(ZIMPAPERS) AFRICAN FOCUS with Tafataona Mahoso: Ouattara’s Nato demands on Cote d’Ivoire

Monday, January 31, 2011

(ZIMPAPERS) AFRICAN FOCUS with Tafataona Mahoso: Ouattara’s Nato demands on Cote d’Ivoire

AFRICAN FOCUS with Tafataona Mahoso: Ouattara’s Nato demands on Cote d’Ivoire
Sunday, 30 January 2011 23:37 Blogs
By Tafataona P. Mahoso

“Haiwa, Ishe wangu, ini nomukadzi uyu tigere paimba imwe chete; ini ndakapona mwanakomana ndigere naye paimba.

Zvino ndapona mwana wangu mazuva matatu, mukadzi uyu akaponawo mwanakomana wake . . . Zvino mwanakomana womukadzi uyu akazofa usiku, nokuti mai vake vakavata pedera pake pamusana pamavato muhope . . . Amai ava vakataura saizvozvo pamberi pa Mambo Soromoni.

“Mambo akati, nditorerei banga rehondo. Varanda vakauya nomunondo kuna Mambo. Mambo akati gurai nepakati mwana wasara ari mupenyu, mupe mai mumwe nemumwe rutivi rwake.
“Ipapo mukadzi aive mai vechokwadi vemwana mupenyu akati kuna Mambo: Haiwa, Ishe wangu, chipai zvenyu mumwe wangu mwana ari mupenyu, pane kuti aurayiwe.
“Asi mumwe wake wakanga asiriye nyakubereka mwana mupenyu akati kuna Mambo: Zvirinane tienzane. Kuita kuti mwana asave wangu kana kuti wemumwe wangu; mugurei zvenyu napakati, tipedze bopoto.

Ipapo Mambo Soromoni akapindura akati: Mai varamba kuti mwana adimburwe nepakati, ndivo nyakubereka. Vapei mwana.” (1 Madzimambo 3:17-27, Native Version, paraphrased)
As far back as January 22 2006, I pointed out in this column that the story of Cote d’Ivoire was an important Pan-African story begging for a non-existent Pan-African Press to attend to it and therefore terribly mishandled and misunderstood. Indeed Africa continues to allow the clans of Judas to pretend to play the role of Solomon in African affairs.

The latest episode in this story, on January 25 2011, appeared on Page B5 of the Business Section of The Herald, borrowed from Xinhua. Concluding with the line: “Laurent Gbagbo has rejected Raila Odinga as mediator, saying he is biased,” the story is a classic study in African self-denial, in the sense that the local Press failed to recognise its profound, strategic significance in relations between Africa and the North Atlantic Organisation (Nato) and the European Union (EU).

Alassane Ouattara, the man now claiming to be the only legitimate leader and President of Cote d’Ivoire, is demanding a total economic, financial and commercial blockade against the very same people he claims to have liberated through alleged victory in the disputed 2010 election. This latest demand comes after Ouattara had already called upon the security forces and the workers of Cote d’Ivoire to overthrow incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo’s government. The armed forces, the police and workers ignored that demand. The total blockade demanded by Ouattara is supposed to starve the workers and the security forces into submission. This means Ouattara is eating from somewhere separate from the people.

Seeing that he did not have the popular internal support which he thought he commanded, Ouattara has finally revealed where the base of his “power” is: in Nato, outside Cote d’Ivoire.

This is the meaning of the terse announcement that “Cote d’Ivoire’s Alassane Ouattara ordered [sic] the suspension of the country’s cocoa and coffee exports, media reports quoted a statement from Ouattara’s government as saying yesterday.”

What is most impressive about the story is Ouattara’s total reliance on external forces and external factors: the absence of a true, popular base for him in the heartland of Cote d’Ivoire. Ouattara “swore himself in as president;” he is holed up in a hotel, surrounded by a dubious UN force sponsored by Nato; and like Raila Odinga of Kenya, he wants to use this external support and economic crisis to negotiate his way into office without an audit or inquiry into the disputed election, because such an audit might show that his claim to popular electoral victory is hollow. His only claim to power is based on the now tedious Press statement that “Ouattara was backed by the international community including the United Nations, the African Union, the Economic Community of West African States, the United States and France as a winner of the West African country’s presidential elections, although the incumbent Laurent Gbagbo refuses to step down”.

Since when did stepping down become the answer to conflict over a dubious and contested election result? It was determined in Nato as far back as 2006.
What the Press claim does not reveal is the fact that this alleged external support has nothing to do with the alleged electoral victory. The pretence of a 2010 election was merely intended to validate an illegal regime change position taken as far back as mid-January 2006.

The evil of that illegal regime change agenda has now been revealed through Ouattara’s demand on behalf of Nato to have Europe and the US impose a total blockade on the people of Ivory Coast similar to the illegal US blockade of Cuba which was also demanded by Cuban sellouts who reside in Miami, Florida. The only difference between Ouattara’s so-called “government” and the Cuban mafia in Miami, USA, is that Ouattara’s exile is internal; he is exiled in a hotel surrounded by foreigners in his own country.

And from that hotel protected by foreigners, Ouattara wants the population starved to death for refusing to stage an uprising to install him on behalf of Nato. In other words Ouattara, in relation to the people, is no different from that whore who begged Solomon to cut the one living child into two dead halves so that she, as the false “mother”, would reduce the real mother to the “equal” status of childlessness. Unfortunately the AU Commission is also another whore. Instead of looking for a Solomon to mediate, they rushed to ask that Judas, Raila Odinga, knowing very well that he is another client of the US and EU and would happily deliver the head of Gbagbo on a platter. As presidents Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and Jacob Zuma of South Africa have pointed out: no mediator of integrity would start by telling only one of the parties in a dispute to commit suicide.

Indeed, it is worth revisiting the Ivorian story as, it was already known in 2006, in order to enable readers to understand the context of Ouattara’s shocking demand for sanctions against the people of Cote d’Ivoire.

The role of the United Nations in Cote d’Ivoire, Lebanon, former Yugoslavia and Iraq has been scandalous. It reminds Africans of the abuse of the same UN by Belgium, the US and their allies in the overthrow and assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the legitimate, popularly elected Prime Minister of Congo in 1960-61.

Zimbabwean patriots have come to appreciate more deeply the need to overhaul the UN after the shocking behaviour of the so-called UN special envoys: Anna Kajamulo Tibaijuka and Jan Egeland, during and after the two envoys’ separate visits to this country in 2005.

The same UN was embroiled in a much worse controversy in 2006 in Cote d’Ivoire, which reminded followers of so-called UN peace-keeping missions of what happened in Baghdad in August 2003, when the resistance to the US-UK occupation of Iraq attacked UN headquarters and killed the UN Secretary-General’s representative and many of his staff.

In the capital of Cote d’Ivoire, in January 2006, Ivorian patriots surrounded the headquarters of the UN because they were incensed by that organisation’s complicity in the Euro-American agenda to maintain the country as a neo-colony by supporting unconstitutional regime change. The event which precipitated the blockade of the UN headquarters in Abidjan was the decision of the imperialist powers to use the UN to terminate Cote d’Ivoire’s parliament and open the way for the imposition of an armed opposition leadership sponsored and funded by France and its Nato allies. That decision exposed the UN and the imperialist powers, underlining the need, not only to change the UN and the African Union but also to push for a second phase of the decolonisation of Cote d’Ivoire. The battle cry has been “national sovereignty” and the UN in 2006 was being accused of dictatorially suspending a national sovereign institution, the parliament of Cote d’Ivoire, in the interest of white imperialist powers and Ouattara’s armed insurgency which is favoured by France and the US.

This stand-off raises grave questions which our media have tended to ignore for a long time.
First, we were told for a long time that the Economic Community of West Africa (Ecowas), which is led by Nigeria, was responsible for overseeing the African or Pan-African agenda in all of West Africa. The same Nigeria was chairing the AU in January 2006. On the surface, therefore, it should have been easy to integrate the West African agenda with the AU agenda to bring about a Pan-African solution to the Ivorian impasse. But that did not happen.

Then, from 2004 to 2006, we were told that then President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa had become the key mediator in Cote d’Ivoire. This was confusing because it was not clear who had asked President Mbeki to mediate and what relationship he had with Ecowas and with the Euro-American interests who wanted a foreign-sponsored regime change in Cote d’Ivoire. What appeared in the media was apparent competition for leadership between Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo and South African President Thabo Mbeki, raising questions about the authority of the AU as a Pan-African body. And when Obasanjo sold out former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor to the Europeans and North Americans, it became clear that there was no sovereign Pan-African agenda or strategy in the Ecowas region.

Then there were so-called UN-appointed mediators whom the Ivoirians accused of pushing the Euro-American agenda by strengthening the armed rebels in the North while even daring to suspend a parliament!

Like Raila Odinga, the so-called UN mediators were neither viewed nor accepted as mediators. They were viewed as partisan provocateurs seeking to reduce the government to the same status as the rebels. Even in 2006, the likely scenario to come out of this external intervention was that the rebels would continue to receive weapons while the government was deprived of weapons because of the arms embargo imposed on it. In fact, the French airforce by January 2006 had already helped the rebels by destroying the Ivorian airforce.

These developments raise serious questions about African leadership in West Africa. African leaders cannot say they were not warned about Euro-American plans to use the UN to recolonise Africa for its resources.

While violence in Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan has compelled Europe and North America to upgrade the strategic value of African energy resources, the targeting of Africa for recolonisation happened before the current Middle East crisis. The North Atlantic powers developed the recolonisation strategy at the end of the Cold War. The main motive was and still is economic rivalry with Asia.
In 1993 The Herald (December 30) published a leader page article called “Open Western plans for the recolonisation of Africa”, written by Karrim Essack.
Essack said both white liberals and white conservatives in the West agreed on their need to make a moral, political and economic case for recolonisation of the world without using that term.

Among the media used to promote the case were The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Spectator, and Foreign Affairs.
Among the most open and racist advocates of recolonisation was one Paul Johnson, who like the late US Senator Jesse Helms, realised the recolonisation of the world needed to start with the colonisation of the United Nations itself. On January 20 2000, Jesse Helms announced the plan as a scheme to reform the UN and change its ideological orientation to suit the neo-liberal agenda. Paul Johnson said:
“I foresee the UN Security Council using its advanced powers moving into the business of government (as opposed to mere intervention) taking countries into trusteeship for various periods and becoming itself an architect of honest and efficient administration. It will restore the good name of colonialism it once enjoyed.”

In view of this new imperialist function, it means the so-called UN mediators in Cote d’Ivoire had Nato instructions to disband the country’s parliament!
So, according to Johnson, white reactionaries have adopted the UN as an instrument for the rehabilitation of white supremacy.
Then in 1994, Robert Kaplan published a long article in The Atlantic Monthly which, without openly advocating recolonisation as the solution for the problems he outlined, however, provided the data which the recolonisation lobby would need to make its case. The article was entitled “The Coming Anarchy.” This “anarchy” template is the same one being used by CNN, BBC, E-TV, Euro News and other Western media to explain Ivory Coast, Tunisia, Sudan, Darfur and other African situations today.
For example, this is what Kaplan wrote about Cote d’Ivoire:

“Although Sierra Leone is widely regarded as beyond salvage, the Ivory Coast has been considered an African success story, and Abidjan has been called the Paris of West Africa. Success, however, was built on two artificial factors: the high price of cocoa . . . and the talents of a French expatriate community . . . In Abidjan . . . restaurants (now) have stick- and gun- wielding guards who walk you 15 feet or so between your car and the entrance, giving you an eerie taste of what American cities might be like in the future. An Italian ambassador was tied up and robbed at gunpoint in the ambassador’s residence . . . In one instance Ivorian policemen stood by and watched the necklacing (of bandits), afraid to intervene. Each time I went to the Abidjan bus terminus, groups of young men with restless, scanning eyes surrounded my taxi, putting their hands all over the windows, demanding tips for carrying my luggage, even though I had only a rucksack.”

So Africans were guilty of ruining the former Paris of Africa. In other words, for Europe and North America, the issue in Cote d’Ivoire and Zimbabwe is not sovereignty: It is the disappearance of the white settler economy which white visitors used to relish.

This sort of narrative means that white conservatives and liberals are alike in their perception of other countries, other peoples and other cultures. They look at them in terms of how far they go to accommodate white people, make them comfortable, make them rich and treat them as special. The UN is therefore expected to help make the whole world comfortable and enriching for the white man.
Kaplan concluded the section of his article on Cote d’Ivoire:

“The economy has been shrinking since the mid-1980s. Though the French are working assiduously to preserve stability, the Ivory Coast faces a possibility worse than a coup: an anarchic implosion of criminal violence — an urbanised version of what has already happened in Somalia.”
That is why the Western media will never portray Laurent Gbagbo’s demand for sovereignty as legitimate. Then in 2000, John Peck came close to revealing some of the underlying causes of the destabilisation of Africa. In Foreign Policy magazine, Peck authored a piece called “Remilitarising Africa for Corporate Profit: The Pentagon will receive US$15 to US$20 million per year to ensure commercial diplomacy”.

In other words, the US military were given a budget to serve US arms manufacturers as their salesmen. He pointed out that on the so-called “aid” side, the US had a programme called Africa Growth Opportunity Act (AGOA), which had been subjected to some debate. But the military and security equivalent of AGOA was secret. It was called the African Crisis Response Initiative (ACRI). ACRI is the means by which the US pumps weapons into Africa and helps to train soldiers who become African presidents, such as Paul Kagame of Rwanda. ACRI has since been expanded and renamed Africom under George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

By 2002, it had become clear that the US and its allies were openly pursuing an imperialist agenda without apology. This needed some rationalisation among those people in the West who continued to frown upon imperialism. So one Sebastian Mallaby wrote a piece called “The Reluctant Imperialist: Terrorism, Failed States and the Case for Empire”.

The purpose of the article was not only to justify imperialism and recolonisation but also to hide the fact that the US is the biggest contributor to international destabilisation. Mallaby tried to argue that it is unacceptable chaos which forces the US to intervene in the internal affairs of other states. Unfortunately, there is too much evidence to show that the US and its allies hate and destabilise strong and stable governments which try to exercise their sovereignty and autonomy. Iran today is a good example.-The Sunday Mail

Labels: IVORY COAST, RAILA ODINGA