Maravi

U.S. and Britain are Fueling Violence in Zimbabwe

U.S. and Britain are Fueling Violence in Zimbabwe
By Ayinde
rastafaritimes@yahoo.com
Posted: March 15, 2007
Updated: March 16, 2007

The latest negative media blitz on Zimbabwe manipulates what appear to be injuries sustained by Morgan Tsvangirai following a clash he had with the police after taking part in an MDC organized protest. Apparently, once any group is aligned with the White settlers they can do no wrong in the eyes of the U.S. and Europe. These opposition forces can break any law and be protected by these Western-controlled media. What they want is for President Mugabe and the Government of Zimbabwe to allow these opposition groups, which are being funded and promoted by the U.S. and Britain, to overthrow the democratically elected government of Zimbabwe.

Morgan Tsvangirai, in alliance with Britain and the White settlers, regularly calls on the international community to impose comprehensive sanctions against the Zimbabwe government and President Robert Mugabe. Tsvangirai is the leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) - one of the opposition parties in Zimbabwe that lost in Zimbabwe's 2005 Parliamentary Elections.
"In the 2000 parliamentary elections MDC won 57 seats compared to Zanu PF's 62. In the recent 2005 elections the MDC has dropped to 41 and Zanu PF increased to 78." (Zimbabwe 2005 Parliamentary Elections).

Barrie Collins in the article 'This time, Bob, it's personal' (2002) stated:
Zimbabwe's leading opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), is an opportunistic alliance of white farmers, trade unionists and urban commercial interests. Its track record reveals that it is more concerned with having good relations with the international community than with presenting the Zimbabwean electorate with a convincing alternative.
Since Morgan Tsvangirai lost in the 2005 elections there have been calls for him to step down (Call for Tsvangirai to resign after poll). Morgan Tsvangirai has not stepped down and it appears that he is bent on showing the U.S., European nations and White settlers that he can lead an uprising to overthrow the democratically elected government in Zimbabwe (Zimbabwe elections free and fair, says Tonchi).

To understand the current increase in U.S. and European hostilities surrounding Zimbabwe, one must look at the U.S. instigated Ethiopian invasion of Somalia - an invasion that did not bring a resounding condemnation from the global African community. This lack of widespread African condemnation has emboldened the U.S. and Britain - the enemies of African liberation - in their aggression towards President Robert Mugabe and the government of Zimbabwe.

Many Africans held on to their anti-Islamic biases and did not see the bigger issue of an illegal U.S./Ethiopia invasion of Somalia. The U.S. may now feel it has the green light to invade other African nations in a similar manner. The Islamic governing body was removed from Somalia without much condemnation because the U.S. was able to capitalize on the anti-Islamic feelings of many. (See: Somalia's Crisis)

Now that Africans have remained relatively quiet about the illegal Somalia invasion, the U.S. and Europe have intensified efforts to force the overthrow of the government in Zimbabwe. They may now be shopping for African nations to do the dirty work in toppling the Zimbabwe government, similar to Ethiopia's willingness to invade Somalia at the behest of the U.S.

In the article 'Zimbabwe: State Warns MDC Against Lawlessness' copied from the Zimbabwe government's website, and another article from the BBC's website 'Eyewitness: Harare's brutal clash' that purports to be an eyewitness account of what happened, one gets that the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, among others, were deliberately defying the law and provoking a violent confrontation with the police and the government. As the so-called eyewitness said:
"All in all there were only about 30 police and there were more than 1,000 - we were too many for them. They could not control what was happening."
and,
"We picked up their [police] discarded sticks and used them to beat their left-behind colleagues"
From that BBC article 'Eyewitness: Harare's brutal clash', there is no way we can deduce that the police and the government were to blame for the clash between over a thousand protesters, mostly youths, and thirty police officers. The small number of police officers who were eventually overpowered by the protesters clearly showed that the police did not come out in huge numbers prepared for a violent confrontation.

From the article 'Zimbabwe: State Warns MDC Against Lawlessness' this is another account:
"Cde Mohadi said last weekend's planned gathering was not a prayer meeting, as the opposition had claimed under the so-called Save Zimbabwe Campaign coordinated by the MDC's purported Democratic Resistance Committees (DRC) and other anti-Government civic organisations.

'It was not a prayer meeting because there are flyers which said it was an MDC defiance campaign and they were coercing people to attend the rally,' said Cde Mohadi.

"As police, we could not just stand by and see the country go on fire. So we deployed and managed to quell the disturbances. The leaders of the opposition (Morgan) Tsvangirai and (Arthur) Mutambara were actually commanding (hooligans) using children as shields.

"The flyers read: 'Save Zimbabwe Rally. MDC Defiance Campaign. MDC joins other democratic forces under the auspices of the Save Zimbabwe Campaign for the rally to be held on 11 March 2007 at Zimbabwe Grounds in Highfield, starting at 10am. 'It is defiance or death'.'

"Spokesperson of the Save Zimbabwe Campaign, Jacob Mafume, told reporters at a press conference yesterday that they would continue to defy the law.

'We are not going to stop,' he said."
Complicit in provoking this confrontation, the mainstream, White-owned media does not give the circumstances surrounding the confrontation. Instead they are continuing their demonizing campaign against the President of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe that intensified when he started reclaiming lands from the White minority elite settlers and returned the land to Black Africans. (See: Zimbabwe Under Siege and Holding On to Ill-Gotten Gains)

Rosemary Ekosso, in the article 'Zimbabwe: White Lies, Black Victims' gives a fair analysis of the U.S. and Europe's interest in Zimbabwe.

She wrote:
"Despite their pious claims, Britain and the others are not angry because Mugabe is a corrupt dictator. They sponsor corrupt dictators when it suits them. They are not angry because ordinary Zimbabweans are suffering under Mugabe. They don't care about ordinary Zimbabweans. They were quite happy to herd them into reserves when it suited them.

No, what they care about is the expropriation of white farmers. They express indignation at Mugabe's cronies acquiring the land. That is a bad thing, of course. I myself come from an area where government or government-affiliated bigwigs are buying up all the prime sea-front locations because they can afford them. But in the case of Zimbabwe only 0.3% of people settled on land have acquired it through undue influence or corruption. So 99.7% of Zimbabweans got their land fair and square."
The U.S., UK and their allies have done all in their power to ensure Zimbabwe's economy is ruined to create hardship on the people in the hope of forcing a rebellion to overthrow the elected government in Zimbabwe.

Their aim is to ensure that Zimbabwe collapses under President Robert Mugabe and that this collapse serves as a deterrent to other African leaders and nations from reclaiming lands that were seized from Black Africans during colonial rule.

Stephen Gowans puts it quite nicely in his article titled 'Whose Rights?' (February 25, 2007).

He said:
"ZANU-PF was a leading force in the armed struggle of the Black majority to wrest political control from the White minority Rhodesian settler regime. While the Black majority achieved a kind of formal political independence, de facto independence has always been limited by the reality that the White minority remains economically dominant. The land seizures were a way of carrying forward the revolution to its logical conclusion in the absence of Harare having the wherewithal to buy out the White settlers and absentee British landowners. While the confiscation of land was, on the one hand, a denial of the previous owners' rights to make a profit, it was, on the other, a reclamation of a right to land that had been stolen by colonial plunder -- a war of right against right (with the soft Left in the West, sadly, though predictably, aligning itself in the war with the landowners.) Zimbabwe is not, however, a one-party state, and nor is it a country in which those with money power are prohibited from buying mass media or funding opposition political parties to oppose the government. For this, Zimbabwe too, along with Venezuela, can be criticized for failing to be repressive enough, and yet it is revolutionary and national liberation movements that fail to repress their enemies with sufficient zeal and that allow ample opportunity for their enemies to marshal a counter-strike, that are often the most vigorously reviled by the soft Left (and perhaps because part of the counterstrike is PR campaigns mounted in the West to discredit the regime in question - campaigns the soft Left has always shown a particular vulnerability to.) Whatever repressive measures ZANU-PF takes toward its opposition must be understood in the context of the history of the struggle for national liberation and of the alliance of the main opposition party, the MDC, with Britain and the White settlers."

Visit: Zimbabwe Watch

Labels: INTERNATIONAL MEDIA, ZIMBABWE

posted by MrK @ 8:05 PM