the fig-leaf of humanitarian relief which, in the hands of NGOs in Zimbabwe, has also been exposed.
The continual claims that there are no real economic sanctions; that there are only selective and smart sanctions targeted at President Robert Mugabe and his cronies; have outraged the people of Zimbabwe against the policies of these countries and against MDC-T.
The people have looked back and realised that the transformation of the entire Zimbabwean economy: from a credit and savings economy to a cash economy run by speculating middlemen, started at the very same time that the 500 or so foreign companies from the UK, the US and the EU joined hands with the ZCTU to organise "stayaways".
In fact the very first such "stay away" was organised by such companies against the 50 000 Zimbabwe Dollars paid to war veterans; but that stay away was disguised as a protest against high taxes.
The denials of the reality of sanctions made on television by Learnmore Jongwe (18 July 2001); Nelson Chamisa (21 May 2008); Douglas Mwonzora (1 June 2008); Obert Gutu (8 June 2008; and Tongai Mathuthu (15 June 2008) are identical to those issued by the EU Presidency in the second week of February 2002; or by the UK Embassy in Harare on numerous occasions through its magazine Britain and Zimbabwe; or by former US Ambassador to Zimbabwe Christopher Dell on 2 November 2005 at Africa University.
In other words, the African puppets of imperialism in MDC are such stooges that for the last nine years they have not dared to change even a single word of the imperialist rationalisation for the illegal and racist sanctions imposed on the people of Zimbabwe.
They routinely deny the people’s daily experience of sanctions in exactly the same language used by the imperialists themselves.
In the third place, the people of Zimbabwe are outraged by the fact that white racism and contempt for the African is shown most clearly when the white racists and imperialists think they are being most kind and most helpful to Africans.
A few instances can be used to illustrate this fact. George Bush, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have frequently announced to the whole world how little the money is which they have spent to purchase the whole Movement for Democratic Change and to insure its cooperation; not only in efforts to destroy Zimbabwe, but also in redirecting the country’s economic policies for benefit of the US, the UK and the EU if the MDC were to win elections and take over this country.
The latest announced amounts of pieces of silver paid were £3,3 million from the UK, 18 million Australian Dollars from Australia, and US$7 million from the US government.
Moreover, the ways in which the leaders of Australia, New Zealand, Britain, the US and the EU follow the daily fortunes and misfortunes of MDC-T are no different from the ways the owners of a purchased donkey would follow that donkey throughout the stables and the race course.
All the so-called election results announced by MDC-T in violation of the laws of Zimbabwe were first broadcast on CNN, BBC, Euro-News and other imperialist channels long before the MDC-T’s own followers knew about them. In fact the leadership of MDC-T have taken decisions on the basis of instructions from Washington and London without consulting their members and even against the interests of those members.
Since the MDC was formed, it has organised media stunts or media events to help the EU renew sanctions against Zimbabwe every February.
Other media stunts have been organised to coincide with UN Security Council meetings; G8 meetings; Commonwealth meetings; Sadc meetings; and so on.
The media antics performed in May and June 2008 were meant to help the US bring Zimbabwe before the UN Security Council at a time when the US controls that body’s presidency.
In the fourth place, the people of Zimbabwe are outraged and sickened by the white racist assumption in Britain, the US and the EU, that whatever these countries do or associate with will be seen in good light around the world.
This is why these countries are not ashamed to treat MDC-T like a purchased race-horse which must be watched and fed every minute without any shame.
This racist stupidity is shown not only in assumptions that white support will win the MDC votes in Zimbabwe but also in a uniform frame of reporting which assumes that Zimbabweans are totally ignorant of world affairs except the God-given goodness of the white man.
Therefore any association between MDC and the Western powers is presumed to enhance the appeal of the former. Therefore no media report on CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera English, SABC Africa and Euro News is going to question a single move or policy made by the MDC, the Trojan-Horse of the good white saviour of humanity.
Unfortunately, the people of Zimbabwe know about the Berlin Conference and the Rudd Concession; they know about the collusion involving Washington, Brussels and London in the diabolic overthrow and murder of Patrice Lumumba; they know about Mohammad Mossadegh, Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, Salvador Allende, Jaimé Roldos, Omar Torrijos, Samora Moises Machel, Steve Biko, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King; just as much as they know about Soweto (1976); Chimoio (1977); Nyadzonia (1976); and Kasinga (1978).
Just as the selective white conscience of imperialism has white-washed these mass murders and discounted them from the list of crimes against humanity — so have the ambassadors representing white racist powers in Harare also discounted all the atrocities committed by the MDC-T in the run-up to the June 2008 run-off election.
But the people know that MDC-T has committed atrocities and attempted a scorched-earth campaign on behalf of white settlers and against resettled African farmers. The people know that the police have arrested both Zanu-PF and MDC-T members suspected of having perpetrated political violence.
In other words, the crises which are not being reported on BBC, CNN, Sky News, Euro News, Al Jazeera and even SABC are the crisis in Euro-American policy toward Zimbabwe and the crisis within MDC-T.
Interestingly, a former US Ambassador saw the crisis in US policy as far back as 1979 and called it a "tragedy."
The Christian Science Monitor on 22 January 1979 published a story called "Rhodesian looks to US as ally". Ten days before that, on 12 January, the New York Times published an article called "Rhodesia’s whites look to US for aid." And there were hundreds of similar articles in the US Press at the time.
In January 1979, people truly interested in democracy and human rights would have been pre-occupied with the destiny of the African majority who were about to emerge as liberated nation of Zimbabwe after 100 years of brutal colonial rule. But, no, the European and US ruling classes and their Press were concerned about the destiny of the oppressor minority, the whites.
The 1979 articles on Zimbabwe were no different from the 1960 articles on Congo. One by Francis B. Stevens on 22 August 1960 in the magazine US News and World Report was called "The White Man’s Future in Africa," in reference to the impending independence of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Although it was Belgium and the US who were threatening the Africans’ future by plotting to assassinate Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, the Press presented the conspiring killers as the ones who were threatened by the African leaders they planned to assassinate.
Among the 1979 articles on Zimbabwe there was one which stood out because it was written by a former US Ambassador to West Africa who was also a Professor teaching at one of America’s elite universities, Columbia University.
Elliot P Skinner was a good white liberal, so he wrote apologetically about the axis of white racism which we see now closing in on Zimbabwe.
The neoliberal racists now attacking Zimbabwe on behalf of a racist minority do not apologise for their racism.
This is what Skinner wrote in January 1979, a few weeks away from Zimbabwe’s independence.
"Our tragedy is that, whether we like it or not, the United States has inherited (from the British Empire) the role of metropole (that is the new mother country) of all whites in Southern Africa.
"This is not a role we welcomed, but it is one we cannot avoid . . . We are the ones who have led the discussions about the future of these countries (of Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa.)"
Even this liberal white professor and former ambassador was racist enough to believe that the US really has no choice but to always gang up against African interests and in defence of white settler interests.
This is what has outraged Zimbabweans against US, British and EU policies.
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UN blocks British, US attempts to halt run-off
Posted: Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Herald Reporters
June 25, 2008
The Herald
THE United Nations yesterday blocked attempts by Britain, the United States and France to declare MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai as the President of Zimbabwe on the basis of the results of the March 29 harmonised elections.
This came as South Africa's ruling ANC party rejected foreign intervention in Zimbabwe, especially from erstwhile colonisers.
Britain, the current president of the Security Council, tried to use Belgium to halt Friday's presidential run-off election and illegally install Tsvangirai as president, but South Africa's Ambassador to the UN, Mr Dumisani Khumalo, blocked these attempts.
Associated Press reported that the US and France also tried to include in the Security Council statement language asserting that Tsvangirai should be considered the legitimate president of Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe's permanent representative to the UN Ambassador Boniface Chidyausiku said submissions by South Africa and Zimbabwe convinced the 15-member Security Council that it would be legally improper to halt the run-off and install Tsvangirai.
The original draft compiled by the British had claimed that the elections would not be free and fair, but the Security Council eventually issued a watered down non-binding statement condemning political violence.
"We would like to pay tribute to Ambassador Khumalo for the sterling work he did. It is a big victory for us.
"Britain, through Belgium, which is not a member of the Security Council, tried to get the UN to impose Tsvangirai as president in contravention of the country's Constitution and electoral laws.
"But South Africa made it clear that this would not be acceptable and we also made submissions indicating that it would be improper to subvert the law like that," Ambassador Chidyausiku said.
He said last week, Belgium -- apparently acting on orders from Britain -- had asked for a Security Council brief on what was going on in Zimbabwe.
The strategy was to use this as an excuse to criticise the electoral process, negate the need for a run-off and then recognise Tsvangirai as president on the basis of the March 29 poll results.
"The draft that we saw on Friday was mild. It was something that we could have lived with. But over the weekend Tsvangirai said he didn't want to participate in the run-off anymore and this gave Britain, through Belgium, ammunition to attack Zimbabwe," Ambassador Chidyausiku said.
On Monday morning, he said the draft was suddenly harder and bent on preventing a run-off as if they were aware Tsvangirai would lose the election.
"They were happy to go with the results of the March 29 poll when the law is clear that there should be a run-off.
"We, too, respect the results of the harmonised elections and that is why we agree that there should be a run-off. For anyone to prevent a run-off is to prevent the free expression of the will of the people as provided for by the law," he said.
Ambassador Chidyausiku said Britain and its allies tried to argue that a cancellation of the run-off would be necessitated by the prevalence of State-contrived violence.
However, Zimbabwe's mission to the UN presented the Security Council with statistics indicating that the opposition was mostly behind the political violence in the country.
"The figures we have show that 400 MDC-T supporters have been arrested for political violence compared to 160 Zanu-PF supporters.
"We also demonstrated that there have been numerous cases of MDC-T supporters going around dressed in Zanu-PF regalia and beating up people.
"This is an outdated strategy used by the Selous Scouts during the liberation struggle and with the predominance of Selous Scouts in the MDC-T it is obvious what is going on.
"We managed to get them to recognise these realities and they failed in their bid to install Tsvangirai."
He said the people of Zimbabwe would determine the future of Zimbabwe.
Ambassador Chidyausiku also said that it was imperative for Sadc to remain united under the Lusaka Summit resolution to respect South African President Thabo Mbeki's mediation role.
"Sadc gave President Mbeki the mandate to mediate in Zimbabwe and that should be respected. That is a mandate that came out of a summit and no pronunciations by any individual outside of a summit should nullify this reality.
"Lusaka stands," he said.
The ANC, South Africa's ruling party, rejected any outside diplomatic intervention in the Zimbabwean matter yesterday arguing that "any attempts by outside players to impose regime change will merely deepen" the problems in Zimbabwe.
Although it said it was concerned with the situation in Zimbabwe, the ANC evoked Zimbabwe's colonial history and insisted that outsiders had no role to play in ending its current problems.
"It has always been and continues to be the view of our movement that the challenges facing Zimbabwe can only be solved by the Zimbabweans themselves," the statement said. "Nothing that has happened in the recent months has persuaded us to revise that view."
In what seemed a clear rebuke to the efforts of Western nations to take an aggressive stance against the Zimbabwean Government, the ANC included a lengthy criticism of the "arbitrary, capricious power" exerted by Africa's former colonial masters and cited the subsequent struggle by African nations to grant new-found freedoms and rights.
"No colonial power in Africa, least of all Britain in its colony of 'Rhodesia' ever demonstrated any respect for these principles," the ANC said, referring to Zimbabwe before its independence.
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Tsvangirai seeks refuge in Dutch embassy
Posted: Monday, June 23, 2008
ZIMBABWE opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has sought overnight refuge at the Dutch embassy in Harare as unconfirmed news filtered in that he was backtracking on his earlier decision not to contest the run-off presidential election on Friday (June 27).
Tsvangirai is still believed to be at the embassy in a move viewed by senior government officials as unnecessary and intended to attract attention from international media and the West.
"The man's cry-baby tactics have now become ridiculous. Who is after Tsvangirai? Everyone is busy preparing for the run-off election and he is busy trying to convince his international backers that he is in some danger," said a Zanu PF official.
Full Article...
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THE Zimbabwean government on Monday urged opposition Movement for Democratic Change leader Morgan Tsvangirai not to withdraw from the country's presidential run-off election saying it would be regrettable if he did so.
Worried over Robert Mugabe vs. the Western World's Press?
SHOULD you be worrying about 84 year old Robert Gabriel Mugabe, duly elected President of the Republic of Zimbabwe returning Zimbabwe land to Zimbabweans in national security mode? Should the world be worrying about a US, EU, Britain backed Movement for Democratic Change (MDC-T) run-off election to un-declare its government's Declaration of Independence and to abolish its Constitution and return illegally seized land to white farmers?
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Zimbabwe: 'MDC-T lies to discredit polls'
Posted: Saturday, June 21, 2008
By Bulawayo Bureau
June 21, 2008
The Herald
PRESIDENT Mugabe yesterday chided MDC-T for compiling a list of alleged victims of political violence claiming they were its supporters so as to justify claims that the polls will not be free and fair.
Earlier, the President told captains of industry in Bulawayo that Zimbabwe was negotiating with Equatorial Guinea to secure more fuel at regular intervals from the oil-rich West African country.
He then addressed thousands of people at White City Stadium in Bulawayo as his campaign for the June 27 run-off reaches fever pitch.
President Mugabe's sentiments on MDC-T came as some wire reports suggested that the opposition party was developing jelly feet and contemplating pulling out of the race claiming the "electoral playing field is uneven", the usual cry that the opposition makes each time it stares defeat in the face or actually loses an electoral contest.
"The MDC people have been busy at their Harvest House compiling names of what they say are victims of political violence. They have been saying their supporters are being beaten up by our soldiers. They say this so that they can later say the elections were not free and fair. Which is a damn lie!
"Ndafamba maprovinces akawanda and where there have been incidents of violence, arson or destruction yemusha hapana yakaitwa nemaforces edu," Cde Mugabe said.
"I was in Matabeleland North yesterday, it's all very peaceful. I was in Matabeleland South, a day before yesterday and it's also peaceful except for a (recent) incident in the northern part of Gwanda where the MDC destroyed an office, a sub-office yedu. Here in Bulawayo. Khonapha ko Bulawayo, there is absolute peace. People are campaigning, yes but we are campaigning in peace. So on 27 June let us go in peace tinoita cast vote, a historic vote. We dare not make a mistake. Don't vote against yourself. Siyekele ukuzibulala," the President said.
At the business meeting held at a local hotel, President Mugabe said the Minister of Energy and Power Development, Retired Lieutenant-General Mike Nyambuya was in Equatorial Guinea, leading a team from Zimbabwe to negotiate the fuel deal.
Cde Mugabe was responding to a question from businesspersons who wanted to find out if the Government could provide more fuel for public transporters.
"Let us wait and see if we get more fuel," said President Mugabe.
"The Minister (of Energy and Power Development) is there (Equatorial Guinea) to negotiate for more fuel and also for us to get it more regularly. Then we could be able to do that."
A few days ago, the Government launched a fuel subsidy scheme in Bulawayo.
The facility has enabled passenger transporters to reduce their fares from $2 billion a trip to $500 million.
The President said the Government was committed to ensuring that the transport sector got more reliable fuel supplies.
However, he said public transport operators have disappointed the Government in the past after they failed to reduce fares despite accessing cheap fuel from Noczim.
"If fuel becomes available and all (passenger transporters) get cheaper fuel, can we rely on them to make fares cheaper? The commuter transporters have disappointed us," he said.
President Mugabe said once more fuel supplies were secured, the Government could find ways of ensuring that private importers, who were selling fuel in foreign currency were made to operate like Noczim was doing by charging affordable prices.
Turning to MDC-T leader Tsvangirai, President Mugabe said voting for Tsvangirai, who is a front for British neo-colonial interests, was tantamount to going back to colonialism so that another war could be fought to liberate the country from the shackles of colonisation for the second time.
He said lives were lost for the liberation of this country and therefore Zimbabwe's independence and sovereignty should be held dearly by all its inhabitants.
"Nezuro kuNkayi North, ndakaratidzwa nzvimbo pakamira Baba weZimbabwe, Umdala Wethu, achitambira magamba adzoka tapedza hondo kuZambia," said Cde Mugabe.
"Saka tavakuenda musi wa27 next week tinosungirwa kuenda tichifunga nhoroondo iyoyo. Kufunga vakafa, vakava zvirema kuhondo. Kufunga anaLobengula, hatizivi kwaakazofira, anaMashayamombe. Hondo yavakatanga ivavo yakatipa moyo wokubvisa mabhunu. Hatidi kuti tidzokorodze imwe hondo yokubvisa mabhunu zvakare nokuti matadza kuvhota. Mawar veterans arikuti kwete. Silabo lapha. Lo uchairman weprovince (Cde Macleod Tshawe) ngomunye wabo."
He reiterated that the war veterans had vowed to put up a fight against recolonisation embodied in the existence of MDC on Zimbabwe's political landscape.
"Mawar veterans arikuti vanhu ngavayeuke kuti isu takarwa nepfuti imi muri kupiwa ballpoint pen chete.
"The ballpoint pen must not defeat the gun. Zvanzi hatidi kuona ballpoint pen ichinzi yakunda," said the President drawing applause from the crowd.
"Vari kuti ivo ballpoint ngaitevere nzira yomubhobho. Ukada kuita nharo mubhobho versus ballpoint, hazvife zvakaitika."
He said Government had programmes such as people's shops where affordable basic commodities could be bought as well as people's buses among others, meant to mitigate the effects of the sanctions that were imposed on Zimbabwe over the land reform programme – which was the source of the standoff between Harare and London.
Cde Mugabe implored the people of Bulawayo to join the rest of the country in defending Zimbabwe's independence and emphasise the City of Kings's place as the second largest in the country by voting resoundingly for Zanu-PF.
"Tibude tose. Vote yomuno muBulawayo iri vote of the capital city."
He appealed for voters in the Mpopoma-Pelandaba House of Assembly constituency by-election to vote overwhelmingly for the ruling party candidate, Dr Sikhanyiso Ndlovu, whose works, he said, were there for all to see.
Dr Ndlovu, who is the Minister of Information and Publicity, said the constituency which he was contesting in had a pride of place as it had been once held by some of the nation's founding fathers – the late Vice President Dr Joshua Nkomo and Vice President Joseph Msika.
"Mhlaka 27 uPresident Mugabe ewofisini, uDr Ndlovu Ephalamende," said Dr Ndlovu to thunderous applause.
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Zimbabwe and the perception of ruin
Posted: Thursday, June 19, 2008
By Reason Wafawarova
June 19, 2008
The Herald
THE current economic crisis and political instability bedevilling Zimbabwe continues to be portrayed as a direct sequel of the political shortcomings of one man, President Robert Mugabe, and we are all meant to solemnly believe that the mere removal of this one man will mean that Zimbabweans will live happily forever after.
The political complexity that has been created by Western interests in the affairs of Zimbabwe will continue to be relegated to obscurity by those who have chosen to bestow upon themselves the honour of apostleship to the now hysterical doctrine of regime change.
To many this political interest has been misconstrued as something emanating from the land reclamation era that started in 2000. In fact, the land reclamation programme only exacerbated the ruinous effect of the neo-colonialism resolve to maintain imperial supremacy over former colonies, in this case over Zimbabwe.
Las Casas, a 16th century Spanish writer, left in his will a telling statement about the long-term effect of colonial ruin – an effect that he reckoned would undoubtedly provoke divine powers to anger.
Said Casas: "I believe that because of these impious, criminal and ignominious deeds perpetrated so unjustly, tyrannically and barbarously, God will vent upon Spain His wrath and His fury, for nearly all of Spain has shared in the bloody wealth usurped at the cost of so much ruin and slaughter."
Casas was obviously condemning the very uncivilised conquest of Latin America by Spain – a conquest that was a result of six small but powerful European countries terrorising the rest of the world in the name of Western civilisation.
Britain decided to bloat its ego by calling themselves Great Britain despite their tiny geographical territorial space. They called themselves "great" because they had developed themselves into champions of expansionism.
Cecil John Rhodes was the British queen's foot soldier to Southern Africa and for his legacy he decided to name Zimbabwe after his own name, calling it Rhodesia. Rhodes and his British South African Company reduced Africans to a labour resource in their mining and farming enterprises that Britain saw as a legitimate expansion of its economy. Africa, just like Latin America and Asia, fought colonialism from a political front and this is what we have called the "fall of colonial empires". Colonial empires might have fallen politically but the reality facing the developing world today is that the West has not lost much of its usurped colonial wealth and they will do all in their power to make sure that this does not happen.
For Lancaster in 1979, it was not too much for Zimbabwean nationalists to ask to have our little region back as long as what they were asking for was limited to political power.
Now that the political power has been used to venture into the economic territory of imperial Britain, for better or for worse, we do see an ominous backlash where Britain is teaming up with her Western allies against Zimbabwe all in the in the name of an altruistic international community. The West and altruism have now become a contradiction in terms.
The weapon used to destroy the threatening political power in Zimbabwe has been the criminal sanctions against the masses of Zimbabwe, never mind the spurious argument that these sanctions are "targeted" at Government officials. This line of argument has just become a nauseating joke that annoys even the most avowed right-wingers.
It is obviously not enough for Britain and her allies to merely destroy the political power that has shaken the economic interest of the West in Zimbabwe. They inevitably need to fill up the gap. What is needed is to create a replacement political power centre that falls under the control of the imperial authority.
The legitimacy of this kind of political power centre cannot be seen to be founded in economic principles, just like liberation movements were largely pushed to be founded in ideologies that were free of economic influence.
Most of the liberation movements entered independence agreements that merely brokered an assurance that the new political leadership would not only co-exist with capitalist business owners but would actually ensure an employee-employer relationship between indigenous peoples and their former colonisers.
Many countries, Zimbabwe included; were applauded for "employment creation" initiatives that were in essence an abuse of cheap labour for maximised profiteering by Western multinational companies.
To make sure that the political leadership followed this route the West employed the tactic of foreign aid – ostensibly meant for "development enhancement" programmes. To this end, it was made to look perfectly normal for developing countries to rely on aid for rural development while they continued to top the global export indexes for their minerals and other raw resources.
Secondly, African politicians were tactically rewarded for compliance to this subtle campaign for economic supremacy. Such rewards would and still do come through such awards as Nobel Peace prize, honourary degrees, knighthood awards or foundation scholarships.
Those who have not lived up to the imperial expectations of the awarding authorities have in the past been demonised frantically and we have now seen a new trend of the "revoking" of these awards.
Those who have enjoyed the dishonour of being shining lights in looking after imperial wealth do not only continue to have more awards thrust upon them but also continue to receive wide-ranging media coverage as beacons of "democracy and human rights".
We have just seen a list of African personalities appearing on a list of signatures to a document that purports to be calling for "free and fair" electoral process ahead of the Zimbabwe June 27 election. Desmond Tutu of South Africa will never miss duty on such an assignment and at the rate John Sentamu of Uganda is going, he stands a fantastic chance of landing the Noble Peace prize right in the footsteps of the clearly obnoxious little bishop from down south.
The opposition MDC is meant to be a political replacement to Zanu-PF and not to be an alternative government for the people of Zimbabwe. An MDC-led government is meant to excel in proving to the world that African political power can only work in partnership with Western economic power.
The MDC wants to form the next government whose mandate would be to impress what they keep calling "the international community" – a euphemism for Western powers.
George W. Bush has just publicly said to Gordon Brown "We will help you get a free and fair election in Zimbabwe." Why does Brown need a free and fair election in Zimbabwe, or more precisely why does he need an election of whatever form in Zimbabwe? He is not even elected himself.
Britain, Australia and the US have all vowed to take Zimbabwe to the UN Security Council "should Mugabe emerge the winner" in the coming election. Effectively it now stands as a fact that a Morgan Tsvangirai loss is, by definition a result of an unfair and unfree election.
To the West this is a one-way election whose result is now cast in stone. Sadc and all observers are meant to descend on Zimbabwe and monitor a Morgan Tsvangirai win or they risk being labelled biased and less robust in the fight for democracy.
It is by design that the West staunchly supports the MDC's purported fight for democracy and human rights. That is the credo and platform upon which client regimes are founded these days. There is no client regime that preaches economic empowerment for indigenous people. They all preach freedom of speech, jobs, food and a whole spectrum of shiny packages of limitless freedoms and liberties.
To make the crusade for freedom legitimate Zimbabwe is unreservedly portrayed as a lawless country where the Government is killing its own people. MDC political activists can be as provocative as they wish because any arrest will, by assumption, be viewed as a violation of basic human rights. All that is happening in Zimbabwe right now is just a cycle of colonial ruin and what the MDC is seeking is not a "new Zimbabwe" but a restoration of Rhodesia.
Rhodesia was founded on Britain's impious, criminal and ignominious murders of 1890 and the MDC's "new Zimbabwe" is to be founded on the ruinous, profane and despicable sanctions that have been unleashed on the generality of Zimbabweans.
We were subjected to servitude by the power of gunpowder in 1890 and we are being forced into subordination by the ruthless power of economic sanctions in 2008.
Some among us collaborated with the enemy in 1890 and some among us are collaborating with the enemy today. The British interests over Zimbabwe have not changed. Zimbabwe must help make the small island of Britain stand as "Great Britain" by allowing British imperial authority to preside over the economic affairs of Zimbabwe.
What has changed is the warfare. Gone are the days of military conquest. Gone are the days of crude power politics. Now is the time for economic strangulation. Now is the time for stage-managed crusades for "democracy and human rights".
Britain wants its citizenry to continue to share the bloody wealth of Zimbabwe usurped at the cost of so much ruin and slaughter as we saw through the many lives that were massacred during the First and Second Chimurenga and the many more lives that have been claimed by the ruinous effect of the illegal sanctions currently imposed on Zimbabwe by Western allies. This cycle of colonial ruin cannot be allowed to continue. The economic war in Zimbabwe must be viewed for what it is. It is a blatantly ruthless war that cannot be wished away by the citing of a clique of corrupt officials and claiming that their moral shortcomings are the cause of the people's suffering.
They did it to Maurice Bishop of Grenada in 1979, they did it to the Sandinistas of Nicaragua again from 1979, they did it to Salvador Allende's Chile in 1973, they did it to Pathet Lao of Laos in 1958, they did it to the Vietnamese nationalist movement from 1961 to the mid-seventies and they are trying to do it to Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe in 2008.
Those who cannot see this second phase of colonisation, which is packaged in client regimes for what it is are either clearly ignorant of the history of Western powers or simply romanticised by the glitters of Western supremacy.
In the past we were mesmerised by the supremacy of Western firepower and romanticised by the glitters of Western civilisation and we helped them accumulate our wealth with our tacit approval. Now we are being made to fight each other over idealistic limitless freedoms and liberties, while the West lines up lapdog politicians to maintain and exercise power over us so as to ensure that they enjoy control of our economic system.
It is rather a shame that we lost limbs and lives to free ourselves from political domination, but we cannot afford a night on an empty stomach to free ourselves from economic domination.
It is no wonder that those of us who survived the liberation war have a resolve that simply says Zimbabwe is not going anywhere.
Colonial ruin has revisited us and we need to accept the reality of the economic war in which we all find ourselves today. It is a war that cannot be fought by votes.
Votes are a peaceful expression of opinion and yet our peace has been taken away by the economic onslaught brought upon the country by the imperial gangsters. We did not vote from 1965 to 1980 because this was no time for votes but for waging a victory-oriented war that would bring us a peaceful environment where the vote would be our voice.
Is a vote that surrenders to sanctions something we should call the voice of a sovereign people? Can voting in of lackeys be called the genuine voice of a sovereign people?
Is it sensible when some among us say let people vote in imperialism if that is what they want? And how democratic is it to say the MDC-T has a right to come for political competition in the company of former oppressors? It is incumbent upon each Zimbabwean to reflect on where we have come from and help build Zimbabwe in a manner that leaves imperialists where they belong, and that is as far away from our resources as possible.
Zimbabwe we are one in our heritage and together we will overcome.
wafawarova@yahoo.co.uk
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reason@rwafawarova.com
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Zimbabwe: Land root of our row with UK - President
Posted: Thursday, June 19, 2008
By Bulawayo Bureau
June 19, 2008
The Herald
BRITAIN'S dispute with Zimbabwe stems from the land reform programme and talk about the rule of law and democracy are mere excuses to camouflage the former colonial power's neo-colonial machinations, President Mugabe said yesterday.
Cde Mugabe was addressing thousands of supporters at Manama Business Centre.
It was his second rally in Matabeleland South Province yesterday, after he addressed another at Malala Primary School in Beitbridge, where he said Government was moving fast to curb border jumping and illegal activities.
Cde Mugabe said the road to freedom was a long and arduous one with the Rhodesian leader Ian Smith vowing that there would never be majority rule in the country.
"At the (1976) Geneva conference, Smith did not stay; he said that was nonsense, he had better things to do back home. That is what he said. Tasvika zvino muna 1979 arohwa nemaliberation forces coming from Zambia and Mozambique, now he said majority rule can come. Aimboti never in a thousand years, never. At Lancaster House he agreed, this is where they pledged that Britain would fund the resettlement programme," said President Mugabe.
He said land issue was a thorny issue at the Lancaster House Conference and it was only after intervention by the Carter administration in the United States that Britain accepted its colonial obligation of funding Zimbabwe's resettlement programme.
Cde Mugabe said although the Conservative Party led by Mrs Margaret Thatcher and later Mr John Major agreed to fund the programme, the Labour government under Mr Tony Blair reneged on the pledge through a letter written by one of Mr Blair's ministers, Ms Claire Short.
"The Labour Party did not want to co-operate with us. They reneged on the agreement. 'We derive our own authority from our own principles, not the Conservative Party,' they (the Labour government) said," said the President.
He said the Government tried to reason with Mr Blair but to no avail. "Takatifungai patsva. Think again. No! Fungai patsva. Think again. No! Mawar vets amaona apa akati kana akadaro we now take the land and the responsibility for compensation lies with the British. That is the policy. We take the land. Kana vasingade ndezvavo izvo," said President Mugabe.
He said the willing buyer-willing seller approach had failed with the British refusing to pay compensation for the acquired land.
"Then we said, keep your money, we keep our land. Fair, fair, zvabharanza. So arikuchema ndiani? Why should they now cry foul?" asked President Mugabe amid applause.
"The British realised that they could not argue with us on the land issue and hatched a plan to rope in their allies into the dispute by fabricating excuses such as allegations that there was no democracy in Zimbabwe, no rule of law, no freedom. Hakuna democracy? Was there freedom when maBritish ruled this country? Did they give you democracy? We had no vote at all. We were denied the right to vote. The white man could vote for another white man," said President Mugabe.
"There was racial discrimination, so you would talk of native education and European education as well as native reserves ivo vatora pakatorwa nyika naRhodes, fertile lands."
He said the black majority were reduced to "mere squatters on our land". During Rhodesia, blacks were not allowed into shops such as Barbours and were not allowed to buy certain items regarded as a preserve of the whites even if they could afford them.
"When entering shops, you were told khipha longwani kawena. You were nothing. You are not a voter. There was no rule of law. You could be arrested for anything, anywhere. Ingave nyika yakadaro?"
He said they tried to protest against the racial discrimination but their protests fell on deaf ears.
"We thought if we spoke loudly they would listen. Kunyepa! They would never listen. We figured that the only way we can now win, the only language which the settlers and the British could understand is the language of the bullet. Bara, bara! Ndopatakavamba the struggle."
He said Zipra and Zanla fought the war as one family.
"We are only one family, we should not quarrel. People can't be made to suffer under us when they suffered under the Boer. Let's unite across the country from Plumtree to Chirundu. Even when he died VaNkomo, Silundika, JZ Moyo, Mangena and vakaenda. I thank God ndichiripo. Saka what is my role? Ndorega nyika ichiendeswa kumabhunu neMDC? When I am still alive that will never happen, never ever! Let the British hear this, it will never happen," said the President amid applause.
He said the way white former commercial farmers started trooping back into the country when they had heard the lies that Tsvangirai had won the presidency showed how the MDC was a British front in a neo-colonial plot on Zimbabwe.
"Britain are the creators of the MDC. They -- Labour, Liberals and Conservatives -- poured money into the MDC through the Westminster Foundation Fund. MDC was created as a party to fight the revolutionary party of Mugabe and Nkomo. They united to create a party here. They talk of democracy and non-interference in the affairs of others going against the United Nations Charter. There are viola-
tions of that charter. Democracy inoreva kuzvitonga. Kwete kutongwa nevarikunze."
Cde Mugabe said when the British thought about forming a party to challenge Zanu-PF they targeted the Zimbabwean Congress of Trade Unions led by Gibson Sibanda as president and Tsvangirai as the secretary-general.
"UGibson angithi uvela lapha (Matabeleland South) and Tsvangirai elsewhere. MDC is a British-sponsored party and to this day the British give it money. Mukanzwa vanotaura vachisupporter MDC it's Britain, Australia, United States and Canada, all these countries are English-speaking. In Australia, when Mr John Howard was still prime minister he gave a vote of 18 million Australian dollars to the MDC, (British Prime Minister Gordon) Brown gave MDC a vote of 3,3 million pounds, (United States President George W.) Bush US$7 million for MDC. Is that fair play? Kupa ivavo? Inopiwa manon-governmental organisations kuti vange vachiti tirikukupai kudya vhoterai MDC, mukavhotera Zanu-PF hatidzoki," he said.
"But here in Gwanda South, amhlophe, amhlophe! You have stood your ground, won all the council seats (during the harmonised elections), the senatorial seat. Even your vote for me was outstanding. Rambai makadaro. Stay where you are."
Turning to Tsvangirai, Cde Mugabe said he was a coward who abandoned the struggle and ran back home.
"Kuzouya ichi (Mr Tsvangirai) chakatiza hondo. 'Ndivhoterei neMDC for change.' Change yacho inotipei? 'You (President Mugabe) gave land to the people, wonai varikufa nenzara. Ini ndikawina ndodzosera mapurazi to the whites'," said Cde Mugabe.
"He says he will reverse everything that the Zanu-PF Government has done, that is agricultural programmes, educational policies. Uchiita reverse kuenda kupi? For whose benefit? So it's reversals. Even Heroes Acre, tinochera vaende kunovigwa kumusha kwavo. Ko chakurwadza chii? You are there today because of the independence that was brought by these national heroes."
President Mugabe said that re-colonisation of this country would not happen.
"That day will never dawn on this country," he said amid thunderous applause.
"That is what the silent voice of my dead colleague is asking me. Chii chirikuitika? Where are the people going? What are you doing? When you are right like you are doing here, I say we are standing firm. On the land, I respond, the land is the people's land. Umhlabathi ngowethu. It's still our land. We have not given it up. Freedom kuvanhu, tinayo unity, we are still united. Imperialism is our enemy. Neo-colonialism," he said.
"Handitengese vanaNkomo nanaMuzenda. I still stand. I will stand with you as long as this issue remains in question. I will be with you and stand firmly leading you. So don't doubt. Tiritose, I will never yield. Don't doubt. Andidududze panyaya iyoyo. This is not the time to surrender. You (people of Gwanda South) are the light and this place we can call Ekukhanyiseni. Let others see what you have done, learn from you. Let your determination inspire them. Vamwe vanga vatengwa vamwe vanga vaenda."
Cde Mugabe said although there were hardships brought by sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe this was not a reason to mortgage the nation.
He said to ease the hardships being faced by the people, Government had bought 50 000 tonnes of maize from South Africa and redoubled efforts to transport the grain by both rail and road.
Cde Mugabe, who received a rousing welcome when he arrived for the rally in the afternoon, appealed to the people of Gwanda South to vote resoundingly for both himself and the party's candidate in the constituency's House of Assembly by-election, Cde Orders Mlilo.
In Beitbridge, President Mugabe said Government has stepped up efforts to develop strategic areas such as border posts to curb border jumping and illegal activities.
Addressing thousands of people at Malala Primary School, 8km west of Beitbridge town, President Mugabe said the ongoing development projects at Beitbridge are meant to transform the border town into a world-class city.
"As the Government, we want to deal with key and strategic areas, particularly our border posts, so that we have businesses and factories operating in those areas. You will also note that currently several projects are going on in Beitbridge as we want to transform it into a world-class southern city," said President Mugabe.
He urged the youths to desist from the inclination of illegally crossing the borders into neighbouring countries.
"We want to continue developing Beitbridge and other key areas so that our children work here rather than continuously border jumping into South Africa yet our country is very rich in natural resources such as minerals. Let me remind youths to desist from border jumping as if it's a sport," said President Mugabe.
He said the Government was working tirelessly to develop Matabeleland South, as it was an important province which gave birth to patriots and nationalists such as the late Vice President Dr Joshua Nkomo and national hero Cde Jason Ziyaphapha Moyo.
President Mugabe said that Matabeleland South was largely a drought-prone, hence the need to encourage irrigation farming and animal husbandry.
"We have Limpopo River and Zhovhe Dam, and as the Government we want to construct irrigation schemes along the canals and we want to do that through the mechanisation programmes. We want to improve food security here in Beitbridge and other parts of the province," he said.
President Mugabe hailed Zimbabwe's education system, saying it was the second best on the continent after Tunisia.
"Education is our top priority and therefore as Government, we continue to educate our children and empower them with the necessary academic and technical skills. We don't want our schools to collapse and we are doing our best, as we want to see the country having more mechanical engineers, water engineers, agronomists and veterinary surgeons," he said.
"In terms of health we have built several hospitals across the country, but, however, we continue to face the challenges of drug shortages due to lack of foreign currency as a result of sanctions imposed on us by the West."
"In Matabeleland North, we are building a university in Lupane and a Government complex to house our departments since it is the provincial capital," said Cde Mugabe.
Cde Mugabe urged Zimbabweans to go in large numbers and vote for Zanu-PF, saying it was a tried and tested revolutionary party which brought about the liberation of the country from colonialism.
"Iyi iZimbabwe yakarwirwa neZapu neZanu-PF. Musangano wedu uyu wakaumbwa neZapu neZanu-PF, tisu chete misangano miviri (Zanu and Zapu) iyi yakarwira rusununguko,"
"Tisu takaunza zvakare ivhu iri, umhlabathi, then kwakuita vamwe vanoda kukanganisa independence yose. Kwaita vamwe vakatengwa navarungu nemaBritish," he said.
Cde Mugabe urged people to remain united and strengthen the Unity Accord signed in 1987.
"In the past election some of you voted for MDC because we were divided. If you vote for MDC on 27 June, you would have killed yourself, liyazibulala, because you will lose your land because we saw the white farmers coming back soon after the 29 March elections.
"We don't want a repeat of what happened in the previous election. We should strengthen the party and Government.
"Rega kuita hope dzemusi wa29 March takarara, kumele sivuke and conquer MDC," he said.
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Zimbabwe: President warns MDC-T
Posted: Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Herald Reporters
President Mugabe has warned MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai and senior opposition officials that the Government will hold them responsible for the orgy of organised violence that has rocked some parts of the country and would soon invoke measures to curtail it.
Addressing thousands of Zanu-PF supporters at Siakobvu Business Centre in Kariba and Rimuka Stadium in Kadoma, President Mugabe said the Government had noted with grave concern the organised violence against people, especially Zanu-PF supporters, through the burning of houses and kidnappings, among other heinous crimes.
Government, he said, would soon invoke what is known in law as "vicarious responsibilities and liabilities" against MDC-T leaders and senior party officials saying the terror attacks were premeditated and organised, exposing them to liabilities.
"Zvino chitema chakaipisa cheMDC mweya wehuSatani wekupisa dzimba dzevanhu. Zvino zvikarega kumira watichanenera ndiTsvangirai nevamwe vake.
"These cases of arson, kidnappings and violence on people coming from the MDC have shown a definite pattern which we read across the country. There is a definite plan of violence, an organised system of violence aimed at disturbing law and order. Let them be warned that we will invoke what is known as vicarious responsibility and liability which means we will hold them responsible for the violence across the country," he explained.
This invocation, he said, was only applied in special circumstances that threaten to disturb peace.
President Mugabe explained that normally parents are not held responsible for the misdeeds of their children, but when their operations show an organised streak then people are left with no choice but suspect complicity by the parents.
"This wave of violence has to stop and Government would not allow people to suffer and for people to wantonly disturb law and order . . . we cannot allow it to continue."
Cde Mugabe made the remarks after he was briefed about the violence being perpetrated by MDC-T supporters in Mola communal lands where they have reportedly barricaded roads using logs and have gone on a spree of arson that has displaced people and left others injured.
Three people have since been arrested in connection with the disturbances while some MDC-T supporters have left the opposition party to rejoin Zanu-PF.
Mr Fanta Masaka said he rejoined the ruling party after realising that MDC-T had nothing to offer.
He said people should not vote with their stomachs and desire for such niceties as sugar because they did not match the heritage that President Mugabe and Zanu-PF has bequeathed to them through land redistribution and indigenisation programmes.
Turning to the forthcoming run-off, President Mugabe said he was chosen by the people at the 2004 Zanu-PF congress and he accepted to return the people's trust.
MDC-T, he said, dithered on whether to participate in the election while waiting for a signal from their masters in the West.
"VeMDC vakamboti hatidi, voti tinoda kunge musikana ari kunyengwa. Tsvangirai pazvakabuda kuti hapana ahwina akabva atizira kuBotswana uko akazongodzoka anzi naAmbassador wekuAmerica (James McGee) dzokera tikachiona chichidzoka chichimhanya. Akakumbira armoured car kubva kuBotswana namaguards asi vakati kwete kana uri murombo tinogona chete kukutengera ticket rendege rekuti udzoke kumusha ndokudzoka kwaakazoita," said the President amid laughter from the crowd.
President Mugabe said Zimbabwe was under threat from Western imperialist forces fronted by MDC-T and people need not look further than events after the March 29 elections when whites thought the opposition had won.
He said most farmers who lost their land and had gone to neighbouring countries such as Zambia, Malawi, South Africa, had returned to reclaim their land.
Cde Mugabe declared that the land would not be returned to the whites as long as war veterans and other progressive thinking Zimbabweans in the country were still alive.
He said Anglo-Saxon interests vested in MDC-T were also evidenced by US Assistant Secretary for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer, who parroted claims by MDC-T that they had won the presidential elections before the official announcement by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission.
"Kamusikana kekuAmerica kakauya kachiti Tsvangirai ahwina vanofanira kutonga. Isu tikati ibva kuno. Kakanga kava kuzviramba kakadzokera kwavo."
He said Anglo-Saxons were working together to destabilise Zimbabwe by imposing sanctions in the vain hope that people would revolt against Government and vote for the puppet MDC-T to further the regime change agenda.
President Mugabe said Zimbabwe had minerals like platinum, chrome, nickel, which were complemented by the recent discovery of uranium that he said Government would soon look into ways of fostering co-operation and assistance from China and other countries in harnessing the resource for energy development.
He said there was wealth in the land as evidenced by the returns that resettled farmers have yielded saying the whites tried to hoodwink Zimbabweans into thinking that there was no wealth in farming by putting on shorts and dressing shabbily.
He said chiefs should identify people who need land and forward their names to Government.
Government, he said, had to put in place measures to empower people and ensure the availability of basic commodities and clothes at reasonable prices through the establishment of people's shops.
He urged people to vote for him, saying voting for him was voting for Zanu-PF which has a history of liberating the country and working to uplift and empower people.
President Mugabe said Government was committed to improving the lives of people in the Zambezi Valley, where people survive through hunting and fishing.
The First Lady, Amai Grace Mugabe, Politburo members Cde Nathan Shamuyarira, Cde Ignatius Chombo, Central Committee members from Mashonaland West, provincial chairman Cde John Mafa, Chief Mola and other traditional leaders attended the rally.
Addressing a capacity crowd at another rally at Rimuka Stadium in Kadoma later in the day, Cde Mugabe said people should understand that when they vote for MDC-T they would be voting against themselves and selling out the country's heritage.
"Tinozviziva kuti kune nzara nekushaikwa kwezvatinoshandisa asi mungatengesa nyika nekuti mashaya?
"Imi mukati nyika yarwadza mukati ngativhotere ichi chibato makatengesa nyika masikati machena.
"We are lucky midzimu yakaramba kuti nyika iende. The vote was not disastrous (after March 29) but we are saying don't vote against yourselves, vote for your country, your legacy and your heritage that you would bequeath to the future generations."
Cde Mugabe said celebrations by whites after the premature announce-
ment by the MDC-T should inspire people to be strong in defending the country's sovereignty.
"We need to be strong, to know that this is our country, Zimbabwe. We have nowhere else to go.
"The whites have a lot of places to go. The Anglo-Saxon world is very large and Zimbabwe is small but endowed with riches, underground, on its land we have to utilise, our forests with its birds, animals and everything that is found in it.
"The country also has the people, sons and daughters, which is our first resources for developing the country," he said.
He said people should know that the land in the country is sacred and should never be sold.
"Ivhu iri ratinaro rinoyera, haritengeswe, tinoripfumbudza richisara riripo, haritakurwe.
"Mabhunu havafaniri kukanganisa pakati pedu asi vakauya kuti vashande pamwe nesu for the good of our people then we would accept them."
He said the Government would continue to work with whites that want to see the country develop.
"We would work with those who want to help the development of the country but to imperialists we say down with them."
Cde Mugabe said as scholar of Kwame Nkurumah he learnt a lot of lessons about imperialists forces.
"I learnt from Nkurumah to be wary of imperialists, he taught me that only a dead imperialist is a good one.
"The second lesson was to follow my principles; this should not be bought.
"We should have the sense that the country is mine, I would die for, look after it and would never sell my country."
"We should also know that principle is sacred, can't be sold on the altar."
"Izvi zvinofanira kutibatsira kudzamisa hunhu hwako, tienderere mberi zvakanaka tiri vanhu vanozvitonga.
"If change comes in another way like what the MDC-T way, which is a sellout organisation, we will not accept that.
"Change should come out of the people, come out of the Zimbabwean people, people who stand for the rights of the people," he said.
Cde Mugabe said there were people who suffered for the country's independence and who understand the history of the struggle.
"We want leaders who stand strongly for the people, hatinzwisisane nezvimbwasungata, hatidi vatungamiriri vanoda kupfuma asi tinoda vanoshandira vanhu."
He castigated people who join the ruling party so that they could use it to be rich.
"People should come to work for the people. We want development for the people, to send children to school and develop ordinary Zimbabweans to have their own businesses. Leaders should be people-oriented," he said.
Cde Mugabe castigated MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai for not respecting ancestors and fallen heroes who died for the country's liberation and being used by the British to reverse the gains of independence.
"Munoti hamuzive kwakabva MDC, the British formed this party when the three parties in the country agreed to start the Westminster Foundation.
"Vakati kuti tirwise bato guru rakasimba tinofanira kushanda nevanhu veZCTU. We take the secretary-general of ZCTU and make him the president while the organisation's president becomes his deputy.
"Kana usingazive hauzive history, kana vashandi varipano vanozviziva kana usingazive hausi wemuno vakafanana nevachena vasiri vemuno.
"Hamukwanise kuona musiyano pakati pangu naTsvangirai, that is why you voted for him."
Cde Mugabe said he was different from Tsvangirai because he fought for the independence of the country, including those in the opposition.
"Takarwa hondo kuti vana teaboy vave maprofessionals kwete kuswera uchihwetera varungu.
"After independence we are saying we have our natural resources, we got them from God but Mbuya Nehanda, vanaMashayamombe nevakuru vese vakadamburwa musoro nenyaya yezvatinazvo munyika muno."
He said the war waged by the ancestors inspired him and the other leaders to fight for independence.
"Taisabvumirwa kugara kumasubburb, tikavakirwa dzimba dziya dzamunoti misana yenzou asi takati bhabhai kumisana yenzou and built proper houses.
"Ndopamunosimuka moti pasi neni, pasi neZanu-PF a-ah!
"Munoda Tsvangirai momuvhotera. Does he have the knowledge to lead the country? We are an enlightened country, ndopatinotora munhu ane pfungwa dzekumashure-shure anoti 'Kana makasunungurwa akakusunungurai wacho ngakudzorerei pamanga makasungirirwa'."
He said there is no way Zanu-PF will let the country go back to the colonialists.
"ZvanaTsvangirai zvekuti varungu tichavadzorera nyika hazvife zvakaitika, kuzvinyepera. You can vote for him but if he brings back the whites toenda kuhondo.
"Tinoita Chimurenga chechina nokuti varungu hapana chimwe chavanoda asi regime change, asi hazviite. Takatambudzikira nyika ino saka vakomana vangavari kuhondo vakati nyika haingaende nepenzura.
"You decide for yourselves to vote for war or vote for people who work for the development of the country.
"Tirikuda kupa vanhu masimba ekuzvitira if there are any whites who want to work in Zimbabwe they should be minority partners while we are the majority shareholders."
Cde Mugabe urged people in Kadoma to be united and vote overwhelmingly for Zanu-PF on June 27.
"When you vote for me on June 27, you will be voting for Zanu-PF so that when we vote, we vote to protect the gains of independence, our heritage, for Zimbabwe, the future of our children in our minds.
"We hope to vote for Zanu-PF, for me so that I must deliver a knockout blow to the MDC-T and its Western financiers."
First Lady Amai Mugabe, who also addressed the gathering, urged people to safeguard the riches of the country.
Amai Mugabe received a donation of $5 trillion for various projects she is spearheading from Kadoma businessman, Cde Simba Chinembiri, of Savanna in the town.
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MDC-T borrows from Bush campaign
Posted: Tuesday, June 17, 2008
By Philip Murombedzi
June 12, 2008
talkzimbabwe.com
A COLLEAGUE and columnist of The Zimbabwe Guardian, Lloyd Whitefield Butler Jr. wrote, on June 2, 2008, "U.S. Republican party and MDC-T are alike with media spin deception". He said that "it appears Morgan Tsvangirai … is imitating the George Herbert Walker Bush's 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis."
I couldn't help drawing similarities when Morgan Tsvangirai unveiled his 'campaign bus' yesterday.
This is a true manifestation of the American-style campaigning and image sprucing by Western PR companies – nothing wrong, if it eventually delivers victory to him.
If it doesn't, then Morgan Tsvangirai will look dumb in the eyes of all Zimbabweans and all those PR companies that are helping repair his image.
Does anyone remember a video showing Bush grabbing voters' hands, jumping on and off a campaign bus during his 2004 presidential campaign?
The Bush campaign team drove around the country in the campaign bus they had equipped with sound and light systems, confetti cannons, and various props and costumes. They gave dozens of stump speeches, distributed campaign videos and "USA Patriot Pledges," and performed patriotic songs to audiences across the country.
This works only in America. Africa is not America. The socio-political terrain is different. Media and image spin works differently.
Again this is evidence that Tsvangirai has not yet grasped the true meaning of African society and politics and what African leaders' concerns are.
Tsvangirai does not need buses at the moment. He needs clear strategy and powerful negotiators. That will bring the much needed change, not a bus parked at Harvest House. It might present him as a magnanimous 'hero' or leader, but Zanu PF is still very much part of the daily fabric of Zimbabwean society, moreso than the MDC-T party. They are still in power and control all sectors of the economy and politics.
These tokens being used to spruce up Morgan's image work very well in the West, not in Africa. The 'Zimbabwe Idol' type campaigning works well for countries that understand the need for those tokens and have grown accustomed to those images.
The image of a new Tsvangirai could actually alienate him from his mainstream supporters who will see him distanced from their everyday struggles. What brought him the popularity was his 'commonness', not these symbols. He has to be careful, otherwise these desperate attempts by the West will spell his disaster and his downfall.
Tsvangirai should realise that these tactics are alien to Africa. They have never been tested. So they could well work for him, but I do not see how, or they will make him look like a fool after the heat is off.
The MDC-T leader is using what Whitefield Jr. called "distorted imagery". The public soon wises up to it. The "media spinmiesters" which he identified will not do much for his campaign which was traditionally rooted in the people.
When I saw the 'tour bus' and his 'victory tour' campaign I could not help making comparisons with Simba Makoni's campaign on Facebook. These images make you look cool, but do nothing for victory and power transition and power transfer.
This victory bus – in a few weeks' time – might actually help Tsvangirai launch a commuter business if he loses the election on June 27, 2008.
philipmurombedzi@yahoo.com
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Zimbabwe: Politics and Food Aid
Posted: Thursday, June 12, 2008
By Stephen Gowans
June 04, 2008
There is no evidence that the government of Zimbabwe is using food "as a political tool to intimidate voters ahead of an election" or that it is deliberately denying "hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Zimbabweans" food aid, as Human Rights Watch and The New York Times allege.
In fact, a careful reading of what both sources claim, points to a deliberate and knowing attempt to palter with the truth, reflecting and reinforcing a narrative that holds Africa, and particularly Zimbabwe, to be marked by suffering people, corrupt and monstrous governments, and endless chaos.
The New York Times began a June 4 article on Zimbabwe by announcing that "hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Zimbabweans – orphans and old people, the sick and the down and out - have lost access to food and other basic humanitarian assistance."
It's true that Zimbabweans have lost access to food delivered by Western NGOs, but not food aid altogether, and only for the duration of the presidential run-off election campaign. In the interim, the government has made arrangements to take on the job of distributing food aid to those in need. No government-engineered famine is imminent, notwithstanding what The New York Times says.
Harare has ordered NGOs to temporarily scale back or cease operations, accusing them of illegally channeling funding to the opposition MDC party and in March's elections of "going around threatening villagers in rural areas that the donations they were handing them would be the last if they voted for Zanu-PF and President Mugabe." [1] It is out of a desire to eclipse Western interference in the election that the Zimbabwe government has taken this step.
Are the government's accusations credible?
For the last seven years, the US and its allies have cut off all development assistance to Zimbabwe, disabled all lines of credit, stopped the World Bank and International Monetary Fund from providing financial assistance, and have pressured private companies from doing business with the country. The result has been "a form of collective punishment designed to destabilize the country and shake the population's faith" in the government. [2] Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Zimbabweans – orphans and old people, the sick and the down and out - have suffered. And to hide their hand in creating the misery, the US and Britain and their allies have blamed it all on Harare's land reform policies, an inversion of the causal chain. It was not Harare's land reform policies that created the disaster, but the West's meting out collective punishment in response to the land reform policies that undermined Zimbabwe's economy and created widespread suffering.
It is hardly outside the realm of high probability, then, that Western governments that continue to use sanctions "to weaken the economy of the country, to get the people of Zimbabwe so poor and hungry they can change their voting behavior," [3] would also use food aid directly as a political weapon to shape the outcome of the upcoming election through their influence over NGOs operating in the country. After all, creating hunger in Zimbabwe is exactly what Western governments have been doing for the last seven years, indirectly, through the use of sanctions.
But Human Rights Watch and The New York Times say nothing about Western sanctions and instead accuse the Mugabe government of making Zimbabweans miserable, and further, of deliberately inducing hunger. Human Rights Watch researcher for Africa, Tiseke Kasambala, accuses Harare of taking a decision "to let people go hungry," citing it as "yet another attempt to use food as a political tool to intimidate voters ahead of an election." [4] Kasambala conjures the impression that (a) the government is deliberately inducing hunger and (b) that this will somehow help Mugabe's chances of winning the presidential election run-off poll. But while the HRW researcher says the government is letting people go hungry, he also complains that it is picking up the slack, delivering food aid in place of the NGOs. The government, he says, should not be distributing food but should "let independent aid agencies feed people." [5]
Harare, then, stands accused of two opposing crimes: of letting people go hungry, and of delivering food aid (in place of NGOs) and thereby saving people from hunger. Kasambala's "you're guilty no matter what you do" approach reveals that what's really at issue isn't whether people will go hungry (and they won't, though Harare's accusers play politics by carefully couching their comments to make it seem a government-engineered famine is imminent); the real issue is who controls the food aid. The problem from Kasambala's and New York Times reporter Celia Dugger's point of view, is that it isn't Western-funded NGOs that will be doling out relief for the duration of the election campaign. Dugger acknowledges that the government has bought 600,000 tons of corn to distribute to the hungry, but warns Harare could (not will, but could) use food "as an inducement to win support." [6] Of course, she offers not a whit of evidence that it is doing so or will do so. On the other side, there is good reason to believe that if Western governments are consistent, they'll use their funding arrangements with NGOs to extend their policy of bribing the people to vote for their candidate - this time with threats of food aid deliveries stopping if the wrong candidate is elected.
Kasambala, representing a rights organization that is dominated by the US foreign policy establishment, and can therefore hardly be expected to be politically neutral where Zimbabwe is concerned, goes further by predicting Harare will withhold food aid as "a political tool to intimidate voters ahead of (the) election." [7] In a milieu in which the "media have long since largely abandoned any attempt at impartiality in its reporting of Zimbabwe, the common assumption being that Mugabe is a murderous dictator at the head of a uniquely wicked regime," [8] Kasambala's dark prediction has a ring of plausibility to it, but if you examine his accusation critically, it falls apart.
How, one might ask, could a government induce hunger and expect to win support, when a hungry electorate would be far more likely to vote against, not for, whoever caused the hunger? Indeed, the aim of sanctions is to create enough misery to force the voters to cry uncle by voting Mugabe out of office. It would surely be a government of fools that would add to the misery already created by sanctions by deliberately engineering more misery. This would serve the aims of the regime changers in the West, not Mugabe and his Zanu-PF party. According to Kasambala's logic, if John McCain wants to win support, he should announce that, if elected, he will restore the draft and hike taxes sharply across-the-board.
Western media and organizations allied with US and British imperial goals are trying to create the impression that the government of Robert Mugabe is deliberately inducing hunger and using food aid to shape the outcome of the presidential run-off election, that is, when they're not accusing him of planning to rig the election. One wonders why Mugabe would tamper with the election results if he is using food as a political weapon, and vice-a-versa. Apparently, the aim of the demonization campaign is to hurl as many accusations at Mugabe as possible, in hopes that some or all of them will stick, even if they're mutually contradictory.
It is Western countries that have created hunger through a program of sanctions that has sabotaged the Zimbabwean economy and led to widespread misery and need for food aid. Mugabe's government has temporarily suspended the operations of NGOs, not to seize control of the delivery of food aid for political gain, but to block Western governments from operating remotely through NGOs to channel funding to the campaign of opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai and to use food as a political weapon. If you read the Western press uncritically and absorb Human Rights Watch's analyses without a healthy dose of skepticism, it doesn't seem that way, but as Malcolm X once said, "If you're not careful the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing." [9]
NOTES:
1. Herald (Zimbabwe) May 29, 2008; June 4, 2008.
2. CPGB-ML Statement, "Hands off Zimbabwe," May 12, 2008.
3. Peter Mavunga, Herald (Zimbabwe) May 3, 2008.
4. Guardian (UK), June 4, 2008.
5. Ibid.
6. New York Times, June 4, 2008.
7. Guardian (UK), June 4, 2008.
8. Seamus Milne, Guardian (UK), April 17, 2008.
9. New African, June 2008.
Reproduced from:
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/zimbabwe-politics-and-food-aid/
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'China will not meddle in Zimbabwe's affairs'
Posted: Tuesday, June 10, 2008
'China will not meddle in Zimbabwe's affairs'
CHINA has told a group of local and international journalists currently in Beijing that Zimbabweans are able to solve their own problems without outside interference and Zimbabwe can realize stability and prosperity on its own.
S.Africa and Russia block wider Security Council briefing on Zimbabwe
THE United Nations Security Council will meet Thursday to weigh the humanitarian situation in Zimbabwe, but a wider political briefing has been blocked by South Africa and Russia who are members of the 15-member group.
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Zimbabwe: How soon we forget
Posted: Tuesday, June 10, 2008
By Stella Orakwue
June 10, 2008
The Herald
IT is a pity that the people who voted against President Robert Mugabe have no ability to remember the servitude they existed in prior to the last 28 years.
They did it for the money. What is the price of the loyalty? It is a heavy price to pay when "your" people are prepared to buy and sell you for Western money. Western money could not, and cannot, buy President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. But clearly, as the number of people who voted against him in the presidential election show, people of Zimbabwe, in Zimbabwe, are prepared to sell him to the West in return for money.
Land, property, money, buying and selling. The ownership of land, the ownership of property. Property and the European. Robert Mugabe knew, and knows, about what property means.
Other people's land. Land belonging to people with black skin. He knows what that means.
Property and the European are interchangeable, indistinguishable, inseparable. The one goes with the other. One without the other is untenable. The two together provide an almost visible exhibition of an orgasmic sensation-taking place.
But together the European and other people's land, particularly land belonging to black people, and we have climax, multiple orgasmic sensation.
Are the people of Zimbabwe prepared to return to servicing the orgasmic needs of the European desire for property, money, ownership and control of the people's land?
Whether that control and ownership is direct or indirect? Are Zimbabweans prepared, willing, and ready to be servicing foreign nations, foreign international bodies, foreign leaders, and foreign "global community"?
And what is the price of service to your own nation and your own continent, Africa? Robert Mugabe, fighter, liberator, leader, man, has paid heavy price upon heavy price. But he will stand fast because men like "Mugabe" come back once a century. Men who bring true transformational change to the lives of their people. It is a pity that "the people" in whose lives this fundamental change has been wrought have such short memories. It is a pity but it is irrelevant that they have no ability to remember the servitude they existed in prior to the last 28 years.
It is irrelevant because of all Africans, living and not yet born, for millennia to come, the actions of Robert Mugabe in returning land, African land, to the rightful ownership of African people, will live on inside all Africans. He will be the psyche of all Africans for all time. And there is nothing that anybody, particularly any foreign body or power can do about that. For they are not God, and it is God who gave us "Mugabe" to lead his people and to show African people the way. Viva Mugabe, viva!
But watch the European cocks crowing! They think their hour is nigh. These Zimbabwean elections aren't "fixed" or "rigged" when they think that their man, the "democratic opposer", has won. Only election wins they don't like are unstomachable.
They did it for the money, for the "help" they think will come. The white "helpers" with their dome-shaped bags laden with helping money. Money that is not available to men that they do not like. Friendly white money that will take the burden of the land off their black backs and hand it back to the white man. For is it not the land the white man's rightful burden? So you Zimbabwean friends white help, lie back, relax, let the white help show you how to do it. That's what friendly white money is for – loosening your control of things. Sit, take the load of the land off your back. Other people want to run your country.
Those people of Zimbabwe who want the democratic opposer, let us see how long it will last. Zimbabweans who want to put their lives in other people's monied hands – let us see how long you remain pleased with the results that await you. Perhaps you do prefer to reap where you do not sow. After all, the Europeans bringing friendly White Money say that those nice, poor blacks that they want to help, well, they don't know how to sow and grow anything on land because they are black and blacks have never been farmers, and they are helpless and they need help. White help.
You can shout at me, "What do I know about poverty and going without food and having no money?" and I will laugh in your face. Do you think that I don't know about poverty, about being poor, because I "live in the West"? I know about poverty. Poverty has been my closest friend for many years. There have been times when I have asked myself whether it is worse to have no food in a place where there is no food – and therefore you all go hungry – or to have no food in a place where food is aplenty but you have no money to buy food – and therefore you go hungry. You see, you can go hungry in the West, too. I know what it is like to count every single penny in my buttered old purse – not to save up for a car or a television, but to buy a loaf of bread, because that is all I have to eat.
It teaches me yet another thing about myself that I didn't know that I was capable of: Money could never, ever buy me. I have seen, and I see, that I would rather starve than bow down to anything that I did not believe in. I would rather starve than sell my fundamental principles. Yes, you cannot eat principles, but without them you don't deserve to eat. Without them you are better off dead.
Look at the Westerners circling like sharks! They flocked from their watching hotels around the globe. They came to bury Robert Mugabe, but he won't go without a fight. What an alarm this poses – what, a black man fighting instead of fleeing or cowering before the white man and his henchmen and women! Let them dig a hole in the ground, fill it with money, and bury themselves in it.
Do you think that if "Mugabe" had got the money, the financial credits, the financial buttresses that Zimbabwe needed, that Zimbabwe's economic situation would not be utterly different, and that "the people" would not have given him the vast majority he deserved? "The people" of the "democratic opposer" know that it is the presence of "Mugabe" that is preventing the West from giving them friendly White money. Money meant for them that that they are not getting because he is there. Sad. Very sad. Sad to see what people will do for money and how flexible their principles can be!
Is it too hard without the white man? Without the Westerner in charge of your resources, in charge of your money, looking after you behind the scenes? Would "the people" rather have the Westerner in charge of their land? Do "the people" actually want "their own" land, if the white man and his Friendly Money are not going to be looking after them?
How much money was taken out of the country by Friendly White Employers with their vast land holdings? How beneficial was that for Zimbabweans? The Friendly White Employers slept in lavish houses and mansions with all unnecessary necessities, all the finest purchasable amenities that money from land could buy; while their "loved" farm workers enjoyed a mattress on an earth floor in their basic dwellings fit for basic lives, and all the rudimentary things that just a teeny-weeny bit of money could buy.
How much money will pour in, Zimbabweans, if you sell out the man who gave you back your land? Will you luxuriate in money like you would in a vast deep bath, water swirling all around you? How long will the taps stay on? The white man's Friendly Money is running on empty. But don't tell "the people" – let them find out the easy way.
What is the rate of return on betrayal? What is the rate of return on a lack of fortitude, a lack of desire for self-being? What is the rate of return on flexible principles? Do you think that the West will ever forgive that land that his kith and kin once held was returned to its rightful owners, back into the hands of black people? It is untenable for them. It is not something that they can deal with, because it has never happened to them before. Their urge is to get it back, buy it back, lease it back, rent it back – do anything but have it back in their hands one way or the other. They need to be back in charge. In control, holding the land and its money again, and the "democratic opposer" and his supporters will help them. Do you think that there is some kind of mysterious white magic to running an economy? That only white people with their white money can do it? How shameful that after only one generation "the people" of Zimbabwe are already going down this road. What was it for, President Mugabe, I ask you?
I say this to myself: God provides, then it is up to each of us to decide what to do with his provisions. God provides, we decide. The Lord has given us that ability. And we do not bow down to people who behave, who conduct themselves, as if they are gods walking upon this earth: Do as they say or else die. Away with them! Your life is in your own hands.
Friendly White Money is nothing but a short-term pay off, a lease on comfort. It is here today, gone tomorrow. But in a worse economic state.
And then you will be back to where you were before but without your dignity, without your strength, without your pride. Back to dependence instead of independence. Back to tilling the soil for others instead of for yourselves. Back to waiting for what the white man wants to do with you, instead of what you want to do for yourselves. Back to no land.
The time you should have spent "suffering" – how does it compare to the war year? But learning about yourselves, your skills, your capacities, you spent in what passed for a "comfortable" life of dependency on the white man and his Friendly post-Mugabe Money. – New African Magazine.
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Mbeki Responds to Media Misrepresentations
Posted: Thursday, June 5, 2008
Statement of the Presidency: Media reports on Mr. Morgan Tsvangirai's supposed letter to President Thabo Mbeki
June 04, 2008
FULL TEXT: Statement from South Africa's Presidency
The Presidency has noted ongoing media reports of a letter supposedly sent to President Thabo Mbeki by Zimbabwean Movement of Democratic Change (MDC) leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, on May 13 2008.
Regarding these reports, the Presidency reiterates that President Thabo Mbeki has not received any such letter from Mr Tsvangarai. Nor has any official in the Presidency or the South African government received any such letter from any member of the MDC.
Furthermore, the MDC has never discussed the letter with the Facilitation Team, the Presidency or any department of government and the MDC at any time.
It is worth noting that whereas some newspapers claim to have "assurances" of the letter's acknowledgement of receipt by the Presidency from the MDC, no newspaper has, as yet, attributed such "assurances" to any official of the MDC.
In light of the fact that the Presidency did not receive the letter and in the absence of any authentication by media entities which have reported about it, the logical conclusion is that there is no such a letter.
We note further that since the commencement of the facilitation process, the Presidency, and government have, on numerous occasions, made corrections to false media reports that have been industriously fed to an otherwise vigilant media.
On August 15, 2007, the Presidency issued a statement correcting media reports which claimed that President Mbeki would present a report at the SADC Heads of State and Government Summit held in Lusaka, Zambia on August 16 to 17, 2007, which would blame Britain for Zimbabwe's political and economic challenges.
The statement made it clear that the Presidency was not aware of any such report and that, if any such existed at all, certainly, "it was not authored by the Government of the Republic of South Africa."
Regrettably, the media did not take our statement seriously and, apparently without further qualms, persisted in attributing the report to President Mbeki. Our investigations later revealed that the news report originated from a news agency stringer, based in Lusaka, a stringer who had been handed a copy of "the" report and then deliberately, fallaciously, attributed it to President Mbeki instead of to its real author. The news agency later retracted its report, albeit in no more than three paragraphs. None of the other local and international media who reported on the matter retracted, nor offered any apology.
Again on September 14, 2007, the Presidency issued a statement in which we rebutted the falsehood which some media reported at length to the effect that "the South African Government … has been secretly working to remove [President Robert Mugabe] from power" through "lobbying for sustained international pressure to bear on the Mugabe regime."
This year, as in the previous year, it appears as though there exists a disinformation campaign whereby all manner of fabrications are fed to the media.
In April, there was a sustained attempt to present President Mbeki's answer to a specific question about whether at that point (April 12) the election process in Zimbabwe constituted a crisis. Both the context of the question and the detail of the reply were ignored; resulting in the impression that the President was oblivious to the challenges in Zimbabwe.
As recently as last month, the Presidency and the Ministry of Defence have had to rebut allegations (reported in the media) that President Mbeki ordered Deputy Defence Minister, Mluleki George, to refuel the An Yue Jiang; the Chinese parastatal-owned vessel which docked in Durban in April carrying arms to Zimbabwe, amongst other variously destined goods.
Though not all have been published, the Presidency has been the recipient of media inquiries of similar kind about Zimbabwe which some media seem to have pursued with precious little critical reflection. These include claims that either President Mbeki or Mrs [Zanele] Mbeki are supposed to be blood relatives of Mrs Grace Mugabe, the Zimbabwean President's wife.
Another such inquiry concerned the phantastical supposition that President Mbeki was arrested for arms and drug smuggling in Zimbabwe in 1982; "which is why," in the words of one journalist who recently sought comment, "he is so afraid of President Mugabe."
Yet another media inquiry appears to be somebody's perception of a State Secret that since the Zimbabwean elections, President Mugabe has been secretly residing at Mahlambandlopfu – the official residence of the South African President – for fear of reprisals in an impending military coup.
We cite these examples to illustrate the extent to which fabrications about the SADC mandated facilitation process are being given to the media. To what extent this is deliberate or coordinated, and what immediate or long-term local or international objectives might be served by it, is a matter for historians to unravel.
What is clear is that these fabrications are focusing on demonisation of the facilitation process with the intention to prevent the possibility for a solution to the challenges in Zimbabwe.
In this context, the media ought to remain vigilant by, amongst other ways, authenticating information as well as greater scrutiny of the motives of those who leak information.
For more information, please contact: Mukoni Ratshitanga on (012) 300 5436/ 082 300 3447
Issued by The Presidency
Tuynhuys
Cape Town
Source: www.thepresidency.gov.za
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Run-off: Not just a Zimbabwean poll
Posted: Thursday, May 29, 2008
By Caesar Zvayi
May 29, 2008
herald.co.zw
READING the headlines in the Western Press and pronouncements by Western leaders and their envoys here when Morgan Tsvangirai and his MDC-T prematurely claimed victory in the March 29 elections, one got the feeling that Zimbabwe was just the stage for a contest far bigger than what the contestants, with the notable exception of those in Zanu-PF, knew.
Readers all over the world were intrigued by the headlines in British newspapers particularly, The Evening Standard, that had a front-page banner that screamed "We have beaten Mugabe".
A banner that left them wondering who had "beaten Mugabe"? Was it the Evening Standard, the British government or MDC-T?
Any doubts about who had squared off against President Mugabe and Zanu-PF on March 29 were soon dispelled when the British and American governments began demanding the release of the official results with the likes of the BBC and CNN devoting hourly reports to Zimbabwe quoting Brown and Bush speaking like contestants.
White former commercial farmers who had left Zimbabwe in a huff after the farms they held – not owned – were gazetted for resettlement, returned en masse and set up base in country clubs dotted around Zimbabwe's farming communities where they held "victory" celebrations complete with fireworks and flare guns before heading to the farms where they threatened resettled farmers with eviction once Tsvangirai was sworn in. The crude ones even racially abused the black bar tenders.
By their feverish excitement and unguarded pronouncements, the Westerners exposed themselves to be the real force behind Tsvangirai and the MDC faction that bears his surname. A sickening and frightening reality that was missed by those who voted for Tsvangirai and his personalised MDC on March 29.
The harmonised poll was a contest between President Mugabe and Zanu-PF fighting from the corner of the entire developing world and Tsvangirai and MDC-T fighting from the corner of the rightwing Western hemisphere with Bush and Brown as trainer and ringside doctor respectively.
The run-off is akin to a rematch of that contest.
One only has to go back to Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana to realise that the events that have unfolded in Zimbabwe over the past eight years were a throwback to Ghana 1957 to 1966.
Zimbabwe represents the last frontier in Africa for the struggle between black nationalist resistance and Western neo-colonial encroachment by proxy. It is the only country that is still headed by a distinguished liberation icon cut from the same cloth that gave Africa Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Toure, Gamal Abdel Nasser and Samora Machel, to mention just a few.
Many of the countries in Southern Africa that are still under liberation governments are headed by leaders mentored by this class of the 1960s.
Yes, Tanzania is still under the able leadership of Chama Cha Mapinduzi, a revolutionary party, but it is a fact that CCM did not rock the Western boat as much as Zanu-PF has done.
Our brothers down south are still under the leadership of the African National Congress, the party that brought the apartheid behemoth – the National Party – to its knees, but again they have chosen to coast along, barely challenging the economic order in a country that has been dubbed a First and Third World country in one comprising of a scandalously affluent white populace and an impoverished black majority that basically owns nothing apart from the shirts on their backs, as indeed the myopic black-on-black violence amply demonstrates.
That is why the progressive world was collectively saddened by reports that Zanu-PF had lost to MDC-T, while the Western world was collectively elated. Africa was morose because of the realisation that the MDC-T is not Zimbabwean nor African, but the latest brick from the kiln that gave the continent Moise Tshombe's Conakat, Afonso Dhlakama's Renamo and Jonas Savimbi's Unita, to mention just a few.
It was thus fitting that Zanu-PF launched its campaign on May 25, Africa Day, the day the African Uni0n – formerly the Organisation of African Unity – was formed on May 25 1963 with the objective of completely exorcising the foreign ghost from the continent.
That is exactly what Zimbabwe is about; it is about the total eradication of all forms of colonialism, which is why the run-off theme is "100 Percent Empowerment, Total Independence". Zimbabwe, under President Mugabe, has taken up the fight that should have been spearheaded by the AU, that of taking the struggle for independence to its logical conclusion by getting beyond the façade of flag independence to full socio-economic empowerment of the historically disadvantaged Africans.
This is why the Westerners have declared war on Zimbabwe as they do not want Zimbabwe to set a "bad example" for the rest of the developing world, from which the resource-poor West continues to siphon its scandalous affluence.
If Zimbabwe succeeds, the neo-colonial exploitation of the developing world through the likes of the World Bank and IMF will no longer be possible.
The strategic role Zimbabwe is playing in the age-old fight between the North and South is why the Bush administration has openly admitted that "Zimbabwe poses an unusual and extraordinary threat to the foreign policy of the United States". And that foreign policy, as we all know, is about dominating other people and their resources.
The fact that Tsvangirai and his MDC-T are fronts for Western interests is the reason why the Western alliance ordered him to go on a six-week diplomatic offensive in Sadc to try to establish a connection with a continent his politics had shunned, and which also shunned his politics.
Since the MDC's launch in September 1999, Tsvangirai has spent more time in the US or European capitals, consorting with, and pandering to the whims of the Western leadership while simultaneously insulting African leaders for what he termed "blind support for Mugabe".
This failing was ably captured by British establishment (sub note: ESTABLISHMENT not ESTABLISHED) journalist Peta Thornycroft, who, in an interview on the pirate radio station Short Wave Africa on November 13 last year, said the following, among other things: "When the MDC started in 2000, what a pity that they were addressing people in Sandton, mostly white people in Sandton north of Johannesburg instead of being in Dar es Salaam or Ghana or Abuja. They failed to make contact with Africa for so long, they were in London, we've just seen it again, Morgan Tsvangirai's just been in America.
"Why isn't he in Cairo? Maybe he needs financial support and he can't get it outside of America or the UK and the same would go for Mutambara. They have not done enough in Africa . . ."
And that attempt to connect with an Africa he had shunned and insulted for so long was the reason Tsvangirai went into self-imposed exile not the wild claims that his life was in danger. It is important to note that if one were to look at Tsvangirai and President Mugabe's credentials; it is actually President Mugabe who has a right to claim, with justification, that his life is in danger.
Readers may remember that it is Tsvangirai who has appeared in court facing charges of treason related to either plotting to kill President Mugabe or to unconstitutionally unseating the Government.
It is Tsvangirai who was captured by secret cameras contracting a Canadian political consultancy firm Dickens & Madison to assassinate President Mugabe, which footage was aired under the banner "Killing Mugabe: The Tsvangirai Conspiracy" by an Australian TV station, Special Broadcast Services Dateline, on February 13 2002.
It is Tsvangirai who, at Rufaro Stadium on September 30 2000, shocked the world when he openly threatened President Mugabe with violence, saying in part: "What we would like to tell Mugabe today is, please go peacefully, if you do not want to go peacefully, we will remove you violently."
It is Tsvangirai who organised orgies of violence disguised as a "defiance campaign" that culminated in the March 11 2007 disturbances in Highfield and surrounding suburbs, disturbances that fed months of terrorist bombings on police stations and other Government institutions.
As such, as evidenced above, it is President Mugabe, not Tsvangirai, who can allege an assassination plot with justification.
Anyway, Tsvangirai's actions are consistent with the terrorist activities visited on progressive African countries by his forebears like Tshombe and Savimbi, who we all know were just fronts for Western subversion of the developing world.
As such, as Zimbabwe braces for the run-off on June 27 voters must remember this is not just a Zimbabwean election, they will vote on behalf of the developing world.
www.herald.co.zw
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