Maravi

(HERALD) WAFAWAROVA: Democratisation for whom?

WAFAWAROVA: Democratisation for whom?
Thursday, 30 June 2011 01:00
Reason Wafawarova

PERHAPS the most extreme disaster visited upon Zimbabwe since independence was the involvement of Westerners in the politics of a political party by the name Movement for Democratic Change.

The episode was a mere decade, but it restored virtual slavery to the people of Zimbabwe, killing thousands and displacing hundreds of thousands, and opening the country to a virtual welfare takeover by Western charities, the so-called NGOs.

All this came in the name of democratisation, just like the bombing of Libyan people is supposed to be for their own good. Before the NATO bombings from the skies of Libya, not even one Libyan could be described as poor, not even was homeless, and not even one Western charity was doing humanitarian work in Libya, according to statistics recently provided by Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan.

Now we hear Westerners blaming Col Gaddafi for what they say is his inhumane behaviour of blocking humanitarian aid into Libya. Without the West bombing Libyans from every angle in the sky, there would be no need for humanitarian aid in Libya. But we hear NATO is freeing Libyans from themselves, from their own leadership - and the Libyans are supposed to be grateful for humanitarian aid provided by the West precisely because the West itself has utterly destroyed Libya's lifeline.

The most extreme of the many disasters ever visited upon Haiti since its liberation from France was the invasion by Woodrow Wilson in 1915, restoring virtual slavery, and mercilessly murdering fifteen thousand innocent souls, according to Haitian historian Roger Gaillard.

Of course, the entire goal of the invasion was to open up Haiti to a complete takeover by US corporations - something very familiar with most, if not all of the over 35 invasions carried out by the US since 1945.

After the invasion of Haiti, the US left the shattered society in the hands of a ruthless, US trained National Guard serving the interests of the Haitian elites, especially the mulatto and the whites. It did not really matter that this elite was even more predatory and rapacious than the French colonists, or that it had a culture of unprecedented corruption.

These elites were no different to the puppet regime of Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, a regime that is made up of absolute thieves and shameless election cheats. Even Western elites acknowledge publicly that Hamid Karzai is a remarkably corrupt and dishonest fellow. Both the Karzai regime and Haiti's National Guard of 1915 are excellent examples of the many triumphs of "Wilsonian idealism," itself a forerunner of modern day "democratisation" - the very pretext under which Western firepower is descending upon the people of Libya. The takeover of Haiti by US corporations was then accomplished by the disbanding of Parliament under US Marine guns. This was after the Haitian Parliament had dared to refuse to accede to the US demand that it accepts a US-written constitution that permitted the "progressive measures" of allowing US capital owners free reign over the resources of Haiti.

Those Zimbabweans who still do not understand why Western influence over the constitution making process is undesirable may just need to be reminded of the Haitian history. Western interests can never have something to do with true democracy. In fact, Western interests in resourced countries like Zimbabwe, which are the only countries such interests are ever seen anyway; are undemocratic and entirely selfish - seeking nothing short of Western monopoly and exploitation of natural resources at the expense of the masses of these countries.

Western countries can cry with voices louder than the trumpet about the diamonds of Zimbabwe being looted by a small but powerful elite, but the reality of the matter is that their interest in the diamonds is no different from what the Zimbabwean elite is allegedly doing. In fact the elites in question hardly have any capacity to match the rate at which Westerners are known to siphon raw resources from developing countries. These would be small time robbers standing like a pea to a mountain when the sins of Washington are paraded.

The West relies so much on the facade of democracy in pushing for hegemony over the affairs of weaker nations. This is why a Zimbabwe election under the harsh economic hardships brought about by illegal Western economic sanctions is favourable to the West. They reckon the sanctions- induced hardships can only discredit Zanu-PF as a failed political party, disenfranchising people from the legacy of the revolutionary party. So, they want to manipulate the electoral process and then they can tag the process as democratisation, as a mark of democracy in Africa. In the 1915 Haiti, US occupiers indeed carried out a referendum for their constitution, in which the US demands received 99,9 percent approval, with only 5 percent of the population participating.

Of course, the measures were deemed progressive for Haiti, as they are for sanctioned Zimbabwe, for Libya too, soon for Syria, and barring foolhardy naivety for Iran as well. The US State Department explained that Haitians were "inferior people" and "It was obvious that if our occupation was to be beneficial to Haiti and further her progress it was necessary that foreign capital should come to Haiti. . . (and) Americans could hardly be expected to put their money into plantations and big agricultural enterprises in Haiti if they could not themselves own the land on which their money was to be spent."

How many times have we heard the same argument put forward over the mineral resources of Zimbabwe, as well as over the agrarian regime - now completely controlled by Zimbabwean capital? We must understand that it was out of a sincere desire to help suffering Haitians that the United States forced them at gun point to allow US investors to take over their country in an "unselfish intervention" carried out in a "fatherly way" with no thought of "preferential advantages, commercial or otherwise" for the Americans (New York Times).

It is of course the same "unselfish intervention" we see happening in Libya today - NATO bombing the Libyan cities to ashes in a "fatherly way," using high precision lethal bombs with no thought whatsoever of "preferential advantages, commercial or otherwise;" just out of the West's true love for the civilians of Libya, who the West are convinced would have been victims of a Gaddafi-inflicted genocide, of course based on the irrefutable evidence that Western leaders thought as such. It is evidence enough for Obama to simply think that a genocide is about to happen.

The West will always work with locals to buffer the possible effect of nationalism and anti-imperialism. These locals are the pathetic puppets that receive Western funding in the name of promoting what is often called democracy. In Haiti, the lapdog National Guard perfected the evil art of repression and terror, and later the Duvalier dictatorship prospered and obscenely enriched itself, totally isolated from the country they were helping to rob - completely alienating the masses.

Ronald Reagan assigned USaid and the World Bank to institute programs that would turn Haiti into the "Taiwan of the Caribbean", perhaps the same way Benghazi is likely to be turned into a "Taiwan of Libya". For Haiti, the strategy was to make sure that the country would import food and other commodities from the United States, while working people toiled forever in US-owned assembly plants. This is the old trick of comparative advantage where weaker but resourced countries are prevented from adding value to their resources, while being forced to provide cheap labour in the exploitation of the raw materials.

Only Western corporations can successfully capitalise the mining of diamonds at Zimbabwe's Chiadzwa. Otherwise, Zimbabweans themselves can only provide cheap labour as employees, that way reducing the high unemployment rate in the country. This business of South African companies and the Chinese mining at Chiadzwa is simply unacceptable. This is why the Western sponsored MDC-T does not believe there is any meaningful mining of diamonds happening at Chiadzwa.

The only meaningful mining known to the MDC-T and its Finance Minister Tendai Biti is mining made possible by Western capital, employing thousands of labour-gifted Africans, and of course administered from

Western capitals. Any mining done by any other people can only constitute "gross human rights abuses". When Zanu-PF talks of cutting diamonds within Zimbabwe, they must be dismissed for who they are; "inferior people" who do not understand the benevolence of "unselfish" Westerners, who are always coming to the rescue of us lesser peoples in a "fatherly way".

In 1985, the World Bank reported that Haiti's export-oriented development strategy would see domestic consumption "markedly restrained in order to shift the required share of output increases into exports," emphasising "the expansion of private enterprises," while support for education had to be "minimised" and such "social objectives" as welfare had to be privatised.

A decade later, it was Zimbabwe receiving identical instructions from the same World Bank and its partner in crime, the IMF. And, the demise of the economy began, leading to the 1997 Land Summit, itself a result of growing discontent among the masses.

After Esap destroyed the industrial economy, more and more people began to see their future as dependent on land.

As happened to Haiti, Zimbabwe was "advised" that "private projects with high economic returns should be strongly supported," in preference to "public expenditures in the social sectors" and that "less emphasis should be placed on social objectives which increase consumption." These instructions marked the beginning of problems bedevilling such institutions as the University of Zimbabwe and power utility Zesa, today.

The focus from the West is always to support private capital; in short to support democracy for the rich minority, sidelining "social objectives," the euphemism for people-oriented projects. But, the real Taiwan was following a different model.

Taiwan was allowed freedom from foreign control, and it pursued radically different policies to those dictated to Haiti. Taiwan targetted investment to rural areas so that they could increase consumption and prevent rural-urban migration - the root cause for Africa's countless miserable urban slums, for which President Mugabe is bitterly criticised by the West for clearing off.

The slums of Haiti and Africa are a direct result of the progressive policies dictated by the IMF and the World Bank. This is why Haiti remained Haiti, and never became Taiwan. With liberal policies from the IMF and the World Bank, Zimbabwe will remain the Zimbabwe we know today, and will never become a Malaysia or Singapore, let alone a Switzerland. Tendai Biti needs to hear this message.

Only local protectionism will give Zimbabwe a comparative advantage to develop its economy. Foreign capital is no panacea to our woes. It is part of our woes and any sane Finance Minister must treat it as such.

We cannot elevate economic unconsciousness to the level of pure logic. The economic disasters brought upon Haitians by the US were described by the Reagan administration as an "encouraging step forward" - certainly forward for the looting foreigners and their Haitian elitist sidekicks, but a million steps backward for the masses of Haiti - robbed blind by insane corporations enjoying the protection of evil minded politicians.

So pleased was Reagan that he supported the Haitian legislature for passing a law requiring every political party to recognise president-for-life "Baby Doc" Duvalier as the supreme arbiter of the nation, outlawing the Christian Democrats, and granting the government the right to suspend the rights of any political party without giving reasons. This was the height of Reagan's "democracy enhancement," just like he had another fabulous achievement in Afghanistan, where he helped create the woman-hating Taliban government.

More than likely, Obama will create his own tyrannical regime in Libya, if only NATO will succeed in its resolve to publicly assassinate the Libyan leader so that the Al-Qaeda affiliated Benghazi rebels can take over power. These rebels are the Wahhaabist extremists who are inherently anti-West and also anti-woman freedom.

Reagan was so thrilled with Duvalier's model of democracy that his administration kept providing military aid to the vicious and venal dictator so that he could keep up his fabulous and successful democratising of Haiti, making all Haitians worship him by law.

Reagan had every reason to celebrate the democracy he had "enhanced" in Haiti. The law to recognise the president-for-life had passed through Parliament and had been ratified by a majority of 99,8 percent, quite close to the 99,9 percent achieved under Wilsonian idealism. What more democracy does can one expect?

It does not matter the Haitian Parliamentarians were bludgeoned by the system to vote the way they did. What mattered was they voted for the new law. Westerners are quite aware that client regimes can force through repressive laws for the master as much as they can do so for their own benefit. That is how puppet politics are carried out.

Then, there was Haiti's first free election in 1990. For the first time the impoverished majority entered the political arena and they elected their own candidate by a two thirds majority. This marked the beginning of the short era of the highly popular Jean Bertrand Aristide.

Aristide's victory shocked Washington and most observers. Not much attention had been paid to this man, with most observers pinning their hopes and opinions on the US-backed Marc Bazin, himself a former World Bank official. Of course Bazin had all the support from Haiti's wealthy elite, but he was not wanted in the slums and the Ghettoes.

For his troubles, Bazin received 14 percent of the vote, a clear sign of the kind of democracy the US had created under Duvalier - a democracy where the wishes of 14 percent of the population was treated as majority opinion. During Aristide's tenure there was an interesting development. Refugees started returning from the US and other parts of the world in a moment of meaningful hope. This was in stark contrast to the

Duvalier era where hundreds of thousands of refugees were fleeing terror and repression, only to be turned away by the US Coast Guard, when they were not bundled to Guantanamo Bay against both US and international laws.

The fewer people who still sought asylum when Aristide was in office were swiftly granted asylum visas, and, Washington happily announced that it was receiving refugees that were fleeing a democratic government that the US totally opposed, not the vicious Duvalier regime that the US supported. By shifting real democracy towards benefitting the impoverished masses, Aristide was drifting dangerously from the US orbit - adopting people-oriented policies that disadvantaged the rich US investors and the minority Haitian elites.

Washington typically responded by pouring aid to the business-led opposition and moving in to strangulate and undermine the Aristide government by numerous devices that always came in the name of "democracy promotion". By 1991 the CIA had succeeded in instituting a much anticipated military coup, killing thousands of Haitians in the process. The architect in chief of this massacre was Emmanuel Constant, the leader of the terrorist organisation Front pour I' Advancement et le Proges Haitien (FRAPH), who was to be later protected from prosecution by the Clinton administration, clearly because he knew too much to be allowed to reveal.

When Aristide was restored by the US in 1994, 160 000 pages of documentation were confiscated by the CIA "to avoid embarrassing revelations," according to Human Rights Watch. The restoration of Aristide was an act of Bill Clinton's discretion, after he had convinced himself that the Haitian population had been punished and intimidated enough, and that Aristide himself had been "civilised" by US instructors. The condition for the reinstatement was that Aristide would abandon his people-oriented policies and pursue neo-liberal policies, pretty much the very program that Washington had prepared for the US-backed candidate he had defeated in 1990. The greatest fear among Zimbabweans today is the instruction given to the MDC-T by Washington and other of its Western backers. It is the fear of these neo-liberal policies that makes the prospect of an MDC-T electoral victory a matter of national security.

Haiti was barred from providing any protection for its economy, and Zimbabweans rightfully fear for the fate of the land reform program and the indigenisation policies. Reversal of these policies is a possibility under an MDC-T government, though it is an unlikelihood. Democracy must be for and about the people in whose countries democracy is being talked about, not about the interests of Westerners, not even about the values from the West. Neither is democracy simply a matter of holding free and fair elections.

Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!
Reason Wafawarova is a political writer and can be contacted on wafawarova@yahoo.co.ukThis e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or reason@rwafa warova.com or visit www.rwafawarova.com

Labels: HAITI, JEAN BERTRAND ARISTIDE, MUAMMAR AL-GADDAFI, NEOCOLONIALISM, REASON WAFAWAROVA

posted by MrK @ 5:21 PM