(TALKZIMBABWE) We cannot rebuild Zimbabwe on lies

We cannot rebuild Zimbabwe on lies
Sun, 28 Jun 2009 00:54:00 +0000

"Musandisaidzira kune vavengi; Nokuti zvapupu zvenhema zvakandimukira, navanofemurika nehasha." (Mapisarema 27:12)

MY first major entry into the print media in the United States was on April 18 1979, exactly one year before Zimbabwe's independence. My piece was entitled "In defence of the WCC grant to the Patriotic Front — Zimbabweans are fighting for self-determination and a non-racist society" and it appeared in The Christian Century, April 18 1979, pages 442-444.

My purpose was to refute five lies which were then prevalent in the US and other Anglo-Saxon countries about Zanu and Zapu.

One of the five lies was that the US$85 000 grant from the World Council of Churches to more than 150 000 Zimbabwean refugees under the Patriotic Front would be used to buy weapons to kill Christians in Rhodesia, even through this amounted to less than 30 cents per refugee.

A second lie was that Bishop Abel Muzorewa and Ian Smith were the last defenders of Christianity in Southern Africa and if they gave way to the Patriotic Front, the whole region would be overrun by communism, bringing centuries of Christian missionary effort to a sudden halt.

As most Zimbabweans know, the church in Zimbabwe, in fact, expanded phenomenally after independence in 1980.

I refer to this story because, as we prepare to mark Zimbabwe's Heroes Day, Zimbabwe is still besieged by well-organised liars.

Our task in April 1979 was easier than it is today because most of the liars were not Zimbabwean. In my Christian Century intervention I listed some of them as the American Conservative Union, the American Legion, the Knights of Ku Klux Klan, the John Birch Society, the American Security Council, the Heritage Foundation and the International Club.

At least 27 US Senators were in 1979 supportive of the Smith-Muzorewa deal and helping to fuel lies against the Patriotic Front.

What makes fighting against liars and lies much harder now is that the liars have become fully imbedded, fully integrated, within the so-called "civil society" sector which in this country boasts of more than 2 500 NGOs inside Zimbabwe alone.

In addition, the new communication technologies make an ever-flowing Zimbabwe-on-lies possible. The foreign liars do not have to do much work. They parachute in and out the country and obtain concocted reports from pre-paid sources among the people who help to confirm in loco whatever lies the foreign liars have been commissioned to prepare, orchestrate and repeat.

Two weeks ago, Senator Sekai Holland, the Co-Minister of State for National Healing and Reconciliation in Zimbabwe's inclusive Government, appeared on ZTV trying to refute the contents of an interview she had granted someone she called a "BBC undercover reporter".

By the time she was trying to refute it, the BBC video had already been aired and the British House of Lords had used it to justify a debate on Zimbabwe. In the meantime a director of Amnesty International had also parachuted into the country with an equally damning report on "the appalling and deteriorating human rights situation in Zimbabwe."

The BBC tape featuring Senator Holland made astounding claims that no one was safe in Zimbabwe, that there existed in Zimbabwe a ZANU-PF list of MDC-T leaders to be assassinated and that the inclusive government was paying US$3 million a day to Zanu-PF militias whose job was to beat up MDC-T supporters.

The contents in fact sounded like a recycling of the same BBC documentary of 2004 called Secrets of the Camps aired in January and February 2004 and concocted by Hillary Anderson. In other words, the contents were the usual BBC fare.

In the Hillary Anderson tape there was complete failure to identify the location and context of the tape as Zimbabwe, there was the appearance of Table Mountain in the widow, and there were strange Afrikaans accents among the voices of the supposed Zanu-PF "thugs."

In the 2009 video, the so-called undercover reporter got a Senator who is also a Minister of State. And the Senator's reaction raised more questions than answers.

l She said that she thought she was being interviewed by someone representing a donor agency interested in funding projects in the Senator's constituency.

l She said she now realises the person was a BBC undercover reporter.

l She said the claims she made about the human rights situation in Zimbabwe were made before the formation of the inclusive government in February 2009 and not in June 2009.

It was obvious from Minister Holland's efforts that she felt the video compromised her position as a Minister of State and put into question her sincerity about national healing and reconciliation.

It was not clear why she thought the claims she made on the tape would be all right if her listeners placed them before 13 February 2009. National healing and reconciliation are about individual and collective integrity as well as mutual trust among the people.

In reality it is the cumulative effect of all the lies which have been told about Zimbabwe since 1997 which remains an obstacle to the reconstruction of the country in economic as well as human and spiritual terms. Lies do not expire. They can only be withdrawn or corrected, even though the withdrawal or correction does not reverse the damage already done.

If the Senator in fact made those claims to BBC at any time during the years Zimbabwe has been under attack because of its African land reclamation programme, then there arise serious questions about Mrs Holland's leadership in the national healing and reconciliation process.

The lies told against Zimbabwe have been generated in order to justify illegal sanctions against Zimbabwe and the sanctions remain in place to this day. The sanctions are taking casualities on a daily basis and they will continue doing so even after they have been lifted.

The events surrounding Senator Holland's outburst against the BBC suggest that the western propaganda war against Zimbabwe has not ended. Unfortunately, the Senator chose to deal with the incident only in personal terms. If the BBC uses spies as journalists and journalists as spies, how is the state supposed to respond to such a mass media service? Is it only the BBC which uses such under-handed means to get stories? Why is the BBC or any other western media interested in telling lies about Zimbabwe?

The video in which Senator Holland features was directed against the national healing and reconciliation efforts in which the Senator is involved. It was also directed against peace in Zimbabwe. In other words, the video constitutes war-like propaganda. How are we supposed to respond to it? This is important since the same British House of Lords on 14 March 2007 was asked to consider why Zimbabwe should not be invaded the same way Iraq was invaded in 2003. The first appropriate response to war-like propaganda directed against the peace is to assume that it is used so often because it has worked before against many countries. Therefore "black propaganda" by the white axis powers must be taken seriously. As the editor of African Business wrote in his editorial of February 1998, "People, some in very high places, believe what they read in their papers (even when it is concocted rubbish.) Their attitudes are shaped by what they read and they behave accordingly."

Television is even more persuasive than the Press.

In other words, the propagandists of the Anglo-Saxon axis know that most leaders in most sectors are too busy to afford the time and energy to cross-check and double-check what they read, watch or hear. They therefore make things easy for themselves by trusting and believing those who make "news" convenient for them by bringing them ready-packaged "information" which does not require much effort to digest. War-like propaganda fits the bill.

The second appropriate response follows from the first: Every country must have think-tanks, agencies and individuals tasked with tracking propaganda directed against its citizens and finding and recommending effective responses.

The third appropriate response is to train one's own citizens to recognise different kinds and different levels of propaganda. The fact that the Anglo-Saxon axis has been deploying war-time lies against our peace should send us an unmistaken message. According to Ludo Martens, using the example of attacks of Eastern Europe during the Thatcher-Reagan era:

"When the fundamentals of capitalism are threatened, no bourgeois state will hesitate to massacre thousands of workers or peasants, hundreds of thousands if need be. We only need to look at events (mostly seldom heard of in our western media) in Germany 1918, Hungary 1919, Franco's counter-revolution in Spain in 1936, Fascism in Germany and Italy, the British war against the Greek anti-fascists between 1944 and 1949."

Mr Martens could have added the US-sponsored coup in Chile in 1973 and the joint invasion of DRC by Rwanda and Uganda in 1997-98.

The model for regime change in Zimbabwe derives from joint US-EU-NATO efforts in Eastern Europe in the 1990s.

One particularly horrific target of the western onslaught was Nikolai Ceausescu's Romania in 1989. All the major western media employed the mode of war-like propaganda against all the East European "regimes" which the imperialist powers had targetted for "regime change." As a result, all these media hid the extent to which western right-wing spies, thugs and special forces had infiltrated Romania with the purpose of instigating mayhem which was to be blamed on Nikolai Ceausescu, his wife and the Romanian intelligence service, the Securitate.

The western-sponsored NGOs, parties and state departments which had been thoroughly infiltrated by western special forces and agents were the ones to be presented in western media as victims of violence. But one year after the upheavals, investigations showed that the western-infiltrated groups, parties and forces instigated and perpetrated the violence. This was proven by studying the buildings occupied by the various parties and the direction, damage, and extent of bullets and bombs. In December 1989, for instance, the Belgian paper Bilk reported that Ceausescu's Securitate had murdered 100 000 while Le Journal et Independence put the number at 70 000 dead and 300 000 wounded.

TV pictures showed what were alleged to be 4 630 corpses in one mass grave in Timisoara on 24 December 1989. All were supposed to be victims of Ceausescu. Wilfred Martens, the Belgian Prime Minister, declared on television that same 24th of December 1989 that there were 12 000 corpses in Timisoara alone. After much of the media hype was over and the country completely overrun by western agents and their Romanian collaborators, it was concluded that on average the western media and politicians had inflated the numbers of people murdered or injured by a factor exceeding 133. This was because of prior prejudice in the west against the demonised Ceausescu.