(HERALD) CNN’s war against Africa

CNN’s war against Africa

THIS is the final of a two-part series in which DR TAFATAONA MAHOSO looks at how President Mugabe’s interview with CNN’s international correspondent Christiane Amanpour exposed the Western media’s double standards and how the regime change lobby has become part of the media’s diary

THE struggle which CNN mounted against President Mugabe and the binary frame used on September 24, 2009 date back to 1957-1961, when the Anglo-Saxon axis waged a war against the African revolution in Congo and murdered the first Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba in a swift and cruel process of regime change.

Using the cover of the United Nations and ability to blend white racism with anti-communism, the United States was able to subsume different white nationalist agendas under its synthetic whiteness marketed as global anti-communism.

The British interest expressed through South Africa and the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, the Belgian interest expressed through Belgian companies and soldiers in Katanga, and the US interest and suspicion against the Soviet Union — all came together to eliminate Patrice Lumumba and abort the African revolution.

Significantly, the US lobby group American Committee for Aid to Katanga Freedom Fighters (ACAKFF) did not only promote the blending of white supremacy with anti-communism in the destruction of the African revolution in Congo; it also lived to become the nucleus of the Rhodesia lobby in the US after Rhodesia, like Katanga, declared its unilateral independence in 1965, four years after the overthrow of the African revolution in Congo.

The American lobby for white supremacy in the Congo became the Rhodesia lobby after Rhodesia’s UDI. It also became the source of diplomatic support and mercenaries for Moise Tshombe’s Katanga as for Ian Smith’s Rhodesia.

Therefore Lumumba’s assassination had far-reaching consequences for the African revolution in Southern Africa.

Another significant development was the prevalence of media lies and the willingness of all parties in the imperial triangle not to contradict each other. There was agreement not just on the portrayal of Lumumba and the Congo revolution as communist and anti-Western, but also on the suppression of information on the roles played by the United Nations, the US government, the Belgian government, the British government, the Congolese government and the provincial puppet regime of Tshombe in Katanga.

This willingness to lie and to cover-up what was happening in the Congo is similar to the willingness not only to misrepresent the Zimbabwe war of liberation against settler Rhodesia but also the struggle of the Zimbabwean liberation movement in government in later years to reclaim African land from white settlers.

Using the example of the Congo, we notice the following: the victory of Lumumba’s party in elections in 1960 was both surprising and unwelcome to the imperialist and settlerist interests.

As a result, Lumumba’s victory was followed by a campaign of vilification and demonisation in all the Western capitals and in Rhodesia and South Africa.

Even more astounding was the cover-up of the collective crime of the Western powers and interests against Lumumba and the people of the Congo. This cover-up is being repeated over Zimbabwe. The damage inflicted on Zimbabweans through illegal economic sanctions must be covered up.

Lumumba, Joseph Okito and Maurice Mpolo were murdered the night of January 17, 1961. The bodies were later exhumed and dissolved in acid on January 18, 1961.

The telltale signs of global foul play were everywhere for anyone to see who would bother to exercise curiosity and ask questions. For instance, why did the UN which had come to Congo at the invitation of prime minister Lumumba, proceed to impose sanctions on the prime minister and his government as well as place him under house arrest and therefore facilitate his capture and transfer from Leopoldville (Kinshasa) to Katanga?

After Lumumba and his colleagues were handed to Tshombe and the Belgians, UN officials had opportunity to demand to see the three or to have them handed over to the Red Cross. They did not.

On February 10 a new lie was made up, that Lumumba and his colleagues had mysteriously escaped from prison in Katanga. Then on February 13 a new statement was issued to say that the trio had fallen into the hands of hostile villagers who had swiftly killed them.

Tshombe’s interior minister Godefroid Munongo was used to produce fake death certificates, instead of bodies, as proof that the three had been killed by villagers. The death certificates had been faked by a white Belgian doctor, Guy Pieters, who did not see the bodies but trusted someone else who swore that he had seen the bodies.

In short, it took from January 17 to February 13 1961 for the world to learn that Lumumba and his ministers had been killed. But the announcement itself was meant to compound the multilateral Anglo-Saxon complicity and cover-up.

If we now move to the operations of the "triangle" in Rhodesia and Zimbabwe during Ian Smith’s UDI (1965-1980) and during the Third Chimurenga, that is the land reclamation phase of the revolution from 1992 to 2004 we find both similarities and differences.

In both phases, the US provided the overriding frame and the European Union obliged. Zimbabwe was framed as rebelling against the global neo-liberal demand to "reform".

The victory of Zanu-PF in the 1980 election, though not completely a surprise, was undesirable to the Western powers who had preferred Bishop Abel Muzorewa’s UANC.

There were assassination attempts on Cde Robert Gabriel Mugabe of Zanu-PF followed by an attempted coup d’etat, once Cde Mugabe had won the election. On the eve of independence the Rhodesians destroyed tonnes of sensitive government records with the knowledge and connivance of the Western powers.

At the time this destruction was blamed on the Rhodesians but it now appears that the British and the North Americans did not object to the destruction of evidence because they were also implicated in escalating violence and prolonging the Rhodesian war through top-level visits to Ian Smith and through the supply of oil, weapons and mercenaries in violation of UN sanctions.

In the 1965-1980 period the UN was relatively strong because of the growths of the Non-Aligned Movement and the Organisation of African Unity in the context of a bipolar world. In the 1992-2004 period, however, the weakness of the UN shown in the case of the Congo crisis had returned, with the UNDP, the WFP, Unicef, Unesco and the Global Aids Fund being used against Zimbabwe as if they were bilateral instruments of the UK or US and its EU allies.

More significantly, the weakening of the UN in the 1992-2004 period allowed almost a repeat of what happened in the Congo in the 1960s:

l The unfolding of an elaborate vilification and demonisation programme against Zimbabwe based on mass media;

l The revival of global and white anti-Mugabe lobbies similar to the Katanga and Rhodesia lobbies of the 1960s and 1970s;

l A very high dosage of big trans-Atlantic lies employed against Zimbabwe, similar to those against Lumumba and the Congo revolution in 1960-1961

l The masking of white supremacy under the slogan of "globalisation" similar to the masking of white supremacy under the slogan of combating communism in the 1960s and 1970s.

Therefore there has existed in the US, an Anglo-American, Anglo-Rhodesian lobby to protect white settler interests and Anglo-American interests in Zimbabwe and throughout Sadc. The following words were written in 1979 by a US diplomat and they indicate why the US government and US media still see their mission as the protection of white settlers:

"Our tragedy is that, whether we like it or not, the United States has inherited the role of metropole [or the 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 [including Zimbabwe, South Africa, Namibia, Angola and Mozambique."

These are the words of former US ambassador Elliot P. Skinner at the time of the Lancaster House Conference on Rhodesia in 1979. By that time Skinner was teaching at Columbia University in New York. He was at pains to explain from a white liberal view the consistently reactionary and racist thrust of US policy toward Southern Africa, where the US appeared to favour apartheid and UDI and to be obsessed with the protection of the privileged interests of dwindling white settler minorities at the expense of overwhelming African majorities.

There was in the 1970s in the US a white racist preacher and media personality called Dr Carl McIntyre, whose support of the Rhodesian and South African apartheid regimes could be heard on more than 600 radio stations across the United States for 30 minutes every day for six days a week.

This was in the 1970s and McIntyre was among the pioneers of rightwing politics and rightwing journalism which we see today in the work of Pat Robertson, Christopher Dell, Peta Thornicroft, Christiane Amanpour and all the white media crusaders.

It is time to start telling part of this long and complex story. The crusading, racist and intolerant journalism Africans are enduring today in neo-Rhodesian and neo-apartheid media took some time to develop. It is part of the history of the white racist rightwing, which took power in the West in the last 15 to 30 years. The crusading and sectarian tone of this journalism is not accidental. It is an integral feature of what is sometimes called "robust journalism".

This journalism is sometimes represented by sponsored hate-stations directed against Zimbabwe, against Palestinians, against Cuba, against Venezuela, against Bolivia and against Iran.

For instance, Gerald Horne in is book, "From the Barrel of a Gun: The United States and the War Against Zimbabwe, 1965-1980", has documented the collusion between white Western corporate media and local white media. These two forces colluded in degrading and demonising the African liberation movements, in promoting white supremacy, and in exploiting the myth of superior and protected white womanhood, again in order to degrade African women and humiliate African men.

According to Horne: "Sex rested close to the heart of Rhodesian military operations. Not only was the protection of Rhodesian [white] women from allegedly ravaging Africans seen as a rationale for the war but, like many [white] male enterprises, the military used female images to foment [white] male bonding."

Western "independent" media and white settler media colluded in this racist and sexist strategy. "Romance, sexuality and gender anxiety were an essential component of the elements that drove US citizens to Rhodesia — and kept them there . . . One of the prime linkages in this chain of whiteness were the mass media . . ." The linkages remain now, causing so much Western interest in how we manage our media in Zimbabwe.

Now, any thinking African would therefore carefully scrutinise the scores of supposed mass media companies seeking to open up the Zimbabwean media market and to set up newspapers, magazines, radio stations, television stations and internet services. Who are the owners and drivers of these projects? Why do they seek to bless us now?