I CAME ACROSS AN INTERESTING ARTICLE WHICH I THOUGHT I SHOULD SHARE TO PROVOKE YOU ANALYSIS OF GLOBAL TRENDS.

How Public Perception Influences Foreign Policy: A Comparative Analysis of Liberia-China Relations
Thursday, July 31, 2008

By Varney A. Yengbeh, Jr.

A recent Pew Global Attitudes Survey indicates that "Across Africa, favorable views of China outnumber critical judgments by two-to-one or more in every country except South Africa, where opinion is divided. The survey provides a trend only for Nigeria, where favorable attitudes toward China are sharply up, rising 16 percentage points in just the past year from 59% to 75%."

The survey further suggests that "Across sub-Saharan Africa, China's influence is seen as growing faster than America's, and China is almost universally viewed as having a more beneficial impact on African countries than does the United States. Clear majorities say America's influence in their countries is generally good. But the perception that China has a positive impact is far more widespread."

In the International Herald Tribune Survey conducted in sixteen African countries, 76% of Africans hold positive attitudes toward the general image of China compared to 14% negative and 10% neutral.

In Liberia, public perceptions and attitudes toward China are generally favorable today. Liberia's domestic and foreign policies are based on the following four key pillars: enhancing national security, revitalizing the economy, strengthening governance and rule of law, and building infrastructure and basic services. The situation context of post-conflict Liberia has played a major role in terms of the strategies and tactics the government has employed to advance the country's domestic and foreign policy objectives.

But what is unclear is whether Liberia's foreign policy is informed by clear understanding of the complexities or intricacies involved in the international environment of the 21st Century. Of particular importance is that there is no grand strategy. The process of formulating, implementing and evaluating the policy of a grand strategy is beyond the scope of this article. As a practical matter, it is an effective grand strategy, coupled with a bold, long-term vision, reason and principle that will determine the destiny of peace, security and prosperity in Liberia. Moreover, the vital role of foreign policy leadership will also be crucial in the balancing art or balance of power relations between America and China, which will be paramount for the promotion of global stability in this century. This would also require the consistency and continuity of foreign policy for the foreseeable future.

In the field of international relations, each country is freed to advance its national interests. Of great significance is the fact that the current Liberian government is pursuing her own interests through an economic and development diplomacy aimed at securing much-needed strategic partnerships in support of Liberia's post-war reconstruction and development initiatives. While it is too early to predict precisely whether Chinese long-term engagement in Liberia will produce a positive influence, the recent impact of China is highly visible in infrastructure investments and development projects such as building roads, hospitals, schools, agriculture, and timber industry among others. China has agreed to rebuild the University of Liberia Fandell Campus, which was destroyed during the civil war. Chinese peacekeepers served in the 15,000-strong United Nations Mission in Liberia. All of these projects create opportunities for the Liberian government to fulfill the hopes and aspirations of a better life for the people. Therefore, the government and people hold positive perceptions and attitudes toward China. However, this belief is based on a false sense of so-called Chinese humanitarian aid and philanthropy.

A close-up examination of Liberia-China relations reveals a different but more realistic image based on a foreign policy perspective. The rapid growing Chinese presence in Liberia has much more to do with China exerting a unique combination of geopolitics, diplomacy, national security and business interests rather than humanitarian aid and philanthropy.

Over the past three or more decades, various Liberian governments have been aligned with either mainland China or the Taiwan Strait. President William R. Tolbert had established one China policy. President Samuel K. Doe continued close relations with China. Doe recognized the relevance of such strategic partnership and seized the opportunity for the implementation of the Tolbert doctrine by using the Chinese government to build the SKD Sports Stadium in Monrovia. President Charles Taylor switched ties to Taiwan. Taylor too realized that Taiwan could help by renovating a section of the John F. Kennedy Hospital. Charles Gyude Bryant, Chairman of the National Transitional Government of Liberia, went back to China. Edwin Snowe, former speaker of the Liberian Legislature, who was loyal to the Taylor regime, met secretly with the Taiwanese government officials in the Gambia. This caused a forceful storm of disapprovals and negative reactions because many Liberians at home and abroad felt that his unilateral action undermined Liberia's foreign policy. In February 2007, President Hu Jintao of China cancelled Liberia's debt of 15 million dollars during a state visit. President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf reciprocated in-kind by signing a joint agreement reaffirming Liberia's commitment to the one China policy.

Furthermore, the effectiveness of the one China policy has been that Liberia supports China's national reunification, while Liberia will not support Taiwan on major foreign policy issues such as declaration of independence and the proposed referendum of United Nations membership. China views Taiwan as an integral part of its territory, which means that such events would be considered provocative. China is happy to remain in Liberia as long as Taiwan is out. China sees a small window of opportunity to consolidate its influence and project its power. In principle, the fundamental implication is that China advances its geopolitical and national security interests.

On the one hand, China is further interested in Liberia to feed its growing need for energy and natural resources. Liberia's vast natural resources will fuel Chinese economic growth. For example, Chinese companies have been working in the Liberian logging industry, construction, telecommunications sector and are now prospecting for the mining sector. Moreover, the Liberian government is working hard to secure their mutual economic interests. Today, some Liberian political and economic elites even believe that America and, perhaps, other Western allies cannot force them into deals they don't want or cannot afford. In their view, China is not only a credible and willing international partner but also a strategic option for Liberia.

On the other hand, the Liberian market is relatively small in comparison to many African markets. Ordinary Liberians feel that Chinese-made commodities are not durable. Indeed, Liberians believe that Chinese made products for the American market are far better than those made for African markets. Liberians prefer American products.

Liberian consumers, workers and small businesses are worried about the economy. People are specifically concerned about the high costs of living, taxes, food crisis, transportation vis-à-vis gas prices, housing, and education for their children. Meanwhile, Liberians appear to be taking a wait and see attitude at this time. Because of the present severe economic conditions and mass poverty, negative feelings may not be isolated only to Lebanese and Indian business communities. In turn, these foreign business people, who have enjoyed a much longer commercial experience within the economy, are now feeling the squeeze and carefully studying the situation. Negative feelings will likely rise if government failure creates a self-fulfilling prophecy due to high unemployment, high inflation, costs of living, depreciation of real value of Liberian dollar, and economic depression. The general security situation is also declining at an alarming rate. Armed robberies and mob violence (or mob justice as it is sometimes called) are especially on the rise. All of these factors together will be key determinant of what will happen as China continues to exert her influence in Liberia.

In summary, after successive Liberian governments have danced in a seesaw fashion between China and Taiwan, Liberia has today exerted even more crucial Liberia-China relations. China has certainly emerged as a contender in global economic trend. China is also viewed as a serious threat to the West. America too is clearly concerned. Liberians must heed the lessons learned. History has shown that whenever a rising power, like China, creates fear among its neighbors and other great powers, such as America, that can be a cause of conflict. Applying Newton's third law of motion to global politics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Consequently, the achievement of a successful foreign policy leadership within the context of the complexities of the 21st Century international environment implies the conscious application of a grand strategy. African leaders – particularly from either politically unstable environments or post-war countries such as Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Rwanda, and Democratic Republic of Congo among others – must avoid relying on foreign aid, importing development and reducing poverty from abroad. Among the key policy level considerations are the following:

The importance of Liberians and their African brethren to inspire and expand the ideas and ideals of a freer society, free thinking and brighter future for their own people; and,

* The future prosperity of Liberia should take into account the uniqueness of the country in terms of encouraging and rewarding hard work, creativity, innovation, self-reliance, entrepreneurial spirit, and productivity.

Only through thy selfless labor, love for liberty and freedom, and destiny creed, the Liberian people shall truly achieve durable peace, security and prosperity for all. Now is the time to seize the opportunity of building



http://www.africanliberty.org/node/345

Continuation

ZUJ aiding Western schemes

By TAFATAONA MAHOSO

This is the final of a two-part article by TAFATAONA P. MAHOSO highlighting the evils of the Western-sponsored regime change agenda.

BRITISH, Australian and US intelligence forces united in their efforts to divide the people of Indonesia among themselves at the same time they were serving to isolate the whole country from its neighbours.

The popular nationalist President Sukarno of Indonesia was branded a communist dictator who relied for power on the Communist Party of Indonesia.

This was not the case. But the demonisation succeeded in dividing the country, in terms of propaganda and public perception, between a "dangerous" communist minority and the majority who were Moslems, Buddhists and so on.

It also provided a pretext for stooges of the West to use against Sukarno.

In the eyes of white US and European citizens, the combination of anti-communism and racism meant that the majority of white people could not see the media’s fabrication of stories about Indonesia and its president.

In the case of Indonesia, as in the case of Zimbabwe today, the leaders of the US and Britain led the provocations and the aggression against President Sukarno.

Harold McMillan of Britain and John F. Kennedy of the US agreed in 1962 that Sukarno had to be "liquidated".

The most striking feature of the crimes against peace in Indonesia, which resemble those against Zimbabwe, is that the groundwork for provoking a holocaust was done by those mass media which are close to imperial interests together with Western intelligence services such as the CIA.

The labels which the intelligence agencies put on the Indonesian president, on factions within his party, on patriots, on the Afro-Asian Solidarity Movement and on the Indonesian Communist Party were almost identical to those which the media created and foisted on the same forces. Such agreement between mainstream Western media and intelligence services was not a coincidence.

This identity of fabrication and description means that a whole country, a whole region, was framed up in such a way as to foreclose alternative interpretations of events.

But the CIA went beyond labelling people the way the EU and US have labelled Zimbabwean patriots who must be targeted. The CIA plotted with General Suharto and other military personnel by first giving them more than 5 000 names, pictures and addresses of the cadres to be murdered in a coup d’etat overthrowing Sukarno and replacing him with Suharto.

The CIA also identified loyal and patriotic generals who were likely to oppose the coup. These were to be murdered and their murder was to be blamed on the "communists" who were part of Sukarno’s political coalition.

In addition, state-of-the-art communication gear was to be flown from US bases in the Philippines to Indonesia at the right moment in order for the CIA and Suharto to co-ordinate the massacres of those pre-marked.

The result of the coup d’etat was that for each of the 5 000 people on the CIA list, at least 10 more were killed in the actual fight that ensued. Most historians put the minimum number of people massacred at 500 000, at most one million.

The role assigned to British, European and US media and historians was not just to help in framing and provoking a conflict, but also to downplay the magnitude of the massacres afterwards.

A popular college textbook in the US in the 1980s put the entire holocaust in the following words:

"Under the colourful but erratic President Sukarno, the Republic of Indonesia assumed an aggressive role in Asian politics, but his reckless policies brought both economic disaster and internal discord.

"With encouragement from China, and to some extent from Sukarno, communist influence increased, and the Indonesian Communist Party for a few years was the third largest in the world. An abortive coup in September 1965, attributed to the Communists, led to the imposition of a military regime which stripped Sukarno of power. The Indonesian Communist Party was shattered but at the price of a reign of terror lasting several months and a bloodbath that took the lives of at least half a million people."

The mass media said even worse things than the white professors. Time Magazine called the massacres and the coup "The West’s Best News in Asia". The magazine US News and World Report called it, "Indonesia: Hope where there was none". And the New York Times called it "A gleam of light in Asia", according to author John Pilger.

British, Australian and US politicians took the same view: Pilger quotes Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt who told US media: "With 500 000 to a million communist sympathisers knocked off, I think it’s safe to assume a reorientation has taken place." So massacres of up to a million people simply constituted a "reorientation" of South East Asia.

Former British Prime Minister "ZUJ most valuable friend".

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair also helped in rearming Suharto before he was overthrown. Naomi Klein’s research confirms John Pilger’s, as follows:

"The CIA had been quietly compiling a list of the country’s leading leftists (according to the US Cold War definition), a document which (conveniently) fell into General Suharto’s hands, while the Pentagon helped out by supplying extra weapons and field radios so that (the rightwing) Indonesian forces could communicate in the remotest parts of the archipelago.

Suharto then sent out soldiers to hunt down the four to five thousand leftists on his ‘shooting lists’, as the CIA referred to them; the US embassy received regular reports on their progress. As the information (on the massacres) came in, the CIA crossed names off their lists until they were satisfied that the Indonesian left had been annihilated."

By the late 1970s, the CIA had succeeded in overthrowing popular democratic governments in Iran, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, Panama and elsewhere. Using the same computer technology that was denounced in apartheid South Africa in the book Automating Apartheid, the CIA merged most of the shooting lists to produce one super list for the entire South American region.

This list was then given to all the repressive military regimes who were clients of the US. The super list made it possible for all the various juntas to arrest, detain, deport or shoot one another’s targeted persons, thereby making it impossible for those on the list in one country to find refuge in another country in the region.

The standard letter which the US government sends to persons on the shooting list sounds innocent and well-intentioned. The one I received is dated April 10, 2006 and it reads in parts, as follows:

United States Department of State

Washington DC 20520

10 April 2006

Mr Tafataona Mahoso

Chairman

Media and Information Commission

HICC Centre Complex

Harare Sheraton Hotel

P O Box BE33

Harare

Dear Sir

On February 22, 2002, the President of the United States signed a Proclamation suspending the entry into the United States as immigrants or non-immigrants those persons responsible for actions that threaten Zimbabwe’s democratic institutions or impede the transition to a multi-party democracy. The entry into the United States of the spouses of such persons was also suspended.

Information available to the US Department of State indicates that you may be covered by this Proclamation. Accordingly, you are hereby notified (or renotified, in case you received a previous notification) that you and your spouse may be ineligible to receive visas to enter the United States except as provided for by the Proclamation’s terms.

Two points may be worth noting. The shooting lists are quite detailed so that the CIA and its collaborators will know where their targets are.

Secondly, the justification for putting people on the shooting list must use language which is vaguely acceptable to gullible US citizens.

The US President cannot openly say he is putting Tafataona Mahoso on a shooting list because Mahoso opposes the US-UK sponsored illegal regime change project whose purpose is to install a puppet neoliberal regime which will reverse the African land reclamation revolution, privatise all State enterprises and abolish the Mines and Minerals Act as well as the Indigenisation and Empowerment Act.

However, an astute US citizen would still wonder why the Bush administration assumes the right to protect and promote "Zimbabwe’s democratic institutions" and "the transition to multi-party democracy".

If Zimbabwe already has democratic institutions, who actually created them and why is it still necessary for the same democratic institutions to go through a foreign-sponsored "transition to multi-party democracy"? Based on the contents of appeals which the then leaders of the Zimbabwe Union of Journalists sent to prospective donors in 2006, it is safe to conclude that Caesar Zvayi’s name was suggested for the EU’s shooting list by overzealous ZUJ leaders in exchange for donor funds.

The appeals which ZUJ sent to donors in 2006 were peculiar in that the papers presented the then ZUJ leaders as partisan political activists affiliated to the MDC-allied National Constitution Assembly and the donor-funded African Commission on Human and People’s Rights whose reports on Zimbabwe have been thrown out routinely by AU Heads of State for being hopelessly ill-informed and partisan.


http://www.herald.co.zw/inside.aspx?sectid=700&cat=10

Khama’s EU shooting list

By Tafataona Mahoso

This is the first of a two-part article by Tafataona P. Mahoso highlighting the evils of the Western-sponsored regime change agenda.

WHAT happened to Zimbabwean lecturer and journalist Caesar Zvayi at the hands of the Botswana government is a profound warning to Sadc and Africa about the evils of the Western-sponsored regime change project.

The Botswana President is keeping a shooting list of so-called "cronies of Robert Mugabe" which he has received from the European Union but which has been compiled by opposition parties, sponsored journalist associations and non-governmental organisations for pay.

For Pan-Africanists to appreciate the threat which the EU and its Botswana collaborators pose to African freedom, let us look at an extract from journalist Naomi Klein’s recent book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

The extract concerns an Egyptian man who was put on a CIA shooting list while visiting Pakistan. He was, therefore, kidnapped from Pakistan and taken to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where it was found, too late, that he should never have been on the CIA list, except for the fact that the CIA was offering good prize money to those who compiled the shooting lists. Here is the extract:

"Do you have any theories about why the government and the Pakistani intelligence folks would sell you out and turn you over to the (North) Americans?"

"Come on, man," he replied, "you know what happened. In Pakistan you can buy people for US$10. So what about US$5 000?"

"So they sold you?" the tribunal member asked, as if the thought had never occurred to him.

"Yes."

But Klein does not stop with just that exchange. She then goes to other research which shows that the Egyptian victim of US kidnapping was released, too late, when it became clear that he had been put on the shooting list by cynical and over-zealous Pakistanis who wanted the US$5 000 prize badly.

"According to the Pentagon’s own figures, 86 percent of the prisoners at Guantanamo were handed over by Afghan and Pakistani fighters or agents after bounties were announced. As of December 2006, the Pentagon had released 360 prisoners. The Associated Press was able to track down 245 of them; 205 had been cleared of all charges when they returned to their home countries.

According to the Chronicle issue of August 13 and Herald of August 15, 2008, the new President of Botswana has ordered the forced expulsion of four Zimbabweans so far for the crime of being labelled supporters of Zimbabwean President Mugabe and being on a white man’s (EU) shooting list.

Those who have studied the histories of apartheid and imperialist "regime change" will not fail to realise that the Botswana leader is now involved in a white man’s crime dating back from the beginning of the Cold War in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

The compilation of a shooting list on a country is one of the key stages in the development of the white imperialists’ regime change and destabilisation plan. It was used in the US-sponsored fascist destruction of democracy in Chile in 1973; it was used in the destruction of the progressive mixed economies of Argentina and Brazil and the imposition of neo-liberalism in those countries in 1976 and 1965 respectively. It was a critical tool in the enforcement of apartheid in South Africa, with the authors of the book Automating Apartheid accusing the US government and US computer companies of computerising the police, intelligence and military systems of South Africa whose responsibilities included the generation of similar shooting lists of freedom fighters to be eliminated.

Before we look at some of the historical cases, it helps to examine the issues at stake.

Just as the US found that 86 percent of its kidnapped prisoners at Guantanamo Bay were kidnapped after the announcement of prize monies of up to US$5 000, Sadc will also find that the shooting lists of banned Zimbabweans are also being paid for by British, US and EU spies and NGOs serving the regime change project in our region. Even some journalists have also been involved in selling one another to the highest bidder.

But our main concern here is to warn Sadc that some of its members and certain churches, NGOs and associations are engaged in an evil project which has an ugly past of which they may not be fully aware.

Since the document which became the so-called Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act (ZIDERA) was written in 2000, Zimbabweans have been told by MDC-T and its sponsors that the sanctions against Zimbabwe were only "targeted travel bans". The truth is that targeting individuals has always been part and parcel of regime change programmes which also include economic sanctions and financials warfare. Targeting individuals by compiling shooting lists is not in any way inconsistent with economic warfare or with an economic blockade.

Unfortunately, journalists in Zimbabwe have routinely failed to unbundle the concept of targeted sanctions in terms of recent history and practice. What exactly is involved?

First, the compilation of shooting lists was perfected during that part of the Cold War known as the McCarthy era in the US.

Its logic has been revived by George W Bush under the binary doctrine of "You are either with us, the good guys, or you are with them, the terrorists."

So, in each targeted state, the CIA and its collaborators always compile lists of the bad guys on the other side. That list is used for various purposes, some of which we shall demonstrate through real historical cases.

In Chile, the binary processes began with the massive selection on youths who were to be trained to become "the good guys. Using the Ford Foundation and other organisations, the US government selected students from Chile and channelled them to the University of Chicago where they were trained in the neoliberal economic ideology of Milton Friedman and John Williamson.

Chile’s foreign minister in the 1990s was to describe the channelling of Chilean students to the University of Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s as "a striking example of an organised transfer of ideology from the United States to a country within its direct sphere of influence".

But the successful election and inauguration of Salvador Allende and his Popular Unity Government against the US-sponsored opposition in Chile convinced the CIA that it could not win Chile for neoliberal imperialism through the battle for ideas. The people of Chile would have to be forced, through fascism and mass torture, to realise what was "good for the".

The CIA, therefore, started to plan for a coup d’état which eventually overthrew the popular Allende government on September 11, 1973. This was planned carefully between the CIA and rightwing generals in the military. As part of the plan for the coup, a shooting list was compiled by the CIA and given to the rightwing generals led by General Augusto Pinochet.

The list included intellectuals, professors, progressive union leaders, students and patriotic members of the armed forces who were committed to upholding the democratic constitution and protecting the country’s national independence and sovereignty.

In Chile, as in Indonesia eight years before, the shooting list was detailed and thorough enough to enable Gen Pinochet’s death squads to move around after the coup and pluck out those people who had been identified.

Those on the shooting list who were members of the armed forces were murdered before the coup d’etat in order to pave way for the illegal regime change and leave the targeted President without adequate defence. After the coup d’etat, more than 13 500 civilians were rounded up and detained immediately.

Before these acts of national mass torture were over, 3 200 persons were "disappeared", which means that they were murdered in such a way that their bodies have never been accounted for. It is believed that they were cut up and dropped in the ocean. More than 80 000 were imprisoned, and 200 000 had to flee the country for fear of persecution. Pan Africanists will remember also that the murder of the first Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and his close advisors and followers in 1961 was carried out according to a CIA shooting list.

Let us now turn to the example of Indonesia. The story begins eight years before the fascist coup d’etat in Chile.

The people of Indonesia were punished through the provocation of two holocausts (1965-66 and 1975-81) for their role in Afro-Asian solidarity and in the Non-Aligned Movement. Zimbabwe has a lot to learn from this imperialist treatment of Indonesia.

In order not to confuse rhetoric with actual practice, the first question Zimbabweans must ask about themselves is: Why did the US and Europe intervene in Indonesia the way they did and why are they similarly interfering in the internal affairs of Zimbabwe and in bilateral relations between Zimbabwe and Britain?

In Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corporations, Barnet and Muller provide part of the answer:

"Capital and ideological purity were preserved together. The readier the Pentagon and CIA were to bring down or raise up a government, the better the investment climate for US corporations. US military power was used to establish the ground rules within which American businesses could operate.

The US government acted as a consultant for rightist coups in Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Greece and Indonesia . . ."

In the 1960s, Indonesia was viewed in Europe and America as the richest core of the South-East-Asia region, containing 85 percent of the world’s natural rubber, more than 45 percent of the word’s tin, 65 percent of the world’s copra and 23 percent of the world’s chromium ore.

In other words, Indonesia was central in terms of rich raw materials and minerals and in terms of ideological leadership in Afro-Asian solidarity against imperialism.



http://www.herald.co.zw/inside.aspx?sectid=650&cat=10

Cde Mbeki, Zim and neo-liberal regime change

AFRICAN FOCUS by Tafataona P. Mahoso

"AS nations throughout the region sought to reform their economies, mitigate ethnic tensions, and broaden civil society (according to the Washington Consensus),




Belgrade seemed to delight in continually moving in the opposite direction. It is small wonder Nato and Yugoslavia ended up on a collision course. It was Yugoslavia’s resistance to the broader trends of political economic reform — not the plight of Kosovar Albanians (not violations of human rights) that best explains Nato’s war." Strobe Talbott, US Deputy Secretary of State in the Clinton administration.

President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa is a Pan-African hero because he has invoked and unleashed to the maximum the entire arsenal of Pan-African diplomacy in defence of Zimbabwe’s sovereignty and independence.

The result of this maximum use of African diplomacy is that Zimbabwe’s basic position against the UK, the US and the EU has been upheld at the level of the Southern African Development Community (Sadc), at the level of the African Union (AU) Summit, at the level of the Non-Aligned Movement’s (NAM) Summit, and even at the level of the United Nations Security Council. Russia, China, Vietnam, Libya and South Africa insured that this position was upheld at the UN.

However, the people of Zimbabwe inside and outside the country also need to gather and deploy their own intellectual, spiritual and material resources in ways which enable their country and President Mbeki of South Africa to get most out of the recent diplomatic successes.

The first form of action needed in this regard is for the people of Zimbabwe to research, study, produce and share strategic information on the challenges facing their country, starting with a clear identification of the problem. The problem facing Zimbabwe is foreign interference by the British government, with the assistance of the US government, some governments in the European Union and remnants of the Rhodesian lobby. The objective of all these forces is to install unfettered neo-liberalism or what Naomi Klein calls disaster capitalism and David Korten calls corporate cannibalism. Morgan Tsvangirai and the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) were supposed to be installed at the end of the last elections in March and June precisely because they had promised that they would install neoliberalism once they were allowed to form a government or join a coalition with Zanu-PF.

The research and study which Zimbabweans have to undertake must include exposing and understanding the patterns of US interventions in other countries since 1893. For it is the US model of foreign intervention which has operated here since the US sanctions law called Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act in 2001.

This research shows that what triggers the desire for US intervention is not politics, not human rights and not the need to promote democracy. It is, rather, economic interest. A multinational corporation or several of them, based in the US or in an allied country, first complain that their interests are being threatened or hindered by certain actions, laws or policies of the targeted government.

In the case of Zimbabwe, it is multinational corporations in agro-business and in mining which felt threatened by Zimbabwe’s African land reclamation movement; by Zimbabwe’s land redistribution programme; by Zimbabwe’s denunciation of and efforts to abandon structural adjustment; by Zimbabwe’s intervention in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC); by Zimbabwe’s Look East policy; and, recently, by the Mines and Minerals Amendment Act and the Indigenisation and Empowerment Act.

These actions by Zimbabwe openly contradicted what the dean of neo-liberal economists, John Williamson, declared as the Washington Consensus. This so-called consensus referred to the fact that by 1989 the World Bank and the IMF had abandoned their original 1948 mandates and adopted a common objective of helping global multinational corporations to make neoliberal capitalism universal through the imposition and enforcement of structural adjustment programmes. Before the 1980s, the IMF and World Bank were supposed to play different roles. The Washington Consensus meant that the World Bank, the IMF and all the major governments and corporations backing them had agreed by 1989 that, at a minimum, the neo-liberal economic policy package to be imposed and enforced upon each member state in the South and the East should include the wholesale privatisation of state enterprises; the free flow of foreign capital; the deregulation of all markets (that is currency, labour, goods, stocks); and drastic reduction in public expenditure.

The research will also show that, once a US-based or US-allied corporation has complained against a targeted country, the next step is for political leaders in the US and in allied states to re-interpret the alleged crimes of the targeted state in order to recast the motives behind the actions and exaggerate the alleged harm or damage as being directed against the US itself and its allies. In the case of Zimbabwe, the desire of the majority of the African people to correct the intolerable legacy of colonial land theft and stop the white Western looting of African mineral wealth has been recast and turned into a geostrategic and ethical-moral violation of the rule of law directed against the UK and US themselves.

The research will also show that, once the normal human motives and actions of the targeted people have been recast to fit the racist-imperialist template of the US and its allies, the political leaders of the US, the UK and EU then work out a strategy and programme to force their own sceptical populations to accept the recasting or reinterpretation. The technique used is called conflation.

This means that the interests of Barclays Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, Old Mutual, Anglo-American Corporation, Unilever and Heinz Corporation are made identical with the interests of the ruling elites in the US, the UK and Netherlands first and, then, they are made to seem identical with the entire nations of the US, UK and Netherlands. In other words, taking over and redistributing a farm from which Heinz Corporation used to obtain beans and vegetable oils comes to be seen as an attack on the US.

The research will show that the conflation of interests will be easier for the imperialist ruling classes to make if the leading politicians are former corporate CEOs, which is especially true of the current US administration of George W. Bush. Up to this point, the pattern of intervention does not depart too far from what it was in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Regime Change and the

Myth of the Clean Slate

But the interventions of the late 20th and early 21st centuries are even more dangerous than those of the 19th and early 20th centuries. They are based on the neo-liberal myth of regression and the clean state. Neo-conservative economic theory is modelled after theories of torture where it is believed that a dysfunctional personality can be tortured and shocked until he or she loses memory and personality to become a clean slate upon which a new personality can be built scientifically. Likewise, a nation can be subjected to mass torture until it submits to an external programme of complete rebuilding from scratch.

The neo-liberal economic parallel to shock and torture was first applied in Chile, but its most spectacular application has been in Iraq. There, the US and UK speak of "nation creation", not nation building.

What we mean is that in the 19th century and most of the 20th, the purpose of foreign intervention was to install a friendly regime which would provide the imperial power with easy and cheap access to raw materials, labour, markets and space for resettling the imperial power’s excess population. In other words, the intervention would be considered successful and profitable when most of these objectives were met.

Now, under neo-liberalism, the privatisation of the state, the privatisation of war itself, means that for the intervening power intervention is profitable at all stages. Therefore the intervening forces do not worry about destruction of the targeted economy or about the suffering of the people.

According to Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism:

"When the zeal for the shock therapy in Russia was at its peak, its cheerleaders were absolutely convinced that only total destruction of every single institution would create the conditions for a national rebirth — the dream of the blank slate that would recur in Baghdad. ‘It is desirable’, wrote Harvard historian Richard Pipes, ‘for Russia to keep on disintegrating until nothing remains of its institutional structures’. And Columbia University economist Richard Ericson wrote in 1995, ‘Any reform must be disruptive on a historically unprecedented scale. An entire world must be discarded, including all its economic and most of its social and political institutions . . .’ (But when) it was no longer possible to hide the failures of Russia’s shock therapy . . ." the neo-liberal economists blamed what they called Russia’s culture of corruption.

The Case of Zimbabwe

The efforts of friends of Zimbabwe such as President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa will produce the best results only if the people of Zimbabwe themselves understand the full intentions of their enemies.

The enemies of Zimbabwe want to impose the Washington Consensus on Zimbabwe and install neoliberalism. The diabolic means they have used up to now include everything except direct invasion. They have used intimidation, psychological war, economic sabotage, terrorism, financial warfare, travel bans, and diplomatic manipulation and pressure.

These actions against Zimbabwe (while not identical with those of a direct military invasion) in fact produce effects which are comparable and which serve the same purpose. The key to understanding the similarities lies in Morgan Tsvangirai’s statement to his followers to tell those who boast of having liberated Zimbabwe to take it back to a stage and time when it was still a colony, so that the MDC and its sponsors can then start all over again to liberate it.

Therefore the process of destabilising and attacking Zimbabwe has been comparable to that of an invasion and mass torture. Here are some of the similarities.

The first stage is called marketing fear through propaganda and psychological war

against the country. This is orchestrated, so that hundreds of TV, radio, internet, newspaper, magazine, embassy and even church channels market the same message of fear at the same time.

The intended effects of this marketing of fear include:

l To impress and demoralise the targeted population in order to deter it from mounting a collective and strategic response. The US-UK attacks are meant to appear to be coming from the entire "international community" so that citizens of Zimbabwe feel that the enemy is so invincible and overwhelming that one can only make a personal decision to stay out of the way or to run away to the so-called Diaspora.

l To deter neighbours and friends from coming to the defence of the people, in the belief that Zimbabwe may be right but it is no use trying to defend it because the attackers are everywhere and too powerful to heed small voices.

l To deter other countries who have also been thinking of taking economic and legislative decisions similar to those Zimbabwe has taken.

The next step in the process is one of show and tell, what the Pentagon calls "fear-up". This is a sequential step from marketing fear. The focus is no longer overwhelming noise appearing to come from every corner of the earth. The focus now is on the types of instruments which are available to the torturer, to the imperialist power, to use against the target. What is similar between marketing fear and fear-up is the continuing co-operation and collaboration of the imperialist mass media and their proxies. In cases where military action is part of the option there is a thorough review of the worst weaponry which might be used. And there are war games.

But where actual war is not an option, the focus will be on financial instruments, credit instruments, investments, electricity grids, airline routes and fuel supplies which the "fear-up" threatens to cut off. The bigger the number of items and lines mentioned as available for cutting off the more overwhelming the powers of the intervening forces appear to be. Zimbabweans can go back to the time when their country was being told even by some faint-hearted citizens that the country could not survive its threatened suspension from the Commonwealth.

In the third stage the war focuses on interfering with what the people are used to hearing as a means of causing mass disorientation and hysteria. In the case of the coup d’etat against Venezuela in late 2002, Chile in 1973 or Yugoslavia in 1999, the war disrupted radio, television and telephone transmitters and signals. And the people suddenly ceased to hear themselves, to hear each other or to hear solidarity messages from abroad.

In the case of Zimbabwe, because the war is waged through sanctions, the interference is achieved through hyperinflation which makes both rates and gadgets unaffordable; the interference is achieved by luring the radio and television technicians out of the country through promises of scarce foreign currency abroad; the interference is achieved also through sabotage and the introduction of illegal channels, pirate stations and hostile internet sites.

In the fourth stage the war disrupts the patterns of what the people normally see or watch. In a military invasion this means bombing generators, power stations and pylons. It also means obliterating people’s horizons.

In the case of Zimbabwe most of the darkness is achieved indirectly through sanctions, incremental sabotage and the mass migration of technicians from the public utility to the private sector or through emigration abroad in search of higher pay and foreign currency.

The ways in which the economic war has disrupted what people are used to see are countless: Most book stores no longer have books above the secondary school textbook level. The only literature available outside primary and secondary school textbooks is propaganda sponsored or published by purveyors of the neoliberal Washington Consensus —the IMF, the World Bank, Northern donor agencies, charities and NGOs.

Electricity blackouts are most vivid demonstrations of this disruption of what people are used to seeing. And the patterns of load-shedding are quite consistent with the logic of the war as mass torture. In Zimbabwe both township dwellers and resettled farmers complain that they get the little available electricity during those hours between 10.30 pm and 4.30 am when they can least use it.

In other words, the lack of relevant books and magazines in the bookstores is reinforced by the silencing of radio, television and computers during the usual blackout period from 4.30 am to 10.30 pm!

The fifth stage in this game of mass torture is to embarrass or humiliate the people by deliberately depriving them of little things and commonplace comforts which they are used to taking for granted.

The erratic supply of electricity at odd hours already started that process because people are forced to have lunch at 11pm and breakfast at 3am, for instance. Bathing, ironing and listening to music are also dislocated.

But the removal of commonplace comforts is much more basic than breakfast at 3am. It means that families who drive around in Mercedes-Benzes, Jaguars, Pajeros and Jeeps of the latest models still fail to find bathing soap, salt, matches, sugar or skin lotion because the local manufacturers are proxies of the imperialist powers and subsidiaries of global multinationals who want to install neoliberalism in Zimbabwe.

These proxies started the war by organising their workers to stay away from work and from production in the 1990s.

In situations of actual war or torture, this process of hiding or removing commonplace comforts is associated with stripping the victims, scandalising them or forcing them to wear shocking clothes.

In the US-UK occupation of Iraq, the victims were forced to strip while remaining hooded or to eat pork instead of fish, against their religious beliefs.

In Zimbabwe, the internal collaborators with the external sanctions regime have consistently deprived the population of salt, sugar, tea leaves, soap, candles, paraffin, matches, milk and flour. In a bizarre campaign of corporate sabotage, Zimbabweans have been forced to buy imported sugar, salt, milk and cooking oil while the very same items, locally manufactured, have flooded the Mozambican, Malawian, Namibian, Zambian and Botswana markets!

The sixth form of attack encouraged in this kind of war is the sponsored assault on basic values through the glorification of disrespect.

In the war on Iraq the invading forces encouraged or condoned the pillaging of sacred and revered sites, objects and texts. According to Naomi Klein, citing The Los Angeles Times of April 17 2003:

"The hundreds of looters who smashed ancient ceramics, stripped display cases and pocketed gold and other antiquities from the National Museum of Iraq pillaged nothing less than records of the first human society. Gone are 80 percent of the museum’s 170 000 priceless objects."

The National Library of Iraq contained every book and every doctoral thesis ever published in Iraq. But it was left a blackened shell within hours of the invasion. Illuminated copies of the Koran which were more than a thousand years old were looted from the Ministry of Religious Affairs.





to be continued.......

http://www1.sundaymail.co.zw/inside.aspx?sectid=77&cat=10

Protect revolution from the West

By Stella Orakwue

WHO are "the people" and what are "the people"? Are "the people" slow? Are "the people" thick? Are "the people" liars, mendacious, deceitful? Are "the people" base?

"We the people" have spoken, but what did they say, what are they saying? "We the people" have voted, but who did they vote for, what are they voting for?

What do "the people" want? Do they even know what they want, or do they lie to themselves, lie to other people, and lie in the polling booths? Can you believe a word that "the people" say?

Who are "the people"? Are they only people like you? Are "the people" only people who are businessmen and businesswomen like you? Are "the people" only people who live in urban areas like you do? If you live in town or a city, are the people who live in rural areas, the countryside, people, too?

Are rich people "the people"? And are you part of "the people" if you are a member of a family that is elite? Are the elite people?

Do you, reader, consider yourself to be "the people"? Or are "the people", to you, other people? People out there, washed or unwashed, great or not great, nasty or not nasty, base or not base, but always, other people? Are they mostly poor, to you? Mostly stupid, or, at least mostly not quite as bright and intelligent as you? Mostly not quite as attuned to what is going on as you are?

"The people dem ah renk!" is a popular Jamaican street saying which in strict literal translation means "the people stink", but in actual usage means "the people" are a nasty piece of work, a waste of space. It is one of my favourite sayings, one I use a lot. The great irony? These other people probably think exactly the same of you: "the people" are always somebody else.

Politicians spend their working lives talking at length about "the people". But what do they actually know about these people they talk about? Which of them lives among "the people", really lives with them, who is an elected politician?

How long do they spend among "the people", really spend, outside of driving or flying in for special or ordinary visiting times, for speech-making, for electioneering?

Who sees "the people" close up and very personally on a day-to-day basis, lives among them, eats among them, talks to them, every single day — but who is not, strictly, of them? That is, he or she is of the ruling class, a politician, a leader?

It seems to me that it is very easy to forget what it is like to be one of "the people". But then again, do "the people" really expect their leaders to dwell amongst them? Do they not expect their rulers to live in big mansions, ride in big cars, have plenty of money and lavish lifestyles, otherwise their leaders and politicians would be no better than them, and what, then, would give them the right to rule over "the people"?

But "the people" want it both ways, do they not? "Look at him," they say of a leader, "eating and I have no food! Look at his birthday cake — where is my cake so I can eat it too?" Deliver them cakes, but would that satisfy them?

Who are "the people" to a politician? His constituents or his country? Are people who support opposing parties "the people"? If the opposition is murdering, torturing, ill-treating "your" people, who then, does the opposition comprise of? People. Surely, "the people".

And if the boot were not on their foot, where, pray is the guarantee that "your" people would not behave in like manner? Are not "your" people, that the opposition is "persecuting", people who are capable of doing exactly the same things to "the people" who are not seen as being "their people"?

Yes, they, your people are capable of being persecutors, murderers, torturers, starvers, that you allege "other people" are. Otherwise, you will need to spell out what is so different about "your" people, people from the same rural areas, from the same towns, from the same cities, from the same educational (or lack of educational) backgrounds, with the same upbringing.

What makes "my people" murderers and "your people" incapable of murder?

Politicians say they are "working on behalf of the people". What they do not say is which people they work for. They cannot be working for all the people. They work for and profess to love their people.

Take them away, out of their section of "the people", the familiar, comfortable people, and put them among others of "the people" and see how they fare and how they feel now and see how long they last.

What do "the people" want? Can you treat "the people" better than they deserve? Yes, in my experience, it is definitely possible to do that. If you see, observe, spot that what "the people" want has changed, is changing, will change, what do you do about that and when do you do it?

When did "the people" — which people? — of Zimbabwe decide that the Western-backed Movement for Democratic Change had become a party that was good enough for them to replace Zanu-PF?

When did Zanu-PF realise that "the people" — which people? — had moved away so far, had lost sight of the revolution to the extent that they could even contemplate voting for, bringing in Members of Parliament who were being primed and prompted, propped up, funded and aided by Western powers whose sole aim is the destruction of Zanu-PF, the revolution, and the man who symbolises both: President Robert Mugabe?

Are "the people" who voted for voted for the MDC so radically different in countenance and personality, shape and form from "the people" who voted for Zanu-PF? No, they are not. You cannot. You cannot tell the people of Zimbabwe apart from each other.

Therefore, how does the West know, how are they so certain that the leader of the MDC, and "the people" who have voted for the MDC into its current parliamentary majority, are such nice, good, clean-living, fantastic people incapable of despotism, dictatorship, atrocity? The West does not know. They do not care to know because they do not care.

What they care about, what they want is the break-up, the end of a revolutionary, liberation-era party that reminds them of their defeat, failure, and losses.

When one man is hated to such an extent by a group of nations all sharing the same skin colour that there is an editorial in the biggest mass-selling daily British newspaper calling for his murder, and a prime-time mass audience British state television programme airs views calling for his death, as in the case of President Mugabe and his presidential election run-off, then you realise that it is something, perhaps some things, other than the man himself that is also hated.

What does that man, Mugabe, represent? "We are not a British colony," he instructs them. "We are not a British colony." The British would like him dead.

Why do the British and their people want his Zimbabwean opposer, the other man, the other guy, the one who threw in the towel? What does that other man represent to the white nations of Europe and America? What is this one capable of being, of becoming that pleases them?

When it is said or written that actions are taken and things are done "on behalf of the people" of Zimbabwe, my question is: on behalf of what? Their virtues? Their morals? Their decencies? It is up to "the people" and the Government of Zimbabwe to provide their living standards.

But how do you protect the minds of a revolutionary country from being seduced by outsiders and their promises of a life lived as richly empty as theirs? If "the people", after one generation, are tired of hearing about "the revolution", how do you freshen their minds? By making the revolution modern. By saying that the revolution wasn’t just then; the revolution is now.

The revolution is how you live every day each day, each night, each month, each year. The revolution is you and your life. The revolution is your family and your children and your future.

Protect the revolution. What was gained in harsh struggle over years can be lost — or thrown away — in an instant. If Western lives are so great, so golden, why do their people want the little in comparison that Africans have? Why do they want what is yours when they have so much already? Because they have so much and yet they have nothing at all in comparison.

We think we have so little and yet we have so much. Seeing the true value of what you have. Seeing it and recognising it before those who truly know the value seize it from you.

They say we are the "poorest" continent, and yet they will not leave us alone. They are all over us, trying to take, take, take. Who steals from the "poor"? Do rich people covet a poor man’s goods? Do they sit and plot how to rob from those who do not have? Perhaps only if they suffer from mental illnesses.

The revolution is still a work in progress. More work, more progress. It will never "finish". There is no "end". You have to remain ever vigilant to protect the gains of the past. There is no "that’s in the past", when foreign powers still want to relive their past in your territory. And take back from you today what they possessed yesterday.

I say this and I say it now, today: President Mugabe is the greatest African leader! He has done it all. He has fought and won in all three wars: national, political, empowerment. His legacy cannot be surpassed. Look at him, listen to him, read him, and you will see this: God is by his side.

For me, Mugabe has become the barometer of African consciousness. What you think of him, how high you hold him up, this great African leader, will reveal how conscious, how aware, how awake you are to Africa’s past, present, and future realities.

PS: I do not have a buxom body, a long silvery sequinned dress or blonde hair, but I would like to croon to you: "Happy victory to you, and the people of Zimbabwe."

l Stella Orakwue is a New African magazine columnist. This article is reproduced courtesy of the August/September 2008 issue of the magazine.




http://www.herald.co.zw/inside.aspx?sectid=613&cat=10

I came across this study which i thought i shopuld share with you guys.

Underdevelopment in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Role of the Private Sector and Political Elites
by Moeletsi Mbeki


Moeletsi Mbeki is deputy chairman of the South African Institute of International Affairs, an independent think tank based at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Published on April 15, 2005


Economic growth in Africa, as in the rest of the world, depends on a vibrant private sector. Entrepreneurs in Africa, however, face daunting constraints. They are prevented from creating wealth by predatory political elites that control the state. African political elites use marketing boards and taxation to divert agricultural savings to finance their own consumption and to strengthen the repressive apparatus of the state. Peasants, who constitute the core of the private sector in sub-Saharan Africa, are the biggest losers.In order for Africa to prosper, peasants need to become the real owners of their primary asset — land — over which they currently have no property rights.

Peasants must also be given direct access to world markets. They must be able to auction their cash crops, including coffee, tea, cotton, sugar, cocoa, and rubber, freely rather than being forced to sell them to state-controlled marketing boards at discounted prices. In that respect, South Africa is unique in the region. The country does not have a large disenfranchised peasantry.Most of South Africa’s private sector belongs to South Africans, who also have a say in the political process. The future will show whether those factors will constrain the power of the South African political elite in a manner that is sufficient to safeguardSouth Africa’s growth potential.



http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3728

what your opinion on this subject?

Heroes Day lessons for Africans

By Obi Egbuna

AS the people of Zimbabwe paid homage to their fallen heroes throughout the country on Monday, there are several valuable lessons daughters and sons of Africa both at home and abroad can learn.

While the majority of people who visit Zimbabwe annually eagerly anticipate visiting Mosi-oa-Tunya (commonly referred to as Victoria Falls) or Great Zimbabwe in Masvingo because of their breathtaking beauty, it is the National Heroes Acre in Harare that will help people not only understand the people’s collective resistance spearheaded by President Mugabe and Zanu-PF.

The national shrine also puts Zimbabwe’s current political and economic challenges in a proper historical context.

The first thing that stands out about the shrine should not be the beautiful architecture, but the deliberate effort to bury comrades in Zanu and Zapu right next to each other as comrades-in-arms and not political rivals.

This shows the African world the kind of unity that led to independence on April 18, 1980.

Because the West continues to deliberately overlook Zimbabwe’s positive achievements, they will never grasp the true meaning of Heroes Day and the Africans under their thumb are in danger of letting these valuable lessons pass them by.

The national shrine is arguably the strongest political statement on the lengths an oppressed people can go to when attempting to unify their resistance efforts while in pursuit of total liberation.

This has significance on both the Memorandum of Understanding and the talks between the three main political parties.

While US and British imperialism and their neo-colonialist counterparts intensify their efforts to diminish the talks and their political value, they underestimate the political culture of Zimbabweans.

It is these dynamics that made both formations of the MDC realise that the leadership of President Robert Gabriel Mugabe and Zanu-PF in Zimbabwe is the driving force behind the bond that makes the masses in Southern Africa rejoice that they reside in the most stable and unified region of the African continent.

The African community inside US borders is light years behind Zimbabweans and our comrades in the Sadc region when it comes to the concept of unification.

It is quite contradictory that the Africans inside US borders who have decided to devote their energy to condemning President Mugabe and Zanu-PF, using the same baseless rhetoric as the Bush and Brown administrations, are unwilling to do the necessary work to create and maintain a united African front among organisations fighting inside the belly of US imperialism.

We have seen in the last 10 years the funerals of human rights icons like Kwame Toure, James Forman and Rosa Parks turn into showcases for many spokespeople who still haven’t learned how to properly pay tribute to fallen comrades.

Instead of using these platforms to showcase their oratory prowess, they should highlight the work of the fighters they would have gathered to honour instead of behaving like they are trying to earn the final spot on a debate team.

If they came to Zimbabwe for Heroes Day, the first thing that would stand out is that President Mugabe is the only speaker of the day, and others who are gifted in articulating ideas that are the cornerstone of the revolutionary process in Zimbabwe, actually have the humility to sit down and listen to someone else without itching to be the stars of the show.

The way President Mugabe uses this opportunity is both humble and brilliant. He highlights the giants of yesterday for the born-free generation and this ensures the work of comrades like Herbert Chitepo, Josiah Tongogara and Joshua Nkomo will be not only remembered but continued.

He then turns to confronting Zimbabwe’s immediate challenges.

A few weeks ago at a the Press conference after the MOU was signed, opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai said nobody held a monopoly on patriotism.

This was perhaps his most eloquent remark since he has been on the political scene in Zimbabwe, even going back to his days as the secretary-general of ZCTU.

Tsvangirai will have to admit he has never heard President Mugabe or anyone in Zanu-PF ever declare themselves a patriot.

We can say with certainty that Tsvangirai will find it extremely difficult to find any significant historical figure in any liberation struggle, whether in Africa, Asia or Latin America, who will claim to be a super patriot.

Such a label can only bestowed upon you by your people.

So when evaluating his role in Zimbabwe’s struggle, if the majority of his compliments are coming from Britain and the United States,

perhaps this will help expand his understanding and appreciation of who President Mugabe and the fallen comrades buried at the Heroes Acre are.

Tsvangirai can also travel the world and visit the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia which have a rich revolutionary tradition like Zimbabwe, and we are confident he will find that the accolade of a patriot can only be given by the people.

The climate of unity in Zimbabwe is stronger than ever and this has helped the country stave off the negative propaganda that comes from Westerners who would like to see the revolution and the talks fail.

What is becoming increasingly obvious is that the US and British governments have made their biggest foreign policy blunder in the manner in which they have chosen to engage Zimbabwe.

This is because of a combination of two dynamics: their hatred of President Mugabe and Zanu-PF and their inability to convince both formations of the MDC to merge and march to the beat of their drum.

As more accurate information is revealed about Anglo-American imperialism’s dual agenda on Zimbabwe, the African world will discover in the near future that the opposition was created to do anything to frustrate President Mugabe’s revolution.

Any means necessary were to be used in this quest.

That is why the West is worried about the present talks and it is working night and day to ensure they do not succeed.

The West has not backed Tsvangirai for all these years only for him to sit at a negotiating table with the man they want removed at all costs.

The European Union, the US and their allies do not have confidence in Tsvangirai’s negotiating skills and they thus do not want to see him talking face-to-face with President Mugabe.

The West will settle for nothing less than President Mugabe’s total capitulation and they do not see this coming out of dialogue.

Today Zimbabwe is too united for the West’s liking and the spirit of oneness, as embodied in Heroes Day, is too much for them to bear.

Arthur Mutambara was present at the Heroes Day commemorations and it is for this reason that the anti-Zimbabwe campaign will try now more than ever to try and make him look irrelevant.

Zimbabweans has resisted such attempts to divide the nation before and they will resist again.

Long live the fallen heroes! Long live President Mugabe! Long live Zimbabwe!


http://www.herald.co.zw/inside.aspx?sectid=468&cat=10

Democracy: One size does not fit all

By Reason Wafawarova in SYDNEY, Australia

IN modern-day society, it is generally agreed and viewed that democracy is the best system of governance but, as even Aristotle admitted centuries ago, it has its own shortcomings.

To many countries in the developing world today, democracy has become a transcendent aspiration more espoused by donor-mongering civic groups than it is practised by society.

Many countries that have thrown off the yoke of colonialism are, by virtue of historical colonial links, either trying their best or being persuaded if not coerced into adopting Western-style democracy.

For Africa, the fact is that Western-style democracy is not only unsuitable, but evidently not workable in the least.

Since Western colonial empires started falling in the 1950s, Africa has had this roller-skater political ride characterised by the rise and fall of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, the serial military dictatorships of Nigeria and the spirited but not so successful socialist campaigns by Mozambique’s Samora Machel and Burkina Faso’s Thomas Sankara.

We have also witnessed Western-propped dictatorships such as Uganda’s Idi Amin and Congo’s Mobutu Sese Seko, the unforgettable civil wars of Mozambique and Angola, the genocide of Rwanda — all the way to the diplomatic warfare between the West and Zimbabwe’s President Mugabe and Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.

The incompatibility of Western-style democracy to the internal dynamics of former colonies is what has led to many civil wars and secessions, as seen in the break-up of the original Pakistan leading to the creation of Bangladesh.

Western-backed Congolese secessionist Moise Tshombe still stands out in African history as a notorious villain.

There are a few factors that make Western-style parliamentary democracy a facade at its best in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

For Africa many states are still struggling to become nations after the imposition of colonial boundaries and without national unity it is futile to preach Western-style democracy in these countries.

It is best to first find what the various indigenous groupings want collectively before anyone can dream of creating a United States of Africa.

Democracy by its very nature cannot be imposed by one society on another — not with the many cultural and value-based incompatibilities inherent between them.

National unity is the basis for a democratic dispensation and this is why the Western-sponsored confrontational approach to attaining democracy has only succeeded in fuelling conflicts across the world.

A united approach towards the resolution of problems facing Zimbabwe is already proving to be more promising in only two weeks when compared to the confrontation of the last eight years in the so-called struggle for democracy.

Some argue that the idea of relative democracy based on various cultural and economic needs is dangerous for international relations.

Rather, it is dangerous for the spread of Western influence, and Western influence is not what is called international relations.

Secondly, accelerated economic growth has been proven to have a tendency of increasing the role of governments in economic life.

This means that countries that seriously want to catch up with global development will inevitably have to run planned economies and significant government influence will be evident in the running of these programmes.

China has virtually shot to the top of global economic growth by insisting on government involvement in the planning of their economy. It is a blatant lie to credit unabated free market forces as the magic behind China’s economic growth.

This government role in economic affairs is what Western-style democracy calls a violation of property rights and governance by unsound policies.

But is it not a fact that if strong leadership does not take control of the means of production then imperial capital will? Imperial capital, just like colonial capital before it, is for the benefit of the owners of the capital and not for indigenous populations.

Thirdly, democracy is a human character naturally founded on values, be they social, economic, cultural or political.

Evidently the Western social order is not necessarily the same with that found everywhere else and many people are simply not prepared to pretend to be Europeans in the name of democracy.

The West cannot democratise the world on matters such as morality, culture, freedoms and perception.

These are value-based aspects of social life that vary from country to country if not village to village. While there is agreement for some form of uniformity, there is no evidence that a Western lead towards this is what the world needs. To the contrary there is evidence that Western political influence in many countries has been more detrimental than it has been useful.

Fourthly, democracy is supposed to be dependent on public opinion and the West want to shape public opinion across the world and this naturally creates conflict and resentment with political leadership right across the world, Africa included.

Africa has an opinion of its own and Africans have their own homogeneous aspirations towards happiness and prosperity and so do Latin Americans and Asians.

They do not need Western "advice" in defining what happiness is. It is this subversive interference in the internal affairs of other countries that undermines the democratic processes on the planet.

The argument that the West cannot leave Africans, Asians and Arabs killing each other is puerile if one looks at how much Europeans have not only killed each other in the past but also how they continue to kill people of various nationalities across the world today.

If countries are left to shape their own public opinion without undue interference there is no doubt that the global democratic process will develop faster.

The role of South Africa in settling the Zimbabwean political stand-off is one good example of how effective regional synergies can be when given a chance.

Fifth, democracy is now viewed in line with human rights and the West clearly preaches the primacy of individual rights over collective rights.

The African culture, for example, is a collective system that views society as supreme to the being.

This is why there is a tendency to check undue individual freedoms in the interest of peace and stability and this is often interpreted as repression.

To Africa, China and other collective cultures this regulation of individual rights and ensuring they conform to the aspirations of the wider society means order.

Subsistence rights such as the right to land, food, life and shelter cannot be inferior to procedural rights such as expression, association and conscience.

There are countless Western-funded NGOs tirelessly fighting for the cause of procedural rights in non-Western countries where poverty is often threatening to wipe out entire populations and the organisers are strangely convinced that their priorities are perfect.

It does not occur to the West that freedom of expression and association is meaningless to a starving population.

Looking at all these factors it is simply hard to believe that the Western standard of democracy to which the world is subjected today will ever in essence facilitate any form of meaningful democracy.

Today China is viewed in the West as not only undemocratic but as anti-democratic.

The Western tradition erroneously assumes that a communist political system and a capitalist economy cannot co-exist.

The enigma that is today’s China is but the embodiment of the naivete of this kind of thinking. It is almost 60 years since the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed by Mao Zedong’s Communist Party and in tomorrow the Beijing Olympics will showcase a government planned, market-driven, technologically sophisticated country that is presided over by the same "authoritarian" political party that Mao Zedong founded.

One wonders if it is Mao Zedong or John F. Kennedy turning in the grave at this point in time.

Is this the triumph of a loathed communist political system or that of American capitalism?

China will undoubtedly use the Olympics to raise the country’s profile just like South Africa will do with the soccer World Cup in 2010.

The West still insists that China cannot be gracious Olympic hosts because according to Western common sense, freedoms of expression and association are alien to Chinese communist norms.

The IOC has been lambasted by the West for their decision to give the Games to Beijing, purely on the basis of China’s alleged anti-democratic style of governance.

However, the athletes are currently gathered in the Games village and the communist Chinese do hold the world in thrall.

They will strive to please their guests according to their own standards and expectations, not according to the West’s standards of democracy and happiness.

As usual the West will insist on creating tension through this sporting event, because to the Western ruling elite every global platform, be it sport, a United Nations gathering or a visiting Catholic Pope — everything is a platform for the negotiation of cultural and political boundaries.

To these political leaders it is either the Western way or the high way.

To them democracy is Western by definition, and this is why the negotiations involving Zimbabwe’s ruling Zanu-PF and the opposition parties are meaningless in the absence of Western input.

Zimbabwe needs not be held to Western standards of democracy because those standards are plainly largely irrelevant, much as they are preached to us daily by tireless voices driven by donor funding or by the romanticising effect of the glitter of Western capitals.

Beijing is now glittering without Western standards of democracy and equally Harare can stand and shine on a local model of democracy and system of governance.

For Zimbabwe it is always homeland or death. Together we will overcome.

l Reason Wafawarova is a political writer and can be contacted on wafawarova@yahoo.co.uk or reason@rwafawarova.com or visit www. rwafawarova.com



http://www.herald.co.zw/inside.aspx?sectid=109&cat=10

Africa’s wealth for Africans

By Tsitsi Makwande

Africa, is without doubt, the richest continent in the world in terms of both natural and human resources yet, ironically, it is also the poorest.

This may be a bit difficult to understand for someone who appreciates the vast wealth of minerals to be found across the length and breadth of the continent.

Countless valleys, innumerable mountain ranges, limitless flowing rivers, a variety of flora and fauna, the most beautiful natural tourist attractions and so many more features of wealth and interest abound in Africa.

This picture contrasts sharply with the levels of poverty on the ground.

Of course, all is not doom and gloom, but the fact is that pandemics like Aids have wreaked havoc, wars have played their part and food insecurity is real and present across the continent.

According to one Unicef report, about 30 000 children die daily due to the effects of poverty.

Water-borne diseases such as cholera caused by poor sanitation also claim their share of precious lives.

Life expectancy has been declining, while in other parts of the world, which do not have the kind of natural and human resources that we have, people are living longer and leading improved lives.

It has been estimated that the gross national product in the countries worst affected by HIV and Aids could contract by 18 percent by 2020, and the disease could kill 13 to 26 percent of the agricultural labour force in those countries during the same period.

The United Nations said its efforts to provide anti-retroviral treatment for one million infected people in 2007, was outpaced by the number of new infections, which numbered 2,5 million that year. (Thankfully, though, in Zimbabwe’s case new infections are declining.)

Millions others have died or were displaced as a result of civil wars and natural disasters. The disturbing images of malnourished children in Sudan or Somalia with more bones than flesh, quickly come to mind.

But this is more than just an image; it is a stark reality that has to be dealt with immediately.

The question we have to ask ourselves is: why are our people living under such conditions when the continent is the richest in the world?

Mining giant De Beers details in one report that Africa produces about 76 percent of the world’s supply of diamonds valued at US$10 billion.

Zimbabwe alone boasts of deposits of more than 40 minerals, including ferrochrome, gold, silver, platinum, diamonds, copper and asbestos, and about 19 million hectares of forest as of 2000.

With such amazing wealth, it is confusing to see our people so disadvantaged.

The reason is although we are rich, we continue to live in poverty because we still have not found ways to harness our resources for our own good and for that of our children. Instead, many African countries continue to be a source of raw materials, leaving foreign countries to benefit from the real business in the resultant finished product, a situation no different from what happened during the slave trade and colonialism.

As Zimbabweans, we need to come up with sustainable strategies that will allow our people, and not only foreigners, to benefit from the vast treasures of gold, diamonds and other minerals available in our land.

We should open our eyes and see how other countries have done it and follow suit. It may take a while and require strong financial backing, but if others have done it, so can we. Zimbabwe needs to take charge of its economy and alleviate poverty in our nation without having to depend on donors and aid relief organisations.

Despite the economic challenges we are facing, we can take a leaf from Cuba, which has been under economic sanctions since 1963 but still managed to revive its economy and boast of the best social services in the world.

This is not an event that will happen overnight, but a process requiring innovative and dedicated people and strategies.

We have such people in our country, people who can make things happen, people who can build realities out of dreams, intelligent and hard-working people.

It is pleasing, therefore, to see Government embarking on its empowerment drives with such gusto.

Land reform signified the first stage of the process of harnessing our resources for our own development and now we have an all-encompassing empowerment law.

Our goal should be to ensure that this piece of legislation is fully implemented to improve the livelihoods of the people of Zimbabwe, who are the rightful owners of the resources found across the country.

The entire African continent can learn from the manner in which Zimbabwe has striven to empower its people.

The imagination of people from all walks of life in Zimbabwe has been captured by the empowerment drive that started in 2000 with the Land Reform Programme.

Over the past eight years, about 300 000 families — which translates to over a million individuals if we assume the average family size is five — have been empowered by the changes in land tenure systems.

When the situation in the country stabilises and people can access agricultural inputs on time, one can only imagine the benefits these families and the entire nation shall reap.

Recently, President Mugabe signed into law the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Act.

This piece of legislation will see the manufacturing and mining sectors being indigenised in the same way that agriculture has been.

The requirement is that Zimbabweans should own at least 51 percent of any company in the country and already big firms such as Old Mutual have said they see no problem with such an arrangement.

After all, the resources are for Zimbabweans and it only makes sense that locals are enriched by them ahead of foreign companies.

South Africa has also embarked on its own Black Economic Empowerment policy and the challenge for the rest of the continent is to move towards the strengthening of the economic position of indigenous people. Various models can be employed to do this, but the ultimate aim should be the empowerment of Africans.

Indeed, the African Union should declare 2009/2010 as the year for 100 percent empowerment of Africans using African resources for Africa’s development.



http://www.herald.co.zw/inside.aspx?sectid=117&cat=10

The will of Zimbabweans is supreme



HISTORIANS tell us that the first civilisation to codify its laws was ancient Babylon.

The codification, a means of writing down laws in a manner that is understandable and accessible to the ordinary public, was done by King Hammurabi around 1760 BC and is therefore known as the Code of Hammurabi.

And to demonstrate to those living in the territory and the world beyond the permanence and immutability of his codified civil law, King Hammurabi had them inscribed in a way reminiscent of the Christian 10 Commandments.

Other historians say that the first codification of any sort was by Ur-Nammu, the King of Ur, in the 25th century BC.

However, the first "permanent" codification system was done in China with the establishment of the Tang Code and this formed the basis of that great civilisation’s criminal code.

This is not to say other parts of the world did not have laws; it just means that for various reasons they did not write them down as a legal code.

The ancient Greeks and Romans also employed the practice of codification.

And it was the Romans who first showed the world how to codify laws in a manner that made it difficult for the ordinary person to access which was in contradictio