Maravi

(HERALD) Mugabe-bashing, Politics of humanitarian aid

Mugabe-bashing, Politics of humanitarian aid
Tuesday, 12 July 2011 02:00
By Farirai Chubvu

IN the run-up to the 2008 harmonised elections, the MDC-T leadership told us ad nauseum, that their Western handlers were standing at the borders ready to rush in with bagfuls of greenbacks (US dollars) to improve people's livelihoods. Some, in their wisdom or lack of it, swallowed this rhetoric and almost sent the revolution out of kilter when they voted for Tsvangirai and his cat's paw party.

The 2008 cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe and the dawn of the inclusive Government were both met with enthusiastic if not bragging announcements of support pledges from a few of these Western countries.

It is not like the sanctions-ravaged country had not needed any aid since the illegal sanctions were imposed in 2001.

Organisations like Oxfam, Save the Children and others had been involved with providing humanitarian aid in many parts of the country during that period.

During this time the US led Western alliance had their governments largely involved in the acrimonious rhetoric that all the lack and want in Zimbabwe was Mugabe's fault, not a result of the economic strangulation that had collectively launched on Zimbabwe.

Now three years down the line, ‘‘the best finance minister'' in Africa is still singing the blues and today stands at loggerheads with long-suffering civil servants who want to know when their lot will be improved.

Many in the public service and ordinary Zimbabweans country-wide must surely know that their livelihoods were destroyed by the West's illegal economic sanctions regime that the MDC-T leadership refuse to condemn to this day.

At the risk of being viewed as one wont to vitiating the GPA and its inclusive Government, and in the process frustrating the helping hand we believe the West is, this writer will interrogate the posturing of humanitarian intervention we saw when the Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai visited the White House in 2008, along with pledges made by other Western governments - all supposedly to be expected to come through unnamed Western NGOs operating in Zimbabwe.

In international relations, states are rarely considered as moral agents; they are vehicles of power, which operate in the interests of the particular internal power structures of their respective societies. So, anybody who intervenes in another country is most likely going to be doing so for their own purposes - and that has always been true in history.

When the US decided to intervene in Somalia in 1992, that was sold in heartland America as "humanitarian intervention" just as was the promised US$73 million to Zimbabwe by US president Barack Obama.

For Somalia, the United States waited very carefully as the Somali famine ravaged the country between 1991 and 1992, the same way they waited patiently as the economy of Zimbabwe crumbled under ruinous sanctions from 2001 to date.

The same major international aid organisations like the Red Cross, Save the Children and others were doing a lot of work in Somalia just like they have been doing in Zimbabwe, albeit not enough to halt the demise in both cases.

So, if the US government had had any humanitarian feelings with regard to Somalia - it had plenty of time to show it - in fact they could have shown it from 1978 through to 1990, when the US was Siad Barre's chief international supporter.

When the US' supported strongman collapsed, the US pulled out, a civil war erupted and has not yet ended. There was mass starvation, and the US did nothing.

The famine and the civil war reached peak levels in 1992, and still the US waited cleverly until around the November 1992 Presidential election in the US.

Then, Somalia became a favourite place to do impressive photo shoots for the election. The campaign managers reckoned that if the US government sent 30 000 Marines into Somalia when the famine was declining and the feuding fighters were getting weary, that would be a nice opportunity to get nice shots of Marine colonels handing out cookies to starving children.

People like Colin Powell publicly said the mission would be "good for the Pentagon".
Equally, if the US government had had any humanitarian feelings for Zimbabwe, then it should never have even thought of enacting the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act (Zidera), the sanctions 2001 sanctions law that stops US companies from doing any business with Zimbabwean business entities.

The US, the UK and other Western countries publicly celebrated the suffering in Zimbabwe as "Mugabe's unsound policies" for about eight years, and they waited very carefully for an opportune time to play public relations with the lives of Zimbabweans.

So, they waited until the cholera outbreak reached its peak, killing thousands of people, and they reckoned this was an opportune time for photo shoots of a helping hand underlined by a strong media base line of, "it's all Mugabe's fault".

With the inclusive Government coming in place in February 2009, they reckoned it was perfect timing for photo shoots announcing their scepticism of the whole arrangement covered in impressive announcements of financial pledges destined for Zimbabwe's suffering masses - albeit via routes that have nothing to do whatsoever with the inclusive Government.

What a way of showing the world humanitarian love for Zimbabweans while showing disdain for President Mugabe and everything associated with the man.

The poor masses of Zimbabwe can be massacred by murderous sanctions when it suits the purposes of Western governments, but they can also come in handy when it suits Western public relations to posture as humanitarians of the highest order.

This tactic does not always work out well. For Somalia, it was a nightmare when the US lost 18 marines in one Somali strike and they were forced into a hasty and unplanned humiliating retreat.

When you put a foreign military force into another country, it will not be long before they are fighting the local population, never mind that the population may have welcomed the invaders in the first place.

Take Northern Ireland for instance where the British were invited by the Catholic population in August 1969.

Two months later, the British were murdering the Catholic population. The same happened with the invasion of Iraq.

No sooner did we see the celebrating masses at the deposition of Saddam Hussein than we saw American troops murdering the same masses in Baghdad.

Some Zimbabweans might have celebrated the imposition of sanctions in the vainglorious hope that the embargo would put MDC-T in power, but over the years people have come to understand the deleterious nature of the sanctions and, are naturally peeved by both the West and the MDC-T for their role in the destruction of the economy in the last eight years.

The public relations posturing will not impress Zimbabweans at all, and the MDC-T's refusal to condemn the sanctions does not help matters either as it exposes the deception in this mischievous posturing by Western governments.

We were told by the Australian government that they were only going to support the ministries run by members of Tsvangirai's party.

That announcement was calculated not only at isolating President Mugabe and Zanu-PF government officials, but also at painting that picture that Australia has humanitarian feelings for the people of Zimbabwe.

This is the country that worked so tirelessly to have Zimbabwe expelled from the Commonwealth, and they even punished innocent cricketers in the name of punishing President Mugabe.

The public relations posturing has manifested itself in a number of ways.
We have heard this earth shuttering gospel about human rights abuses in Zimbabwe and how the West would never rest until all Zimbabweans are exposed to freedom and liberty.

The number one evidence of these human rights abuses are the thousands of Zimbabweans who have told dramatised stories of how they escaped "Mugabe's murderous men" as they fled to various Western destinations.

These are the ‘‘asylum seekers'' that have told drama stories of living "dead parents and family members" all killed by Mugabe.

Their stories needed no verification because they were good enough for public relations and Mugabe-bashing.

The West must be seen to be offering refuge to unfortunate escapees fleeing a "murderous regime".

All these people know for a fact that they fled Western sanctions, but they cannot say so to Western immigration officials. That would betray the whole cause and it certainly would not do.

One would have thought that the West would at least trust that Zimbabweans knew what they wanted when they signed the GPA on September 15 2008.

Zimbabwe may in the end benefit or be harmed by these Western machinations and this writer is not certain what the outcome will be.

Whatever it is, the reality is that humanitarianism is not part of it. The country just happens to offer excellent props for photo opportunities and good publicity back in Western communities.

Any benefits that may come our way may be purely incidental.

Labels: CHOLERA, MDC, PROPAGANDA

posted by MrK @ 7:16 PM