BUSH's BLOOD-ORGY IN SOMALIA

"They Are Slaughtering Somalis Like Goats"
Mike Whitney

"Land is not our priority. Our priority is the people's peace, dignity and liberty. It is the people that are important to us." Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, Head of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU)


07/07/08 "ICH" -- -- While George Bush was busy railing at Zimbabwe's President, Robert Mugabe at the G-8 summit in Toyako, Japan; his Ethiopian proxy-army in Somalia was grinding out more carnage on the streets of Mogadishu. More than 40 civilians have been killed in the last 48 hours. On Sunday, Osman Ali Ahmed, the head of the UN Development Program in Somalia, was shot gangland style as he left a mosque Mogadishu. He died before he reached the hospital with wounds to the head and chest. Ali Ahmed is just the latest of the peace-keepers who have been killed in the ongoing battle between Bush's Ethiopian occupiers and Somali guerrillas.

"I care deeply about the people of Zimbabwe," Bush announced. "And I am extremely disappointed in the election which I labeled a sham election."

Right. Bush's newly-discovered empathy for black people was nowhere in sight during Hurricane Katrina when thousands of African Americans were rounded up at gunpoint and forced into the Superdome without food, water or medical supplies. Nor is it visible in Somalia today where millions of Somalis have been forced to flee their homes and relocate to tent cities in the south because of Bush's support for the Ethiopian army's invasion. The latest surge in violence has been the worst in a decade and the security situation continues to deteriorate despite the arrival of 2,600 troops from the African Union and a tentative truce that was signed in June between some of the warring factions. It should be no great surprize that the western media has stubbornly refused to report on the rising death-toll in Somalia, choosing instead to focus all of their attention on America's "villain du jour", Robert Mugabe. Mugabe is next on the neocon's list for regime change. Neocon Godfather Paul Wolfowitz even composed a postmortem for Zimbabwe's president in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial "How to Put the Heat on Mugabe".

In 2006, the United States supported an alliance of Somali warlords known as the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) who established a base of operations in the western city of Baidoa. With the help of the US-backed Ethiopian army, western mercenaries, US Navy warships, and AC-130 gunships; the TFG was able capture Mogadishu and force the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) and their allies to retreat to the south. But, much like Iraq and Afghanistan, the resistance has coalesced into a tenacious guerrilla army which has returned to the capital and resumed the fight making it impossible for their Ethiopian rivals to govern. As the struggle continues, the humanitarian situation gets worse and worse. At least 2.6 million Somalis are now facing famine due to acute food shortages spurred by a prolonged drought, violence and high inflation. UN monitors have warned that the figure could hit exceed 3.5 million by the end of 2008.

The UN Security Council has played its traditional role as facilitator of American-backed imperial violence by failing to condemn US involvement in Somalia and by promising to send peacekeepers to mop up after violence subsides. The UN has shown no interest in stopping the carnage and have become little more than the glove-hand of the US military; an accomplice to Bush's chronic adventurism.

In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, Salim Lone, a columnist for the Daily Nation in Kenya and a former spokesperson for the UN mission in Iraq explains the UN's role in providing the "go ahead" for the US invasion:

"The lawlessness of this particular war is astounding; the most lawless war of our generation. You know, all aggressive wars are illegal. But in this particular one, there have been violations of the UN Charter and gross violations of international human rights. But, in addition, there have been very concrete violations by the United States of two Security Council resolutions. The first one was the arms embargo imposed on Somalia, which the United States has been routinely flaunting for many years now. But then the US decided that that resolution was no longer useful, and they pushed through an appalling resolution in December, which basically gave the green light to Ethiopia to invade. They pushed through a resolution which said that the situation in Somalia was a threat to international peace and security, at a time when every independent report indicated, and Chatham House’s report on Wednesday also indicated, that the Islamic Courts Union had brought a high level of peace and stability that Somalia had not enjoyed in sixteen years.

So here was the UN Security Council going along with the American demand to pass a blatantly falsified UN resolution. And that resolution actually was a violation (of the) the UN Charter. You know, the UN Charter is like the American Constitution and the Security Council is not allowed to pass laws or rules that violate the Charter. And yet, who is going to correct them?"

The Bush administration has predictably invoked the "terrorist" hobgoblin to justify its involvement in Somalia, but no one is buying it. The ICU is not an Al Qaida affiliate or a terrorist organization despite the absurd claims of the State Dept. It is true that the ICU was trying to enforce Sharia Law, but a much milder form of Sharia than in Saudi Arabia. The ICU was the first government in over a decade to restore security and order to Somalia and--generally speaking--the people were supportive of the new regime.

Political analyst James Petras summed it up like this:

"The ICU was a relatively honest administration, which ended warlord corruption and extortion. Personal safety and property were protected, ending arbitrary seizures and kidnappings by warlords and their armed thugs. The ICU is a broad multi-tendency movement that includes moderates and radical Islamists, civilian politicians and armed fighters, liberals and populists, electoralists and authoritarians. Most important, the Courts succeeded in unifying the country and creating some semblance of nationhood, overcoming clan fragmentation."

The real motives behind the invasion were oil and geopolitics. According to most estimates 30 per cent of America's oil will come from Africa in the next ten years. Bush's new warlord-friends in the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) have already indicated a willingness to pass a new oil law that will encourage foreign oil companies to return to Somalia. The same oil giants that are now lining up in Iraq will soon be making their way to Somalia as well. The Horn of Africa is also critical for its deep-water ports and strategic location for future military bases. It's all part of the Grand Schema for reconfiguring the region to accommodate America's hegemonic ambitions.

Humanitarian Catastrophe: "The Ethiopian invasion has destroyed all the life-sustaining systems"

Heavy fighting and artillery fire have reduced large parts of Mogadishu to rubble. More than 700,000 people have been forced to leave the capital with nothing more than what they can carry on their backs. Entire districts have been evacuated and turned into ghost towns. The main hospital has been bombed and is no longer taking patients. Ethiopian snipers are perched atop rooftops across the city. Over 3.5 million people are now huddled in the south in tent cities without sufficient food, clean water or medical supplies. It is without question the greatest humanitarian crisis in Africa today; a man-made Hell entirely conjured up in Washington. Just weeks ago, Amnesty International reported that it had heard many accounts that Ethiopian troops were "slaughtering (Somalis) like goats." In one case, "a young child's throat was slit by Ethiopian soldiers in front of the child's mother."

In another Democracy Now interview, Abdi Samatar, professor of Global Studies at the University of Minnesota, had this to say:

"The Ethiopian invasion, which was sanctioned by the US government, has destroyed virtually all the life-sustaining economic systems which the population have built without the government for the last fifteen years. And the militia that are supposed to protect the population have been looting shops. For instance, the Bakara market, which is the largest market in Mogadishu, has been looted repeatedly by the militias of the so-called Transitional Federal Government of Somalia, supported by Ethiopian troops. And the new prime minister of Somalia, Mr. Hassan Nur Hussein, has himself announced in the BBC that it was his militias that—who have looted this place. So what you have is a population that’s hit from both sides--on one side, by the militias of the so-called Transitional Federal Government, which is recognized by the United States, and on the other side, by the Ethiopian invaders who seem to be bent on ensuring that they break the will of the people to resist as free people in their own country....

What you have is really terror in the worst sense of the word, a million people have been displaced that the Ethiopians have been denying humanitarian aid, and the United States which seems to just watch and let it happen. It’s like there's has been a calculated decision made somewhere in the world, maybe in Washington, maybe in Addis Ababa, maybe in Mogadishu itself, to starve these people until they submit themselves to the whims of the American military and the Ethiopians, who are acting on their behalf."

Amnesty International has called for an investigation of the United States role in Somalia. Regrettably, neither the United Nations nor the corporate media are at all interested in Bush's war crimes in Africa. What they care about is Mugabe.


Notes

Somalia: Troops killing people 'like goats' by slitting throats-new Amnesty report

ZIMBABWE: CRITIQUE OF THE MDC

The Movement for Democratic Change: The Continuity of its Theoretical and Practical Weaknesses

By Sehlare Makgetlaneng*
Race & History
June 10, 2008

"The fight against Zimbabwe is a fight against us all. Today it is Zimbabwe, tomorrow it will be South Africa, it will be Mozambique, it will be Angola, it will be any other African country. Any government that is perceived to be strong, and to be resistant to imperialists, would be made a target and be undermined. So let us not allow any point of weakness in the
solidarity of the SADC, because that weakness will also be
transferred to the rest of Africa."
—Thabo Mbekii(1)

The Movement for Democratic Change is characterised by
unique and frightening theoretical and practical
weaknesses. It is as if it is not an opposition political
party in the former settler colonial society in the region
which was the victim of settler colonial rule. It has no
position on imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism,
racism, globalisation and north-south relations. Despite
acute problems confronted by the masses of the Zimbabwean
people on a daily basis, its strategy and tactics have been
failing to meet their demands and needs. The consequence
has been that they do not recognise them as expressions of
their own experience. Its remaining alternative to defeat
the Zimbabwean African National Union - Patriotic Front
(ZANU-PF) to be in power in Zimbabwe is the ballot box. The
purpose of this work is to demonstrate that the MDC's
profound theoretical and practical weaknesses have
continued increasing. In its achievement in the March 2008
presidential and parliamentary elections, the MDC have
exposed the continuity of its theoretical and practical
weaknesses. It is as if it does not have serious organic
intellectuals capable of articulating appropriate strategy
and tactics, nationally, regionally, continentally and
internationally. Who are its leading intellectuals and
strategists?

The MDC maintain the thesis of the primacy of external
factors over internal factors. While it maintains that
ZANU-PF is responsible for socio-political and economic
problems in the country, or that their sources are
internal, it maintain that their solution is external. It
maintains that leaders of some other African countries,
particularly President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, are
crucial for solving these problems and the survival of the
Mugabe administration as well as ZANU-PF as the ruling
party. The incorrect thesis of the primacy of external
factors over internal factors either in the resolution or
maintenance of Zimbabwean problems is maintained even by
some of those who declare to be against it. They maintain
it when they argue that external actors are critical to the
continued survival of the Mugabe administration. Ian
Phimister and Brian Raftopoulos defend this thesis when
they maintain that "the support of President Thabo Mbeki
has all along been crucial for survival of Mugabe's
regime." Leaders of the whole Southern and Central Africa
have also enabled the regime to survive. As the "ZANU-PF
government" effectively suspended the rule of law" in its
attempts to "bludgeon its opponents into silence, it has
enjoyed the support provided by the so-called 'quiet
diplomacy' and 'constructive engagement' of other Southern
and Central African governments."(2) A critical and
objective analysis of the state of the MDC will support the
fact that internal factors, not external factors, have been
crucial for survival of the Mugabe administration.
Highlighting its practical and theoretical weaknesses,
Dumisani Muleya maintains that it is:

getting into a state of paralysis. After defeating Mugabe
and his ruling Zanu (PF) [in the 29 March 2008 elections],
the MDC seems to have run out of ideas.

The trouble is that the opposition has no serious leverage
to change the situation. Its attempt at mass action a few
weeks ago was a damp squib. The truth is that even if the
MDC is popular with the masses, it is structurally brittle
and lacks strong leadership. It has no capacity to deal
with Mugabe's hardened regime. It has been consistently
outflanked in the streets by Mugabe's brutal security
forces and outmanoeuvred at the negotiating table.

The power relations still favour Mugabe, due to his control
of the instruments of repression. There is a need for the
MDC to be more dynamic to avoid becoming paralysed. The
party also needs to rely more on formal structures to make
critical decisions on the way forward, rather than ghostly
characters or money grubbers with narrow vested interests.
The party risks being hijacked by money mongers, especially
now that it is on the verge of gaining power.(3)

After the Zimbabwean Electoral Commission delayed to
announce the results of the March 2008 presidential and
parliamentary elections, maintaining that the MDC won the
presidential elections and that it had obtained the
required percentage for it to be in charge of the political
administration of the society, Morgan Richard Tsvangirai
moved from one administrative capital to another
administrative capital of Southern Africa meeting political
leaders of the region asking them for support for his
political party. These are some of the leaders his
organisation has been not only avoiding, but regarding as
central to the survival of the Mugabe administration. The
issue of mobilising the masses of the people to support
what the MDC said was its overwhelming victory in the
presidential and parliamentary elections was avoided.

Barney Mthombothi in 2004 maintained that, instead of
mobilising its supporters, the MDC "has been wasting time
on fervent pleas to the international community."
Tsvangirai and his colleagues should recognise the reality
in practice that the masses of the people of Zimbabwe are
"the fount of their credibility, legitimacy, power and
authority" and that when "the masses are properly mobilised
no autocrat, no matter how powerful or repressive, can rule
them against their will for any length of time." He
concluded that the MDC's "tactic so far has been to appeal
for international assistance in the form of sanctions and
boycotts without a concomitant intensive mobilisation of
the masses within the country" and that this tactic is
incorrect in that it fails to come to grips with the
reality that the "home front is the theatre, the crucible,
of the struggle" or that the "engine of the opposition is
in Zimbabwe, not outside" the country.(4) Briefly, "the key
catalyst for change" in Zimbabwe "remains Zimbabweans."(5)
This position is the advice to the MDC - the advice it has
refused to recognise in theory and practice in its
insistence that the solution to Zimbabwe's problems is
primarily external, not internal. The MDC under the
leadership of Tsvangirai is still embarking upon this
programme of action. After the Zimbabwean Electoral
Commission delayed to announce the result of the March 2008
presidential and parliamentary elections, maintaining that
the MDC won the presidential elections and that it has
obtained the percentage for it to be in charge of the
political administration of the society, Tsvangirai moved
from one administrative capital to another administrative
capital of Southern Africa meeting political leaders of the
region asking them for support for his political party.
These are some of the leaders his organisation has been not
only avoiding, but regarding as central to the survival of
the Mugabe administration.

Tendai Biti, secretary general of the MDC, in his speech at
the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation symposium in
Cape Town on 8 May 2008, pointing out that there must be "a
commitment to democratisation, social and economic
reconstruction and national healing" in Zimbabwe, concluded
that the Southern African Development Community, the
African Union and South Africa "have a duty to play their
part" to serve as "the midwife to deliver the baby" and
that "Zimbabweans did what they could" in bringing into
existence "the people's victory of 2008" elections whose
recognition is essential.(6) In a typical MDC appeal to
"international community" and threat of mass action if it
does not do what it is being asked to do, Biti concluded in
his speech: "Leadership must emerge from the international
community to fill the vacuum of mediocrity, inaction and
paralysis. Without this the population of Zimbabwe might
have no option but to fight back."(7) What Biti refuses to
acknowledge is that if the MDC is committed in practice to
"democratisation, social and economic reconstruction and
national healing" in the country, it must wage a war
against itself being the organisation accused even by some
of its members of providing the leadership of "mediocrity,
inaction and paralysis" in the resolution of the Zimbabwean
national question. The responsibility to bring this popular
national development into existence in Zimbabwe lies on the
shoulders of the people of the country. For the political
party to spend time, energy and resources criticising
leaders of other countries for not committing themselves to
resolving national problems it declares to be the primary
reason behind its establishment is to maintain that it is
not capable not only to achieve this national objective,
but also of serving as a genuine national leader, leading
the people into achieving and defending their strategic and
tactical interests. This position is supportive of the
position that the MDC is a front of imperialist forces as
the Mugabe administration maintains.

What is the MDC's minimum programme of action? Does it mean
that the MDC is of the view that it is possible to realise
its objectives without mobilising the masses of the people
and without their active participation in the struggle?
Official documents and speeches of leaders of any
organisation articulating popular democratic grievances and
aspirations in theory and practice reflect, among others,
that it has conducted a careful and concrete study of the
concrete socio-political and economic conditions in the
country as well as its problems, their form and content,
causes and consequences. Secondly, they reflect that it has
executed the task of studying members of the society to
ascertain their grievances and aspirations. This
theoretical task enables it to find out which grievances
and aspirations are common to the majority of the members
of the society in order to base its minimum programme of
action on them. This theoretical task serves the practical
task of solving common grievances and achieving common
aspirations. This is not the case with the MDC whose
theoretical method consists of pre-conceived views of the
national situation, ZANU-PF, Mugabe's administration and
their alleged African allies whose support we are told is
essential for their survival and also, by implication,
whose withdrawal of their support is essential for the
solution of the country's problems.

The MDC is not facing the critical structural and
fundamental challenges progressive and revolutionary
organisation are confronting. These challenges are that:

In as much as the slave cannot ask the slave-master to
provide the strategy and tactics for a successful uprising
of the slaves, so must we, who are hungry and treated as
minors in a world of adults, also take upon ourselves the
task of defining the new world order of prosperity and
development for all and equality among nations of the
world.

For the weak to challenge the strong has never been easy.
Neither will it be easy to challenge powerful vested
interests on the current and entrenched orthodoxies about
the modern world economy.(8)

The MDC's means of mobilisation of resources for the
resolution of Zimbabwe's problems is characterised by its
continued efforts to attract and preserve political,
ideological and economic investment of advanced capitalist
countries to itself and its cause. It regards and accepts
their political, ideological and economic goodwill as of
crucial importance in achieving its objective to be in
power so as to achieve governance, democracy and
development objectives it has set for the country. This is
the same issue of subordinating Zimbabwe's development to
the resources of the political, economic and financial
forces of developed countries. The key issue is not that
these forces have proved to be not reliable when it comes
to the development of Africa and that of the majority of
its people, but that they are structural enemies of Africa
and the masses of its people. By acting in alliance with
these forces in the adoption, formulation and
implementation of strategy and tactics for a successful
achievement of its objectives, the MDC is providing them
with powerful weapons to create Zimbabwe under its
leadership in their own image.

When the MDC promised to march on the State House and bring
"millions onto the streets" in what it regarded as the
"final push" on Mugabe and the ZANU-PF to defeat them, it
displayed its practical and theoretical weaknesses. Jono
Waters maintained that because of its lack of appropriate
strategy and tactics, it failed to capture the imagination
of Zimbabweans in the process.

However, it was a promise that the MDC failed to come close
to achieving. Almost no one turned out, partly because of
the heavy state security presence, but largely because of
the MDC's own lack of organisation, unimaginative ideas and
ability to play straight into government hands.

The MDC as a party is disorganised and has been slow to
capitalise on building structures in the "high density
suburbs" or townships, where most of its support is. I
regularly asked my staff if they were going to take part in
MDC mass action. No, because firstly they don't know what
to do as there is no organisation and secondly, they
reckoned someone else would do the marching.(9)

Waters provides some of the key reasons why the MDC
maintains the position that the solution to Zimbabwe's
problems is external, not internal and that external
factors, not internal factors, have been crucial for
survival of the Mugabe administration.

There now exists what Zanu (PF) rightly calls
anti-government non-governmental organisations (NGOs) who
pour thousands of dollars into opposition coffers. I would
go as far as to say that these NGOs have been a major
contributor to the downfall of democracy in Zimbabwe.

For two reasons: the government has capitalised on it by
making the link with "meddling in Zimbabwe's affairs"; more
importantly, people do not see an opposition leadership
that struggles and thinks and feels with them. They see a
bunch of greedy, US [United States] dollar salaried, Pajero
drivers.

The foreign press also gives the MDC more credit than it
deserves. Whether or not these "correspondents" were
sitting in Johannesburg or London (where it appears most
now are), or even Harare, they would draw the same pro-MDC
conclusions.

When the most recent "action" [final push march] failed,
the MDC was then able to hide behind an easy excuse for
their inability to organise - with the foreign press being
their apologists - Mugabe's brutal and despotic regime.
Yes, it is brutal and despotic. But the point that keeps
getting missed is that most of Zimbabwe's cowed and
subjugated population appear to feel the MDC is not worth
being beaten up or, let alone dying for.

Repressive regimes ultimately implode, but what sustains
this one to some extent is a general lack of belief the MDC
will be any better running the country.(10)

Given its unique and frightening lack of appropriate
strategy and tactics, does it mean that there is no
alternative for it to defeat ZANU and assume power? Its
remaining alternative is the ballot box through which to
achieve this objective.

Waters correctly maintained that the MDC's "greatest
mistake was" that "it did not capitalise on people's anger
quickly enough" when, after the presidential election in
March 2002, "the people were angry in what appeared to be a
manipulated outcome."(11) It intensified this "greatest
mistake" after the Zimbabwean Electoral Commission delayed
to announce the results of the March 2008 presidential and
parliamentary elections and when after more and more people
agreed with it that it won not only parliamentary
elections, but also the presidential elections for its
leader to be the president of the country. Instead of
capitalising on "people's anger" and mobilising them into
decisive mass action for what it regarded as its
overwhelming victory in these elections to be recognised
(as Biti maintained that this recognition is essential), it
displayed in theory and practice its leadership of
"mediocrity, inaction and paralysis."

In a damaging e-mail note (by William Bango as Tsvangirai's
spokesperson, to the party's leader based in Belgium
representing it to the European Union, Grace Kwinje), the
practical and theoretical weakness of Tsvangirai and the
MDC are pointed out as articulated by some of its members.
It was leaked to the state-owned Sunday Mail on 8 June
2008. In Bango's words:

They complain that the MDC is a spineless party with a
leadership that is scared to nothing (sic). They say all
kinds of unkind words for Morgan Tsvangirai ... he is a
poor strategist ... he is a condom that we will quickly
take off once we are satisfied with what we are doing... he
is a coward, why is he not marching with everyone, why is
he not in front, why is he still going to court if it is
the finish push.(12)

Bango was attempting to brush aside criticisms of
Tsvangirai by some party members. These criticisms of
Tsvangirai constitute invaluable advice to him, his
advisors and his colleagues in the leadership of the
organisation. Tsvangirai has continued refusing to
recognise this advice in theory and practice by not
willingly seeing to it that the organisation critically
assess its theoretical positions as it confronts the
practical question as to what is to be done to achieve its
strategic and tactical objectives. The critical assessment
of positions is a task specified by political practice, as
any serious organisation constituting the realisation of
the unity of theory and practice under the dominance of
practice confronts the current situation for its concrete
understanding, confrontation and resolution.

After the Zimbabwean Electoral Commission delayed to
announce the results of the March 2008 presidential and
parliamentary elections and when after more and more people
agreed it won parliamentary and presidential elections for
him to be the president of the country, Tsvangirai went
into a self-imposed exile concentrating on mobilising
diplomatic pressure against Mugabe. Instead of capitalising
on the immediate post-March 2008 electoral crisis and
mobilising Zimbabweans into decisive mass action for what
the MDC regarded as its overwhelming victory in these
elections to be recognised and affirmed, he displayed in
theory and practice his leadership of "mediocrity, inaction
and paralysis" by refusing to return to the country to lead
the presidential run-off election campaign. He cited an
alleged plot by the military to assassinate him as the
reason behind his decision of postponing his return to the
country. Zimbabwean analysts maintained that regardless of
the security danger he may have faced, his absence from the
country to lead from the front raised negative questions
about his leadership qualities and his willingness to put
his safety or security on the line at the crucial time when
the MDC constantly maintained that many of its members and
supporters were being killed and continue being killed.

John Makumbe, political scientist at the University of
Zimbabwe maintained that if Tsvangirai "doesn't come back"
home "he will be demonstrating that he is fearful of
Mugabe, therefore he is less of a leaders than Mugabe and
that will have very serious implications on his qualities
as a leader."(13) Bill Saidi, deputy editor of the
independent newspaper The Standard, maintained that,
through his self-imposed exile, Tsvangirai has created
impression that he is more concerned about his security
than that of the members and supporters of the organisation
under his leadership. This is "not heroism at all. If you
are in a struggle ... and if you are not in front to back
your people, then you weaken the struggle."(14) According
to Jonathan Moyo, former Minister of Information and
Publicity, Tsvangirai is damaging his reputation as a
leader prepared to be with the members and supporters of
the party. Maintaining that at issue is "not about losing
or winning the runoff, but his credibility as a national
leader who is able to be with the people" and that he
should "stop behaving like an opposition leader and behave
like a leader of a government-in-waiting." He concludes:
"All national leaders are under daily security threat but
they don't allow those threats to shape their agenda. You
can't wish to be president of Zimbabwe by remote control.
Each day he spends out of the country is very costly to
him."(15)

Nelson Chamisa, the MDC spokesperson, attempted to gloss
over Tsvangirai's prolonged self-imposed exile by
maintaining that questions should be raised about Mugabe
and his administration rather than about Tsvangirai and the
MDC. For him: "The issue is about violence and the killing
of people and the pressure should be put on the Zanu (PF)
regime to end the violence. The regime is on the
rampage."(16) Eldred Masunungure, political scientist at
the University of Zimbabwe, like Makumbe, Saidi and Moyo,
disagrees with Chamisa's position. His position is that
Tsavngirai's decision to stay outside the country at such a
crucial time in the history of the struggle of the
organisation to defeat the ZANU-PF "is ill-advised and very
damaging." The point is that: "Once you decide to get into
politics you should be prepared to take risks. You should
be prepared to take risks. You should not be like a general
who abandons his troops at a crucial moment."(17) Central
to this criticism is that, by going into self-imposed exile
and prolonging it, he betrayed the trust of the MDC members
and supporters and the national confidence in himself. He
enabled Mugabe and ZANU-PF to recapture the ground they
lost and set the agenda impelling him and the MDC to react
to it. If leaders of political parties declaring to be for
popular social change indicate that they are not willing to
risk their lives and possessions for the achievement of
their strategic and tactical objectives, why should their
members and supporters do what they are not prepared to do?
Responding to this criticism levelled against him even by
some of his allies and supporters, he ended his
self-imposed exile on 24 May 2008 by leaving South Africa
for Zimbabwe.

The position defended by Phimister and Raftopoulos that the
support of Mbeki has been crucial for survival of the
Mugabe administration is also defended by Morgan
Tsvangirai. Tsvangirai continues blaming South African
foreign policy towards Zimbabwe for its problems. He
continues demanding that President Thabo Mbeki should
contribute towards their resolution. The MDC under his
leadership has failed to provide external actors with
platforms to contribute towards support to the resolution
of Zimbabwe's problems. It has failed to provide them with
platforms to render support to itself. Addressing the
Foreign Correspondents' Association of Southern Africa on
13 February 2008 in Johannesburg, he pointed out that Mbeki
should have "a little courage" by criticising Mugabe in
public since he does not have to fear that Mugabe would
send him to jail. Mbeki "can break his policy of quiet
support for the dictatorship in Zimbabwe" and "add his
voice to those demanding free and fair elections in
Zimbabwe." Mbeki does not need to fear to face risks
members and supporters of the opposition are taking on a
daily basis. He "can do it without taking the risks that we
taking. He won't be arrested, teargassed, beaten, charged
with treason, he won't see his supporters killed." He
continued: "Only a little courage is required - the courage
to speak the unpleasant truth, the courage to see what is
before him." Mbeki "owes it to our common African humanity;
he owes it to his own people - who are seeing refugees
streaming into their cities, taking their jobs, crowding
their cities, dying on their streets" in South Africa.
Tsvangirai warned that if Mbeki does not solve Zimbabwe's
problems, South Africa might soon be "overwhelmed by the
tragedy of Zimbabwe." In his words: "President Mbeki, if
you won't do it for us, if you won't do it for Africa, do
it for your own country. Do it for your legacy. You have
invited the world to see what freedom and democracy has
done for South Africa [and] for the World Cup. Do not allow
your South Africa to be overwhelmed by the tragedy of
Zimbabwe."(18) Why if Mbeki does not solve Zimbabwe's
problems, South Africa might soon be "overwhelmed by the
tragedy of Zimbabwe?" One of the reasons why is because,
according to him, the 29 March elections were not going to
be free and fair. This line of reasoning is not new. It is
what the MDC faction under his leadership has been saying,
that South Africa should contribute towards resolution of
Zimbabwe by acting against Mugabe. Its supporters have been
regarding Mugabe as authoritarian, corrupt and a dictator
who has been stealing elections since the MDC posed a
serious challenge to his rule in the 2000 elections. He is
seen as a threat to the socio-political and economic
development and progress not only of Zimbabwe and Southern
Africa, but also of the whole African continent, Africa's
initiatives such as the New Partnership for Africa's
Development and Africa's relations with the Western
European countries. Leaders of developed countries have
exerted pressure upon the leaders of Southern African
countries to join them in condemning Mugabe, demanding that
South Africa should play a leading role in acting against
Mugabe because of what they regard as his administration's
violations of human rights.

It is interesting to note that leaders of developed
countries and their allies throughout the world do not
criticise atrocious violations of human rights in some
other countries. At issue is hypocrisy or double standards
on their part. Khathu Mamaila maintains that hypocrisy or
double standards of the West has helped Mugabe to maintain
his grip on power. He cites some "crimes" constantly
mentioned in the criticism of the Mugabe administration.
These are examples of this hypocrisy or these double
standards. Firstly, is the issue of the suppression of the
media by the Mugabe administration. Mamaila maintains that
on this issue, the Mugabe administration "is not the
worst." He cites "the case of two Ethiopian journalists
arrested for "outrage against the constitution." They "face
execution or life sentence if convicted. There is no public
outrage about this" from the West and the fundamentalist
critics of the Mugabe administration. There are other
"worse humanitarian crises on the continent" and throughout
the world. He cites the case of the genocide in Darfur and
"unending fighting" in the Democratic Republic of
Congo.(19)

Mamaila maintains that at issue in the hypocrisy or double
standards of the West and its allies is "the need to
understand the lack of legitimacy of the anti-Mugabe
efforts." On the so-called invasion of the Zimbabwean land
by African Zimbabweans, his position is that those who
attacked Mugabe for "giving" Africans land "lacked
legitimacy because they have failed to condemn the
obscenity of fewer than 4000 white farmers owning more than
70% of the arable land."(20) These forces lack legitimacy
primarily because they are leaders and theoreticians of the
forces of the sagacious dispensation of legitimised
rapacity and sanctioned organised theft on an international
scale. This system structurally protects thieves who
transform themselves into legitimate owners who invoke the
rule of law and order upon establishing themselves in
possession of what they have stolen including the land.

Leaders of developed countries and their allies focus
exclusively on human rights issues in the country. Despite
governance, democracy and development challenges it is
facing, Zimbabwe since achievement of its political
independence in 1980 held elections every five years. Its
record of holding elections is more progressive than that
of a considerable number of African countries. Opposition
political parties participated in these elections. This
development has not been the case with some allies of the
United States and the United Kingdom of Great Britain in
Africa. Some of them are unelected presidents of their
countries. Gordon Brown himself is an unelected prime
minister of his country. Seretse Ian Khama of Botswana, the
son of the country's first president, and Jose Eduardo dos
Santos of Angola are unelected presidents of their
countries. Some of their allies in the continent refuse to
subject themselves to procedural motions of transparent,
credible, free and fair elections. Leaders of developed
countries and their allies do not criticise them. When they
criticise some of them, their criticism is moderate if not
insignificant.

The United States and the United Kingdom of Great Britain
demanded the immediate resignation of Mugabe and his
handover of state political power to Tsvangirai after their
satisfaction that their ally overwhelmingly defeated him in
the March 2008 presidential elections. This position was
articulated, among others, by the United States Assistant
Secretary of State for African Affairs, Jendayi Frazer. The
MDC maintained and defended this position. Its allies
regarded this development as their historical opportunity
to effect regime change in the country they have chosen for
this process. African countries refused to join developed
countries in their demand that Mugabe should leave office.
They are fully aware of their regime change agenda in the
country and their hypocrisy and double standards. The
United States initially supported the re-election of
President Mwai Kibaki of Kenya despite international
opposition to the obvious rigging that characterised the 27
December 2007 presidential elections and the national and
international popular position that the process was won by
Raila Odinga, the leader of the Orange Democratic Movement.
The Bush administration sent its glowing congratulations to
Kibaki and the Kenyan Electoral Commission urging "all
candidates to accept the Commission's results." Kibaki, the
leader of the Party of National Unity, a staunch ally of
the United States and the United Kingdom of Great Britain
and a leader of the "frontline state in the global war on
terrorism" had to be supported. The issue of their
interests is primary in relation to their declared
commitment to good governance and human rights including
transparent, credible, free and fair elections. Their
practice of hypocrisy or double standards applies to other
countries throughout the world.

Business Day in its 15 May 2008 editorial entitled,
'Scapegoats' maintains that "there is a convincing argument
that Mbeki's "quiet diplomacy" is directly responsible for
much of the influx of Zimbabweans."(xxi) Tony Leon, foreign
affairs spokesperson of the Democratic Alliance, quoted
approvingly The Economist statement of April 2008 that
"South Africa's president has prolonged Zimbabwe's
agony."(21) This position basically means that South Africa
is responsible for socio-political and economic problems
which have led not only Zimbabweans, but also people of
other countries to leave their countries for South Africa
and other countries. Mbeki and South Africa are used as
scapegoats for governance, democracy and development
failures of some countries.

According to this position, the African National Congress
(ANC), not the MDC, not to mention the Zimbabwean African
National Union - Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) which is
regarded as the problem, is central not only to sustaining
Zimbabwe's national problems, but also to their solution.
It is obvious that this position is incorrect and that it
degrades the people of Zimbabwe. Those who maintain and
defend it are fully aware of this reality. They do not
believe their propaganda. The fact that this position is
incorrect is not the issue. The issue is what it intends to
achieve. It is the tactical means to achieve the strategic
objective. Central to its demands is that the ANC
government should allow itself to be used as the
organisational means to effect regime change for the MDC to
be in power in Zimbabwe for the advancement of the
strategic interests of imperialism and its allies. One of
these demands is that the ANC should "play a role in
getting rid of Mugabe" for it to set "a precedent" for
itself and to see itself having "taken a step along the
road from revolutionary liberation movement to political
party"(23) or for South Africa not to implement the
theoretical understanding that "so long as imperialism is
in existence, an independent African state must be a
liberation movement in power, or it will not be
independent."(24) It is a tragedy of Zimbabwean politics of
opposition that as the leading opposition political party
striving to be in power, the MDC continues regarding
individuals maintaining these positions as its supporters -
individuals who have proved through their works including
writings that they are against the interests of Africa and
its masses of people. It has failed to mobilise the masses
of the Zimbabwean people into decisive mass action to
achieve its objective to be in power. Its only remaining
alternative to defeat ZANU-PF is through the ballot box. If
it assumes power, will it be able to meet the demands of
its powerful external supporters without meeting the
national popular demands, particularly of the working class
in the cities and urban areas which constitutes its crucial
support base? Will it not be regarded as lacking the
political will in the language of structural adjustment
programme in managing national affairs in its exercise of
political power?



Why has the MDC failed to provide
alternative vision and agenda of the future Zimbabwe to
that offered by leaders of imperialist countries and the
international organisations such as the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank controlled by these
countries? The strategic tasks confronting the masses of
Zimbabweans are primarily political, not economic. Who
should be their national president and why? How should
their national problems be resolved? What should be the
nature of the future Zimbabwe's relations with its regional
and continental African countries and the rest of the
world, particularly imperialist countries? How best and
effectively to improve the material conditions of the
millions of Zimbabweans? These are some of the questions
which should be answered to the satisfaction of the
majority of Zimbabweans. Zimbabwe's national problems
should be viewed beyond the conflict between the MDC and
the ZANU-PF and their leaders. The centrality of their
resolution is the issue of confronting them in the resolute
struggle against internal and external enemies and to
transform the society's governance, democracy and
development dynamics in the interest of the masses of its
people. Briefly, at issue is the struggle to effect the
fundamental socio-political, economic and ideological
transformation of the state and the society, not only a
rearrangement at the top of the society. It is on this
strategic issue central to the resolution of the Zimbabwean
national problems that the MDC is lacking. This explains
why a considerable number of individuals maintain that the
solution to Zimbabwe's problems lies within ZANU-PF, not
within the MDC. The struggle to resolve these problems
including power relations between imperialist countries and
the country are fought within ZANU-PF, not within the MDC.
Zimbabwe's contribution to the struggle against imperialism
regionally in Southern Africa, continentally in Africa and
beyond the continent will serve the country under the
leadership of ZANU-PF, not of the MDC.



NOTES:

* Dr. Sehlare Makgetlaneng is a social science researcher with Governance and Democracy research unit of the Africa Institute of South Africa in Pretoria, South Africa.


1. Thabo Mbeki's statement at the Extra-Ordinary Southern
African Development Community Summit of Heads of State and
Government in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 29 March 2007.

2.
Ian Phimister and Brian Raftopolous, "Mugabe, Mbeki and the
Politics of Anti-Imperialism," Review of African Political
Economy, Vol. 31, No. 101, September 2004, p. 385.

3.
Dumisani Muleya, "Zimbabwe suffers in total paralysis,"
Business Day (Johannesburg), 12 May 2008, p. 11.

4.
Barney Mthombothi, "Why Mugabe still wields power?" The
Star (Johannesburg), 3 November 2004, p. 14.

5. Khathu
Mamaila, "Double Trouble: Hypocrisy helps Mugabe to
maintain his grip on power," City Press (Johannesburg), 22
July 2007, p. 22.

6. Tendai Biti, "Zimbabwe: where to
now?" Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg), May 16 to 22, 2008,
p. 33.

7. Ibid.

8. Department of Foreign Affairs of
South Africa, Speech of the Deputy President of the
Republic of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, at the Opening of
the Ministerial Meeting of the X11 Summit of Heads of State
and Government of the Non-Aligned Movement, Durban, South
Africa, 31 August 1998, X11 Summit Conference of Heads of
State and Government of the Non-Aligned Movement, Durban
1998: Basic Documents, 29 August to 3 September 1998,
Durban, South Africa, Pretoria: Department of Foreign
Affairs, 1998, p. 230.

9. Jono Waters, "Failed 'big push'
on Mugabe exposes hubris of MDC," Business Day
(Johannesburg), 30 June 2003, p. 11.

10. Ibid.

11.
Ibid.

12. William Bango, quoted in Waters, "Failed 'big
push' on Mugabe exposes hubris of MDC," p. 11

13. John
Makumbe, quoted in Susan Njanji, "'You can't be president
by remote control': Tsvangirai's stayaway is 'damaging his
credibility,'" Business Day (Johannesburg), 20 May 2008, p.
7.

14. Bill Saidi, quoted in Njanji, "'You can't be
president by remote control': Tsvangirai's stayaway is
'damaging his credibility,'" p. 7.

15. Jonathan Moyo,
quoted in Njanji, "'You can't be president by remote
control': Tsvangirai's stayaway is 'damaging his
credibility,'" p. 7.

16. Nelson Chamisa, quoted in
Njanji, "'You can't be president by remote control':
Tsvangirai's stayaway is 'damaging his credibility,'" p.
7.

17. Eldred Masunungure, quoted in Njanji, "'You can't
be president by remote control': Tsvangirai's stayaway is
'damaging his credibility,'" p. 7.

18. Address by Morgan
Tsvangirai, leader of Zimbabwe's Movement for Democratic
Change, to the Foreign Correspondents' Association of
Southern Africa, February 13, 2008
(www.fcasa.co.za/PDFs/morgan%20Tsvangirai/speech), page 3
of 7.

19. Khathu Mamaila, "Double Trouble: Hypocrisy
helps Mugabe to maintain his grip on power," City Press
(Johannesburg), 22 July 2007, p. 22.

20. Ibid.

21.
Business Day, "Scapegoats," Business Day (Johannesburg), 15
May 2008, p. 12.

22. The Economist, quoted in Tony Leon,
"South Africa and Zimbabwe," Business Day (Johannesburg),
29 April 2008, p. 9.

23. John Kane-Berman, "Good time to
reconsider ANC-Zanu (PF) kinship," Business Day
(Johannesburg), 15 May 2008, p. 13.

24. Amilcar Cabral,
Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings of Amilcar
Cabral, New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1979, p.
116.

ZIMBABWE'S WAR BETWEEN PATRIOTS AND QUISLINGS

Zimbabwe At War

June 24, 2008

By Stephen Gowans

With Western media coverage on Zimbabwe monopolized by the views of the neo-liberal MDC, the US and British governments, and “independent” election monitors and human rights groups funded by the US Congress and State Department, the British government’s Westminster Foundation for Democracy, George Soros’ Open Society Institute, and the CIA and Council on Foreign Relations-linked Freedom House, one might think it would be possible to find a measure of relief from the uniformity of ruling class dominated opinion on a socialist web site. Just a tiny break.

Instead, the Socialist Project serves up an article on Zimbabwe, “Death Spiral in Zimbabwe: Mediation, Violence and the GNU”, by Grace Kwinjeh, a founding member of Zimbabwe’s neo-liberal MDC party. The article, not surprisingly, re-iterates a view that is friendly to the party the author is a principal member of.

In your defense, Kwinjeh has a habit of disguising her background, one that’s hardly irrelevant to the subject she’s writing on, by presenting herself as simply an independent journalist living in South Africa –kind of like John McCain submitting analyses on Obama’s politics calling himself an independent journalist living in Arizona. Kwinjeh, a regular on the US propaganda arm Voice of America’ Studio 7, traveled to Washington not too long ago on George Soros’s tab to testify to the regime changers in Washington. She is neither independent, particularly interested in national self-determination, or an opponent of neo-liberalism. You can learn more about Kwinjeh here

http://gowans.wordpress.com/2008/03/23/who-is-grace-kwinjeh-and-why-did-patrick-bond-co-author-an-article-with-her/ and here http://gowans.wordpress.com/2008/03/24/the-company-patrick-bond-keeps/.

One might expect the Socialist Project to offer a view from the other side, especially given its support for “the national self-determination of the many peoples of the world” and its implacable opposition to neo-liberalism.

As a corrective, I offer the article below.

Let me make a full disclosure. Unlike Kwinjeh, I am sympathetic to Zimbabwe’s project of national self-determination, I am implacably opposed to neo-liberalism, and while many of my articles have been published in Zimbabwe’s state-owned newspaper, The Herald, (none of which I submitted or was paid for) I have no membership in any political party in Zimbabwe, disguised or otherwise, much less a relationship as a founding member. I would think the article below is much closer to the aims and sympathies of the Socialist Project than Kwinjeh’s.

Zimbabwe At War

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 is 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, and 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 Hilary 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 absolute 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.

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. http://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. http://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 http://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 http://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. http://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 http://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.