(HERALD ZW) Latest: US embassy staffer booed, heckled by Masvingo youths
January 23, 2014 Costa Mano Local News
George Maponga in Masvingo
There was drama at the Masvingo Civic Centre, Wednesday evening, after a US embassy staffer was booed and heckled by youths protesting the illegal economic sanctions imposed by Washington on Zimbabwe.
The youths booed and heckled programme assistant of the Zimbabwe-United States Alumni Association (ZUSAA), Ms Corra-Leigh Magiya Magiya, during a question and answer segment after her presentation on the Business Entrepreneur Exchange Programme.
The programme is under the Young African Leaders Initiative which every year sends about 50 local youths to the US for training in business and entrepreneurship, public management and civic leadership.
Trouble started at the event after some youths sitting in the public gallery demanded to know why the US government targeted only 50 youths under the African Leaders Initiative when other Zimbabweans were mired in poverty because of illegal sanctions.
They rapped the US for hypocrisy saying Washington’s policies had economically ruined Zimbabwe.
The meeting abruptly ended after the youths started singing revolutionary songs denouncing the US government and its regime change policies in Zimbabwe.
Zanu-PF national deputy political commissar in the Youth League Cde Talent Majoni who attended the meeting, defended the heckling and booing accusing the US government of covertly pursuing the regime change agenda in Zimbabwe.
“We simply wanted to know why the US government targets only 50 youths in Zimbabwe for training in their country as if they are doing it in good faith because their sanctions are hurting millions of ordinary Zimbabweans. Our point is that there is nothing that our youths can learn from the US which is known for causing suffering in other nations across the globe,” he said.
Cde Majoni added that rather than learning from US President Barack Obama, President Mugabe’s visionary leadership and his spirited push to economically empower the oppressed was a far much better lesson to local youths.
Labels: AMBASSADOR, EMBASSY, SANCTIONS, USA, ZDERA
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(NEWZIMBABWE, XINHUA) Chinese envoy raps West’s Cold War mentality
22/10/2013 00:00:00
by Xinhua
CHINESE Ambassador to Zimbabwe Lin Lin on Tuesday defended China’s relations with Africa and dismissed as coloured by a “cold war mentality” Western criticism of his country’s dealings with the continent.
"There are always people observing China-Africa relations through coloured glasses with the Cold War mentality, posing groundless criticism and attacks against China-Africa cooperation, " Lin told about 40 scholars attending an academic symposium on China-Africa relations organized by Southern African Research and Documentation Centre.
"Such practices have disturbed the sound and stable development momentum of China-Africa cooperation," Lin said.
"The relationship is solidly based on friendship and cooperation and remains on the top agenda of our leadership."
Lin, who was formerly the ambassador to Ethiopia, said for example there were a lot of Chinese-invested projects in Ethiopia, a country without much resource and does not face Western sanctions like Zimbabwe.
"Some people say China only invests in minerals and oil rich countries, but Ethiopia has neither of them," Lin said.
China has been the main source of foreign investments for Zimbabwe.
Last year, Chinese investment accounted for 72 percent of the more than US$900 million U.S. dollars foreign invested-projects approved by the Zimbabwe Investment Authority.
The envoy also brushed off allegations that China pushes for investments in Africa to solve its own unemployment.
"Today, you may find Chinese companies everywhere in Africa, but it is not a government strategy to solve unemployment. The Chinese government creates a lot of jobs for its people, and we don't have to send people to Africa to find jobs," he added.
China-Africa relations developed to new highs after the Forum on China Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) was established by Chinese and African leaders at their inaugural summit in 2000 to chart a new type of strategic partnership.
Bilateral trade surged, foreign direct investment grew, and cooperation in health, agriculture, and many other fields achieved breakthroughs.
Labels: CHINA, COLD WAR, USA
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Zimbabwe student shot, killed by US cops
Grief ... Teenager's dad Mabasa Nhekairo speaking to US TV station over shooting
28/03/2012 00:00:00
by Staff Reporter
A NAKED man fatally shot by police in the US state of Georgia on Tuesday night has been named as 18-year-old Zimbabwean, Tendai Nelson Nhekairo.
Cobb County police say they responded to reports of a man shooting a gun at an apartment complex off Shadowood Parkway around 7.40PM. Officers turned up to be confronted by a naked man armed with two knives, a spokesman said.
Sgt. Dana Pierce of the Cobb County Police Department told local television:
“He made an aggressive movement towards those officers and unfortunately those officers had to use what means was necessary to stop that aggressive act.”
Nhekairo was a student at nearby Campbell High School, reported Channel 2 Action News.
The teenager’s mother, Blessed, and father, Mabasa Nhekairo, said they had never seen their son behave violently and knew of no mental health problems he may have had. They admitted they were having a hard time believing what police are saying.
"I don't know what happened on Tuesday night, but what I do know is that my son did not have any violent tendencies," the senior Nhekairo said.
He said Tendai was a keen American football player and looked forward to graduating from High School. Channel 2 Action News, meanwhile, reported the teenager had been arrested recently for possession of marijuana off campus.
The officer involved in the shooting, whose name has not been released, has been placed on routine administrative leave, Sgt. Pierce said.
Labels: POLICE BRUTALITY, STUDENTS, USA
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The US will continue to assist the government, even if the authorities refuse to legalise gay rights in Zambia-Schwartz
TIME PUBLISHED - Saturday, March 3, 2012, 7:27 am
THE United States (US) deputy chief of mission to Zambia Stephen Schwartz has said that his government has not asked the Zambian government to legalise gay rights as a pre-condition to receiving aid.
He said the US government’s provision of development aid to Zambia is on the basis of commitment to poverty reduction, respect for human rights and good governance.
Mr Schwartz said the US government engages in regular dialogue with Zambia to monitor its commitment to poverty reduction and other areas.
“The US government’s provision of development assistance to the Government of Zambia is on the basis of its overall commitment to reducing poverty, respecting human rights, improving public financial management, fighting corruption and promoting good governance and transparency,” he said.
Mr Schwartz said the US raises issues with governments when there are serious and systematic violations of human rights.
He said to date, the issue of gay rights has not arisen with the Zambian government, adding that the US will continue to assist the Zambian government, even if the authorities refuse to legalise gay rights in Zambia.
“My government will not cut aid to Zambia and what I can say at the moment is that our development aid to Zambia has increased and we will continue to assist Zambia as we promote human rights for all the people,” Mr Schwartz said.
His comment follows calls by United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-Moon that the Zambian government should discourage discrimination against anyone, based on sexual orientation.
Mr Schwartz said this in Lusaka during the week when he held a governance and public dialogue meeting with students at the National Institute of Public Administration (NIPA).
[Zambia Daily Mail]
Labels: AMBASSADOR, BAN KI-MOON, HOMOSEXUALITY, UN, USA
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Romney to right tax "mistake" after primary loss
By Reuters News
Mon 23 Jan. 2012, 10:40 CAT
Humbled by a stunning loss in South Carolina, Mitt Romney said on Sunday he would release this week the tax returns demanded by rivals as he bids to regain the upper hand in the volatile Republican presidential race.
Romney, the longtime front-runner in the Republican race and one of the wealthiest presidential candidates in history, lost to a resurgent Newt Gingrich in the conservative Southern state on Saturday after stumbling badly in debates with clumsy responses to demands that he disclose his tax history.
Trying to recapture his footing as the contest heads to more populous and more moderate Florida, Romney said he would release his 2010 returns and an estimate for 2011 on Tuesday.
"We made a mistake holding off as long as we did and it just was a distraction," Romney said on "Fox News Sunday."
Romney said the returns would be on the Internet and emphasized he was releasing two years of returns after Gingrich posted 2010 taxes on Thursday.
He slammed Gingrich as a Washington insider, a line of attack he is expected to use going forward, and called on his rival to release details of his contract with the government-sponsored mortgage finance giant Freddie Mac.
Gingrich's work for Freddie Mac could raise concerns for some voters in Florida, a state that has been hit hard by the downturn in the U.S. real estate market.
"He talks about great, bold movements and ideas, well what's he been doing for 15 years? He's been working as a lobbyist ... that's selling influence around Washington," Romney told about 300 supporters in a campaign stop later on Sunday outside Daytona Beach, Florida.
Romney's tax announcement was meant to draw a line under a bad week punctuated by his own missteps, a surprising turn in an otherwise tightly scripted campaign.
In the midst of a halting response to the tax return controversy, Romney said he paid a rate of about 15 percent, low compared with many U.S. wage earners but in line with what wealthy individuals pay on income from investments.
Gingrich, a former speaker of the House of Representatives with a sharp tongue that played well in debates, pounced on Romney's weak flank and walloped the former Massachusetts governor by 40 percent to 28 percent in South Carolina.
The Gingrich win reshaped the Republican race and reflected a party sharply divided over how to beat Democratic President Barack Obama in the November 6 election.
There have been three nominating contests so far and Gingrich, Romney and former Senator Rick Santorum have each won one.
A victory in Florida's primary on January 31 would restore Romney's luster after South Carolina, and a Gingrich win would solidify him as a serious challenger to the former business executive. A protracted and poisonous Republican battle, in turn, could be a boon to Obama's re-election bid.
"It's hard to see it ending soon. It could drag on to April," said Al Cardenas, the chairman of the American Conservative Union. Cardenas headed Romney's campaign in Florida in 2008, but has remained neutral this time.
"When this is over, we are going to have a presidential candidate showing all his warts. We are going to enter into a national election with a candidate whose chinks in the armor are visibly seen," he said.
With 19 million people, Florida presents logistical and financial challenges that may give an advantage to Romney's well-funded campaign machine.
In Florida, he leads Gingrich by 40.5 percent to 22 percent, according to polls cited by RealClearPolitics.com, conducted before Romney's battering in South Carolina. Santorum, a social conservative who won the Iowa contest but has struggled to gain traction since then, is third with 15 percent.
Texas Congressman Ron Paul, who is not campaigning in Florida, is fourth at about 9 percent.
ROMNEY FLOODS FLORIDA
Some Florida voters were delighted by Gingrich's rise.
Eugenio Perez, 58, a Miami property manager, said Gingrich's experience would help him in the White House.
"We live in a very complex world and we can't put a novice in such a high place, as we did in 2008," he said.
The more moderate electorate in Florida may help Romney, who has failed to consolidate conservative support despite his longtime front-runner status and had hoped to wrap up the nomination after Texas Governor Rick Perry and former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman bowed out last week.
Facing a real estate crisis and an unemployment rate of 9.9 percent, above the national average, Floridians are also expected to be more open to Romney's argument that he is the type of "CEO president" the country needs.
"I like the fact that Romney is a businessman who has been successful. Some people criticize that but I think that's commendable," said Mike Sullivan, 57, a professional golfer who attended the Romney rally.
"Right now, we need a chief executive who can run America like a business and not like the Salvation Army."
The tax release shift and financial advantage could help Romney regain his momentum after Gingrich's win.
A political action committee formed by Romney backers, Restore Our Future, has spent $5 million in Florida for Romney since mid-December, 20 times the amount spent there so far by any other group supporting a Republican candidate, according to Federal Election Commission filings analyzed by Reuters.
Romney could get some help from Santorum, who is competing with Gingrich to be the conservative alternative to Romney.
"It's a choice between a moderate and an erratic conservative - someone who on a lot of the major issues has been just wrong," Santorum told ABC's "This Week" program, saying Gingrich was out of step with many Republicans on Wall Street bailouts, health policy, immigration and global warming. "I think he's a very high-risk candidate.
Gingrich has see-sawed in national polls but has shown an uncanny ability to hang on, especially after an exodus of his staff last summer. Now he must prove he is the most "electable" choice despite hefty political and personal baggage.
Gingrich, who refers to Romney as a "Massachusetts moderate," said having his rival's taxes on the table would at least put an end to that part of the campaign narrative.
"As far as I'm concerned, that particular issue is now set aside and we can go on and talk about other bigger and more important things," Gingrich said on NBC's "Meet the Press."
But the tax issue will almost certainly not go away.
Income inequality has become a leading topic in the presidential race, and Obama has signaled he will talk about an economy that works "for everyone, not just a wealthy few" in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, the day of Romney's tax return release.
Labels: ELECTIONS, USA
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'Racist' US church bans Zimbabwean man, partner
30/11/2011 00:00:00
by Staff Reporter
A ZIMBABWEAN man has been banned from a church in the United States because he is BLACK. Gulnare Freewill Baptist Church in Pike County, Kentucky, recently voted to ban interracial couples.
And when American national Stella Harville – who attended the church her whole life before moving to college – turned up with her fiancé, Ticha Chikuni, she felt “unwelcome”.
She has described the church’s ban on interracial marriages “the work of the devil”.
“Unfortunately, these convictions will remain in our society, but they crossed the line in revoking my fiancé and I's right to worship in a public place,” Harville said.
"I think part of me is still in shock and trying to process what's been going on the past few days. I really hope they overturn this."
The vote by members last Sunday was 9-6. It was taken after the service, which about 35 to 40 people attended. Harville said many people left or declined to vote.
Harville, a 24-year-old graduate student at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Indiana, called the vote "hurtful."
Her dad, Dean Harville, is a deacon at the church.
He told how Melvin Thompson, a church member, crafted the resolution excluding black people from the church’s functions.
"If he's not racist, what is this?" Harville said of Thompson.
Thompson, who stood down as a pastor in the church earlier this year, said he is not racist and called the matter an "internal affair."
He added: "I am not racist. I will tell you that. I am not prejudiced against any race of people, have never in my lifetime spoke evil about a race. That's what this is being portrayed as, but it is not."
The Harville's, who live in Pike County, say if the decision is not reversed, then they will move churches.
The church's pastor, Stacy Stepp, said Wednesday that he was against the resolution. Stepp said the denomination's regional conference will begin working on resolving the issue this weekend.
Labels: RACISM, USA
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Seeing the US Everywhere
what's left
By Stephen Gowans
November 16, 2011
The New York Times ran an article today about Washington’s plans to strengthen its military presence in Australia. Australia is to be used by the US military “as a new center of operations in Asia” from which the United States will seek “to reassert itself in the region and grapple with China’s rise.”
The problem for policy planners in Washington is that “China has become the largest trading partner with most of the countries in the region, undercutting American economic influence.” And so the United States will beef up its presence in the Pacific to prove that “it intends to remain a crucial military and economic power” in Asia.
In simple language this means that China has secured export and investment opportunities in its own backyard and that US corporations, banks and investors want them for themselves. So Washington will use its military to take them away from the Chinese.
For obvious reasons, China thinks this smacks of old-fashioned gun-boat imperialism.
Not so curiously, the headline of the Ian Johnson and Jackie Calmes article announcing Washington’s plan to muscle China out of economic primacy in the region put a chauvinistic spin on the story: “As US looks to Asia, it sees China everywhere.”
Imagine China setting up military bases in Venezuela and sending aircraft carriers to the Gulf of Mexico in order to “assert itself in the region.” How strange would seem a newspaper headline that read: “As China looks to the Gulf of Mexico, it sees the United States everywhere,” as if this were an unexpected discovery.
The New York Times’ headline could have been more aptly written this way: As China looks around its neighborhood, it sees the US military everywhere. But then this would have made US imperialism uncomfortably obvious.
An article by Johnson and Calmes’ New York Times’ colleagues Nada Bakri and Rick Gladstone, also in today’s edition of the newspaper (“Syria faces new threats as opposition seeks allies”) is equally worthy of comment. Their article used “one human rights group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights” as a source for the number of people killed in recent clashes with Syrian government forces.
One might get the impression that the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is a neutral human rights monitor without a political agenda. After all, Bakri and Gladstone refer to it as “one human rights group”, and nothing more.
Were it an opposition group seeking to overthrow the Syrian government we might think twice about trusting it as a source of unbiased information.
Well, think twice.
A statement posted to the group’s website on November 15, 2011, makes clear that it is more than just “one human rights group.” In the statement, the group calls for a no-fly zone over Syria “in accordance with its duty and commitment to echo the voice of Syrian Popular Revolution.”
The Observatory makes no secret of the reason it wants “the international community” (which is to say, Nato) dropping bombs on Syrian military installations and Assad supporters: “the acceleration of overthrowing Syrian brutal regime.”
Meanwhile, the Gulf Cooperation Council, the group of US-allied oil autocracies that had been acting as arms and propaganda suppliers to Libyan rebels, played a key role in pushing through the recent Arab League suspension of Syria.
The Council has also become a key to Washington’s plans to continue to dominate the Persian Gulf, even as—or rather, precisely because–US troops are being withdrawn from Iraq.
Both US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have said that the United States will “maintain a large military presence in the region, in part as a counterweight to Iran.” The US military will rely on “the six nations in the Gulf Cooperation Council — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. While the United States has close bilateral military relationships with each, the administration and the military are trying to foster a new ‘security architecture’ for the Persian Gulf that would integrate air and naval patrols and missile defense.”
It’s not only China that is hemmed in by the US military. As Iran looks around its neighborhood, it too sees the US everywhere.
Labels: NEOCOLONIALISM, STEPHEN GOWANS, USA
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US obsession with Zim strange
Friday, 01 July 2011 01:00
By Tichaona Zindoga
There is something strange, and particularly evil about the United States of America's obsession with Zimbabwe. It is no doubt based on racism and an enduring dislike of the self-determination of black people of this country. Was it not
Henry Kissinger who declared that Zimbabwe and South Africa did not belong to black Africa?The
US, a beneficiary of British colonialism here, was one of the countries that helped bust international sanctions against the rogue and racist regime of Ian Smith. The
US imported chrome from the then Southern Rhodesia wherein Smith had declared the Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965.
Smith is notoriously noted for his statement that black Zimbabweans would never rule themselves in a thousand years. Smith, despite being shown the dignity and the magnanimity of the policy of reconciliation adopted by the black Government in 1980, died the same old, racist in Cape Town, South Africa.
At the Lancaster House talks that preceded Zimbabwe's independence in 1980, the US, under President Jimmy Carter promised to fund the land reform in Zimbabwe, alongside Britain.
As the one important element of the talks and the reason why the liberation war had been fought since 1890, the score of land, and in this instance its resolution by the twin pledge by Britain and America, it carried the day.
Yet, no funds have come to date from America. This contributed to the sticky question that the land question has been, particularly in recent times.
When the situation imploded in 2000 as Zimbabwe reclaimed its land, disrupting white capital, the US came onto the scene again.
In 2001, former President George W Bush promulgated into law the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act, after buying into the bilateral land dispute between Zimbabwe and Britain.
The law provides for the barring of trade between Zimbabwe and the US in private and national levels.
The law provides for the barring of Zimbabwe's access to multilateral lending institutions and cancellation of indebtedness.
While seeking to penalise US individuals and companies dealing with the Government of Zimbabwe and other designated persons - who are mainly drawn from business and politics - the US, through its Office of Foreign Assets Control sniffs and chases Zimbabwe's overseas transactions so that it can freeze them.
It has been remarked that sanctions are silent atomic bombs - and ironically, the United States is noted for bombing Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki resulting in some of the worst disasters the world has seen - and so, the socio-economic effects of sanctions is clear.
It is clear because they are intended and calculated to foment a humanitarian disaster which would see the US getting on with another Marshal Plan.
While the sanctions are still in place, the United States has been trying to block the sale of Zimbabwean diamonds at international markets.
Zimbabwe's gems are said to be able to satisfy a quarter of the global market and more than satisfy the country's fiscal requirements.
Zimbabwe has complied with the minimum requirements of the international diamond watchdog, the Kimberly Process and Certification Scheme.
Zimbabwe is a founding member of this voluntary body set up to fight the proliferation of "blood diamonds".
Blood diamonds are gems used to finance rebel wars.
Zimbabwe has a legitimate Government and if anything its power has been shaken by opposition bought, created and funded by the US.
The US has tried to frustrate Zimbabwe's sales and has used the provision for consensus building among parties to the KP to veto Zimbabwe's certification.
The civic society, which America sponsors, and US' Anglo-Saxon cousins in Canada and Australia as well as the likes of Israel and Belgium have been throwing spanners into the works.
The US even affords to hide behind these forces to disrupt consensus.
It does not matter that these constitute a minority in the KP.
In fact, many stakeholders have been dismayed that the diamond industry has been held to ransom by narrow racist political interests.
African stakeholders have been particularly slighted and have openly pledged to support Zimbabwe.
African countries produce the bulk of diamonds sold in Europe and India.
And as the current KP chair Mr Mathieu Yamba of the Democratic Republic of Congo has stood by the fact that Zimbabwe has in principle met KP requirements and therefore should sell its gems unconditionally, there has been very familiar noises.
After the KP recently gave two Zimbabwean companies Marange Resources and Mbada Diamonds the greenlight to unconditionally sell gems from the Marange area, the US came with its guns blazing.
Zimbabwe should not sell its diamonds, so believes an unrelenting US.
Victoria Nuland, spokesperson for the US State Department, was outraged such a decision had been made.
And guess what, she went on to conjure the technical nicety of consensus which the US guarantees will forever frustrate any efforts that do not conform to its whims.
Said Nuland: "The United States is deeply disappointed with the Kinshasa Intersessional as it related to Zimbabwe.
"The United States has been a strong supporter of the Kimberly Process in the past and desires to find a way forward for the Kimberley Process that includes Zimbabwe and preserves the credibility of the process.
"The United States believes that progress with respect to exports from the Marange area of Zimbabwe can occur solely through a mechanism agreed to by consensus among KP participants."
She also pontificated: "The Kimberley Process works best when producers and consumers are collaborating, and when civil society is an active participant.
"The US would like to ensure the Kimberley Process' future and enable diamond exports to contribute positively to the region's people and economy."
Surely, there is nothing new in Nuland's statements and she should have declared her country's interests first and foremost.
The United States is disappointed in the KP's decision for the obvious racist reason that seeks to disempower the black majority of Zimbabwe.
At any rate, selling diamonds will bust US and European Union sanctions.
Nuland knows that her country will never seek positive consensus on Zimbabwe and its support for the many civil sector outfits is predicated on throwing spanners into Zimbabwe's bid to legitimately.
Lies have been spun and false documents circulated in misrepresenting the story of Zimbabwe by the likes of Partnership Africa Canada, Global Witness, Human Rights Watch, Zimbabwe Human Rights Association, and "diamond researcher" Farai Maguwu's Center for Research and Research.
The profundity of this desperation was demonstrated by the so-called civil society's rejection of the findings of founding chair of KP and industrialist Mr Abbey Chikane who came to Zimbabwe on several missions to oversee compliance as recommended by the body in Swakopmund, Namibia, in 2009.
Notably, Chikane said that Zimbabwe met KP conditions better than many African producers.
He was impressed with what he saw, including the security in Marange, even granting that state security be maintained until all concerns could provide their own civilian security.
Chikane was here. He is no politician but every inch professional.
There is nothing new the likes of Nuland can tell him.
On the other hand, does it not offend sensibility that as the US continues to stifle Zimbabwe's efforts to revive her economy, one of its papers was celebrating that Zimbabwe is the second poorest country in the world?
A report released recently by the monthly Global Finance magazine put Zimbabwe second bottom ahead of Congo Brazzaville among 182 countries in the wealth classification indexed on the Gross Domestic Product.
It said: "The poorest 10 countries were by order of their poverty Congo, Zimbabwe, Burundi, Liberia, Eritrea, Niger, Central African Republic, Sierra Leone, Togo and Madagascar."
Surely a country with the diamond capacity to satisfy a quarter of the world market, among other riches should not be in such a position, if the report is anything to go by.
The US is working round the clock to stifle Zimbabwe's growth and development. This obsession can only be motivated by malice that borders on criminality.
After all, US sanctions against Zimbabwe fall outside the ambit of the United Nations making them illegal at international law.
Former US Congresswoman Cynthia Mckinney put it succinctly when she accused proponents of Zidera of being racist.
She noted that land was in the centre of dispute between Zimbabwe and the West.
The United States' imposition of Zidera, she said, would continue to marginalise black people who had just got the land that had been stolen from their ancestors.
She said: "When we get right down to it, this legislation is nothing more than a formal declaration of United States complicity in a programme to maintain white-skin privilege. We can call it an ‘incentives' bill, but that does not change its essential ‘sanctions' nature. It is racist and against the interests of the masses of Zimbabweans."
tichaona.zindoga@zimpapers.co.zw
Labels: NEOCOLONIALISM, USA
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Wikileaks reveal U.S. conspired to retaliate against European nations if they resisted GMOs
Global Research, March 10, 2011
Natural News - 2010-12-10
by Mike Adams
Wikileaks continues to rock the political world by shedding light on conspiracies, corruption and cover-ups. The latest batch of diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks reveals what can only be characterized as a U.S.-led conspiracy to force GMOs onto European countries by making those countries pay a steep price if they resist.
The cable reveals the words of
Craig Stapleton, the US ambassador to France, who was
pushing the commercial interests of the biotech industry by attempting to
force GMOs into France. In his own words (below), he expresses his
frustration with the idea that
France might pass environmental laws that would hamper the expansion of GMOs:
"Europe is moving backwards not forwards on this issue with France playing a leading role, along with Austria, Italy and even the [European] Commission... Moving to retaliation will make clear that the current path has real costs to EU interests and could help strengthen European pro-biotech voice."
Got that so far? His own words: "Retaliation" as a way to "make [it] clear" that resisting GMOs will have a price.
Stapleton goes on to say something rather incredible:
"Country team Paris recommends that we calibrate a target retaliation list that causes some pain across the EU since this is a collective responsibility, but that also focuses in part on the worst culprits. The list should be measured rather than vicious and must be sustainable over the long term, since we should not expect an early victory..."
As you read these words again, remember that these are the words of the U.S. ambassador to France who is suggesting the US "calibrate a target retaliation list" in order to "cause some pain across the EU" that must be "sustainable over the long term."
The global GMO conspiracy is no longer a theory
Need we say anything more? This cable proves, once and for all, that there is a global GMO conspiracy where government operatives work in secret to push Monsanto's GMO agenda while punishing opponents of GMOs and adding them to a "target retaliation list."
This cable also proves that NaturalNews has been right all along about the GMO conspiracy, and that GMO opponents such as Jeffrey Smith are battling what can only be called an evil conspiracy to control the world's food supply. It also proves that when Alex Jones talks about the global conspiracy to control the world food supply, he's not just ranting. He's warning about the reality of the world in which we now live.
As Jeffery Smith said today in a Democracy Now interview:
"We’ve been saying for years that the United States government is joined at the hip with Monsanto and pushing GMOs as part of Monsanto’s agenda on the rest of the world. This lays bare the mechanics of that effort. We have Craig Stapleton, the former ambassador to France, specifically asking the U.S. government to retaliate and cause some harm throughout the European Union." (Source: Democracy Now)
Military terms
Do you notice something about these words used by the US ambassador to France? "Calibrate a target retaliation list" sounds eerily familiar, doesn't it? It's the kind of language you might find tossed around in a military bombing war exercise.
That's no coincidence: These government operatives quite literally consider themselves to be at war with the world, and they intend to conquer the world with their genetically modified poisons. They will do anything, it seems, to force-feed their deadly crops to the public.
Eight important realizations from these leaks
This Wikileaks cable brings up all sorts of issues that each might deserve a separate article, but here are the highlights of what comes to my mind on this issue:
Realization #1) Wikileaks is valuable for exposing the government lies in our world. Without Wikileaks, we never would have known about these cables which prove the existence of this GMO conspiracy.
Realization #2) US government diplomatic officials are working for the corporations! It's just as we've described here on NaturalNews numerous times -- Big Government is really just an extension of the most evil and most powerful corporations that now dominate our planet: The drug companies, the weapons manufacturers, the agricultural giants and so on. Here's what Jeffrey Smith had to say about governments conspiring with Monsanto:
"In 2009, we have a cable from the ambassador to Spain from the United States asking for intervention there, asking the government to help formulate a biotech strategy and support the government -- members of the government in Spain that want to promote GMOs, as well. And here, they specifically indicate that they sat with the director of Monsanto for the region and got briefed by him about the politics of the region and created strategies with him to promote the GMO agenda."
Realization #3) The US is willing to retaliate against European countries if they try to block GMOs. This brings up the question: Why is the US so desperate to push GMOs on Europe? Clearly there is another agenda behind all this (maybe we'll learn more in future Wikileaks releases).
Realization #4) No wonder the US government has declared war on Wikileaks because these dark secrets and "conspiracy notes" are never made public through any normal means. It takes a whistleblower to expose the true government corruption taking place in our world today.
Realization #5) The GMO conspiracy reaches to the highest levels of global control. This US ambassador Stapleton wasn't just a nobody. He was, in fact, the co-owner of the Texas Rangers with former President George W. Bush! His wife, by the way, is George Bush's cousin. This is a conspiracy involving the highest-ranking officials across multiple countries who are pushing a GMO agenda that's poisoning people across the planet.
Realization #6) Governments are literally trying to kill their own people. It is widely known in the inner circles of power that GMOs are deadly, but governments keep pushing them anyway. As Jeffrey Smith explains in his interview with Democracy Now:
"...the person who was in charge of FDA policy in 1992, Monsanto’s former attorney, Michael Taylor, he allowed GMOs on the market without any safety studies and without labeling, and the policy claimed that the agency was not aware of any information showing that GMOs were significantly different. Seven years later, because of a lawsuit, 44,000 secret internal FDA memos revealed that that policy was a lie. Not only were the scientists at the FDA aware that GMOs were different, they had warned repeatedly that they might create allergies, toxins, new diseases and nutritional problems. But they were ignored, and their warnings were even denied, and the policy went forth allowing the deployment GMOs into the food supply with virtually no safety studies."
Realization #7) The GMO conspiracy is always reframed as "science". At one point in the leaked cables, Stapleton warns that in opposing GMOs, France would "roll back established science-based decision making." The GMO conspiracy, you have to remember, is always hidden behind the term "science" so that anyone who opposes GMOs can be characterized as being somehow against "scientific thinking."
All this gives science a bad name, of course, but I suppose that since the history of science is filled with arrogant scientists poisoning people in the name of science (mercury, vaccines, radiation, plastics, medications, etc.), we shouldn't be all that surprised to observe this.
Realization #8) Spain has been a key co-conspirator to push the U.S. GMO agenda. Much of the conspiring taking place in the EU has been spearheaded by Spain, whose officials met personally with the head of Monsanto to plot their push of GMOs into Europe.
All of a sudden the Blackwater story adds up
This all reminds me of a story published a few months back by The Nation in which Jeremy Scahill exposed a link between Monsanto and the military contractor known as Blackwater. His article claimed that Monsanto had hired Blackwater spies to "infiltrate activist groups organizing against the multinational biotech firm." (http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/09/16/disney-monsanto-discovered-blackwaters-hidden-clients/)
Monsanto vehemently denied the allegation. I looked hard at covering that story at the time but could not substantiate the accusations to my satisfaction. However, given the new information gleaned from these leaked diplomatic cables -- which blatantly state that the GMO conspirators plan to "calibrate a target retaliation list" -- all of a sudden the Blackwater story adds up.
This is the verbage of a military-style retaliation campaign, and that's exactly the business of Blackwater. Remember how Stapleton said the US needed to "cause some pain?" That's Blackwater's calling card!
Although these cables don't prove any connection between Monsanto and Blackwater, they do lend credence to the idea that such a link is not only possibly, but perhaps even probable. It clearly deserves additional investigation.
Regardless of whether the Blackwater / Monsanto link is ever proven, what's crystal clear from all this is that the global GMO conspiracy is very real and that GMO conspirators plot retaliatory actions against any nation that refuses to allow GMOs into their country.
The whole thing is then disguised as "science" so that anyone who opposes it can be branded as "non-scientific." This is the same sick way in which vaccines are pushed, too: They're called "scientific" even when they're based entirely on scientific fraud (as are GMOs).
How governments really operate
Above all, what these Wikileaks cables really reveal is that government conspiracies are, of course, not only real but that they are taking place right now. Diplomats and ambassadors are, in effect, government thugs who engage in the most unethical actions, full of threats and retaliation, in order to serve the financial interests of their corporate masters.
That's how the world really works, despite the Disney-like image portrayed by the mainstream media. Behind the scenes, the U.S. government is literally plotting with Monsanto to take over the world's food supply. That is not an exaggeration. It's not conjecture. It is a statement of fact based on the words of the government's own operatives (who obviously didn't know their words would ever be made public).
Through Wikileaks, we have been given a glimpse into the truth behind the Great Wall of government lies. And that truth, it turns out, is a lot uglier than most people could have imagined. (It's no surprise to me, because I've seen things that most regular people have never witnessed. But to a regular Joe Blow working his J.O.B. and watching the evening news, the hard-core truth about the world is a bit too much to handle...)
Personally, I can't wait to see what other dark secrets are buried in these Wikileaks cables. And it all makes me wish we had a Wikileaks for the FDA, too. Can you imagine all the dirty secrets that would come out of the FDA's offices if we could read their emails? We need an FDA leaker.
The other thought that comes to mind is how much I wouldn't want to be Julian Assange right now. His head is now the world's most powerful bullet magnet... especially when government rifles are anywhere nearby. If the U.S. government would conspire to create a "retaliation target list" of nations that are merely resisting GMOs, can you imagine what they will do if they ever get their hands on Assange?
Read the leaked cables right here:
http://213.251.145.96/cable/2008/02/08MADRID98.html
and
http://213.251.145.96/cable/2009/05/09MADRID482.html
(Note: These links may not be active for very long because the governments of the world are obviously trying to shut down all the websites that post this information. The truth, it seems, is just too dangerous to allow it to be openly published.)
How to turn all this around
Don't let all this get you down. You can take action to help turn this around!
Action Item #1) Don't buy GMO foods! Look for the non-GMO "Project Verified" label on foods.
Action Item #2) Urge lawmakers to oppose GMOs or require honest GMO labeling of foods.
Action Item #3) Help support the Institute for Responsible Technology and other non-profits working to oppose GMOs.
Action Item #4) Stay informed! Read NaturalNews and our Facebook GMO Dangers page (www.facebook.com/GMO.dangers) to stay up on this issue. The IRT (above) will keep you even more deeply informed on GMOs.
Action Item #5) Share what you know! Share videos, cartoons, articles and websites with your friends and family members who also care about protecting their health from GMOs.
Action Item #6) Don't trust the government! They are pushing a GMO conspiracy. They don't want you to have natural food, and the FDA is now being unleashed under the new food safety bill to destroy small farmers who tend to use non-GMO crops. Fight against government encroachment of our natural right to grow honest food. Support food freedom!
Global Research Articles by Mike Adams
Labels: FRANCE, GMOS, NEOLIBERALISM, USA
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COMMENT - The US is using Kenya and Uganda to send T-72 tanks to the SPLA in Southern Sudan. Just as they are using Uganda and Rwanda to haul Coltan out of the DRC.
SUBJECT:
GOK/GOSS AGREE ON TIMETABLE FOR SECOND TANK 7/29/2009 14:42
Subject: gok/goss agree on timetable for second tank shipment
Classified By: CDA Robert Whitehead for reasons 1.5 (b) and (d)
¶1. (C) GOSS xxxxxxxxxxxx has admitted that, on the margins of the Washington "Forum for CPA Partners," he pressed Kenyan Foreign Minister Moses Wetangula on the need to expedite delivery to South Sudan of tanks off-loaded from the MV Faina. Three months had passed since Nairobi initially agreed -- albeit in a staggered fashion and only under cover of darkness -- to ship the SPLA its second order of tanks (REFTEL Khartoum 00378). According to xxxxxxxxxxxx upon xxxxxxxxxxxx instruction he told the Kenyan ForMin that if the tanks did not start moving by Juli's end, the GOSS would be forced to "reevaluate its relationship with Nairobi. Despite such threats, xxxxxxxxxxxx maintained that the meeting was largely positive. "The Kenyans are relieved that we will be routing them through Uganda -- keeping them out of the spotlight."
¶2. (C) Asked whether he was any more confident of actual delivery, given how earlier promises from the Kenyans had vaporized, xxxxxxxxxxxx responded in the affirmative. xxxxxxxxxxxx and newly-appointed xxxxxxxxxxxx had met in Nairobi as xxxxxxxxxxxx returned from Washington to again discuss the transfer with Kenyan Department of Defense counterparts. "We are certain that this time they will move." xxxxxxxxxxxx further confirmed that weapons, armaments, and the spare parts and support packages for the T-72 tanks had already been moved out of Nairobi into Sudan's South, although he would not divulge their location. xxxxxxxxxxxx
¶3. (C) xxxxxxxxxxxx optimism appears to be merited. xxxxxxxxxxxx travelled to Kampala xxxxxxxxxxxx in order to meet with Ugandan counterparts on unspecified business. xxxxxxxxxxxx remains an integral member of the SPLA's tank procurement team, despite the SPLA's May reshuffle which pushed him into the xxxxxxxxxxxx. SPLA Affairs Minister Nhial Deng Nhial admitted to A/CG xxxxxxxxxxxx had been granted extraordinary authorities to handle the totality of the SPLA's outstanding contracts in order to ensure the circle of those involved in the tank procurement remained small "for obvious security reasons." xxxxxxxxxxxx The decision to extend such authorities xxxxxxxxxxxx would appear to indicate the entire "adminstrative chain" of the SPLA has been shielded from the decision. END COMMENT). At a July 23 farewell dinner, xxxxxxxxxxxx confirmed the Kenyans had begun trans-shipment of tanks to Uganda, but could not speak to when they would arrive in the South.
¶4. (C) Per reftel, the SPLA is dependent on Nairobi concurrence to authorize the third and final shipment of Juba's 2006 tanks purchase. xxxxxxxxxxxx maintained in mid-July that Nairobi, facing increasing pressure from Khartoum, continued to resist green-lighting the shipment. Notwithstanding xxxxxxxxxxxx contention that the Juba/Nairobi bilateral relationship was weathering the tank-shipment "stand-off," there is growing vidence to the contrary.
¶5. (C) xxxxxxxxxxxx that she had access to documents pertaining to a pending bank transfer linked to an unspecified SPLA procurement initiative worth $34 million. According to the contractor, past SPLA contracts consistently included routing information for banks to Kenya. This contract did not -- a first in this individual's tenure with the Finance Ministry. (NOTE: The contractor further advised that the contract would drive SPLA finances into the red; unless the SPLA saw a budget increase next fiscal year, the SPLA would be without financing until April 2010 if this contract moved forward. END NOTE.) As of July 24, the contractor did not believe this SPLA contract had gone forward in the Finance Ministry's internal approval process.
Khartoum 00000881 002 of 002
(COMMENT: We are not sure that the contractor would be privy to information regarding this contract's approval, however, and think it possible that, given Finance Minister David Deng Athorbei's failed attempts to purchase attack helicopters for the SPLA out of Ministry of Roads and Transport monies in November 2008, he might be sympathetic to other SPLA procurement requests despite current GOSS budgeting woes. END comment).
¶6. (C) Comment. Despite extensive coverage of the tank purchases and delivery in local and internationl media, the SPLM continues to treat the matter as a secret matter, perhaps as a concession to Kenyan sensitivities. The existence of the tanks, however, is one of the least secret secrets in Khartoum.
Whitehead
...
Labels: KENYA, NEOCOLONIALISM, SUDAN, UGANDA, USA
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COMMENT - The same goes for Zambia. For 'economic elite', you can fill in 'foreign owned mines' ($5 billion of Zambia's GDP). For 'Republican Party', fill in the IMF and World Bank, because they are of one and the same ideology.
The Republican plan to wreck the economy and then blame the Dems. Will it work?
By Richard Clark
opednews.com
The Republican Party and its powerful allies in the right-wing news media made it clear from the moment Barack Obama took office that they would demonize everything he tried to do, especially with respect to the economy.
Knowing that progressives had no comparable media infrastructure with which to respond and that many Democrats would cower when attacked the Republicans now appear to have convinced many Americans to hand congressional power back to the GOP, a situation that Stephen Crockett addresses in this Consortium News article, a synopsis of which follows here.
Republicans in Congress have decided that sabotaging economic recovery and employment growth is their best tactic for electoral gains in November as long as they can pin the blame for all the joblessness and the bad economy on the Democrats. And this it seems fairly likely they will succeed in doing, given that most Dem voters are essentially asleep at the wheel when it comes to really understanding how our political economic system works. Signs of this Republican plan have been cropping up since the Democratic victories in 2008.
Here are the things you need to understand, to clearly see how this Republican plan will work:
1. Economic recessions and depressions almost always result from insufficient "effective" consumer demand for goods and services produced domestically. In economic terms, merely wanting something does not constitute "effective demand." For a want to become an "effective" demand for goods or services, it must be accompanied by the monetary ability to actually make the purchase.
2. Jobs are not created by just having large pools of investment money available, as most big corporations and banks now do. There must also be the opportunity to invest in a business that will have customers who have the money to buy the goods and services. Then and only then will investment money flow into business opportunities and job creation.
3. Over the last 30 years, the Republican-Right economic theory that economic prosperity and employment automatically "trickle-down from the wealthy" has been proven again and again to be fallacious. Tax cuts for the wealthy create huge investment money pools -- but not jobs.
4. Republicans are seeking to extend the tax cuts for the wealthy by falsely stating that increases in taxes for the upper 2% of income earners would hurt demand and prolong the economic downturn. Experience and history prove otherwise. The large majority of buying is done by the remaining 98% of the population. The top 2% invest much of their income, not spend it on consumer goods. Besides, there are not that many of them.
Implications for the larger economy
Tax cuts at the highest marginal income brackets simply serve to concentrate wealth and political power in the hands of the economic elite. This power of the economic elite then pushes government policy in directions that dramatically cut the percentage of the nation's wealth and income that goes to the large majority of Americans. And this has been happening for at least the last 30 years. Hence the decimation of America's middle class.
The ever reduced incomes and wealth holdings of the middle class cuts into the ability of most Americans to buy goods and services. As a result, the economy falters because most customers do not have enough disposable income to keep the flow of goods and services at a level that is sufficient to generate the number of jobs and the kind of incomes that a vibrant economy and a healthy middle class requires.
That part of the national income that previously (prior to 1975) would have ended up in the hands of America's great middle class, as disposable income, has for more than 30 years been increasingly diverted into the pockets of our economic elite who, because they already had more money than they could possibly spend on goods and services, have used most of this recent "windfall money" to invest in things that turned out to be "bubbles." As a result, sound business enterprises lacked the numbers of middle class customers they had always depended upon. As a result, many such businesses faltered and had to start laying off employees and/or moving their factories or other operations to low-wage countries.
Why middle-class tax cuts are important
Middle-class tax cuts increase the disposable income of those members of society who spend the vast majority of their incomes and have little left over to save. The money changes hands over and over again (instead of either creating some kind of bubble or sitting idle). This is the great multiplier effect that people learn about when they take a course in, or read a basic text on, economics. Extending unemployment benefits has a huge multiplier effect as well. This is because unemployment benefits are so very badly needed by the recipients that virtually every penny of it gets spent on goods and services, immediately.
Excessive concentration of wealth and income in the hands of the financial elite stifles this kind of middle class spending and thus cripples our economy. And even though all the Republican policies for the past 100 years have been designed to concentrate wealth and income in the hands of the very few, and have always had the effect of crippling the economy, the political-economic dogma of the hard right obviously does not die easily. Why not? Because the very rich spend billions every year keeping it alive! For what purpose? For the purpose of multiplying their incomes, through tax breaks won in Congress by the politicians whose campaigns they pay for, and through the huge sums of money they can "earn" by buying stocks cheap after a market crash, and then selling 'dear' after the market recovers.
Some other ways that the bought-and-paid-for politicians of the rich help their masters stay rich
Failure to enforce anti-monopoly laws, thus permitting price gouging. Failure to cap interest rates, thereby further concentrating wealth in the hands of the rich, which thereby reduces consumer spending and in that way drags the economy down, often leading to a collapse in the stock market, which then allows the rich yet another great stock buying opportunity.
Passage of laws that encourage union-busting, which keeps wages and benefits down, thereby maximizing profits. Problem is, once again, it undermines the purchasing power of workers, leading to a recession.
Passage of laws that lead to the privatizing of government services, which makes plenty of money for the rich but costs consumers more in the way of out-of-pocket expenses that were previously covered by government. This reduces disposable income for these consumers, which of course leads to the same kind of business slowdown already described.
Passage of laws that allow employers to reduce benefits and increase co-pays. This increases the cost-of-living for workers. As a result, these workers once again have less disposable income to spend on goods and services, which, as we've seen, slows down the economy.
Every time the rich reach the levels economic concentration that currently exist, we have a serious depression. Economic concentration of wealth and income are currently at levels very similar to those just before the Great Depression in 1929. And the current level of concentration is a direct result of increasingly "Republicanized" governmental policies which the political whores of the rich have been enacting over the past 30 years, just as their counterparts did before the depression of 1929.
The only reason our current situation has not quite deteriorated to that of the last Great Depression is that the Republicans have not (yet?) been successful in undoing all of the protective reforms (like the Glass-Steagall Act which was repealed in 1999 and which had been enacted after the financial collapse in 1929).
Despite repeated attacks by Republicans, the social safety net remains only damaged but not destroyed. Republican attempts to gut Social Security continue. The attempt to "privatize" Social Security (i.e. make all that money available to Wall Street and the stock market) keeps coming back to threaten the stability and viability of this program. However, simply cutting Social Security benefits (instead of increasing them as should be done) seems to be the avenue of Republican attack most likely to succeed. It is an approach that's being pushed by most Republicans and a few corporatist Democrats.
A wiser economic approach to making sure Social Security will never "go broke" would be to simply remove the income ceiling above which Social Security taxes are not paid. Why should almost all workers be taxed at over 13% to fund social security, while those making a million a year are paying closer to 1% and those making 10 million dollars a year are taxed at around 1/10th of 1% on their income?
Social Security surpluses were "borrowed" by the federal government so they could fund annual deficits created by cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans, cutting taxes on corporations by huge margins, and nearly eliminating taxes on imports. Therefore it is only fair that corporations, wealthy Americans and foreign exporters selling in the American market pay higher taxes to compensate for these previous decades of "borrowing," since they reaped the benefits of all that "borrowing."
Conventional economic policy says that government should run surpluses in good economic times and deficits during economic downturns. This helps reduce the severity of economic cycles. Under the Republican presidencies of Reagan and both Bushes, however, we did exactly the opposite, and thereby created both the current downturn and the debt crisis. The vast majority of our total national debt was created under these three conservative Republican presidents.
In the service of their masters
Currently, the Republicans in Congress have fought every measure to increase employment and help small businesses. They have fought all kinds of economic reforms that would curb corporate abuses of consumers, shareholders or workers. They have also loyally fought all attempts to curb excessive corporate political or economic power. They have been against any measure that would increase demand for goods and services or levels of employment. It is therefore not hard not to conclude that the Republicans want to worsen the economic downturn until it reaches Great-Depression levels, and then pin the blame on Obama. They believe that most voters, political sleep walkers that they are, will automatically and thoughtlessly blame whatever administration is in power for a collapsed or failed economy. They understand that most voters simply lack the education and knowledge to realize that this economic downturn was created by "Republicanizing" our economy. And with tons of corporate money to fund their efforts, and a corporate dominated media at their disposal, it might very well work.
Labels: ECONOMY, NEOLIBERALISM, POLITICS, USA
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Israel, not Zimbabwe, threatens US foreign policy
By: EDITORIAL COMMENT
Posted: Monday, March 15, 2010 9:26 pm
US PRESIDENT Barack Obama recently renewed the so-called Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act (Zidera) saying the country still posed a threat to US foreign policy. How Zimbabwe does that is anyone's guess. President Obama's grandstanding politics is a cause of concern to all those who watch the US with interest.
When he came into power, he promised to engage those leaders who were willing to talk to make the world a better place.
He has quickly abandoned that pledge, among other pledges and continued with the status quo, and has maintained the status of America as a bully -- a bully that preys on weaker nations, and is afraid to face other global powers.
Obama's call for an end to settlement building in Jerusalem by Israel cannot be taken seriously. Noone believes the US will sanction Israel in a manner that it sanctions weaker countries like Zimbabwe.
Israel does not want peace or any permanent boundary with Palestinians as they think that it is cheaper in the long run to keep the status quo and continue annexing new land from them.
They aren't concerned about and bound by any moral considerations regarding their actions in occupied territories.
They have harmed the interests of the US more than any other foreign country or group of people did in the history, and they contiune to do so with great impunity -- and it doesn't look like President Obama will do anything about it.
Obama has to completely disassociate his foreign policy from Israel’s actions otherwise his words to the Middle Eastern and African countries will continue to have no meaning.
It is ironic that In 2010, the US will provide $2.775 billion in security aid to Israel and with it they will continue policies to decrease regional stability and work directly against US interests.
In any case, America and Israel are two sides of one coin: they want peace, but only after they have killed all their enemies.
One can argue that Israel is a sovereign nation like any other. That's true. They can do as they please. But the United States does not have to finance them. They should sanction them like they do with Zimbabwe and withdraw all foreign aid.
Obama needs all those tax dollars for healthcare for all Americans; otherwise he will go down in history as, "The President who said the most, but did the least".
___________
Comments and feedback to info@talkzimbabwe.com
Labels: ISRAEL, SANCTIONS, USA, ZDERA, ZIMBABWE
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Brazil slaps trade sanctions on US over cotton dispute
By BBC News
Tue 09 Mar. 2010, 17:20 CAT
The Brazilian government has announced trade sanctions against a variety of American goods in retaliation for illegal US subsidies to cotton farmers.
The World Trade Organization (WTO) approved the sanctions in a rare move. Brazil published a list of 100 US goods that would be subject to import tariffs in 30 days, unless the two governments reached a last-minute accord.
It said it regretted the sanctions, but that eight years of litigation had failed to produce a result.
It said it would raise tariffs on $591m (£393m) worth of US products - from cars, where the tariff will increase from 35% to 50%, to milk powder, which would see a 20% increase in the levy.
US farm subsidies are condemned worldwide. This archaic practice must stop
Carlos Marcio Cozendey Brazil's foreign ministry
Cotton and cotton products would be charged 100% import tariff, the highest on the list.
The Office of the US Trade Representative said it was "disappointed" by Brazil's decision and called for a negotiated settlement.
Critics say the US has given its cotton growers an unfair advantage by paying them billions of dollars each year.
In 2008, the WTO ruled that subsidies to US cotton producers were discriminatory.
"US farm subsidies are condemned worldwide. This archaic practice must stop."
However some analysts say major changes to these subsidies would involve modifying agricultural legislation - a tall order for the US Congress against a difficult economic and political backdrop, says the BBC's Gary Duffy in Sao Paulo.
Our correspondent says the dispute, which began in 2002, is one of the few in which the WTO has allowed cross-retaliation, meaning the wronged party can retaliate against a sector not involved in the case.
He adds that it appears the Brazilian government has deliberately chosen a wide range of products in order to have maximum impact.
Safety net
Cotton producers in the US argue that the system of subsidies has changed since the WTO made its original ruling in 2005.
"The US has made changes in the cotton programme as well as the export guarantee programme," Gary Adams, chief economist at the National Cotton Council told the BBC, adding that US cotton production was now 40% to 45% lower.
Mr Adams said he believed that subsidies were still justified.
"We feel this is a very important financial safety net for producers," he said.
Steven Bipes of the Brazil-US Business Council urged the US to take steps to avoid what he called "damaging" retaliation by Brazil.
"The business community finds it extraordinarily important that countries, including the US, comply with its WTO obligations and otherwise negotiate to find common ground when there are disputes," he told the BBC.
Labels: BRAZIL, TARIFFS, TRADE SANCTIONS, USA, WTO
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China imposes sanctions on US over Taiwan arms deal
SMH/TZG
Sun, 31 Jan 2010 23:45:00 +0000
CHINA has cancelled all military exchanges with the United States in response to the proposed $US6.4 billion ($7.23 billion) sale of advanced missiles and helicopters to Taiwan by Washington.
Beijing has also imposed sanctions on the companies selling the arms and threatened to review co-operation on other issues. The US responded defiantly, insisting that the sales would contribute to regional security.
The angry row escalates frictions between Beijing and Washington, who are at odds over trade, climate change and a threat by internet giant Google to leave the Chinese market in protest against alleged computer hacking of its members' accounts.
It is a further blow to the hopes of the US President, Barack Obama, to secure Chinese support for tougher measures against Iran over its illicit nuclear programme. The US State Department insisted that the arms sale contributed to ''security and stability'' between Taiwan and China.
''Such sales contribute to maintaining security and stability across the Taiwan Strait,'' said a US State Department spokeswoman, Laura Tischler. ''The US is the leading arms supplier to Taiwan and, under a 1979 act of Congress, is legally obliged to help Taiwan defend itself.''
China had warned the US that the sale would have a ''serious negative impact'' on ties between the two countries.
Beijing regards Taiwan as a renegade province that is still part of its territory.
Announcing its retaliation, a Defence Ministry spokesman, Huang Xueping, said: "We made the decision out of considerations on the severe harm of the US arms sales to Taiwan.''
China's Vice Foreign Minister, He Yafei, said the arms deal would lead to an ''aftermath both sides would not prefer'' and called on Washington to reverse its ''erroneous'' decision.
Mr He said China was "strongly indignant" about the package of weapons, which includes 114 Patriot anti-missile missiles, 60 Black Hawk helicopters and two minesweepers, which was submitted to the US Congress for approval on Friday.
''The US plan will definitely undermine China-US relations and bring about a serious negative impact on exchanges and co-operation in major areas between the two countries,'' said Mr He in a statement.
There have been no signs Beijing will try to use its US dollar assets to pressure Washington, or impose broader trade penalties, both steps that would undercut China's economic strength.
But China's Defence Ministry said military exchanges would be put on hold and Beijing postponed vice ministerial-level talks on security, arms control and non-proliferation.
The military freeze could prevent a visit to China by the US Defence Secretary, Robert Gates. Military contacts between the two powers are limited, and were last suspended by China in 2008 over a previous round of US arms sales to Taiwan.
The row is the latest sign of the fraught relationship between the two superpowers and marks a significant end to US unilateralism.
President Obama's decision later this year to meet the Dalai Lama, who China regards as a dangerous separatist, has also angered Beijing.
Labels: CHINA, SANCTIONS, USA
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US backs lifting of IMF suspension
by
20/01/2010 00:00:00
THE United States has promised to back Zimbabwe’s bid to have its voting rights at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) restored during the multilateral lending institution’s next board meeting.
Zimbabwe’s voting and related rights were suspended in 2003 after the country failed to clear its arrears and the organisation determined it was not getting any cooperation in terms of policy implementation. The IMF says suspension of voting rights is “one in a series of escalating remedial measures (applied) to members that fail to meet their obligations”.
The suspension meant that Zimbabwe could no longer appoint a Governor to the IMF, participate in the election of an Executive Director for its Board, or cast its vote in decisions on IMF policy or country matters.
However, US Ambassador to Zimbabwe, Charles Ray, told The Herald in Harare that his country would support a motion to have the rights restored.
"We would want to assure Zimbabwe that once the issue of restoring Zimbabwe’s voting rights in the IMF is put forward for debate at the next IMF sitting, America will fully support the motion,” he said.
He was speaking after meeting Deputy Prime Minister, Thokozani Khupe who said the country’s fledgling economic recovery needed the support of the international community to be sustained.
"The inclusive Government has covered enough ground and we feel if financial restrictions are removed Zimbabwe will be able to retain its former status.
"As a country, we are making efforts to economically empower our people so that they do not depend much on donor funds but use their vast natural resources to develop themselves and the country," Khupe said.
The Ambassador refused to be drawn on whether the US would consider repealing the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act (ZDERA) of 2001.
The act directs the US representatives to organisations such as the IMF to oppose any loans or debt relief to the government of Zimbabwe.
The restriction would only be lifted once the US was satisfied Zimbabwe had met a series of conditions relating to the “restoration of the rule of law”, the holding of “free and fair” elections and demonstrated commitment to “equitable, legal and transparent” land reform.
Labels: CHARLES RAY, IMF, SANCTIONS, USA, ZDERA, ZIMBABWE
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US, UK: Making and breaking global rules
Comment
Wed, 16 Dec 2009 03:07:00 +0000
THE United States of America and Britain claim to be champions of democracy. They even give human rights awards to people of other countries where they feel their foreign policy objectives are threatened.
This is a very conspicuous US public diplomatic approach to influence the world and present America as the world's saviour. In the last 7 years, the two countries have killed over a million Iraqis and several thousand Afghans in what former US President Bush called "the war on terror".
His predecessor, Barack Obama has shied away from that term, although he has continued as the "War President", despite promising "Change We Can Believe In".
Even Americans are beginning to doubt that change. Mr Obama's popularity dipped to an all-time low of 47% approval rating recently. No other US President achieved that 'feat' in their first year.
He also has another record (on the war front): He has launched more drone attacks in one year than his predecessor George H.W. Bush did in eight. These weapons have killed innocent women and children. They kill indiscriminately.
Mr Obama, apparently, is also the first Black US President. He has set a precedent for future "Black Presidents" - whatever that precedent looks like.
The idea that the United States can impose democracy in other countries is an oxymoron. How can you kill to stop killing? Infact, how can you kill a million people to depose one person from presidency - Saddam Hussein? A million Iraqis were sacrificed to remove Saddam Hussein. Needless to say there are thousands of British and US servicemen who have died, or lost limb, in that mindless war.
Mr Obama, was at pains to try and justify the American war impulse when he was presented the Nobel "peace prize".
Democracy is not a piece of hardware you can hold in your hand and impose on other people. It is a mindset and is relative to a nation.
The idea that Afghans will Americanise in a decade is ridiculous. They have their own social, economic and cultural systems which have evolved over years and are not about to be diluted by US or UK foreign policy.
They have a system of tribes that even the Soviets failed to dismantle. US, Britain and their friends will go on and waste resources in that country and after all is said and done, Afghanistan will still remain the society that it was before they went in.
The Taliban are not a defined group that you can bomb willy-nilly and eradicate. They are a mindset, and mindsets require centuries to change. The Taliban do not look different from anyone else. They are amongst the people they think are their friends. They are the fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, cousins, of the people they are training as security and army personnel in that country.
How then can you defeat the Taliban when they are amongst the people you work with; when they ARE the people you work with?
Infact, when do you say, "We have won the 'war' in Iraq and Afghanistan?" What is the benchmark with which that success is measured?
When you extrapolate the expense of the offensive in Iraq and Afghanistan, the return on investment to the UK and US is not worth it.
It costs a million dollars per troop, per year to run the Afghan offensive. This excludes Iraq. When you think of the collateral costs; costs of manufacturing equipment, security, compensation to victims, and social and political costs, the whole exercise becomes a joke.
The inquiry opened up in Britain a few weeks ago over the "war in Iraq" has exposed Western leadership's hypocrisy and their inadequcies.
Mr Tony Blair, former British Prime Minister, is accussed of 'lying' to his own country's leadership about "weapons of mass destruction" and there are calls in the UK for him to be taken to the International Criminal Court in The Hague on war criminal charges.
If Mr Blair goes, then Mr Bush has to go too.
But, given the fact that these countries make and break global rules, that possibility is still far away.
Infact, an inquiry with no oath on the part of those giving evidence, is totally pointless. In the meantime, African leaders continue to be hailed before that discredited international legal organisation.
One thing is certain though: Iraq and Afghanistan will remain the West's biggest failure, just like Vietnam was America's biggest embarrasment.
Labels: NEOCONSERVATISM, UK, USA
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Botswana, US propaganda pact exposed
Herald Reporter
Botswana entered into a bilateral agreement with the United States to beam anti-government messages into Zimbabwe and recently completed the upgrading of a transmitter to scale up the pirate broadcasts, it has emerged.
In a statement in which Voice of America’s Studio 7 contradicted itself in trying to deny that it is a pirate broadcaster, an official of the subversive station said they were
beaming into Zimbabwe under an agreement between Botswana and the United States.
By hosting the pirate stations, Botswana and Madagascar — which hosts a relay station for Voice of the People — are violating International Telecommunications Union protocols by supporting the broadcasting of the hate messages.
The two countries are also in contempt of Sadc and the African Union as the guarantors of the Global Political Agreement signed by Zanu-PF, MDC-T and MDC.
VOA director of Africa broadcasting Gwen Dillard was quoted by another pirate broadcaster, SW Radio Africa, as saying the US and Botswana had a "government-to-government broadcast agreement" to beam the anti-Zimbabwe propaganda and this was not illegal.
However, she then admitted that they were beaming illegally into Zimbabwe and would continue doing so until Government "liberalised the media space".
Yesterday, the Secretary for Media, Information and Publicity Mr George Charamba said the government-to-government agreement between Gaborone and Washington was in violation of ITU protocols, Zimbabwe’s sovereignty and the Sadc-guaranteed and AU-recognised GPA.
"Neither America nor Botswana can enter into an agreement to violate the sovereignty and interests of a third party.
"None of them represent the interests of Zimbabwe and Zimbabweans. Besides, the existence of such an agreement is no justification for beaming hate messages to Zimbabwe.
"The operative laws governing international broadcasts are not premised on Botswana and America’s bilateral agreements but on ITU protocols that regulate the use of frequencies.
"I challenge VOA to show the world the agreement between Botswana and America and how it encompasses Zimbabwe," he said.
Mr Charamba said Botswana was suggesting it had usurped the sovereignty of a neighbour by entering into an agreement to attack the country and this made the resolution of this matter all the more urgent.
"We know that they have recently completed upgrading a transmitter site with the specific intention of upgrading the media terrorism against Zimbabwe and its people."
On the issue of "opening up media space", Mr Charamba said VOA was trying to cloud the issue by not dealing with the real matter at hand.
"This country has had a State broadcasting monopoly since day one of radio services.
"Why is it that VOA never beamed messages into the country during UDI?
"Why didn’t they do this all throughout Rhodesia if they cared so much about the people of Zimbabwe?
"How about during that thing called Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, why did they not broadcast?
"Why is it they never found it necessary to broadcast into Zimbabwe at independence and they only saw the need to start when we embarked on the land reform programme? What is the principle at work here?"
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has said it will make a formal complaint to Botswana about the succour it is giving to purveyors of hate messages.
Secretary for Foreign Affairs Ambassador Joey Bimha this week said Zimbabwe made a formal complaint last year through the Organ on Politics, Defence and Security Co-operation and they would soon raise the matter with Gaborone, probably through the Committee on Defence and Security and the Joint Permanent Commission.
Botswana ironically hosts the Sadc secretariat but has been at the forefront of violating the GPA that the bloc has said it will act as guarantors of.
The activities of the pirate radio stations and external interference in Zimbabwe’s domestic affairs are some of the main outstanding issues in the implementation of the GPA.
Zanu-PF, MDC-T and MDC negotiators have been meeting over the past week to resolve the outstanding issues in line with commitments made at a recent Sadc Organ on Politics, Defence and Security summit in Mozambique.
Apart from pirate radio broadcasts of hate messages, an issue sources said seized negotiators was that of the reported establishment of parallel government structures in the PM’s Office. The Public Service Commission has since said members of the parallel government will be barred from entering Government offices.
Labels: BOTSWANA, COLOUR REVOLUTIONS, NEOCOLONIALISM, PROPAGANDA, USA, VOA
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US says not lifting sanctions against Zim
Ralph Mutema
Mon, 21 Sep 2009 11:25:00 +0000
THE United States of America says it is still early to lift sanctions against Zimbabwe and reserve the right to lift those sanctions when they want to do so and when they see progress.
U.S. Assistant Secretary for African Affairs, Ambassador Johnnie Carson, told the Center for American Progress that the U.S. heeds the call by the Southern African Development Community (Sadc) to lift sanctions against Zimbabwe but, "We differ on when and how to lift sanctions."
He added: "We reserve the right to lift those sanctions when we want to do so and when we see progress."
South African Broadcasting Corporation's Manalese Tubas asked Ambassador Carson, "You emphasized the issue of mutual respect between the (U.S.) administration and Africans and the fact that you say that Africans must take the lead in resolving their own problems... The resolution of Sadc in Kinshasa a week ago, where they said that sanctions must be lifted in Zimbabwe as a matter of – (inaudible) – so that the people of Zimbabwe should start to rebuild their country. And it does seem to me that you are not listening to that and are not prepared to respect that resolution. Why?"
The ambassador said the U.S. was concerned that lifting the sanctions would bring economic advantages that would allow the government of President Mugabe to "secure their further control on government".
"And we think it is important not to let the economic advantages that Morgan Tsvangirai and Tendai Biti bring to the case to be exploited and used by Robert Mugabe and others to secure their further control on government," said Ambassador Carson.
"We still think insufficient progress has been made, and to remove that pressure may in effect allow for economic gains, but not in effect change the dynamics of the political strangulation that Zanu exercises on political control and power."
Ambassador Carson in his statement referred to "sanctions" as opposed to "restrictive measures", a term favoured by the MDC-T party. He said that "the sanctions that the United States has in place are primarily directed at individuals, some – approximately 220 of them, of the most senior officials in the government, and also at entities that they possess or may own."
Carson said that the U.S. has "an enormous amount of respect for Sadc and what Sadc stands for" and will continue dialogue with the regional grouping.
Earlier this month, the heads of state of the Sadc called for the removal of all international sanctions on Zimbabwe, saying that pogress has been made since the formation of the inclusive Government last February.
The body ignored a call from Zimababwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai for a special Sadc summit to discuss terms before lifting the sanctions.
MDC-T leader and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai accuses President Mugabe of not reversing the appointments of Reserve Bank Governor Gideon Gono and Attorney General Johannes Tomana, although the appointments are not mentioned in the power-sharing agreement and were made six months before the signing of that agreement.
Regional leaders argue that significant progress has been made by the inclusive Government to warrant the lifting of sanctions.
"Considering the positive evolution of the situation, considering the progress that has been made, we believe it is now high time that the santions are lifted," said current Sadc chairman, Congolese President Joseph Kabila.
President Mugabe's press secretary George Charamba said that "by continuing to inflict it [Zimbabwe] with those sanctions that are unjustified and illegal anyway, you are hurting Sadc. Please, do us a favour, remove them."
Labels: JOHNNIE CARSON, SANCTIONS, USA
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US closes South Africa embassy over threat
Written by Reuters
Tuesday, September 22, 2009 5:29:23 PM
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - The U.S. embassy and other American government offices in South Africa were closed on Tuesday due to an undisclosed security threat which police said was under control. South African Police Commissioner Bheki Cele said he could not give details of the threat.
"Our intelligence world is dealing with it. It is under control," he told reporters in Cape Town. "There are things that have happened. There are things that are happening," he said, adding that police were in touch with U.S. officials.
South Africa, due to host the soccer World Cup finals next year, is not itself seen as a target for terrorists.
Somali rebels have vowed to avenge the killing last week of one of the continent's most wanted al Qaeda suspects in a raid by U.S. commandos, but there has been no previous link between Somali insurgents and South Africa.
Bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 killed 224 people and wounded thousands.
A State Department spokesman in Washington said the U.S. government was warning American citizens to be extra vigilant while near U.S. government facilities in South Africa.
"We are maintaining close contact with South African authorities on this issue," he said, adding that the facilities would reopen as soon as the security situation permits.
As well as the embassy, there are U.S. consulates in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town. U.S. embassy spokeswoman Sharon Hudson-Dean said the current assumption was that the offices would reopen on Wednesday.
In addition to the embassy and consulates, there are also other U.S. government offices, including that of USAID.
A spokeswoman for the British High Commission said it had not been informed of anything.
Labels: BHEKI CELE, EMBASSIES, SOUTH AFRICA, USA
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COMMENT - Africans must be in complete control of their own resoures. They must only be exploited for the benefit of the people, and no one else - no secret deals. When that happens, wars like in the DRC, which are over access to the local people's mineral resources, are going to disappear. Also, it might be helpful to rationalize the national borders and put traditional authorities in charge as heads of state with extremly limited powers, and put most powers in the hands of a prime minister, instead of having a President be both head of state and head of the government (constitutional monarchies).
Rwanda: obscuring the truth about the genocide
Barrie Collins
Wednesday 13 August 2008
Far from being radical, the attacks on France for its role in the 1994 war are designed to whitewash Western intervention more broadly. Last week, the Rwandan government published the findings of its commission of inquiry into the role France played in the Rwandan genocide of 1994. It found French diplomats, military leaders and politicians – including former president François Mitterand – complicit in the genocide.
Considering that the current Rwandan leadership has vilified France ever since it launched its bid to seize power in Rwanda in October 1990, eventually winning power in July 1994, it is not surprising that it should now up the stakes against its long-time enemy. The new strongman of Rwanda, President Paul Kagame, is fortunate that he has unswerving support from the United States, Britain and Belgium, and a cheerleading media in these countries which can be counted upon to give his report into France’s role in the genocide maximum impact.
But the truth is that France’s major mistake was to find itself on the wrong side of the moral parable that has been imposed by Western observers on Rwanda’s recent tragic history. A war that was complicated by considerable international intervention has become over-simplified into a morality tale of good versus evil, in which France has been branded as part of the ‘evil side’. Such a simplification further obscures the truth about what happened in Rwanda in 1994, and whitewashes the role of Western intervention more broadly.
According to the moral parable of Rwanda, the good guys were the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which invaded Rwanda in 1990 because it had no other means of protecting the persecuted minority of ethnic Tutsis inside Rwanda and of making the then Hutu-led government accept the right of return of Rwandan Tutsis living abroad as refugees. The bad guys were in the Rwandan government and armed forces. When the international community had helped Rwandans achieve a negotiated settlement, the worst elements among the bad guys drew up a plan to secure Hutu domination once and for all by planning and then implementing genocide against Rwandan Tutsis.
By the time the good guys – the RPF – had fought them off, their evil mission had been largely completed. Hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Tutsis were dead. Genocide had occurred, and the Western world had simply looked on passively. The United States refused to label the war that took place as a genocide in order to resist the clamour for international intervention to save lives. France was the only force on the United Nations Security Council to respond by sending in French forces under Operation Turquoise. But France’s real motivation was not to save lives, but to shore up its erstwhile allies: the bad guys. The French helped them escape Rwanda so that they would not have to answer for their crimes.
A moral analysis like this is compelling because it provides a clear pathway through a maze of complicating factors. For journalists, this moral signposting of the Rwandan genocide leads the way to great copy about the bravery of the heroes and the moral turpitude of the villains. For governments, it provides the crucial element of legitimacy that is the essential underpinning of their right to rule. The Rwandan regime under Paul Kagame depends on this version of events for its support and survival. And so do its principal sponsors, the United States and Great Britain.
As the force that relieved Rwanda from genocide, the RPF - whose leadership currently runs Rwanda - has exploited this version of events to remind Western governments that they failed to live up to the ‘Never Again’ principle that was the driving force behind the passing of the Genocide Convention at the United Nations in 1948. While they battled the genocidaires in 1994, the Western world simply looked on. Except France, that is. But as a supporter of the former, pre-RPF regime, France’s motives for intervening were highly questionable.
It may be the most widely told story of Rwanda, but this version of events is deeply flawed. While the US may have been embarrassed by this account, appearing less than heroic during the months of Rwanda’s greatest torment, it is far easier for it to live with this embarrassment than to be confronted with the facts of how it did intervene in this region of Africa in the early 1990s and since Kagame came to power.
The ‘plane crash’ debate
In fact, the three most influential Western players in Rwanda at this time – the US, France and Belgium – all intervened in ways that created the conditions that made mass slaughter inevitable. Contrary to the prevailing version of events, after its initial deployment of troops defending Rwandan leaders against the RPF’s October War in 1990, by means of Operation Noroît, France recognised that the US and Uganda were behind the RPF and had no desire to become isolated as the sole defender of the Rwandan government. So it increasingly made its military support conditional upon the government’s commitment to serious negotiations with the RPF. According to an informant from the French Ministry of Cooperation, France’s decision to disengage was already evident in 1990: ‘We did not want to remain alone…there were great powers behind the RPF. Uganda could send 30,000 to 40,000 soldiers.’ (1)
The Kagame government’s latest salvo against France, in the shape of its commission report fingering the French for their support for the genocide, is in fact part of an increasingly desperate search for political legitimacy. The weakest point of the Rwandan moral parable is the question of what caused the re-eruption of the war in 1994 and the subsequent descent into mass slaughter. The start of the bloodiest stage of the war is far more complicated than the moral storytellers – who blame it on the then evil government’s determination to secure Hutu domination – would have us believe.
It was an act of international terrorism that triggered the return to war. In early April 1994, an aeroplane carrying Hutu President Juvénal Habyarimana was blown out of the sky by a missile attack that had been planned for several months. Apologists for the RPF have tried hard to blame the attack upon hardline Hutu conspirators, but they have produced nothing of substance to back up this claim. Rather, there is an accumulating amount of evidence that the RPF was responsible for the missile attack – and it is this evidence that has put the current RPF government, led by Kagame, on the back foot. It is the government’s defensiveness on this issue that lies at the heart of the current France-bashing.
The UN’s own investigator, Michael Hourigan, first came across compelling evidence of the RPF’s responsibility for assassinating President Habyarimana and the other unfortunate occupants of his plane. However, it appears that under pressure from Washington, the UN agreed to shut down its investigation into the missile attack. Another UN investigator, Robert Gersony, came across evidence of RPF atrocities and was also silenced; the UN even stated that his report ‘did not exist’.
These inconvenient truths threatened to muddy the clear waters of moral certainty that the Rwandan parable provides. The Rwandan regime has lived behind the shield of international powers which have worked hard to keep the matter of the plane shooting off the agenda. For all of its 13 years of operation, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), whose brief is to establish the truth of what happened in 1994, has ruled that the matter of the President Habyarimana’s assassination (which it chooses to refer to simply as a plane ‘crash’) is not within its remit. When one of the ICTR’s chief prosecutors, Carla Del Ponte, expressed her desire to dust off the investigation into the allegations against the RPF, stating that ‘if it is the RPF that shot down the plane, the history of genocide must be rewritten’ (2), she was abruptly relieved of her position and moved to The Hague.
Del Ponte’s successor at the ICTR, the Gambian Hassan Bubacar Jallow, subsequently confirmed that the shooting down of the aircraft is ‘not a case that falls within our jurisdiction’ (3). It is ironic that the ICTR’s first chief prosecutor, Richard Goldstone, has expressed his view that the plane attack does fall within the remit of the court and ought to be investigated. ‘It is clearly related to the genocide, by all accounts [it was] the trigger that started the genocide and it would have been very, very important from a justice point of view, from victims’ point of view, to find out.’ (4)
However, the ICTR’s deputy prosecutor, Bernard Muna, felt cavalier enough about the issue to tell the ICTR’s legal adviser, Kingsley Moghalu, that ‘after all, there was a state of war, and Habyarimana could be considered a legitimate target’ (5). This is an extraordinary statement from such a senior figure. The missile attack was, among other things, a deliberate violation of Article 1 of the Arusha Accords of 4 August 1993, which stated: ‘The war between the Government of Rwanda and the Rwandan Patriotic Front is over.’
Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the secretary-general of the UN at the time of the Rwanda tragedy, is also emphatic about the cover-up of the investigation into the plane shooting: ‘It is a very mysterious scandal. Four reports have been made on Rwanda: the French Parliament Report, the Belgian Senate Report, Kofi Annan’s UN report, and the Organization of African Unity report. All four say absolutely nothing about the shooting down of the Rwandan president’s plane. That just goes to show the power of the intelligence services that can force people to be quiet.’ (6)
Building upon the evidence received by the UN investigator Michael Hourigan, the French judge Jean-Louis Bruguière conducted his own enquiry on behalf of the family of the French pilot who died in the missile attack, along with the presidents of both Rwandan and Burundi and senior government and military figures. Bruguière’s report is thoroughgoing and detailed. I have interviewed one of the several RPF dissidents who briefed the judge: Aloys Ruyenzi. A former member of Kagame’s guard, Ruyenzi states categorically that he was in the room when Kagame gave the order to shoot down the president’s plane, and names all those who were present. The meeting was between 2pm and 3pm on 31 March 1994 (7). The Kagame government reacted in its customary fashion to these revelations about the shooting down of the plane: it launched a character assassination of all the Rwandan contributors to Bruguière’s report, and condemned Bruguière for being, well, French.
Western complicity: what about the US?
Yet there is more than the legitimacy of the Rwandan government at stake in this latest retelling of the moral parable on Rwanda. The RPF would not have sustained its war without diplomatic support from Washington. The US intervened to legitimise the RPF’s war, even though the justifications for it had by that time proven to be baseless. The first invasion in 1990 was timed, not to force a reluctant Rwandan government to allow refugees to return, but to disrupt arrangements already in place to accommodate returning refugees.
Rather than being a desertion from the Ugandan military (the RPF leadership were in top positions in the Ugandan state), the invasion of Rwanda in 1990 was a joint Ugandan-RPF venture. President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda was keen to have an ally in power south of the border. More importantly, he wanted to be rid of his Rwandan refugee ‘problem’. The issues of land occupation by Rwandans, and suspicions about the leverage that Rwandans in top official positions enjoyed in the Ugandan government, had generated Museveni’s first political crisis since he took power in 1986.
Behind Uganda was its closest international ally and sponsor, Washington. It was US intervention, in the person of secretary of state for African affairs Herman Cohen, which chose not to condemn the RPF’s invasion and Uganda’s support for it, but rather to support the military recovery of the RPF upon its initial defeat. Cohen coerced President Habyarimana not only to negotiate a ceasefire with the RPF, but to enter negotiations with it in order that a stake for the RPF in a new government be agreed.
By July 1992, Rwanda no longer had a single-party regime but a coalition government and a new democratic constitution. The constitution guaranteed freedom of political organisation and prohibited discrimination on any grounds, ethnic or otherwise.
Of course, it takes more than a constitution to bring about democracy, but it was a promising start and presented another opportunity for the US to tell its Ugandan ally Museveni to pull the plug on the RPF or face the end of the privileged ‘New African Leader’ status that it had bestowed upon him. There was nothing to prevent the RPF from campaigning for support inside Rwanda alongside the other opposition parties. Nothing except the fact that the RPF was feared and loathed by the majority of Rwanda’s population.
And yet, Washington was happy for the RPF to intensify its war. In February 1993, the RPF violated the Arusha ‘peace process’ with its heaviest offensive to date. It is arguably the case that if there had not been French forces around the capital Kigali, the RPF may have succeeded in seizing power at that time. The offensive resulted in thousands of deaths and the displacement of nearly a million people, living in miserable conditions in makeshift camps. This offensive did more than anything else to generate hatred for the RPF and, tragically, for the local Tutsi population who were assumed to be in league with the overwhelmingly Tutsi RPF.
How human rights lobbyists boosted the RPF
The RPF had violated the negotiations process with another round of death and destruction. But thanks to coordinated human rights lobbying, the RPF returned to the negotiating table unapologetic about its own conduct and full of moral indignation at the evils of the Rwandan government. A suspiciously well-timed human rights report was published in 1993, accusing the Rwandan government of gross violations of human rights. Some of its authors even accused it of genocide. The government had been responsible for atrocities against civilians in response to the RPF’s initial invasion, and had admitted to them. It objected to the report’s bias: the investigators had made only a token effort to investigate allegations of atrocities committed by the RPF, spending only a few hours interviewing people in the presence of RPF soldiers.
Thanks in large measure to the impact of this report, the RPF was able to take the moral high ground and use the negotiations as a vehicle for translating its military gains into political gains. RPF intransigence and military strategy was facilitated in no small measure by the human rights crusade that was launched against the Habyarimana-led coalition government.
But France, too, played a vital role in prodding the Rwandan government to reach a political settlement with the RPF. According to the French writer Agnes Callamard, it was not just pressure from the US that was applied to get Habyarimana to sign the Arusha Accords in 1993 – ‘it is doubtful if Habyarimana would have signed the peace accords, which gave heavy concessions to the RPF, without pressure and guarantees from the Elysée through François Mitterand’s personal emissaries, and possibly from representatives of the Military Mission of Cooperation, specifically Général Huchon, Colonel Cussac – the French military attaché and head of the French military Assistance Mission in Rwanda, and his assistant, Lieutenant Colonel Maurin.’ (8)
Having secured a virtual coup in the 1993 negotiations – the RPF had won 50 per cent command of the envisaged unified army and enough seats in the proposed transitional government to block anything that was against its interests – the RPF had emerged as the strongest party. The problem it now faced was the scheduled elections where its unpopularity would have been exposed. Local elections in the demilitarised zone that was created in the wake of the February 1993 offensive pointed the way – the RPF was massively defeated at the hands of the former ruling party.
Faced with the prospect of being downsized to a small party by the Rwandan electorate, and with clear support from the US and Belgium, it would appear that the RPF’s interests could only be further advanced with a return to the battlefield. With the promised departure of French forces from Kigali in December 1993, the military path to the capital was clear. What was needed by the RPF was a justification for resuming the war.
The Rwandan war re-erupts
The assassination of President Habyarimana by means of the missile attack upon his plane set off a round of killings of opposition political figures by elements of Habyarimana’s Presidential Guard on one hand, and killings of members of the former ruling party by the RPF on the other. Massacres of Tutsi civilians by Hutu militia soon followed in Kigali, and then spread across the country. But, contrary to the conventional story, RPF forces were on the march long before any massacres occurred.
Peter Erlinder, the lead defence council for the ICTR, stated categorically in a letter to the Canadian prime minister in 2006 that the final offensive of the RPF was ordered by Kagame within minutes of learning of the successful missile attack, ‘long before any retaliatory, civilian killings had occurred anywhere in Rwanda’ (9).
Three years of mounting fear, insecurity and material deprivation (much of Rwanda was by this time in the grip of famine) came to a head. Rwanda’s hastily (but constitutionally) appointed government of surviving ministers fled the capital. The army was pinned down in one losing encounter with the RPF after another. In these anarchic conditions, Rwanda’s defenceless Tutsi population bore the brunt of murderous hatred generated by an ethnically polarising war.
The RPF won the war and took power in July 1994. Africa then witnessed the largest mass exodus in its history. Over two million Rwandans voted with their feet and moved to former Zaïre and Tanzania. The United States, Britain and Belgium in particular rushed to recognise the new regime in Kigali.
Even greater numbers were still to die. The new Rwandan regime’s invasion of various refugee camps and its forced repatriation of refugees, the massacre of internally displaced people in Kibeho in April 1995, and two invasions of what became the Democratic Republic of Congo by the ruling RPF – all of this has brought the death toll of civilians to a level that is the highest of any conflict since the Second World War. The number of ministers leaving the new government and later dying in mysterious circumstances continues to rise.
Accountability on the part of the Rwandan regime for these violations is waived by its sponsors in Washington, London and Brussels. Whenever challenged on these matters, officials from these capitals will reply that this was the force that liberated Rwanda from genocide, and continued Western backing for it is necessary to ensure that the genocidaires never return to power.
The truth behind the moral parable
But facts are stubborn things. Bruguière’s charges will not go away. The matter of the assassination of two heads of state is the Achilles heel of the Rwandan government. If the RPF’s responsibility for the plane shooting as a planned move towards reigniting the war in Rwanda is proven, what can be said about the diplomatic protection given to the RPF by the US and other Western powers? How can the leader of the ‘war against terror’ – America – explain its suppression of the facts about the assassination of two heads of state? What do we make of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda’s brief to foster reconciliation by establishing the truth and ending a culture of impunity?
In The Times last week, Linda Melvern wrote about ‘a large room in the French Embassy in Kigali filled floor to ceiling with shredded documents. This was probably the paper trail that might have revealed the depth of involvement between the Elysée Palace and the Hutu faction responsible for massacring hundreds of thousands of Tutsi and opposition Hutu’ (10). Holding on to the moral parable of Rwanda and endorsing Kigali’s invective against France may work for now. But facts – about the start of the war, the actions of the RPF, and the role of Western intervention more broadly in pushing Rwanda to the brink – are stubborn things…
Barrie Collins is a writer on African affairs and author of Obedience in Rwanda: A Critical Question published by Sheffield Hallam University Press in 1998.
Previously on spiked
Barrie Collins reported from the waiting room of the Rwandan genocide tribunal. Tara McCormack criticised the indictment of Sudanase President Omar al-Bashir for genocide. Julie Hearn looke at Kenya and the myth of Afrian barbarism Brendan O’Neill said Somalia is a case study of the dangers of moralism in international affairs, and that Darfur has been damned by pity. Or read more at spiked issue Africa.
(1) ‘French Policy in Rwanda’, A Callamard included in The Path of a Genocide: The Rwanda Crisis from Uganda to Zaïre, H Adelman and A Suhurke, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1999, p. 178, note 19
(2) Interview with Carla Del Ponte, Aktuelt, 17 April 2000. Cited in Le drama rwandais : Les aveaux accablants des chefs de la Mission des Nations Unies pour l’Assistance au Rwanda, E Karemera, Editions Sources du Nil, 2006
(3) Bush and Other War Criminals Meet in Rwanda: The Great “Rwanda Genocide” Coverup, P Erlinder, Global Research, 20 February 2008
(4) April 6th 1994 Attack Fits ICTR Mandate – Goldstone, Hirondelle News Agency, accessed 12 December 2006
(5) Rwanda’s Genocide: The Politics of International Justice, K Moghalu, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005 p.52
(6) Second Thoughts on the Hotel Rwanda, Philpot, R, Race and History, 26 February 2005
(7) ‘Major General Paul Kagame behind the shooting down of late Habyarimana’s plane: an eye witness testimony, 2nd Lt. Aloys Ruyenzi Press release, 18 January 2005 (Ruyenzi re-affirmed his statement to the author in an interview in Paris)
(8) ‘French Policy in Rwanda’, A Callamard included in The Path of a Genocide: The Rwanda Crisis from Uganda to Zaïre, H Adelman and A Suhurke, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1999, p.163
(9) Open letter to Prime Minister Harper: Regarding state visit of current President of Rwanda, P Erlinder, 6 April 2006 (Copy passed on to author by Erlinder. Emphasis in the original)
(10) The murky truth about France and genocide, L Melvern, The Times, 8 August 2008
Labels: COLONIALISM, COLTAN, FRANCE, GENOCIDE, NEOCOLONIALISM, PAUL KAGAME, RWANDA, UK, USA, YOWERI MUSEVENI
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