Maravi

(HERALD) MDC-T: An unmistakable stooge

MDC-T: An unmistakable stooge
By Tafataona P Mahoso

By begging to be allowed to sleep in the Dutch Embassy on the eve of a Zimbabwean election in which he is supposed to be elected President, Morgan Tsvangirai has finally and openly shown where his real constituency is: in the North Atlantic states of Europe and North America. President Mugabe does not need to say more: Morgan is indeed much more than a Zimbabwean lost child. His constituency is in Europe and he will be elected the best Euro-American puppet of the country while having tea and Dutch cheese in the Dutch Embassy in Harare.
http://www.herald.co.zw/inside.aspx?sectid=668&cat=13
Unfortunately, for MDC-T and Morgan Tsvangirai, British and US foreign policy toward Zimbabwe is being led by men and women who cannot even write an undergraduate paper on African affairs.

Their success in bringing the subject of Zimbabwe’s election for discussion at the Security Council will help inflame the popular and unmistakable anger of the people of Zimbabwe which David Milliband and Jendayi Fraser are incapable of reading.

The popular anger in Zimbabwe against MDC-T and Morgan Tsvangirai, against British, US and EU foreign policy, can best be illustrated by referring back to that popular song from 1980:

Yaramba, povo yaramba,
Munyika mayo, zvemadhisinyongoro.
Yaramba, povo yaramba munyika muno,
zvemadhisinyongoro.

There is no English equivalent to this expression of Shona outrage, but the following translation may come close:

The people, the majority, condemn, reject all the sickening external attempts to confuse, manipulate, disorganise and overwhelm them.

This was used in 1980 to express the contempt and anger of the people of Zimbabwe against the role of foreign powers in the Zimbabwe-Rhodesia project of Ian Smith and Bishop Abel Muzorewa.

Coming to the on-going efforts by the UK, the EU and the US to merge their foreign policies in support of MDC-T and against Zimbabwe, the following expressions of those policies on the ground in Zimbabwe have helped to incense popular opinion:

l In the first category are the acts of racist scandalisation and contempt against the war veterans of the Second Chimurenga which acts have been undertaken by MDC-T since the formation of the MDC in 1999.

The people are aware the war against the veterans of the Second Chimurenga was started by the Rhodesian settler minority in Zimbabwe, the United Kingdom, the US and the EU back in 1997, when the Government of Zimbabwe decided to pay the same war veterans a small gratuity of 50 000 Zimbabwe Dollars.

The current leaders of MDC-T were still in the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions.

They, together with the Rhodesians, the World Bank and the IMF opposed and condemned payment of the small gratuity.

The IMF and the World Bank were representing British, US and EU imperialist interests.

The bitterness of the British, EU and US opposition to the gratuity at the time seemed surprising, but it was a harbinger of future attacks.

Now, the people of Zimbabwe know that the World Bank and the US Marshall Plan in fact paid and resettled white war veterans of the Hitler wars.

Some of those were paid to settle in Zimbabwe under the Rhodesian African Land Husbandry Act of 1951.

But, as Presidential Press Secretary Cde George Charamba pointed out on radio on 24 June 2008, what has outraged the people of Zimbabwe against the UK, the US, the EU and their stooges in the MDC-T is the combined and coordinated desecration, contempt and murder directed against war veterans.

As the people who vowed to die to liberate this country, these war veterans represent the bones of arch-heroine Mbuya Nehanda who vowed before she was executed in 1896 that "My bones shall rise."

The war veterans of the Second Chimurenga are the resurrected bones of Mbuya Nehanda. How dare the UK, the US and the EU finance MDC-T to attack, desecrate and destroy those resurrected bones, the war veteran, yet again?

l In the second place are the despicable, diabolic, racist and illegal sanctions which the UK, the US, the EU and their allies have tried to hide under the fig-leaf of humanitarian relief which, in the hands of NGOs in Zimbabwe, has also been exposed.

The continual claims that there are no real economic sanctions; that there are only selective and smart sanctions targeted at President Robert Mugabe and his cronies; have outraged the people of Zimbabwe against the policies of these countries and against MDC-T.

The people have looked back and realised that the transformation of the entire Zimbabwean economy: from a credit and savings economy to a cash economy run by speculating middlemen, started at the very same time that the 500 or so foreign companies from the UK, the US and the EU joined hands with the ZCTU to organise "stayaways".

In fact the very first such "stay away" was organised by such companies against the 50 000 Zimbabwe Dollars paid to war veterans; but that stay away was disguised as a protest against high taxes.

The denials of the reality of sanctions made on television by Learnmore Jongwe (18 July 2001); Nelson Chamisa (21 May 2008); Douglas Mwonzora (1 June 2008); Obert Gutu (8 June 2008; and Tongai Mathuthu (15 June 2008) are identical to those issued by the EU Presidency in the second week of February 2002; or by the UK Embassy in Harare on numerous occasions through its magazine Britain and Zimbabwe; or by former US Ambassador to Zimbabwe Christopher Dell on 2 November 2005 at Africa University.

In other words, the African puppets of imperialism in MDC are such stooges that for the last nine years they have not dared to change even a single word of the imperialist rationalisation for the illegal and racist sanctions imposed on the people of Zimbabwe.

They routinely deny the people’s daily experience of sanctions in exactly the same language used by the imperialists themselves.

l In the third place, the people of Zimbabwe are outraged by the fact that white racism and contempt for the African is shown most clearly when the white racists and imperialists think they are being most kind and most helpful to Africans.

A few instances can be used to illustrate this fact. George Bush, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have frequently announced to the whole world how little the money is which they have spent to purchase the whole Movement for Democratic Change and to insure its cooperation; not only in efforts to destroy Zimbabwe, but also in redirecting the country’s economic policies for benefit of the US, the UK and the EU if the MDC were to win elections and take over this country.

The latest announced amounts of pieces of silver paid were £3,3 million from the UK, 18 million Australian Dollars from Australia, and US$7 million from the US government.

Moreover, the ways in which the leaders of Australia, New Zealand, Britain, the US and the EU follow the daily fortunes and misfortunes of MDC-T are no different from the ways the owners of a purchased donkey would follow that donkey throughout the stables and the race course.

All the so-called election results announced by MDC-T in violation of the laws of Zimbabwe were first broadcast on CNN, BBC, Euro-News and other imperialist channels long before the MDC-T’s own followers knew about them. In fact the leadership of MDC-T have taken decisions on the basis of instructions from Washington and London without consulting their members and even against the interests of those members.

Since the MDC was formed, it has organised media stunts or media events to help the EU renew sanctions against Zimbabwe every February.

Other media stunts have been organised to coincide with UN Security Council meetings; G8 meetings; Commonwealth meetings; Sadc meetings; and so on.

The media antics performed in May and June 2008 were meant to help the US bring Zimbabwe before the UN Security Council at a time when the US controls that body’s presidency.

l In the fourth place, the people of Zimbabwe are outraged and sickened by the white racist assumption in Britain, the US and the EU, that whatever these countries do or associate with will be seen in good light around the world.

This is why these countries are not ashamed to treat MDC-T like a purchased race-horse which must be watched and fed every minute without any shame.

This racist stupidity is shown not only in assumptions that white support will win the MDC votes in Zimbabwe but also in a uniform frame of reporting which assumes that Zimbabweans are totally ignorant of world affairs except the God-given goodness of the white man.

Therefore any association between MDC and the Western powers is presumed to enhance the appeal of the former. Therefore no media report on CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera English, SABC Africa and Euro News is going to question a single move or policy made by the MDC, the Trojan-Horse of the good white saviour of humanity.

Unfortunately, the people of Zimbabwe know about the Berlin Conference and the Rudd Concession; they know about the collusion involving Washington, Brussels and London in the diabolic overthrow and murder of Patrice Lumumba; they know about Mohammad Mossadegh, Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, Salvador Allende, Jaimé Roldos, Omar Torrijos, Samora Moises Machel, Steve Biko, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King; just as much as they know about Soweto (1976); Chimoio (1977); Nyadzonia (1976); and Kasinga (1978).

Just as the selective white conscience of imperialism has white-washed these mass murders and discounted them from the list of crimes against humanity — so have the ambassadors representing white racist powers in Harare also discounted all the atrocities committed by the MDC-T in the run-up to the June 2008 run-off election.

But the people know that MDC-T has committed atrocities and attempted a scorched-earth campaign on behalf of white settlers and against resettled African farmers. The people know that the police have arrested both Zanu-PF and MDC-T members suspected of having perpetrated political violence.

In other words, the crises which are not being reported on BBC, CNN, Sky News, Euro News, Al Jazeera and even SABC are the crisis in Euro-American policy toward Zimbabwe and the crisis within MDC-T.

Interestingly, a former US Ambassador saw the crisis in US policy as far back as 1979 and called it a "tragedy."

The Christian Science Monitor on 22 January 1979 published a story called "Rhodesian looks to US as ally". Ten days before that, on 12 January, the New York Times published an article called "Rhodesia’s whites look to US for aid." And there were hundreds of similar articles in the US Press at the time.

In January 1979, people truly interested in democracy and human rights would have been pre-occupied with the destiny of the African majority who were about to emerge as liberated nation of Zimbabwe after 100 years of brutal colonial rule. But, no, the European and US ruling classes and their Press were concerned about the destiny of the oppressor minority, the whites.

The 1979 articles on Zimbabwe were no different from the 1960 articles on Congo. One by Francis B. Stevens on 22 August 1960 in the magazine US News and World Report was called "The White Man’s Future in Africa," in reference to the impending independence of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Although it was Belgium and the US who were threatening the Africans’ future by plotting to assassinate Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, the Press presented the conspiring killers as the ones who were threatened by the African leaders they planned to assassinate.

Among the 1979 articles on Zimbabwe there was one which stood out because it was written by a former US Ambassador to West Africa who was also a Professor teaching at one of America’s elite universities, Columbia University.

Elliot P Skinner was a good white liberal, so he wrote apologetically about the axis of white racism which we see now closing in on Zimbabwe.

The neoliberal racists now attacking Zimbabwe on behalf of a racist minority do not apologise for their racism.

This is what Skinner wrote in January 1979, a few weeks away from Zimbabwe’s independence.

"Our tragedy is that, whether we like it or not, the United States has inherited (from the British Empire) the role of metropole (that is the new mother country) of all whites in Southern Africa.

"This is not a role we welcomed, but it is one we cannot avoid . . . We are the ones who have led the discussions about the future of these countries (of Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa.)"

Even this liberal white professor and former ambassador was racist enough to believe that the US really has no choice but to always gang up against African interests and in defence of white settler interests.

This is what has outraged Zimbabweans against US, British and EU policies.

Labels: MDC, NEOCOLONIALISM

posted by MrK @ 1:52 AM