• Mugabe hits out at Obama for ‘failing to help black people’

  • In AFRICA
  • January 30, 2016
  • Agency Report
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• Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe delivered an hour-long speech as he handed over the chairmanship of the African Union to Chadian leader Idriss Debby, hitting out at US President Barack Obama “for failing to help black people”.

  Mr Mugabe said as long as he was alive, he would remain the president of Zimbabwe.

  “I will be there until God says ‘come’, and as long as I am alive, I will head the country. Forward ever, backward never,” he said.

• Mr Mugabe, 91, who was preceded on the podium by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the Chairperson of the AU Commission Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma was cheered.

  “There is Obama today. What is he? A voice made to speak their language, not ours. Blacks still suffer in the US today. There is no education for all, no health for all,” he went on.

  Turning to the UN chief, President Mugabe said: “Mr Ban Ki-moon, you are a good man but we can’t make you a fighter. That is not what your mission is.”

• Mr Ban was at the AU for the last time as his term as UN boss expires this year.

  “They want to talk about us. They are everywhere in Africa through Non Governmental Organisations, spies and pretenders who say they are here to help us,” Mugabe raved.

  President Mugabe renewed the call for Africa to be given at least two slots in the UN Security Council.

  “If we decided to leave the United Nations, only Europe and the US will remain. If the UN is to survive, there must be equality,” the Zimbabwean leader said.

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  As is traditional, the plenary session was opened by the outgoing AU President followed by Dr Dlamini-Zuma.

• CHADIAN LEADER DEBBY TAKES OVER

  Unlike in past, the leaders held a closed-door session in which Mr Deby was chosen AU boss.

  Mr Deby will be deputised by Benin’s President Thomas Boni Yayi while Rwandan leader Paul Kagame will be second vice-president.

  In the past, the summit began with the open plenary session to which journalists were invited.

• “Everyone will agree that succeeding Robert Mugabe is not an easy task but I will do my best,” Mr Deby said.

  “I don’t have the power to change the course of things in Africa. You have given me and the people of Chad a special task.”

  President Deby said the AU would be an empty shell if “Africans cannot move freely across the continent as bearers of a single passport.”

  He decried the union’s failure to act on its resolutions and relying on donor funding for most of its projects.

  The summit welcomed Tanzania’s President John Pombe Magufuli and Burkina Faso’s Roch Marc Christian Kabore.

  The UN boss said anyone who instigates killings in Africa should be prosecuted.

  “Leaders who stand by while civilians are slaughtered should be held to account,” Mr Ban said.

  He cited South Sudan where leaders have failed to act on agreements aimed at ending the civil war.

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  Remembering Bob Marley At The Birth Of Zimbabwe

• Continued from page 1

  Marley and his crew spent the night, carousing with many former guerrilla fighters, at the run-down Skyline Hotel on the outskirts of Harare as foreign journalists had booked all the big hotels. The next day, Marley traveled to spend time with marijuana farmers in Mutoko, a town 143 kilometers outside Harare, where he sampled the herb. In the last hours of Rhodesia, on April 17, thousands flocked to Rufaro stadium in Mbare, the Harare township that was the crucible of the struggle.

• There was a carnival atmosphere; people wore caps and t-shirts bearing the face of the new prime minister, Robert Mugabe.  At midnight, the green, gold and black flag of Zimbabwe, with the African fish eagle, replaced the Union Flag. A 32-year-old Prince Charles stood and saluted as the Union Flag came down for the last time in Africa.

   

  People crushed into the stadium as Marley took to the stage. The police panicked and fired teargas into the crowd. Back-up singers Marcia Griffiths and Rita Marley, the wife of the lead singer, were the first band members to get a whiff of teargas and they ran backstage. When it cleared, they went back. “Bob was still in his element, he didn’t realize what was happening around him,” said Rita in a documentary years later. “So when we got back on stage, this is what Bob said to us: ‘Now I know who the true revolutionary is.’”

   

  “It was a poignant moment; Bob Marley takes a celebratory stance at the front stage, calling out ‘Viva Zimbabwe!’ Each time eliciting a greater response from the audience,” says Zindi. “It is a moment pregnant with possibilities. Rastafari in our father’s land. A realization of the inherent unity in black culture, as emotional for the audience as it is for the band. Homecoming.”

   

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  “Bob Marley was at his height and that alone attracted a lot people’s attention to Zimbabwe,” says Gutto. “It was an historic moment of the liberation of Zimbabwe where the white arrogant people declared independence and so on. It was a moment when I and the other progressive intellectuals went to Zimbabwe. It was a special period. It captured the imagination of the world. You can’t hold Marley responsible for what Robert Mugabe did after that.”

   

  One of the things that Mugabe did was to declare law lecturer Gutto persona non grata, on unspecified national security grounds, in 1988, and deported him. One of the many Zimbabweans turned away on independence night by police outside Rufaro stadium was 21-year-old Enos Nyarenda, an activist who had just returned from exile.

• “When the war ended in Zimbabwe, in January, I went home in Harare with many other activists to witness our independence,” says Nyarenda, now a businessman in Kwekwe, in central Zimbabwe. “My mother cried so much. It was after two years of my absence. My father was still in detention then, detained by the Ian Smith government, but he was released just a few days before independence day. I can’t describe the feeling, it was so emotional. We hugged. He had been detained for five years.”

   

  Luckily, for thousands like Nyarenda, Marley agreed to play again at Rufaro the following day. Nyarenda went with his new girlfriend, Susan, who is now his wife and mother of his three children. “Oh man, we had this international outfit for the first time in Zimbabwe, these guys with long dreadlocks. Some of these things were not familiar at that time. I have never attended a music show bigger than that one. Having been from the bush, I was not the real reggae person. But the people were so excited and screaming. It was a free show. We instead had love for the music. Everyone couldn’t believe we were actually free, I never felt like that in my life. We are still talking about that day,” says Nyarenda. So will Africa as long as people talk.  

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  Remembering Bob Marley At The Birth Of Zimbabwe

• Post written by

  Thobile Hans

  Mr. Hans is a senior journalist, writing for Forbes Africa.

• This story appears in the April, 2015 issue of Forbes Africa

   

  Could it happen in this age of greed? A leading international musician pays his own way to travel thousands of miles to celebrate the independence of an African nation. He spends a night in a rundown hotel; smokes marijuana with farmers; survives teargas and writes a song that goes down in history. This was Bob Marley 35 years ago at the birth of Zimbabwe – an African story told by those who were there.

   

  It all started with the impossible dream in Harare. Two Zimbabwean businessmen, nightclub owner Job Kadengu and Gordon Muchanyuka, wanted a big name to serenade the new Zimbabwe at midnight on April 17, 1980. Kadengu and Muchanyuka agreed Bob Marley was their man. The two flew to Kingston, Jamaica, to invite Marley, just weeks before independence day.

   

  “Chris Blackwell, his manager at the time, was against this tour, but Marley, who had been following events in Zimbabwe, decided he would go,” says Fred Zindi, now a professor at the University of Zimbabwe, then, one of the Marley dreamers. “He hired a PA system in London and paid for his freight to Zimbabwe at his own expense.”

   

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  Marley had inspired Zimbabwe.

• “During the years of Chimurenga (chiShona for uprising), Bob Marley’s music had been adopted by the guerrilla forces of the Patriotic Front; indeed, there were stories of ZANLA troops playing Marley cassettes in the bush,” says Zindi. “Certainly, Marley’s music has potency and a commitment which goes far beyond simple entertainment. He now enjoys a special place in Third World culture; an artist who directly identifies with the black African struggle. Thus, he was the only outside artist asked to participate in Zimbabwe’s independence celebrations.”

   

  “His songs were the food that people in liberation movements, particularly the armed wings, were swallowing,” says Shadrack Gutto, a Unisa professor and constitutional law expert in South Africa, who was to teach law in Zimbabwe for 12 years. “From that point of view… to be able to see that music was an important aspect of the liberation of this continent. Bob Marley, like Amilcar Cabral (the first president of Angola), articulated so well the importance of the role of culture and music in the liberation struggle.”

• So, it was set for a strange arrival at Salisbury Airport (now Harare International) on a Wednesday afternoon, on April 16, 1980. A bemused contingent of police in stiff green uniforms and peaked caps struggled to control a swarming crowd who came to see the arrival of the Jamaican dreadlocked band. The airport had not seen so many people for years as sanctions kept the world away.

   

  “By the time the band arrived, a chartered Boeing 707 was on its way from London to Salisbury with 21 tons of equipment; a full 35,000-watt PA system plus backline equipment,” says Zindi. “It was one of the most extraordinary logistics operations. Mick Cater, from Alec Leslie Entertainment, flew down with the equipment and then set himself the problem of building a stage in time for the celebrations. By Wednesday, when the 12-strong road crew arrived in Zimbabwe, he had six hours in which to construct the stage and find sufficient power for the PA system.”

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• Obama to Make History With AU Headquarters Visit
• Anita Powell

     

    Last updated on: July 27, 2015
• JOHANNESBURG—

  President Barack Obama will make history this week by becoming the first sitting U.S. president to visit the Ethiopian headquarters of the African Union – the continental body playing an increasingly prominent role in shaping Africa’s future.

    

  "The African Union is very fortunate to have a very good dialogue with the U.S.,” AU Commission Deputy Chairman Erastus Mwencha told VOA in Addis Ababa.

    

  "The visit of President Obama would elevate it … and we hope from this visit that the key issues that we deal with together with the United States (are) in the area of peace and security, in the area of energy, in the area of agriculture," Mwencha said.

• Terrorism, democracy

    

  Pretoria-based analyst David Zounmenou said two other issues are likely to emerge – namely, the fight against terrorism, which he said is becoming very important, and the question of democratic power in Africa.

    

  ​Describing the pending visit, Zounmenou said it is "certainly an opportunity to reiterate the position of the U.S. on those two key issues and send a strong message to African leaders who want to hang on to power."

    

  Both subjects have been thrust into the spotlight with growing terror threats and attacks in Nigeria, Kenya, Somalia and Tunisia.

    

  Additionally, central Africa has been thrown into a separate political crisis as Burundi President Pierre Nkurunziza has ignored mediators’ advice that he not run for a third term.

    

  Nkurunziza's actions have plunged his tiny nation -- and with it, the region -- into political turmoil.

• Some disagreement

    

  The United States and AU don’t always agree on everything, however.

    

  Washington strongly opposed the AU’s refusal to arrest Sudan President Omar al-Bashir on an International Criminal Court warrant for genocide at a recent AU summit in Johannesburg.

    

  Zounmenou and other analysts said the U.S. is unlikely to gain traction on this particular issue as the U.S. itself is not a member of the court.

    

  Linda Thomas-Greenfield, U.S. assistant secretary of state for African affairs, said the U.S. has growing respect for the AU despite disagreements.

• "It is an effective organization and it still has a lot of work to do,” Thomas-Greenfield said during an interview with VOA at the summit. "It’s respected on the continent and I think ... we’re going to see the AU become more powerful on the continent."
    
   The U.S. is among the major funders of the African Union, but analyst Liesl Louw-Vaudran said the U.S. needs the AU, too.

    

  Louw-Vaudran said geopolitics is one reason, noting Obama will meet with the AU on its home turf -- a glossy $200 million edifice in Addis Ababa financed entirely by the Chinese government.

    

  "The U.S. definitely needs the AU if it wants to work with Africa, make deals, be in opposition to the Chinese," she said.

• No Mugabe meeting

    

  Meanwhile, Africa watchers have long postulated on the fireworks that might result if Obama were to come face-to-face with one of his most vocal critics, Robert Mugabe, the current AU assembly chairman and president of Zimbabwe.

    

  Obama snubbed Mugabe by not inviting him to a U.S.-Africa summit last year, and Mugabe recently lashed out at the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to legalize gay marriage by publicly proposing marriage -- to Obama.

• "If it becomes necessary," said Mugabe, a staunch Catholic who is known for his virulently anti-gay views, "I shall travel to Washington, D.C., get down on my knee and ask his hand."

    

  According to Mwencha, a seasoned African diplomat, Mugabe will not be present at the meeting.

    

  "I don’t think we should start going in that direction,” he said. "Obama is not coming to meet the AU assembly; he is coming to the African Union Commission."

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• Obama excludes Mugabe from AU meeting

   

  July 28, 2015 in National, News

   

   

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  AFRICAN Union (AU) and Sadc chairman President Robert Mugabe will not be among several African leaders scheduled to meet visiting United States President Barack Obama at the AU headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia,on Tuesday, his spokesperson George Charamba has said.

• BY MOSES MATENGA

   

  Charamba said Mugabe was unmoved by Obama’s visit to the AU headquarters, describing the event as just “a visit by any other visitor”.

   

  “The chairman does not run the AU centre. Obama has come to Ethiopia for an official visit and to address the staff there.

   

  There are many dignitaries who come to the AU headquarters and you can imagine if all come wanting the President’s input,” Charamba said.

   

  “It’s the Head of State of another country. If you are afraid of him, we are not because he is just a Head of State who visits Africa and the AU headquarters by virtue of his ancestry. Madam (Nkosazana) Dhlamini-Zuma (AU Commission chairperson) is big enough to receive him.”

   

  Charamba said when it was said Obama would address the 54-member bloc, Zimbabwe did not represent his audience.

• Obama will today address the AU bloc on several issues affecting Africa.

   

  “AU is not an organ run by Zimbabwe. It does not belong to Zimbabwe. If you want to know who is attending, call the AU offices,” he said.

   

  He said Mugabe and other AU leaders would only receive the report of his visit in January at the AU summit.

   

  “There will be a report on the summit in January where we will get a briefing on the visitor who is called Barack Obama ‘who we received and went back home happy’. . . He did not come to visit Mugabe. He went to Ethiopia and asked to visit the HQ. I did not see you writing that Mugabe snubs Obama when he went for the Ebola summit (in New York),” Charamba said.

• Political analyst Charles Mangongera said the strained relations between Harare and Washington could have influenced the absence of Mugabe as AU chairman to meet Obama in Ethiopia.

   

  “Obviously the nature of the diplomatic relations between Harare and Washington is such that Obama has carefully avoided Mugabe. If relations between the two were cordial, he could have conferred with the AU chairman but remember, they have a position on Zimbabwe that could have influenced his behaviour,” Mangongera said.

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• Mugabe 'unmoved' after Obama snubs him

    2015-07-29 15:01

• Cape Town – Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s spokesperson has reportedly described President Barack Obama’s visit to the African Union (AU) headquarters as "just a visit by another visitor".

  George Charamba said this after Mugabe, who is the current AU chairperson was excluded from meeting Obama during his visit at the AU headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on Tuesday.

  Mugabe also chairs the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

  Charamba said Mugabe was "unmoved" by Obama's visit to the AU headquarters, according to News Day.

• Mugabe "does not run the AU centre. Obama has come to Ethiopia for an official visit and to address the staff there. There are many dignitaries who come to the AU headquarters and you can imagine if all come wanting the president's [Mugabe] input," Charamba was quoted as saying.

  Charamba said Obama was merely a head of state visiting Africa and the AU headquarters "by virtue of his ancestry".

• Africa's democratic progress

  Political analysts, however, said strained relations between Harare and Washington could have influenced the absence of Mugabe in Ethiopia.

  Relations between the US and Zimbabwe have remained frosty for years over allegations of human rights abuses levelled against Mugabe and his ruling Zanu-PF party.

  Mugabe, aged 91, has ruled Zimbabwe since the country's independence in 1980.

  During his speech at the AU headquarters, Obama condemned African leaders who refused to give up power, according to AFP.

• Watch the video below as Obama speaks.

  "Africa's democratic progress is also at risk when leaders refuse to step aside when their terms end," Obama said, drawing huge applause and cheers from some sections of the audience in the AU's Nelson Mandela hall.

• "No one should be president for life," he said, explaining that he was personally relishing handing over office in 18 months.

  "I love my work, but under our constitution, I cannot run again. I actually think I'm a pretty good president, I think if I ran again I could win, but I can't," he said.

  Obama's speech marked the end of his short tour that saw him visiting Kenya, his father's birthplace, and Ethiopia.

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• Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe is asking Britain for human skulls
• Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe is asking Britain for human skulls
• Adam Taylor August 14

• An American dentist's killing of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe stoked anger and outrage around the world. Now Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has taken aim at something else he says was taken away by Western powers: A set of human skulls.

  Speaking earlier this week, Mugabe said that Britain was in talks to return to Zimbabwe the skulls of the leaders of an African uprising against colonial British rulers in the late 19th century. The remains of these leaders, referred to as "the first chimurenga," are currently housed in London's Natural History Museum, Mugabe said.

  The state-owned Herald Newspaper reported that Mugabe would only accept the remains "begrudgingly," and that they would be buried at a sacred shrine in Zimbabwe. "We are told that skulls of our people, our leaders, are being displayed in a British museum and they are inviting us to repatriate them," Mugabe was quoted as saying. "We will repatriate them, but with bitterness, questioning the rationale behind decapitating them."

• In a statement released Thursday, the British Embassy in Harare confirmed that discussions over the return of Zimbabwean remains have taken place since December 2014. However, it added that "it is not yet clear whether these remains are related to the events, places or people referred to in the President’s speech this week." That sentiment was echoed in a statement from the Natural History Museum, which said that the museum "cares for 20,000 human remains in its collection" and that there is "a thorough process that involves establishing the correct provenance of remains based on complex historical sources."

  Zimbabwe was under British colonial rule from 1888 to 1965, and subsequently under a white minority government until a Mugabe-led rebellion led to full independence in 1980. "Chimurenga" is a word from the Shona language, which means revolutionary struggle. The Zimbabwean government uses it to refer to what Western historians call the Second Matabele War, when the Ndebele-Shona people revolted against the rule of Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company's control of the territory in 1896-1897.

• According to Zimbabwean reports, Mbuya Nehanda and Sekuru Kaguvi, two spiritual leaders, were hung from trees after the revolts. Mugabe said that the Zimbabwean government strongly believed the remains of both Nehanda and Kaguvi were now in London, and he condemned their display in a museum as "among the highest form of racist moral decadence, sadism, and human insensitivity," according to Newsday newspaper.

  Under Section 47 of Britain's Human Tissue Act 2004, formal requests can be made of British institutions to return human remains to their places of origin if they are less than 1,000 years old. A number of European countries have returned African human remains in recent years: In 2011, Germany returned skulls that had been used for racial experiments to Namibia as a means of gesture of reconciliation for German colonial rule.

  Speaking on Monday, Mugabe had compared the killing of Cecil the Lion to the horrors of imperialism. “There are vandals who come from all over,” he said. “Be warned, some are here to regularly and illegally acquire these resources.”

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  10 October 2014
• Zimbabwe: Grace Mugabe Declares She Wants "The Throne"

• "When I was approached to come into politics to lead the women, one day I saw a vision of me ruling the heavenly kingdom."

   

  PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe's wife, Grace, on Thursday stunned ruling Zanu PF party supporters in Masvingo when she openly declared that she wants "the throne".

   

  This is the first time that Grace has openly admitted that she harbours ambitions to succeed her 90-year-old husband who has been at the helm since Zimbabwe's independence from Britain 34 years ago.

   

  "When I was approached to come into politics to lead the women, one day I saw a vision of me ruling the heavenly kingdom.

   

  "Rimwe zuva ndakaona ndine humambo hwekudenga, ndiri pano nhasi, ndirikutoona humambo ihwohwo saka ndakati regai ndihutore (One day I saw myself ruling the heavenly kingdom, I'm here today witnessing it and I have decided to take up the kingdom)," Grace said to rapturous applause.

   

  The admission could however send shivers down the spines of her handlers within Zanu PF who now fear she could turn into a Frankeinstein monster.

• Grace's entrance into the political arena is said to have been engineered by shrewd political godfather, Emmerson Mnangagwa, who is battling Vice-President Joice Mujuru in the succession fight.

   

   

   

  Some commentators say Mnangagwa might have created a monster he might not be able to contain as the First Lady having smelt the sweet scent of power now wants more than just to lead the Zanu PF Women's League.

   

  Addressing party supporters in Masvingo, Grace said she also wants a one-party state in Zimbabwe.

   

  Grace began her speech by chanting the slogan: "Pamberi neOne Party State!"

   

  She also threatened those who stand in her way with "strokes".

   

  "I warn you to stop it because you are playing with fire," Grace said.

   

  Zanu PF has always flirted with the idea of a one party state since independence in 1980. Mugabe reluctantly ditched the idea in the early 90s.

   

  But his response has always been brutal when faced with strong opposition parties like Joshua Nkomo's FP Zapu and Morgan Tsvangirai's MDC.

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   12 October 2014 15:02 

   

   

  A new wave of farms invasions hits Zimbabwe
• More than 30 white farmers have been forced out of their properties over the past three months.

• White farmers are once again facing evictions in Zimbabwe. Despite the widespread perception that President Robert Mugabe's land reform benefited only the wealthy, experts say it redistributed land to hundreds of thousands of rural poor.

   

  A new wave of invasions of white-owned farms has hit Zimbabwe, with the opposition accusing ruling party officials of "grabbing" land for themselves.

   

  "We received a phone call from someone called Colonel Nkatazo that we should move off our farm," said Scott Hunter, who was evicted from his maize and wheat farm near Harare in September.

   

  The person wanting the land, he was told, was none other than Mugabe's 24-year-old daughter Bona.

• "The colonel told us that Bona wanted to take three or so farms in the district, and people claiming to be police officers and operatives from the president's office came to tell us to move immediately," a distressed Hunter told dpa whilst in the process of moving farm equipment.

   

  Bona Mugabe has not commented on the allegations that she took ownership of Hunter's farm.

   

  More than 30 white farmers have been forced out of their properties in the west and north of the country over the past three months, according to media reports.

   

  Invaders usually chant slogans of the governing Zanu-PF party and wear its regalia. Reports say most of the invasions are organized by wealthy people using political connections to take over farms.

   

  The main opposition party Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) accuses government officials of "looting" land for themselves.

   

  Less influential invaders have been removed by police.

• The Commercial Farmers' Union (CFU) says less than 500 white farmers remain on their properties after the chaotic land reform that displaced thousands of people.

   

  When the land reform was first launched in 1980, white farmers made up about 5 per cent of the population and held 70 per cent of the most fertile land, according to figures cited by the newspaper Zimbabwe Herald.

   

  The final and most radical phase of reform took place between 2000 and 2010, when white farmers no longer received any compensation for the land they lost.

   

  The land reform as well as a crackdown on the opposition prompted the West to impose sanctions which caused government revenue to collapse.

   

  The European Union eased most of its sanctions in February, while maintaining travel restrictions on Mugabe and his wife.

   

  There is a feeling among many Zimbabweans that it was above all the president's family and cronies who benefited from the land reform.

• "It benefited mainly senior Zanu-PF officials at the expense of the majority," said Pedzisai Ruhanya, director of the independent think tank Zimbabwe Democracy Institute.

   

  Other experts, however, dispute that perception.

   

  While "some elites benefited from the process," the land reform also redistributed wealth, writes Sam Moyo, executive director of Zimbabwe's African Institute for Agrarian Studies.

   

  Between 1980 and 2009, more than 13 of the 15 million hectares that had been controlled mostly by 6,000 white farmers were transferred to over 240,000 families of rural origin, according to figures given by Moyo in the Journal of Peasant Studies.

   

  Mugabe's critics say the expulsion of capital-intensive and experienced white farmers was a disaster for the country formerly known as Africa's bread basket, but that view has been put into question.

   

  "Small-scale farmers have done reasonably well," says Professor Ben Cousins, an expert on agrarian reform in southern Africa.

• While capital-intensive fruit and flower production has declined, cotton production has increased. Maize shortages are largely due to the difficulty farmers face obtaining seeds and fertilizers, says Cousins of South Africa's University of the Western Cape.

   

  The land reform was not always carried out correctly, with the authorities sometimes breaking the rule that one person was only entitled to one farm, Cousins says.

   

  Those now invading white-owned farms may include wealthy people trying to get more land and others who feel wronged because they did not get any, he adds.

   

  "We did not get any land when the land reform programme was rolled out, but the government seems reluctant to address this anomaly," says Tariro Magovanyika, a grassroots Zanu-PF activist who participated in invading a farm near the second-largest city Bulawayo recently.

   

  The farm belonged to Dumiso Dabengwa, the only black person targeted by the invasions so far - allegedly for his position as the leader of the opposition party Zapu.

   

  The farmers' union accuses the government of dragging its feet on dealing with the invasions. Some of the white farmers whose land was taken away have gone to court.

   

  Land Minister Douglas Mombeshora declined to comment on any individual cases of farm invasions, but said the government would not tolerate any more of them.

   

  Anyone wanting land should contact the ministry and "not take the law into his or her hands," Mombeshora told dpa.

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• Morgan Tsvangirai failed Zimbabwe, and now he must go

   

   

  The veteran opposition leader lost his spark when he became Prime Minister for Robert Mugabe's regime. It is time he stopped getting in the way of the real opposition, writes Simon Allison

• Simon Allison for Daily Maverick, part of the Guardian Africa network

   

    Wednesday 30 April 2014

• There was a time, not too long ago, when Morgan Tsvangirai personified everything that was good about Zimbabwe. He was tenacious, fearless and determined to challenge the authoritarian one-party state that Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF was intent on creating. He rallied the masses, campaigned vociferously, stood firm in the face of threats and intimidation and vicious personal attacks. He represented a Zimbabwe that refused to be bowed into submission; one that knew the difference between right and wrong, between democracy and kleptocracy. He wasn’t just the leader of the opposition; in many ways, he was the opposition, and he gave Zanu-PF a serious run for their ill-gotten money.

   

  In fact, he didn’t just scare the ruling party, he beat them fair and square in the first round of those 2008 elections. Zimbabweans wanted change. They wanted Tsvangirai.

   

  For the veteran opposition leader, those heady days – days when the opposition was a genuine force, when the end of Mugabe’s reign seemed to be within touching distance – are long behind him.

• We all know what happened next. Mugabe and his Zanu-PF thugs, terrified of losing their empire, unleashed a carefully targeted anarchy at anyone who showed the slightest sign of dissent. Many of Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) members were killed; more were beaten; still more were locked up on spurious charges. The same was true for all opposition parties.

   

   

  Unable to cope with the onslaught, the MDC made a deal with the devil himself, agreeing to join a unity government in which Zanu-PF held all the big cards (ie. control of the police and security forces, as well as the presidency). Tsvangirai was relegated to the hastily-created and largely ceremonial role of Prime Minister, in which he spent five years trying to make nice with Mugabe. To no avail; he was given little say in the running of government, often left out altogether of cabinet meetings.

   

  In this time, he cut a strangely muted, inconsequential figure. He seemed to have lost the fire in his belly. Power had tamed him. While other opposition figures were making real headway in government (think Tendai Biti’s miraculous economic reforms as minister of finance, or David Coltart’s vital resuscitation of the country’s failing schools), Tsvangirai was more often in the headlines for his messy love life, or for his obvious affection for the trappings of office.

• By the time the next elections rolled around, in July 2013, Tsvangirai had lost much of his appeal. The opposition, led by his faction of the MDC, fared poorly. Even though widespread reports suggest that there was some element of vote-rigging from Zanu-PF, it probably wasn’t necessary; voters returned to Mugabe’s fold in droves, giving him undiluted control once again.

   

   

  It was a failure of epic proportions for Zimbabwe’s opposition – and specifically for the man who leads it. Now, Tsvangirai is facing the consequences.

   

  Last week, a significant faction within the MDC-T declared that they had unilaterally suspended Morgan Tsvangirai as party leader. The statement released in support of this position was damning. In it, Tsvangirai stood accused of stifling dissent, ignoring party structures, corruption, rigging internal elections, and creating his own cult of personality. He was responsible, they concluded, for “the complete Zanufication” of the party.

   

  The statement was signed by none other than Tendai Biti, for years Tsvangirai’s most loyal lieutenant, with the support of 136 MDC-T Guardian Council members. Not enough to form a quorum, admittedly, but more than enough to explode the myth of an opposition party united for Zimbabwe and against continued Zanu-PF rule.

• Of course, this isn’t the first time Tsvangirai has faced internal dissent. The existence of several other parties claiming the MDC name, most notably the one led by Welshman Ncube, attests to this. But this time it’s different.

   

  For one thing, Tsvangirai himself is much weaker. Although he still commands considerable support, he no longer has national appeal beyond his core constituency – as the last election results showed so clearly. He’s also compromised by his time in office; no one can forget in a hurry all the hugs, handshakes and smiles with Mugabe, as necessary as those may have been at the time. Worse for Tsvangirai, there is at least a morsel of truth in the accusations against him. In particular, he is damned by his decidedly Mugabe-esque manoeuvre of altering the MDC constitution to allow himself to run for a third term. The last thing Zimbabwe needs is another leader who doesn’t know when to leave office.

• For another, Zimbabwe’s opposition is particularly vulnerable at the moment. It too has been compromised, and found wanting by voters. Disorganised and divided, it is incapable of providing a genuine check on the government. Instead, it serves as a fig leaf which allows Zanu-PF to extol the virtues of Zimbabwean democracy while effectively enforcing a one-party state. In addition, there is an argument to be made that a weak, divided opposition is worse than no opposition at all, because it prevents other, more effective opponents of the regime from emerging.

   

  Tsvangirai has, of course, vehemently denied the charges against him, likening his “suspension” to an attempted coup. He maintains that he is still the party leader, and that the dissenters do not have the authority or the numbers to enforce their edict.

   

  Perhaps, though, if Tsvangirai cares as much about his country as he says he does, he should take their concerns to heart. Truth is, Tsvangirai has had has his chance to take on Mugabe, and he’s lost. The longer he remains in office, the happier Mugabe will be, secure in the knowledge that Tsvangirai’s combative style and diminishing influence will be unable to unify the opposition against him. Zanu-PF will never be defeated by an MDC faction.
• The only chance the opposition has of successfully challenging the ruling party is to recognise that there is strength in numbers, and strength in unity. Petty political differences must be set aside in pursuit of the greater good. Morgan Tsvangirai has taken his eye off the prize, confusing his own future with Zimbabwe’s – that’s why he must go, to make space for a leader who will put Zimbabwe first.

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• Challenger of Zimbabwe's Tsvangirai expelled 

         

   

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  The move is the latest instalment in infighting that has split the opposition party.

   

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      Last updated: 29 Apr 2014

• Loyalists of long-time Zimbabwe opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai have voted to oust members of a rival faction from their party, as a split in the forces battling President Robert Mugabe deepened.

   

  The Movement for Democratic Change's (MDC) national council voted on Tuesday to expel ex-finance minister and party stalwart Tendai Biti and all members of a group who on Saturday voted to suspend Tsvangirai as leader.

   

  The infighting leaves the MDC's future in serious doubt just months after it suffered a crushing electoral defeat at the hands of Mugabe.

   

  In July the 90-year-old extended his 33-year rule despite serious doubts about the fairness of the poll.

   

  Mugabe's victory prompted much soul searching among the opposition, which had reluctantly formed a power-sharing government with Mugabe for the four years before the election.

   

  Biti, who had been secretary general of the party, had been among those who called for a more fierce opposition to Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party.

   

  Tsvangirai said there would be a party congress in October.

• 'Fuelling divisions'

   

  He accused Mugabe's ZANU-PF of fuelling divisions in his party and insisted that the MDC still enjoyed popular support in the country.

   

  "It does not make Mugabe stronger, far from it. Mugabe's strength cannot be based on power, it has to be based on popularity," he said.

   

  "I don't believe President Mugabe has the popular support of the people of Zimbabwe."

   

  Tsvangirai said all the three successive elections he lost to Mugabe were rigged.

   

  "I have never lost an election in this land," he said. "The solid support that we enjoy in this country is unquestionable."

   

  Tsvangirai said the Saturday meeting by Biti and his team was secretly planned without the knowledge of the party.

   

  "They have betrayed the people. Their action speaks for itself, why would you clandestinely organise a meeting," he said.

   

  "For a very long time we believed Tendai Biti believed in something, the man does not believe in anything other than his hypocrisy.

   

  "He deceived us all. They have formed their own party and we wish them well. They cannot pretend that they are MDC," he added.

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• Zimbabwe’s Mugabe Snubs EU-Africa Summit
• Sebastian Mhofu

   

    April 01, 2014 

   

   

   

    HARARE — The European Union-Africa Summit opens Wednesday in Brussels, but one of the leaders who will not be there is Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, who is snubbing the event after his wife was denied a visa.  
   
   Mugabe will not attend the summit to protest Brussels’ decision to bar his wife from traveling with him.
• Grace Mugabe is subject to an EU travel ban along with her husband, although her husband was granted permission to visit Brussels in this case.
   
   The travel bans date to the early 2000s, when Western nations put sanctions on President Mugabe and his allies for human rights abuses and alleged election rigging.
   
   Zimbabwe’s Secretary for Foreign Affairs Joey Bimha accused the the European Union of “bullying” Africa, and said the incident would further strain Harare-Brussels relations.
   
   He said African Union and the European Union had agreed on terms of the summit earlier this year.
• "But we see some countries that were invited that were not supposed to be invited.  Others that were not supposed to be invited that were invited.  And also the European Union went further to decide to issue visas to certain members of the delegations and refused to others,” he said.
   
   That was an apparent reference to Morocco and Egypt being invited to the summit, while Grace Mugabe was barred from attending.
   
   The EU ambassador to Zimbabwe, Aldo Dell’Ariccia, said the meeting was important for cash-strapped Zimbabwe, as it would have benefited economically and diplomatically.  
   
   "The European Union has invited President Mugabe to attend this fourth EU-Africa summit and we have taken exceptional measures to exempt him from the visa ban," he said. "It has been agreed by all member states of the European Union and the purpose of that was exactly to demonstrate that the European Union is willing engage in dialogue with Zimbabwe at the highest possible level, because the shared goal is normalizing relations, so it’s all in the interest of Zimbabwe to go there."
   
   Despite that argument, Zimbabwe will not be sending a representative to the summit this week.

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• By Nomalanga Moyo
   SW Radio Africa
   20 March 2014

   

  The French government has said it will soon be resuming direct funding to the ruling ZANU PF government, as western efforts to re-engage with the Mugabe regime intensify.

   

  The bilateral cooperation is set to resume November, French envoy to Zimbabwe, Laurent Delahousse told a civil society delegates at a post-election review conference in Bulawayo over the weekend.

   

  “The donor community, the European Union in general and my country in particular will continue to lend support to Zimbabwe through the European Development Fund, provided the government of Zimbabwe agrees,” the Daily News quoted the French envoy as saying.

   

  Decades of corruption and economic mismanagement at the hands of ZANU PF have destroyed Zimbabwe’s economy, which the party is failing to revive despite the recent discovery of diamonds and the extensive mineral resources in the country.

   

  ZANU PF Minister of Finance Patrick Chinamasa declared his government broke soon after his party assumed total control through a disputed poll last year.

• Although the West condemned the “deeply flawed” poll, there have been deliberate moves to re-engage and normalise relations with ZANU PF, starting with the calibrated removal of targeted sanctions against the Mugabe regime.

   

  This has paved the way for the West to begin giving money directly to Zimbabwe or to adopt various economic turnaround projects that should be the responsibility of the ZANU PF government.

   

  In recent months western donors have announced copious amounts of funds in support of the ZANU PF government, reminiscent of post-war rebuilding efforts.

   

  On Wednesday the government received a financial bail-out worth $53 million, and of this amount $35 million is funded by Australia, Denmark, Germany, Norway and Switzerland.

   

  On Tuesday, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation gave the Zim government a grant of $9 million to boost livestock production in Matabeleland North.

   

  About two weeks ago the Swedish government gave the labour Ministry $15 million to assist children in the country. This financial commitment is not tied to any specific programme and, according to Sweden’s Envoy Zim Lars Ronnas, the ZANU PF government can use the money as it sees fit.

• Britain recently gave $10 million to enable the country’s poor children to access basic education.

   

  Political and economic analyst Rejoice Ngwenya said Zimbabwe does not need the financial resources that western countries are pouring into the country.

   

  “African countries like Zimbabwe are well resourced to transform and develop their own economic turnaround programmes. Zimbabwe has sufficient resources for that but lacks policy consistency because those in government have a mentality to plunder.”

   

  “We are already saddled with a $10 billion debt and rather than indebting ourselves further, we need to redeploy our local resources intelligently and this way we will be more committed to our own transformation.”

   

  This includes a demonstrable commitment to respecting private property rights, and an end to expropriations policies in the form of indigenisation, said Ngwenya.

   

  Ngwenya said the grants that Zimbabwe was receiving from donors created a mentality of benevolence and laziness, adding that it was clear that many European countries were now looking at Zimbabwe with a long-term viewpoint.

   

  “Mugabe and his party will not be here forever and so the West is positioning itself for when that time comes and it’s very clever of them to do this.

   

  “While nothing has changed at the moment in terms of government legitimacy and accountability, Western countries can see that the future is bright and they are moving to secure a place in Zimbabwe for their own businesses,” he added.

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• EU to ease sanctions on Zimbabwe, but not on Mugabe
• February 11, 2014

• By Adrian Croft

    

  BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union is to further ease sanctions on Zimbabwe next week, but will keep a travel ban and asset freeze on President Robert Mugabe and his wife, EU sources said on Tuesday.

  But the EU has held out an olive branch to Mugabe, inviting him to take part in an EU-Africa summit in Brussels in April and granting him an exemption from sanctions to visit Europe.

• The moves reflect a cautious easing of EU policy towards Zimbabwe 12 years after it first imposed sanctions in protest at human rights abuses and violations of democracy under Mugabe, who has ruled Zimbabwe since independence from Britain in 1980.

  EU states were divided in their response when Mugabe, 89, won a fifth term as president in an election last July that was endorsed as free by African observers but denounced as fraudulent by the opposition.

  The overhaul of the EU's policy, after a review, is designed to encourage positive change in Zimbabwe while retaining some leverage over Mugabe to pursue reforms.

  "It does seem a time to move forward and the sense is that Zimbabwe is moving ... We need to respond," EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said in the European Parliament on Tuesday in response to a question about easing sanctions.

• "I think we probably are now in the right place to do this on the basis that if things go badly we can move back again," she said.

  EU sanctions on Zimbabwe are renewed annually and are due for review by February 20. The EU is expected to announced next week that sanctions will be suspended on eight of the 10 Zimbabweans affected by asset freezes and travel bans in recognition that the country has made some progress in reforming.

  EU officials have described the eight as "key decision-makers" in Zimbabwe.

  ARMS EMBARGO

  However, Mugabe and his wife Grace will remain under sanctions for a further year, EU sources said.

  The EU will keep its arms embargo on Zimbabwe and Zimbabwe Defence Industries, an arms supplier, will also remain under sanctions, the sources said.

  Sanctions on scores of people and companies that were previously suspended will remain suspended.

  Zimbabwe may be in line to receive some funding from an EU aid fund for developing countries for the period until 2020.

• For years, the EU stopped channeling development aid through the Zimbabwean government and worked instead with charities, but it will now talk to the government about how to spend aid money.

  Zimbabwe, shunned by Western governments and funding institutions, needs $27 billion - more than twice the size of its economy - to fund a five-year plan to improve basic services and rebuild the impoverished country, a senior government official said last week.

  Mugabe's ZANU-PF party has long demanded the complete removal of EU sanctions it denounces as illegal.

  An EU source said Mugabe had not yet replied to the invitation to join other African and EU leaders at the Brussels summit in April.

  Mugabe took part in EU-Africa summits in Tripoli in 2010 and Lisbon in 2007, although his presence at the Lisbon summit prompted a boycott by then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

  The EU has gradually eased sanctions on Zimbabwe for several years to reward it for political reforms under the previous coalition government in which Mugabe shared power with his political rival Morgan Tsvangirai.

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• Good Liberation Hero-Bad Liberation Hero

   

    Posted in Mandela, Mugabe, Zimbabwe by what's left on December 6, 2013

   

   

  By Stephen Gowans

• It seemed almost inevitable that on the new day Western newspapers were filled with encomia to the recently deceased South African national liberation hero Nelson Mandela that another southern African hero of national liberation, Robert Mugabe, should be vilified. “Nearly 90, Mugabe still driving Zimbabwe’s economy into the ground,” complained Geoffrey York of Canada’s Globe and Mail.

   

  Mandela and Mugabe are key figures in the liberation of black southern Africa from white rule. So why does the West overflow with hosannas for Mandela and continue to revile Mugabe? Why is Mandela the good national liberation leader and Mugabe the bad?

   

  A lot of it has to do with the extent to which the liberation projects in South Africa and Zimbabwe have threatened white and Western economic interests—hardly at all in Mandela’s South Africa and considerably in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.

   

  The media-propagated narrative is that Mandela is good because he was ‘democratic’ and Mugabe is bad because he is ‘autocratic.’ But scratch the surface and economic interests peek out.

   

  Land ownership in South Africa continues to be dominated by the white minority, just as it was under apartheid. What land redistribution has occurred has been glacial at best. In Zimbabwe, land has been redistributed from white colonial settlers and their descendants to the black majority. South Africa’s economy is white- and Western-dominated. Zimbabwe is taking steps to indigenize its economy, placing majority control of the country’s natural wealth and productive assets in the hands of blacks.

• The centrality of economic interests in the Western demonization of Mugabe are revealed in York’s complaint about Mugabe’s plan to indigenize Canadian-owned New Dawn Mining company, a process which would force a few wealthy Canadians to surrender a majority stake in the mining of Zimbabwe’s mineral wealth. In York’s view, an African government giving its people an ownership stake in their own economy is unthinkable, but many wealthy countries, including Canada, have done the same.

   

  Mandela, in contrast, rejected calls to nationalize South Africa’s mines, accepting Western and white domination of the country’s economy as a bedrock principle of sound economic management.

   

  And so it is that Mugabe, the redistribtor of land and mineral wealth away from the descendants of white colonial settlers and foreign owners to black Africans is seen as devil incarnate in a Canadian newspaper that concerns itself with reporting the news from the perspective Canadian corporate interests. Canadian business wants the world to be open to profit-taking, and doesn’t care for governments that stand in their way. York reflects that bias. And Mandela didn’t get in the way of it.

• Recycling the usual myths that make up the anti-Mugabe demonology, the Globe and Mail propagandist writes that Zimbabwe’s economic difficulties are due to Mugabe’s mismanagement, not to Western sanctions, erroneously describing sanctions as limited to travel restrictions on Mugabe and his closest associates. This overlooks Washington’s Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act, which has blocked financial assistance to Zimbabwe from international lending institutions, a major impediment to the country’s economic development. It’s as if York blamed the Soviet Union’s crippled post-WWII economy on communist mismanagement, eliding Operation Barbarossa and the Nazi invasion from history. In this, York follows the standard operating procedure of the Western propaganda system, attributing a country’s economic troubles to mismanagement and not the sanctions that cause them.

   

  As to the democrat vs. autocrat dichotomy, it is a propaganda contrivance. It’s what Western governments and media use to legitimize leaders who protect Western corporate interests and demonize leaders who threaten them.

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• Why Western Sanctions On Zimbabwe Backfired

  November 13, 2013

• AFRICANGLOBE – Few Robert Mugabe speeches over the past 10 years have failed to include some blazing rhetorical flourish against the West. “Shame, shame, shame to the United States of America. Shame, shame, shame to Britain and its allies,” he declared at the United Nations General Assembly in September. “Zimbabwe is for Zimbabweans, so are its resources. Please remove your illegal and filthy sanctions from my peaceful country.”

  It was hardly surprising that American diplomats walked out. What’s perhaps more striking, however, is that some of Africa’s more moderate voices have lately joined the Zimbabwean leader in denouncing the policies of the European Union and the United States toward his country.

• Neither Thabo Mbeki nor Kenneth Kaunda fit the mould of the anti-Western polemicist. Mbeki, South Africa’s president from 1999 to 2008, provided a steady hand after Nelson Mandela retired. He is, if anything, a favourite target of leftist critics who say he hewed too closely to the neo-liberal economic policies favoured by the West. Yet here is Mbeki railing in a speech in August against Western assertions that Mugabe’s overwhelming re-election in July was illegitimate:

  “We have a common responsibility as Africans to determine our destiny and are quite ready to stand up against anybody else who thinks that, “never mind what the thousand African observers say about elections in Zimbabwe, we sitting in Washington and London are wiser than they are.”’

  Likewise, Kaunda, president of Zambia from 1964 until 1991, when he stepped aside after defeat in his country’s first multi-party elections in nearly three decades, also had harsh words. “The exploiters are now very hard on Zimbabwe because of the immense resources your country has,” he declared recently. “Let’s continue fighting for our interests in Africa.”

• Still, it’s easy to see why both men have been harshly critical of the economic restrictions imposed by the European Union in 2002 and the United States the following year: The measures have neither brought down the Mugabe government nor influenced its behaviour.

  Far from weakening the ruling Zanu-PF party, they have only highlighted what a blunt foreign policy tool Western sanctions can be. From North Korea to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, sanctions have hit where it hurts least.

  In Zimbabwe, as elsewhere, ordinary citizens — not the cosseted elite — have suffered much from the collapse of Government revenue over the last decade and the drying up of foreign investment. Nothing better illustrates this utter failure then the staggering mass exodus of skilled and unskilled labour — at least three million Zimbabweans in a country of only 13 million have fled. Mugabe, who has been in power since 1980, has certainly kept a firm hold on Zimbabwe.

• The implementation of his land reform program, which sought to redress an odious system imposed under White minority rule, was marked by appalling human rights abuses and precipitous economic decline. So too was the presidential election campaign of 2008, when violence and intimidation culminated in the forced withdrawal of the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, who pulled out of the runoff even though he had won the first round of elections that year.

  What angers many Africans, however, is that Mugabe’s overwhelming re-election this past July has done so little to change attitudes in the West.

  Britain and the United States insist the election was rigged but offer no convincing evidence to show that flaws on voting day amounted to systematic tampering that would have changed the outcome.

  African Union and Southern African Development Community observers declared the election valid.

  Nor would Mugabe’s victory have surprised anyone who saw the findings of a Freedom House survey last year that found that support for Tsvangirai had fallen steeply among those Zimbabweans polled, to 20 percent from 38 percent, following his lacklustre stint as Prime Minister in a unity government formed after the disputed 2008 election.

• In fact, some analysts say the identification of the opposition with Western nations imposing harsh restrictions on Zimbabwe hurt Tsvangirai’s chances and did no harm to the ruling party’s electoral prospects.

  Belgium, which has been a lone voice in calling for the lifting of sanctions and recently persuaded the European Union to allow trading with the main Zimbabwean diamond mining company, estimates that the sanctions cost Zimbabwe US$400 million a year in lost revenue. China, an increasingly assertive presence in Africa, has been quick to step into the breach left by banned Western businesses.

  Chinese firms are taking an ever bigger role in the gold, coal and diamond-mining sector.

  The broader message this sends to many Africans is that the European Union and the United States, in pursuing a rigid policy that carries a high cost to ordinary Zimbabweans, is not ready to engage the continent on equal terms.

  Nor do they forget that the same Western powers once favoured a policy of “constructive engagement” with Apartheid South Africa and imposed only limited sanctions on its racist government. “The Zimbabweans have been in the front-line in terms of defending our right as Africans to determine our future,” Mbeki said in the same speech, “and they are paying a price for that. I think it is our responsibility as African intellectuals to join them, the Zimbabweans, to say, No!”

  Mugabe, who will turn 90 in February, will not be in power forever. With its current policies, the West is effectively surrendering a chance to influence Zimbabwe’s future, and ensuring that he is not succeeded by an even more radical authoritarian ruler.

   

  By: Murithi Mutiga

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• Thank you, Mr Mugabe: Zimbabwe’s forced land redistribution led to huge controversy - but it has transformed the lives of thousands of small farmers 

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

  The tobacco industry is no longer marked by the pattern of large, white-owned farms, which have been seized and resettled

   

   

   

   

   

   

     Godfrey Marawanyika   

   

   

   

   Harare 

   

   

   

   Tuesday 05 November 2013

• Bonus Matashu points to a three-ton truck he bought for $15,000 (£9,360) in cash as an example of how President Robert Mugabe’s often violent programme of seizing white-owned farms and giving them to black Zimbabweans turned his life around. “This is the best thing that could have happened to me and my family and the generality of black Zimbabweans,” the former machine operator said at his six-hectare (15-acre) farm near the tobacco-farming town of Karoi, 93 miles north of the capital, Harare. “I now lead a far better life,” he says.

    

   

  Mr Matashu, 34, says he was allocated land by the government in 2001 after a white-owned farm was seized and its former owner emigrated to South Africa. He grew cotton for a decade before switching to tobacco. This year he earned $34,000 and won an award for being the best small-scale tobacco farmer in Karoi.

• Mr Mugabe said he embarked on the land-grab programme in 2000 to address the expropriation of land from blacks during the 90 years of white rule that ended after a civil war in 1980. While it helped him win rural votes and retain power, the economy was gripped by a decade of contraction, with plummeting exports of crops ranging from tobacco to roses. Zimbabwe’s economy, once one of Africa’s strongest, shrunk to half the size it had been in 1980.

  About 18 white farmers were killed in violent takeovers of their land while almost all of the country’s 620,000 permanent and seasonal farm-workers were driven away from their homes, John Worsley-Worswick, the head of Justice for Agriculture, a Harare-based lobby group, said. Together with dependants, those workers accounted for two million people, he said.

• While many maintain that Mugabe loyalists remain the main beneficiaries of the bloody land reform (the Mugabe family is now said to own more than 30 farms), some have suggested that it was not all bad. For example, though it says the methods used were inexcusable, a book entitled Zimbabwe Takes Back its Land by Professor Ian Scoones of Sussex University concluded: “In the biggest land reform in Africa, 6,000 white farmers have been replaced by 245,000 Zimbabwean farmers. These are primarily ordinary poor people who have become more productive farmers.”

  “We tackled the enemy head on and we got the land,” Agriculture Minister Joseph Made said in an interview. “They will never, never accept that there are now new owners on the land who have done wonders.”

• During the turbulence of the farm takeovers, tobacco production plunged to 48.3 million kilograms in 2008 from a record 236.7 million kilograms in 2000, according to the Zimbabwe Tobacco Association. Now it’s making a comeback, with this year’s 166.7 million kilograms earning about $612m.

  Most of the rest of Zimbabwe’s agricultural industry remains in crisis, however. The rose and horticulture export business, formerly worth $87m a year, has largely disappeared. Once a corn exporter, Zimbabwe has imported the grain in recent years.

• The tobacco industry is no longer marked by the pattern of large, white-owned farms, which have been seized and resettled. In 2000 the crop was grown by 1,500 large-scale farmers while 5,000 small-scale growers produced 3 per cent of the crop. This year 110,000 small-scale farmers grew 65 per cent of the crop, according to the government’s Tobacco Industry Marketing Board. While most of the tobacco used to be auctioned, most is now grown under contract for leaf merchants.

  More than a fifth of the growers were registered this year, and farmers are being encouraged to grow the crop in the arid region of Matabeleland.

  “It took the minority more than 50 years to reach 220 million kilograms,” said Lovemore Chikweya, regional coordinator for the TIMB in Nyamandhlovu, 230 miles south-west of Harare, in an interview. “With these new farmers that number can and will be surpassed within five years,” he said, forecasting production at 200 million kilograms in 2014.

• With the violence associated with the land reform programme and a series of disputed elections resulting in sanctions from the EU and the US targeting Mr Mugabe and his allies, Zimbabwe’s tobacco farmers are now exporting more to Asia.

  “Our exports to China have grown by over 50 per cent,” said Rodney Ambrose, head of the Zimbabwe Tobacco Association. “We have also established new markets, particularly in Indonesia and Malaysia.”

  This year China acquired $197m worth of tobacco while Belgium bought $102m, the TIMB says.

  Zimbabwean tobacco sold for an average of about $3.67 a kilogram this year, the highest since at least 1990, according to Mr Ambrose. “People are seeing that you can grow the crop and it comes in handy because the returns are much higher compared to wheat and cabbages,” Shandu Gumede, a 43-year-old farmer in Matabeleland, said. “I have no regrets.”

  © The Washington Post

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• UN: New Food Crisis Looming in Zimbabwe

   

   

     

  HARARE, Zimbabwe September 3, 2013 (AP)

     

   

     

   

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   The United Nations food agency says Zimbabwe is facing "a looming food crisis" with 2.2 million people — one in four of the rural population — expected to need emergency aid in coming months.

   

   The U.N. World Food Program said Tuesday additional food handouts will start next month and will be scaled up until the next harvests in March.

   

   The agency said rising hunger, mostly in southern districts, was caused by erratic weather, the high cost and shortages of seed and fertilizer in the troubled economy and a 15 percent rise in prices for the corn staple after poor harvests this year.

   

   In years of political and economic turmoil, Zimbabwe has needed regular food handouts. About 1.4 million people in the population of 13 million received food aid last year.

• Mugabe threatens Western firms in Zimbabwe 

         

          <!---->       

   

  Zimbabwean president suggests "tit-for-tat" response against Western firms if sanctions against his country do not end.

   

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      Last Modified: 26 Aug 2013

• Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe has threatened to retaliate against Western countries that have imposed sanctions on his rule, singling out British and US firms for action.

   

  Mugabe's latest verbal broadside on Sunday against his main Western critics followed their questioning of his re-election  after a July 31 vote that his rival Morgan Tsvangirai says was marred by widespread vote-rigging and has denounced as a "coup by ballot".
  
  Mugabe, who at 89 is Africa's oldest leader, has rejected the fraud allegations and was sworn in on Thursday for a fresh five-year term in the southern African nation that he has ruled since its independence from Britain in 1980.

   

  "They should not continue to harass us, the British and Americans," he told supporters at the funeral of an air force officer.

   

  "We have not done anything to their companies here, the British have several companies in this country, and we have not imposed any controls, any sanctions against them, but time will come when we will say well, 'Tit for tat, you hit me I hit you'."

• British companies in Zimbabwe include banking groups Standard Chartered Plc and Barclays Plc. These are already the target of a so-called "indigenisation" policy that requires they cede a majority stake to black Zimbabweans.

   

  Mugabe and prominent members of his ZANU-PF party are subject to financial and travel sanctions imposed by the United States and the European Union. 

   

  The sanctions were applied by Washington and Brussels to punish alleged election-rigging and abuses of power.

   

  Britain said last week that Mugabe's re-election could not be deemed credible without an independent investigation into allegations of voting irregularities.

   

  US officials also said the July 31 election was flawed and Washington had no plans to loosen sanctions until there were signs of change in the country.

   

  In contrast, observers from the regional 15-nation Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the African Union broadly endorsed the Zimbabwean vote as free and peaceful.

1 more annotation...

• what's left

    

   

   

    The Company Patrick Bond Keeps 

   

    Posted in NGOs, Zimbabwe by what's left on March 24, 2008

   

   

  By Stephen Gowans

   

  While Patrick Bond likes to create the impression he offers an independent left perspective on Zimbabwe, it’s difficult to reconcile the impression with the reality. Bond has, in the past, recommended that progressives look to two of Zimbabwe’s “pro-democracy” groups, Sokwanele and Zvakwana, to find out what’s going on in Zimbabwe. (1) Both groups are modeled after Otpor, a Western-funded youth group that worked to oust Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. Like their Serb progenitor, the Zimbabwean groups are handsomely funded by Western governments (2), not to oppose the interests of wealthy individuals, corporations, banks, investors, and imperialist states, but to promote them.

• “The United States government (is) working with the Zimbabwean opposition” “trade unions, pro-democracy groups and human rights organizations” “to bring about a change of administration.” (3) It supports “the efforts of the political opposition, the media and civil society,” including providing training and assistance to grassroots “pro-democracy” groups (4) – groups Bond celebrated in a Counterpunch article as “the independent left.” (5)

   

  The US also supports “workshops to develop youth leadership skills necessary to confront social injustice through nonviolent strategies,” (6) a project enlisting the kinds of nonviolent imperialists Stephen Zunes has made a practice of vigorously defending. (7)

   

  Bond’s most recent attempt to bamboozle the West’s progressive community is a Z-Net article co-authored with a woman who is part of US-sponsored regime change operations in Zimbabwe. (8)

   

  Last April, Grace Kwinjeh traveled to Washington with Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of one faction of the Zimbabwe opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, and representatives from NGOs funded by the US Congress’s National Endowment for Democracy: Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights and the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition. (9)

• The NED does overtly what the CIA once did covertly, namely, meddle in the affairs of foreign countries to bring down governments that refuse to do Washington’s bidding.

   

  Soon after it was established, the MDC became the party favored by white farmers in Zimbabwe for its opposition to the government’s land reform policies. The party is backed by the US and EU. Tsvangirai, the party’s original leader, and now leader of one its two factions, wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend, pledging to restore property rights and to compensate white farmers for the loss of land their settler ancestors took by force. (10)

   

  Last April’s delegation to Washington was organized by the Open Society Initiative, a project of billionaire speculator George Soros, to “build and strengthen the values, practices and institutions of an open society throughout Southern Africa” (11) — roughly, to promote open markets and free enterprise where governments are pursuing programs of economic indigenization.

• SW Radio Africa, which operates on funding provided by the US State Department’s Office of Transition Initiatives, reported that the group was in Washington to “brief Western institutions like the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Woodrow Wilson Center.” (12)

   

  The CSIS is a little known think-tank run by a bipartisan collection of upper class leaders, including Zbigniew Brzezinski, Frank Carlucci, Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft. It recently prepared a report recommending that the West use preventive nuclear first strikes to stop other countries, like Iran, from acquiring nuclear weapons. (13)

   

  The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars is a US government established center that links “scholarship to issues of concern to officials in Washington.” The Center’s Africa program was launched with a grant from the Ford Foundation to promote dialogue between scholars and US policy-makers on Africa. The tenor of the dialogue is obvious in the latest edition of the Center’s journal, The Wilson Quarterly. Articles extol competition (it’s hard-wired into humans) and the US Department of Homeland Security (it doesn’t get enough credit.)

• Kwinjeh is a frequent guest on Studio 7, a radio station sponsored by the US-government’s propaganda arm, the Voice of America. (14) She calls herself “a founder member of Zimbabwe’s main opposition party the Movement for Democratic Change, (MDC),” and says she “spent some time in Belgium as the MDC Representative to the EU.” (15)

   

  At one point, she was the deputy secretary for international relations in the Morgan Tsvangirai-led faction of the MDC. She ran for the post of MDC secretary of information (the party’s propaganda office) unsuccessfully.

   

  When writing for Western audiences, Kwinjeh conceals her MDC connections and presents herself as a journalist – not a senior member of the US and EU-backed MDC, not a part of US-government regime change operations.

   

  The key questions for Western progressives are: Does Patrick Bond know who Grace Kwinjeh is? If so, why is he co-authoring articles with her? Is Bond’s definition of “independent” the same as that of the US state and Western media, i.e., any individual or group that facilitates the US government in its efforts to bring down foreign governments that refuse to do the West’s bidding? If Patrick Bond doesn’t know who Grace Kwinjeh is, why is he passing himself off as a left expert on Zimbabwe? Surely, someone who professes to have a knowledge of Zimbabwe greater than that of Western progressives would know about Kwinjeh’s role in US regime change operations. And what separation is there between the views of Bond and those of Kwinjeh, an MDC operative who has traveled to Washington on George Soros’ account to brief a ruling class think-tank that promotes a nuclear first strike strategy?

• Follow Up, April 11, 2008

   

  Z-Net changed Kwinjeh’s bio after I wrote to Chris Spannos about it, complaining the omission was deceptive.

   

  Bond, usually obsessive about rising to these kinds of challenges, hasn’t replied to the article above, or to the questions asked of him at the end of it.

   

  His most recent writing on Zimbabwe of which I’m aware (this time authored without the help of the US, British, and Australian government-backed MDC) appeared on Pambazuka News. Pambazuka News is directly financed by the Ford Foundation and billionaire speculator George Soros and indirectly by the Canadian government, the European Union and the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

   

  You can’t help trip over Bond’s connections to corporate foundations and groups and political parties financed by imperialist governments. They fund his civil society center and pay for his junkets. Groups he urges leftists to look to as an “independent” left voice are bankrolled by the US, British and other Western governments. Is it any wonder he’s known as Bond…Patrick Bond….of Her Majesty’s NGOs?

• At one time, CIA spooks channeled money to left scholars like Bond covertly. Now, the funding is open, and the connections are hardly concealed.

   

  Incidentally, Spannos mounted a sophistical defense of Z-Net’s accepting Bond’s MDC co-authored Zimbabwe article. Explained Spannos: If Z-Net refused to accept submissions from people who are connected, in some way, to parties or institutions dominated and funded by corporations and imperialist governments, Z-Net would have to dissociate itself from most of the submissions it gets on a daily basis.

• This follows along the lines of a Stephen Zunes argument. Almost everyone, if they have a job, gets paid by capitalists or capitalist-supported governments, so what’s the fuss? The fuss is that few people get paid to undertake funded political activity. Equating a clerk who works for Sears and writes on Zimbabwe to Grace Kwinjeh, is like saying, “Just because George Bush is president doesn’t mean his views on public healthcare are more reflective of the interests of the US ruling class than those of Walmart employees, whose livelihood is also linked intimately to the US ruling class through their employment by a giant corporation.” Walmart employees, unless they’re in the PR department or boardroom, don’t get paid to represent Walmart’s political interests or those of the US ruling class. Kwinjeh, on the other hand, has a direct material interest in representing the interests of the MDC, and through it, the MDC’s patrons.

   

  Sadly, Z-Net, and Z-Net favorites, Bond and Zunes, have a penchant for this kind of specious nonsense.

• 1. http://gowans.wordpress.com/2007/04/15/zimbabwe-and-the-politics-of-demons-and-angels/

   

  2. Los Angeles Times (July 8, 2005)

   

  3. The Guardian (August 22, 2002)

   

  4. U.S. Department of State, April 5, 2007 report on human rights. http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/shrd/2006/

   

  5. http://www.counterpunch.org/bond03272007.html

   

  6. U.S. Department of State

   

  7. http://gowans.wordpress.com/2008/02/18/stephen-zunes-and-the-struggle-for-overseas-profits/

   

  8. http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2008-03/11bond-kwinjeh.cfm

   

  9. http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2007-04/2007-04-27-voa54.cfm?CFID=213706089&CFTOKEN=96857847 and http://www.swradioafrica.com/news290407/un270407.htm .

   

  Regarding NED funding of Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights and the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition see http://fanonite.org/2008/03/10/nonviolent-imperialism-major-revision/

   

  10. The Herald (Zimbabwe) (March 23, 2008)

• 11. http://www.osisa.org/

   

  12. http://www.swradioafrica.com/news290407/un270407.htm

   

  13. http://gowans.wordpress.com/2008/01/27/whose-nuclear-first-strike-strategy-is-this-anyway/

   

  14. http://www.voanews.com/english/africa/zimbabwe/

   

  15. http://gracekwinjeh.blogspot.com/

• Who is Grace Kwinjeh (and why did Patrick Bond co-author an article with her)? 

   

    Posted in Civil Society, NGOs, Zimbabwe by what's left on March 23, 2008

   

   

  By Stephen Gowans

   

  Patrick Bond and Grace Kwinjeh wrote on article on March 11 for Z-Net on the upcoming elections in Zimbabwe. Titled “Zimbabwe’s political roller-coaster hits another deep dip,” the article took the current government to task, predicted a Robert Mugabe victory “by hook or crook,” and declared civil society to be Zimbabwe’s “main wellspring of hope.”

   

  Civil Society Center director Patrick Bond (as in Bond…Patrick Bond…of Her Majesty’s NGOs, as one wag put it) has been lambasting the Mugabe government for years as a self-declared “independent” left voice on Zimbabwe. Bond’s independence includes celebrating activist groups that receive US government funding as part of the West’s regime change program in Zimbabwe.

• But who is Bond’s co-author, Grace Kwinjeh?

   

  Kwinjeh is listed at the end of the duo’s article as a South African-based Zimbabwean journalist. But according to Kwinjeh’s blog, Kwinjehviews, Bond’s co-author is also “a founder member of Zimbabwe’s main opposition party the Movement for Democratic Change, (MDC)” who “spent some time in Belgium as the MDC Representative to the EU.” At one point, Kwinjeh was the deputy secretary for international relations in the Morgan Tsvangirai-led Movement for Democratic Change. (She also says she is a South African-based Zimbabwean journalist. Since this matches the brief bio provided at the end of the Bond-Kwinjeh Z-Net article, I assume Bond’s Grace Kwinjeh is also Tsvangirai’s Grace Kwinjeh.)

   

  Inasmuch as Kwinjeh’s and Bond’s analysis of the upcoming elections is highly critical of the current Zimbabwean government, it is hardly an insignificant point that Kwinjeh fails to disclose her connection to the MDC. This is tantamount to an IBM employee writing a scathing review of Mac computers and then presenting herself as a technology journalist without acknowledging her connection to IBM.

• It’s no less significant that Patrick Bond should be caught up in the deception, given his history of promoting “independent” left voices that are hardly independent (and does so once again.) But, then, maybe that’s what a civil society center director does. See Talk Left, Funded Right.

   

  The MDC, which soon became the favored party of white farmers in Zimbabwe, has manifold connections to the US and British states and EU. The leader of the MDC faction Kwinjeh was deputy secretary of international relations for, Morgan Tsvangirai, worries in the Wall Street Journal about the effect the current government’s land reform policies have had on foreign investor confidence, and favors a policy in which Zimbabweans compensate settlers and their descendants for land taken from them and never paid for in the first place. This is akin to insisting you pay a thief for the return of the goods he stole from your house.

   

  The issue, here, however, isn’t the MDC’s politics, but the deception and Bond’s part in it. Readers of Kwinjeh and Bond ought to be aware that they’re being bamboozled when either writer says or implies he or she is providing an independent left perspective. Kwinjeh should acknowledge her ties to the US- and EU-backed MDC. As for Bond, he should stop misrepresenting groups and individuals linked to corporations, capitalist foundations, and imperialist governments as an “independent” left.

• Concerned Africa Scholars’ Jacob Mundy 

   

    Posted in Concerned Africa Scholars, Democracy Manipulation, Foundation Left, Foundations, Imperialism, Mahmoud Mamdani, Moderate Left, NGOs, Zimbabwe by what's left on March 17, 2009

   

   

  By Stephen Gowans

   

  A member of the executive committee of the scholars’ organization that has accused Mahmoud Mamdani of falling for what it calls the anti-imperialist rhetoric of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, has volunteered and worked for pro-imperialist organizations and has given briefings to the US State Department and Intelligence Council. (1)

   

  Jacob Mundy, who co-edited a recent collection of articles posted on the Concerned Africa Scholars’ website, criticizing Mamdani for failing to take a hard negative line against Zimbabwe’s Zanu-PF party, was a Peace Corp volunteer and has held jobs with The International Crisis Group and Amnesty International. (2)

   

  The Peace Corps “was spawned by the US cold war desire to compete with the Soviet bloc for influence in the third world.” While it no longer has a cold war mission, it remains, at its core, committed to a “battle for hearts and minds” (3) – instilling pro-West and pro-capitalist values in third world populations.

• On top of its missionary function, the Peace Corps has been used as a CIA front.

   

  “Those agents in the Peace Corps who were conscious of their role had several tasks. As they mingled with the people, they were identifying future leftist leaders as well as those right-wingers who in the future would work for U.S. interests. They were assessing consciousness, evaluating reactions to reforms. And they were selecting and training future agents.” (4)

   

  That’s not to say Mundy is a CIA operative, only that his CV is replete with connections to organizations that are interlocked with the CIA or have served pro-imperialist roles, beginning with the Peace Corps.

   

  Mundy’s term with the Peace Corps coincided with the directorship of Mark L. Schneider, who would later join the notoriously pro-imperialist International Crisis Group as Senior Vice President and Special Adviser on Latin America. Mundy would later show up at the ICG to serve a three month stint in 2005. (5)

   

  The International Crisis Group is funded by such pro-imperialist and CIA pass-through organizations as the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Carnegie Foundation, The Soros Open Society Institute and the Ronald Reagan established US Institute for Peace, of which the US Secretaries of State and Defense are ex officio board members.

• The ICG’s board members, past and present, include US and British foreign policy luminaries, among them Wesley Clark (who commanded the Nato assault on Yugoslavia in 1999), cold warrior Zbigniew Brzezinski (who ordered the backing of the Mujahadin in Afghanistan), Lord Robertson (the former Secretary General of Nato), and billionaire financier George Soros, who has been active in bankrolling color revolutions. (6)

   

  Also on the board is Joanne Leedom-Ackerman, wife of Peter Ackerman. Ackerman, another color revolution activist, is a member of the US ruling class Council on Foreign Relations, heads up the CIA interlocked Freedom House, and runs the International Center for Non-Violent Conflict (the ICNC).

   

  The ICNC is significant for having Stephen Zunes, who once was a research fellow at the United States Institute for Peace, as a member of its academic council. What’s the connection to Mundy? Zunes is co-author, along with Mundy, of the forthcoming Western Sahara: War, Nationalism and Conflict Irresolution in Northwest Africa.

   

  The rights group Amnesty International, whose US branch Mundy worked for as assistant country specialist, North Africa, from 2004 to 2007, tends to reserve its harshest criticisms for countries outside the West, preferring a more reserved and nuanced approach to its criticisms of Western governments and their allies. This reflects an underlying commitment to the view that the West possesses a moral credibility which legitimizes its taking a leadership role in the world. For example, Amnesty International USA’s executive director, William Schulz, once called on George W. Bush to order a full investigation into the “atrocious human rights violations at Abu Ghraib and other detention centers,” because,

• “when the US government calls upon foreign leaders to bring to justice those who commit or authorize human rights violations in their own countries, why should those foreign leaders listen? And if the US government does not abide by the same standards of justice, what shred of moral authority will we retain to pressure other governments to diminish abuses?” (7)

   

  In this can be glimpsed the basis of AI’s human rights imperialism – the idea that the US government has an obligation, borne of an assumed moral authority, to lead the world in the defense and promotion of human rights. It’s astonishing that anyone with even a passing acquaintance of US foreign policy would believe that the US hadn’t long ago surrendered the last ounce of moral credibility it ever had and is, without exception, the world’s worst human rights violator.

• Former Amnesty International USA board member Dennis Bernstein underscored AI’s eagerness to expose human rights violations outside the West and kid gloves approach to Western countries in a 2002 interview.

   

  “To be sure, if you are dealing with a human rights situation in a country that is at odds with the United States or Britain, it gets an awful lot of attention, resources, man and womanpower, publicity, you name it, they can throw whatever they want at that. But if it’s dealing with violations of human rights by the United States, Britain, Israel, then it’s like pulling teeth to get them to really do something on the situation. They might, very reluctantly and after an enormous amount of internal fightings and battles and pressures, you name it. But you know, it’s not like the official enemies list.” (8)

   

  In 2006, Mundy wrote a paper on Western Sahara, Islam, Terrorism and Economic Marginality in the Sahara-Sahel for the U.S. National Intelligence Council, gave a presentation on Morocco and Western Sahara to the U.S. State Department and National Intelligence Council, and in August of that year, briefed Ambassador-designate for Algeria, Robert Ford on Western Sahara.(9)

   

  Let’s review.

• Mundy starts out working for the Peace Corps, an organization established expressly to serve imperialist goals, and which has a history of being used as a cover for, and means of, recruiting CIA agents.

   

  He serves a short stint at the International Crisis Group, which is linked up with the US government foreign policy establishment, corporate foundations, and color revolution financier George Soros.

   

  He spends four years working for Amnesty International, an organization whose eagerness to attack US foreign policy targets and reluctance to take on the US, Britain and its allies is notorious.

   

  Meanwhile, he gives briefings to the US State Department and National Intelligence Council while co-authoring a book on Western Sahara with Stephen Zunes, who is active in the US-government-corporate-foundation-supported community of pro-democracy, non-violence activists who travel the world training youth to overthrow the governments of US foreign policy targets, among them the Mugabe government in Zimbabwe.

   

  Next he shows up as member of the executive committee of the Concerned Africa Scholars, an organization offering a scholarly legitimation of the US, British and EU demonization of the Mugabe government, which these powers have openly targeted for regime change.

• The orientation of the Concerned Africa Scholars and the background of one of its executive directors provide an answer to the obvious question: About what are the Concerned Africa Scholars concerned? The answer would seem to be legitimizing the narrative that justifies Western intervention in Zimbabwe (even if only limited to the new missionaries, NGOs (9)) and more broadly, in Africa as a whole.

   

  1. Mundy’s CV was pointed out to me by Michael Barker, who has written indefatigably on the networks of organizations and individuals engaged in democracy manipulation.

   

  2. Jacob A. Mundy, Source Watch, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jacob_A._Mundy

   

  3. Kevin Lowther, “‘Service to your country’ muddied by Peace Corps-military agreement”, Christian Science Monitor, September 21, 2005.

   

  4. Annon, “Under the Cloak and Behind the Dagger”, North American Congress on Latin America, Latin America & Empire Report, July – August 1974, pp. 6-8.

• 5. Mark L. Schnieder, Source Watch, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mark_L._Schneider

   

  6. International Crisis Group, Source Watch, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=International_Crisis_Group

   

  7. Alan Cowell, New York Times, May 26, 2005.

   

  8. Francis A. Boyle and Dennis Bernstein, “Interview with Francis Boyle: Amnesty on Jenin, Covert Action Quarterly, Issue 73, Summer 2002.

   

  9. Jacob A. Mundy, Source Watch, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jacob_A._Mundy

   

  10. One of the articles critical of Mamdani compiled by Mundy is written by a civil society scholar who is referred to in some anti-imperialist circles as Bond, Patrick Bond, of her majesty’s NGOs. Bond has labeled Sokwanele, a US-financed poplar insurrection group trained by “pro-democracy” non-violence activists, as an independent left, despite its connections to imperialist governments and corporate foundations. I’m not sure what Sokwanele is independent of, but it’s not independent of the US government’s regime change plans for Zimbabwe. Neither, it would seem, is Mundy.

• Cynicism as a substitute for scholarship 

   

    Posted in Foundation Left, Imperialism, Liberals, Moderate Left, Zimbabwe by what's left on December 30, 2008

   

   

  “…against those who substitute moral certainty for knowledge, and who feel virtuous even when acting on the basis of total ignorance.”*

   

  By Stephen Gowans

   

  Mahmood Mamdani’s largely sympathetic analysis of the Mugabe government, “Lessons of Zimbabwe,” published in the December 4, 2008 London Review of Books, has been met with a spate of replies from progressive scholars who are incensed at the Ugandan academic throwing out the rule book to present an argument based on rigor and analysis, rather than on the accustomed elaboration of comfortable slogans and prejudices that has marked much progressive scholarship on Zimbabwe. Their criticism of Mamdani has been characterized by ad hominem assaults, arguments that either lack substance or sense, and the substitution of cynicism for scholarship.

• At the heart of what might be called the anti-Mugabe ideology lays the idea that the Zimbabwean leadership clings to power through crude anti-imperialist rhetoric used to divert blame for problems of its own making. This is an elaboration of elite theory — the idea that a small group seeks power for power’s sake, and manipulates the public through lies and rhetoric to stay on top. For example, one group of progressive scholars [1] complains about “Mugabe’s rhetoric of imperialist victimization,” while Horace Campbell argues that,

   

  ”The Zimbabwe government is very aware of the anti-imperialist and anti-racist sentiments among oppressed peoples and thus has deployed a range of propagandists inside and outside the country in a bid to link every problem in Zimbabwe to international sanctions by the EU and USA.” [2]

   

  Contrary to the empty rhetoric school of thought, Mugabe’s anti-imperialist rhetoric is not unattended by anti-imperialist action, but in some extreme versions of anti-Mugabe thought, (for example, that put forward by Patrick Bond), Mugabe is an errand boy for Western capital. [3] The Zimbabwean leader’s anti-imperialist reputation is, according to this view, smoke and mirrors, an illusion conjured by a deft magician.

• The Mugabe government’s anti-imperialist and anti-neo-colonial credentials rest on the following:

   

  o In the late 1990s, intervening militarily in the Democratic Republic of Congo on the side of the young government of Laurent Kabila, to counter an invasion by Rwandan and Ugandan forces backed by the US and Britain.

   

  o Rejecting a pro-foreign investment economic restructuring program established by the IMF as a condition for balance of payment support (after initially accepting it.)

   

  o Expropriating farms owned by settlers of European origin as part of a program of land redistribution aimed at benefiting the historically disadvantaged African population.

   

  o Establishing foreign investment controls and other measures to increase black Zimbabwean ownership of the country’s natural resources and enterprises.

• Progressive scholars typically avoid mention of these anti-imperialist actions, for to do so would clash violently with the idea that Harare’s anti-imperialism is based on empty rhetoric. A few, however, do acknowledge these actions, but insist they were undertaken to enrich Mugabe and, aping US State Department and New York Times rhetoric, “his cronies.” Zimbabwe is said to have intervened militarily in the DRC to profit from the Congo’s rich mineral resources. Land is said to have been redistributed to reward Mugabe’s lieutenants (in which case, with 400,000 previously landless families resettled, Mugabe’s lieutenants comprise a sizeable part of the rural population). And measures to increase black Zimbabwean ownership in Zimbabwe’s economy are said to have no other aim than to enrich Mugabe’s friends.

   

  This substitutes cynicism for analysis. Has there been corruption in the land resettlement program? Asbolutely. But what human enterprise is free from corruption? What’s more, is the presence of corruption in a program, proof the program was undertaken for corrupt reasons? Measures to increase black Zimbabwean ownership in the economy are scorned by progressive scholars for being capitalist. Fine, but a failure to be anti-capitalist is not equal to a failure to be anti-imperialist; nor is it proof of being pro-imperialist.
• The foreign policy of capitalist governments is based in large measure on protecting their nationals’ ownership rights to foreign productive assets and promoting their access to foreign investment and export opportunities. Under the Mugabe government, ownership rights have not been safeguarded and foreign investment and export opportunities have been limited by tariff policies, foreign investment controls, subsidies and discrimination against foreign investors. Absent in the analyses of progressive scholars is the understanding of the Mugabe government’s policies from the point of view of the banks and corporations of the imperialist center. One key US ruling class foundation, The Heritage Foundation, complains that Zimbabwe’s “average tariff rate is high” and that “non-tariff barriers are embedded in the labyrinthine customs service;” that “state influence in most areas is stifling, and expropriation is common as the executive pushes forward its economic plan of resource distribution”; that Zimbabwe has “burdensome tax rates” and that “privatization has stalled”…”with slightly over 10 percent of targeted concerns privatized”…”and the government remains highly interventionist.”
• Of equal concern is Harare’s practice of setting “price ceilings for essential commodities,” “controls (on) the prices of basic goods and food staples,” and influence over “prices through subsidies and state-owned enterprises and utilities” – odd practices for what we’re to believe is a group of errand boys for Western capital. But perhaps of greatest concern to Western corporations and banks is Harare’s investment policies. “The government will consider foreign investment up to 100 percent in high-priority projects but applies pressure for eventual majority ownership by Zimbabweans and stresses the importance of investment from Asian countries, especially China and Malaysia, rather than Western countries.” [4] This paints a picture of the Mugabe government, not as a facilitator of Western economic penetration, but as economically nationalist, pursuing a program aimed at placing control of Zimbabwe’s land, natural resources and enterprises in the hands of black Zimbabweans. It is, in short, a black nationalist government. Clearly, Western investors don’t think Mugabe is working on their behalf. The only people who do are progressive scholars.

• The Mugabe government’s pursuit of black nationalist interests, which clashes in important ways with the interests of Western banks and corporations as well as with the minority population of settlers of European origin, has been met by a strong, multi-faceted response from the US, Britain and the EU. This has included the denial of balance of payment support and development aid, the building up of civil society as a pole of opposition to the Mugabe government, the creation of and subsequent direction of an opposition party, and an international campaign of vilification aimed at discrediting the Mugabe government. [5] Progressive scholars barely acknowledge the Western response, treating it more as an invention of the Mugabe government, used to manipulate the population and to deflect attention from its failings, than as a reality – a bowing to elite theory, rather than to the facts.

   

  Campbell, for example, complains that,

• “The Mugabe government blames all of its problems on the economic war launched by the USA and Britain. For the Mugabe regime, at the core of this economic war, are the targeted sanctions against Mugabe’s top lieutenants under its Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act (ZDERA), passed by the Bush administration in 2001.” [6]

   

  Campbell confuses targeted sanctions aimed at senior members of the Mugabe government, with ZDERA, an act which blocks Zimbabwe’s access to international credit, and, therefore, affects all Zimbabweans, not just Zanu-PF grandees. According to the act,

   

  The Secretary of the Treasury shall instruct the United States executive director to each international financial institution to oppose and vote against–

   

  (1) any extension by the respective institution of any loan, credit, or guarantee to the Government of Zimbabwe; or

   

  (2) any cancellation or reduction of indebtedness owed by the Government of Zimbabwe to the United States or any international financial institution.” [7]
• Zimbabwe’s economy, like that of any other Third World country, was never robust to begin with, and inasmuch as it has always relied heavily on Western inputs and access to Western exports, was never too difficult to push into crisis by Western governments intent on making a point. To pretend Washington, London and Brussels haven’t sought to sabotage Zimbabwe’s economy, or are incapable of it, is absurd. ZDERA effectively reduces Zimbabwe’s access to the foreign exchange it needs to import necessities from abroad, including chemicals to treat drinking water, a significant point in the recent cholera outbreak. Development aid from the World Bank is also cut off, denying the country access to funds to build and repair the infrastructure needed to run a modern economy. Rather than banning the export of goods to Zimbabwe (the popular understanding of sanctions), the US has made importing goods a challenge. This doesn’t mean that Zimbabwe can’t import goods, or that there is no outside investment. What it does mean, however, is that Zimbabwe is denied access to the kind of financial support poor countries depend on to get by. The intended effect is to make Zimbabwe’s economy scream, and it has. Campbell, who, based on his equating ZDERA with targeted sanctions on individuals, doesn’t understand it, or hasn’t read it, dismisses the idea that the West’s economic warfare accounts for Zimbabwe’s economic troubles. He writes that,

• “What has been clear from the hundreds of millions of dollars of investments by British, Chinese, Malaysian, South African and other capitalists in the Zimbabwe economy since 2003 is that the problems in Zimbabwe haven’t been caused by an economic war against the country.” [8]

   

  This is like saying anyone exposed to an influenza virus couldn’t possibly be ill because he has received mega-doses of vitamins. Investment from non-Western sources may mitigate some of the problems created by ZDERA, but it doesn’t eliminate them. Chinese investment in platinum mines, for example, will not eliminate a balance of payment problem.
• Understating the effects of ZDERA is not the only area in which progressive scholars go wrong; their failure to acknowledge Western efforts to build up a civil society with a mandate to destabilize Zimbabwe is another. This is inexcusable, since the efforts of Western governments to create, nurture, support, direct, and mentor opposition to the Mugabe government, including overthrow movements, is well documented [9] – mainly because these governments have been open about it — and is hardly new. It has been used elsewhere, famously in Chile, and recently in Venezuela, Belarus, and the former Yugoslavia.
• One reason for the failure of progressive scholars to acknowledge the role played by Western governments and ruling class foundations in destabilizing Zimbabwe may be because they too benefit from the same sources of funding. Campbell’s critique of Mamdani, for example, was published at Pambazuka News. Pambazuka News is a project of the US ruling class Ford Foundation and of the Open Society Institute [10], a vehicle of billionaire financier George Soros to promote color-coded revolutions, under the guise of democracy promotion, in countries whose governments have been less than open to Western exports and investments. Pambazuka News is also sponsored by Fahamu [11]. While Fahamu no longer lists Western governments as funders, it has, in the past, been funded by the US State Department through USAID, by the British Parliament through the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, by the British government through the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the British Department of International Development, and by the European Union. The US, Britain and EU are on record as seeking the overthrow of the Mugabe government. They fund the organizations that disseminate anti-Mugabe analyses and sloganeering. They do so with one aim: to overthrow the Mugabe government. Campbell’s protesting that he is opposed to imperialist interventions is a bit like buying crack on the street while professing opposition to drug dealing, or placing a Think Green sticker on the bumper of your new SUV. Similarly, progressive scholar Patrick Bond, whose anti-Mugabe diatribes can also be found at Pambazuka News, describes the overthrow movement Sokwanele as an independent left, seemingly unaware it is on the US government payroll. [12]
• Not only do progressive scholars ignore the links of Zimbabwe’s opposition to imperialist governments and foundations, they celebrate the opposition. Campbell refers to members of Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA) as “brave fighters.” [13] Brave fighters they may be, but Campbell does not let on (or know) what Woza is fighting for. The group’s leader, Jenni Williams, won the US State Department’s 2007 International Woman of Courage Award for Africa, a plaudit presented to Williams by Condoleezza Rice in a March, 2007 ceremony in Washington. [14] It shouldn’t have to be pointed out that the US State Department’s priority is to secure the interests of US corporations and banks abroad, not the interests of the women of Zimbabwe. So why is the US State Department recognizing Williams? Not for her service to women’s rights, but because her activities help to destabilize Zimbabwe and bring closer the day the black nationalist program of the Mugabe government can be swept aside to clear the way for the unfettered pursuit of US corporate and banking interests. A US government report on the activities in 2007 of its mission to Zimbabwe reveals that the “US Government continued its assistance to Women of Zimbabwe Arise.” [15] US government assistance to Woza and other civil society organizations is channelled through Freedom House and PACT. Freedom House is interlocked with the CIA and is a “virtual propaganda arm of the (US) government and international right wing,” according to Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman
• [16] It is headed by Peter Ackerman. Ackerman runs the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, of which Stephen Zunes, another progressive scholar, is chair of the board of academic advisors. Ackerman’s wife, Joanne Leedom-Ackerman, is a former director of the Albert Einstein Institute, an organization which trained activists in popular insurrection techniques to overthrow Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, and has consulted with members of Zimbabwe’s civil society opposition on how to use non-violence to overthrow the Mugabe government. [17] Woza supports two US State Department propaganda vehicles: SW Radio Africa, a US State Department funded short-wave radio station that beams anti-Mugabe propaganda into Zimbabwe, and the Voice of America’s Studio 7, also funded by the US State Department to broadcast US foreign policy positions into Zimbabwe. [18] Zunes says Woza can by no means be considered American agents [19], echoing the progressive scholars’ line that there are no Western efforts to overthrow the Mugabe government; it’s all part of the anti-imperialist rhetoric Mugabe uses to stay in power.
• One of the biggest problems for progressive scholars is that their wish to see the Mugabe government brought down inevitably means its replacement by the Morgan Tsvangirai-led faction of the MDC. If Zanu-PF is deplored by some progressive scholars and demonized from the left for being capitalist, the MDC should have two strikes against it: it’s not only capitalist, it is unquestionably the errand boy of the imperialist center, a point one doesn’t have to twist oneself into knots to make, as is done whenever progressive scholars claim Mugabe, despite being sanctioned and vilified by the West, is kept afloat by and works on behalf of Western capital. The MDC’s subservience to Western corporate and banking interests is amply evidenced in its origins (Britain and British wealth provided the seed money), policy platform (decidedly pro-foreign investment), [20] and its advisors (the John McCain-led international arm of the Republican Party, the IRI [21]). Under an MDC government, the stalled privatization program the Heritage Foundation complains about will quickly be restarted. Foreign investment controls, subsidies, tariffs, and price controls will be terminated. Reversal of land reform, while it may come slowly, will inevitably happen, as a condition of ending ZDERA. IMF and World Bank loans will be extended, and the pro-foreign investment measures which are the inevitable condition of these loans will gladly be acceded to.
• So, what do progressive scholars like Campbell offer as an antidote? “That Zimbabweans…oppose the neoliberal forces within the MDC to ensure that the suffering of working people does not continue after the ultimate departure of Robert Mugabe.” [22] There is more naiveté in this single sentence than there is in the average five year old. Please! Neoliberal forces have controlled the MDC from day one [22], and they’ve controlled the party because they hold its purse strings. Their control won’t disappear the moment Mugabe is gone; on the contrary, it is at that moment it will be strongest. But suppose, for a moment, that Campbell’s naive fantasy comes true, and that the forces that provide the funding that is the lifeblood of the MDC, yield to pressure from Zimbabweans, who, at one moment, vote the MDC into power, despite its neo-liberal platform, and at the next, ask the MDC to abandon the platform it was elected on. Were the MDC to yield to this pressure, it would face exactly the same response the Mugabe government faced when it backed away from neo-liberal policies: sanctions, destabilization, demonization and the threat of military intervention. The failure of Campbell to understand this evinces an unsophisticated understanding of the foreign policies of Western countries.
• How droll, then, is the pairing of this breathtaking naiveté with the utter arrogance of progressive scholars. They dismiss Mamdani for failing “to look more deeply at the crisis” and for being “fooled by Mugabe’s rhetoric of imperialist victimization,” and then moan that preventing non-experts from falling for Mugabe’s rhetoric is “one of the more difficult tasks for scholars working on Zimbabwe.” And yet a far more difficult task, it would seem, is for the same scholars to acquaint themselves with the basics: what ZDERA is; why the West is waging economic warfare; what the policies of ZANU-PF are compared to the MDC’s and how these policies align, or fail to align, with the interests of Western banks and corporations; and who created and guides the opposition. Indeed, it could be said that one of the most difficult tasks for anti-imperialists working on Zimbabwe is to persuade progressive scholars to look more deeply into the crisis and not be fooled by imperialist rhetoric.
• 1. Timothy Scarnecchia, Jocelyn Alexander et al, “Lessons of Zimbabwe,” Letters, London Review of Books, Volume 31, No. 1, January, 2009.
   2. Horace Campbell, “Mamdani, Mugabe and the African scholarly community,” Pambazuka News, December 18, 2008. http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/52845
   3. Bond, Patrick, “Mugabe: Talks Radical, Acts Like a Reactionary: Zimbabwe’s Descent,” Counterpucnh.org, March 27, 2007, http://www.counterpunch.org/bond03272007.html
   4. Heritage Foundation, Index of Economic Freedom, 2008, http://www.heritage.org/research/features/index/country.cfm?ID=Zimbabwe)
   5. Stephen Gowans, “Zimbabwe at War,” What’s Left, June 24, 2008. http://gowans.wordpress.com/2008/06/24/zimbabwe-at-war/
   6. Campbell.
• 7. US Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of 2001. http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=107_cong_bills&docid=f:s494enr.txt.pdf
   8. Campbell.
   9. See the section titled “Regime Change Agenda” in Stephen Gowans, “Zimbabwe at War,” What’s Left, June 24, 2008. http://gowans.wordpress.com/2008/06/24/zimbabwe-at-war/
   10. Look under funders at Pambazuka News’ “About” page at http://www.pambazuka.org/en/about.php .
   11. Ibid.
   12. See Stephen Gowans, “Grassroot Lieutenants of Imperialism,” What’s Left, April 2, 2007, http://gowans.wordpress.com/2007/04/02/grassroots-lieutenants-of-imperialism/ and Stephen Gowans, “Talk Left, Funded Right,” What’s Left, April 7, 2007, http://gowans.wordpress.com/2007/04/07/talk-left-funded-right/.
   13. Campbell.
• 14. Jim Fisher-Thompson, “Zimbabwean receives International Woman of Courage Award,” USINFO, March 7, 2007. http://www.america.gov/st/hr-english/2007/March/200703071523081EJrehsiF0.7266962.html
   15. http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PDACL121.pdf . See also Stephen Gowans, “Stephen Zunes’ false statements on Zimbabwe and Woza,” What’s Left, September 30, 2008. http://gowans.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/stephen-zunes%e2%80%99-false-statements-on-zimbabwe-and-woza/
   16. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Pantheon Books, New York, 1988, p. 28
   17. Michael Barker, “Sharp Reflection Warranted: Non-violence in the Service of Imperialism,” Swans, June 30, 2008. http://www.swans.com/library/art14/barker01.html
   18. See Woza’s website, http://wozazimbabwe.org/?page_id=29 ; “Studio 7, launched in 2003, is the Zimbabwe program of Voice of America, which is funded by the United States. The program is broadcast in Shona, Ndebele and English, and is beamed into Zimbabwe from a transmitter in Botswana on the AM signal and by shortwave.” Globe and Mail (Toronto), March 26, 2005. In an April 5, 2007 report, the US Department of State revealed that it had worked to expand the listener base of Voice of America’s Studio 7 radio station. On SW Radio Africa see http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=SW_Radio_Africa .
   19. See Stephen Gowans, “Stephen Zunes’ false statements on Zimbabwe and Woza,” What’s Left, September 30, 2008. http://gowans.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/stephen-zunes%e2%80%99-false-statements-on-zimbabwe-and-woza/
• 20. In 2000, the (British Parliament’s Westminster Foundation for Democracy) provided the MDC with $10 million. Herald (Zimbabwe), September 4, 2001 cited in Gregory Elich, Strange Liberators: Militarism, Mayhem and the Pursuit of Profit, Llumina Press, 2006; “WFD has been involved in over 80 projects aiding the MDC, and helped plan election strategy. It also provides funding to the party’s youth and women’s groups.” Herald (Zimbabwe), January 2, 2001, cited in Gregory Elich, Strange Liberators: Militarism, Mayhem and the Pursuit of Profit, Llumina Press, 2006; “In a clandestinely filmed interview, screened in Australia on February 2002 on the SBS Dateline program, MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai was caught on camera admitting that his organization was financed by European governments and corporations, the money being channelled through a British firm of political consultants, BSMG.” Rob Gowland, “Zimbabwe: The struggle for land, the struggle for independence,” Communist Party of Australia; Civil society groups “and the Movement for Democratic Change…have broad Western support, and, often, financing.” New York Times, December 24, 2004; The International Republican Institute, the international arm of the Republican Party, “is using (the US State Department’s) USAID and the US embassy in Harare to channel support to the MDC, circumventing restrictions of Zimbabwe’s Political Parties Finance Act.
• Herald (Zimbabwe) August 12, 2005; USAID bankrolls sixteen civil society organizations in Zimbabwe, with emphasis on supporting the MDC’s parliamentary activities. “Zimbabwe Program Data Sheet,” U.S. Agency for International Development, cited in Gregory Elich, Strange Liberators: Militarism, Mayhem and the Pursuit of Profit, Llumina Press, 2006; “USAID has a long and successful history of working with Zimbabwe’s civil society, democratic political parties, the Parliament and local government.” Testimony of Katherine Almquist, USAID Assistant Administrator for Africa, The Crisis in Zimbabwe and Prospects for Resolution. Subcommittee on African Affairs, Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, July 15, 2008.
• From the MDC’s 2008 policy platform: The MDC does not believe that government should be involved in running businesses and it will restore title in full to all companies; Private enterprise in general, and industry in particular, will be the engine of economic growth in a new Zimbabwe; The MDC government will remove price controls and reverse the coercive indigenization proposals recently adopted; (An MDC government will show) an unwavering commitment to:
   * The safety and security of individual and corporate property rights.
   * Opening industry to foreign direct investment and the unfettered repatriation of dividends.
   * The repeal of all statutes that inhibit the establishment and maintenance of a socio-economic environment conducive to the sustained growth and development of the industrial sector.
   The MDC will…(open)…up private sector participation in postal and telecommunication services; (The MDC believes) the private sector is in a better position to finance new development and respond to customer needs (in telecommunications); (An MDC government will) look into…the full privatization of the electronic media.
• According to progressive scholar Patrick Bond: “…very quickly, what had begun as a working-class party … was hijacked by international geopolitical forces, domestic (white) business and farming interests, and the black petite bourgeoisie.” Noah Tucker, “In the Shadow of Empire,” 21st Century Socialism, August 3, 2008, http://21stcenturysocialism.com/article/in_the_shadow_of_empire_01694.html
   21. The “IRI held a workshop for Tsvangirai’s shadow government at which each shadow minister presented and defended his/her policy positions. A panel of technical experts grilled presenters on the technical content of their policies.” US State Department report. See Stephen Gowans, “US government report undermines Zimbabwe opposition’s claim of independence,” What’s Left, October 4, 2008. http://gowans.wordpress.com/2008/10/04/us-government-report-undermines-zimbabwe-opposition%e2%80%99s-claim-of-independence/
   22. Campbell.
• 23. That Campbell thinks there’s any possibility of the MDC being budged from its neo-liberal position shows that he should spend less time worrying about whether others are falling for Mugabe’s anti-imperialist rhetoric and more time worrying about whether he has fallen for the rhetoric of the MDC and its imperialist backers. The nascent MDC appointed an official of the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries, Eddie Cross, as its Secretary of Economic Affairs. In a speech delivered shortly after his appointment, Cross articulated the MDC economic plan. “First of all, we believe in the free market. We do not support price control. We do not support government interfering in the way people manage their lives. We are in favor of reduced levels of taxation. We are going to fast track privatization. All fifty government parastatals will be privatized within a two-year frame, but we are going far beyond that. We are going to privatize many of the functions of government. We are going to privatize the Central Statistics Office. We are going to privatize virtually the entire school delivery system. And you know, we have looked at the numbers and we think we can get government employment down from about 300,000 at the present time to about 75,000 in five years.” Patrick Bond and Masimba Manyanya, Zimbabwe’s Plunge – Exhausted Nationalism, Neoliberalism and the Search for Social Justice, Merlin Press, 2002.

• A policy paper issued by the party in 2000 spelled out its plans to attract “foreign direct investment…on a substantial scale.” The party planned to: “Appoint a “fund manager to dispose of government-owned shares in publicly quoted companies”; “Privatize all designated parastatals [public companies] within two years”; Encourage “foreign strategic investors … to bid for a majority stake in the enterprises being privatized.”
   “Social and Economic Policies for a New Millennium,” MDC policy paper, May 26, 2000.

   

  * Mahmoud Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror, Pantheon Books, 2009.

• US Government Report Undermines Zimbabwe Opposition’s Claim of Independence 

   

    Posted in Civil Society, Zimbabwe by what's left on October 4, 2008

   

   

  By Stephen Gowans

   

  The US government had a hand in formulating the policy platform of the Tsvangirai faction of the Movement for Democratic Change, Zimbabwe’s main opposition party, and funded community-based newsletters to create a platform to persuade Zimbabweans to accept Washington’s point of view, according to a US government report. The report boasts that Washington is the undisputed leader in nurturing anti-government civil society organizations in Zimbabwe, operating through a CIA-interlocked organization led by former New York investment banker and Michael Milken right-hand man, Peter Ackerman.

   

  In a November 16, 2007 letter accompanying the US State Department’s “Zimbabwe 2007 Performance Report,” US ambassador to Zimbabwe James McGee wrote that,

• “Working closely with like-minded governments, we continued diplomatic efforts to maintain pressure on the Government of Zimbabwe and to remind the regime that fundamental changes…are a prerequisite to reengagement with the international community.”

   

  McGee called for economic reform, translated as abandonment of Harare’s economic program of favoring Zimbabweans over foreign investors, an end to price controls, and privatization of state-owned enterprises.

   

  The neo-liberal, foreign investor-friendly economic policies Washington favors are central to the policy platform of the Tsvangirai faction of the MDC. The State Department document reveals that the MDC’s policy orientation may be based more on US government direction than its own deliberations. According to the report,

   

  “The (US government)…assisted the MDC to effectively identify, research, and articulate policy positions and ideas within Zimbabwe, in the region, and beyond. In particular, (US government) technical assistance was pivotal in supporting (the) MDC’s formulation and communication of a comprehensive policy platform.”

• Critics of the party point to the absence of any difference between its policy proposals and those favored in Washington for African countries, an absence that may be explained in the US government’s helping “the MDC to identify, research, and articulate policy positions and ideas, and develop and communicate a policy platform.”

   

  US government assistance to the MDC’s Tsvangirai faction didn’t stop at formulating and articulating a policy platform, the report says, but extended to helping the MDC formulate strategy to oppose the Mugabe government. According to the State Department, the US government,

   

  “provided technical assistance to the MDC…to enable it to conduct regular strategic planning meetings to establish goals, identify key objectives, prioritize activities, and determine performance benchmarks.”

   

  The tone of the report paints Zimbabweans as being incapable of establishing goals, setting priorities, and measuring performance themselves and therefore requiring US assistance to perform basic organizational tasks. It may be that the assistance US advisors provided is more accurately, and less tactfully, called direction.

• The technical aid was furnished by the International Republican Institute, the Republican Party arm of the US Congress’s National Endowment for Democracy, whose chairman is John McCain. According to the State Department document, the,

   

  “IRI held a workshop for Tsvangirai’s shadow government at which each shadow minister presented and defended his/her policy positions. A panel of technical experts grilled presenters on the technical content of their policies.”

   

  This assistance was deemed by the State Department to be “critical to building the capacity of (the MDC) to operate effectively and to enable (it) to contend in the (2008) Presidential and Parliamentary elections, and to be prepared to govern.”

• On top of helping the MDC shape its policy platform, the report also reveals that the US government helped shape public opinion in Zimbabwe through support for Voice of America broadcasting and community-based newsletters.

   

  While portraying its role as simply one of delivering assistance, the State Department makes clear in its report that the newsletters provided the US government with a platform “to inform Zimbabweans about issues important to them.” Rather than funding community-based journalism, the report reveals that the State Department underwrote the newsletters to use them as vehicles for disseminating US government propaganda.

   

  The State Department report also offers insight into the financial lengths Washington was prepared to go to create and sustain a civil society apparatus to oppose the Mugabe government. In 2007, Washington gave Freedom House and PACT a total of $1.8 million to back civil society organizations that were hostile to the Mugabe government. Freedom House, headed by former Michael Milken right-hand man, Peter Ackerman, is interlocked with the CIA, according to Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent.

• In addition, over $400,000 was funnelled to Voice of America to counter Harare’s efforts to jam VOA anti-government broadcasts. Washington had been supporting VOA’s Studio 7, an anti-Mugabe radio program, since 2002. According to the report, “the program consisted of English, Shona and Ndebele broadcasts for an hour and a half per day, five days per week, until July 2007, when broadcasts were expanded to seven days a week.”

   

  To thwart Harare’s jamming efforts, VOA’s broadcast time was expanded, and shortwave radios were distributed to Zimbabweans. In addition, publicity campaigns were undertaken to build Studio 7’s profile “via the distribution of calendars and pens, advertising in the print media and a text messaging campaign.”

• The State Department describes Studio 7 as providing a platform for groups opposed to the Mugabe government and its land reform and economic indigenization policies: “the political opposition, exile groups, democracy activists and human rights proponents” – largely the same groups the US government was funding through Freedom House and PACT.

   

  Conspicuously absent from the report’s list of political parties the US government provided “democracy and governance” assistance to in 2007 was Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party. Defenders of US democracy promotion insist that the US government promotes democratic processes aboard, not political parties, but only one party in Zimbabwe received US government assistance: the Tsvangirai faction of the MDC.

• That, however, wasn’t Washington’s goal. The report says the US government planned to aid two political parties in Zimbabwe: presumably Tsvangirai’s MDC faction and the MDC faction led by Arthur Mutambara. But when the US government approached Mutamabara’s party, it was “rebuffed.” Mutambara has complained publicly about US imperialism and hypocrisy in its foreign policy and has manoeuvred to keep himself free from the taint of being an instrument of Western foreign policy.

   

  To square the circle, and prove that it is promoting democracy and not political parties, the US government calls Tsvangirai’s MDC faction the “democratic opposition.” It is not by accident that the MDC’s full name is “the Movement for Democratic Change,” or that another party that once received US government assistance, Serbia’s the DOS, the Democratic Opposition of Serbia, also incorporated the word democracy into its name. The Western mass media mimic the US government designation of the foreign political parties Washington supports as being a “democratic opposition”, thus reinforcing the deception that US support for selected foreign political parties is democracy promotion, not illegitimate interference in the internal politics of other countries.

• The report boasts that the US has been “the undisputed leader among the donor community in providing assistance to civil society,” providing “technical assistance and small grants to 29” civil society organizations through its “implementing partners”, Freedom House and PACT. Grants and assistance were provided to improve “strategic planning, communication, proposal writing (and) platform development.”

   

  Proposal writing is emphasized, the report explains, to equip civil society organizations with the skills necessary to land additional grants from private foundations. According to the State Department,

   

  “youth organizations like the Zimbabwe National Students’ Union (ZINASU) and Youth Initiatives for Democracy in Zimbabwe (YIDEZ) are two good examples of…(civil society organizations that were) nurtured through US (State Department) funding from an idea to a level where they are able to stand on their own and attract other funders.”

• Defenders of the idea that civil society organizations are not created and guided by US government funding, but represent spontaneously arising grassroots organizations that would exist even if they hadn’t received US government largesse, paint a picture far different from the report’s reference to Washington nurturing civil society organizations from an idea to a level where they’re able to attract other funders and stand on their own.

   

  The MDC insists it is an independent political party, and anti-Mugabe civil society organizations and their defenders are adamant that Zimbabwe’s civil society is not under foreign control. Scholar Patrick Bond has declared an underground anti-Mugabe organization that receives US government-funding to be part of an independent left, while scholar Stephen Zunes says Women of Zimbabwe Arise, a group singled out in the State Department report as receiving US government funding, can in no way be considered an agent of the US government. These defenders of anti-Mugabe organizations appear to be unfamiliar with the pivotal role played by the US government in nurturing and sustaining Zimbabwe’s civil opposition.

• The MDC has received considerable assistance and guidance from Washington and the John McCain-led IRI, in developing and articulating its policy platform, and in formulating strategy to defeat the Mugabe government.

   

  In its opposition to Zanu-PF, it has been helped by civil society organizations funded by the US government through Freedom House and PACT, and by US government-funded community-based newsletters and the VOA’s Studio 7, which have served as platforms for disseminating the point of view of the US government and the views of Mugabe-opponents.

   

  The report, then, reveals how the US government has taken advantage of Zimbabwe’s relative openness to intervene in the country’s internal political affairs to try to bring to power a party whose platform it had a hand in formulating.

• Harare has taken steps to counter Washington’s illegitimate interventions, including jamming VOA broadcasts, barring journalists and election observers from the US, and banning some NGOs. These measures have been denounced by Washington as “undemocratic” and “authoritarian” and therefore as reasons for intervention. But the causal sequence is backwards.

   

  The measures Washington calls anti-democratic and authoritarian didn’t cause the US to help the MDC write and communicate its policy platform, to nurture and fund government-hostile civil society organizations, and to provide Mugabe’s opponents a vehicle through Studio 7 and community-based newsletters to shape public opinion. On the contrary, all these things caused Harare to take the measures that have been denounced as anti-democratic and authoritarian as a means to limit Washington’s illegitimate interference in Zimbabwe’s democratic space.
• Anyone who was truly interested in promoting democracy would press Washington to stop its interference in Zimbabwe, rather than lionize US-backed civil society organizations as a spontaneously arising pro-democracy people’s movement, as an independent left that people should look to understand what’s going on in Zimbabwe (Bond), or as groups that can in no way be considered agents of the US government (Zunes).

• Heidi Holland’s Dinner with Mugabe: Failed Demonography 

   

    Posted in Zimbabwe by what's left on September 28, 2008

   

   

  By Stephen Gowans

   

  Journalist Heidi Holland’s biography of Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe, Dinner with Mugabe, begins with the assumption that Zimbabwe’s long-standing president is a monster. In addition, Mugabe, who recently struck a deal with factions of the opposition MDC to share power, is accused by his biographer of creating “a de facto one party state,” [1] and of “failings and excesses” that have left Zimbabweans “starving” [2] – standard fare from Western journalists.

   

  The fact that Zimbabwe’s opposition now controls the legislature and is due to hold a majority of cabinet posts clashes violently with Holland’s depiction of the country as a de facto one party state. By comparison, no one, much less Holland, complains about South Africa, truly a de facto one party state, which suggests that whatever beefs she has with Zimbabwe have nothing to with it being a de facto one party state, (which it isn’t) otherwise we might expect South Africa, and not just Zimbabwe, to fall within her sights (which it hasn’t.)

• As for the hunger of Zimbabweans being due to what Holland describes as Mugabe’s failings and excesses, this too clashes violently with reality. Western sanctions have blocked Zimbabwe’s access to balance of payment support, development aid and other lines of credit. Additionally, drought and electricity shortages have created food insecurity throughout southern Africa, including Zimbabwe. [3] Only if bad weather and standing up to Western bullying count as failings, have Holland’s charges substance.

   

  Proving that Mugabe is a monster, as opposed to uncritically accepting his status as one, isn’t on Holland’s agenda, any more than proving any of her other charges is. All accusations are to be taken as given, starting points for exploring “the untold story of how a freedom fighter became a tyrant.” Holland’s quest, then, isn’t to challenge the received, though unsubstantiated, wisdom, but to affirm it, offering a “psychobiography of a man whose once-brilliant career has ruined Zimbabwe and cast shame on the African continent.”

• This reveals much about Holland. Mugabe’s “once brilliant career”, happens to coincide with the period during which he played by the West’s rules, while his subsequent “ruining” of Zimbabwe, coincides with his breaking the rules to redress historical wrongs related to land ownership and to carry out other measures to invest Zimbabwe’s break with colonialism with substantive content. In other words, the view that says Mugabe was once a paragon who has become a tyrant equates his early “brilliance” to keeping former colonists in London and international lenders happy while chalking up as a “failure and excess” his measures to reverse Western domination. This is a curious view from the perspective of democracy, but perfectly understandable from the point of view of imperialism.

   

  Dinner with Mugabe is a “psychobiography,” the standard form favored by authors who want to avoid substantive policy issues, in favor of dwelling in a comic-book world of heroes and villains. There is a shocking absence of policy mentioned in most discussions of politics, including – if not especially – among many on the left, who think the brilliance of any political analysis can be measured by the number of times the author uses the words “thug,” “brutal dictator” and “tyrant.” Holland’s biography is in this mold.

• What of policies? It is worthwhile to quote Michael Parenti on this.

   

  “One of the things I try to do is find out what leaders actually do when they’re in power. That’s one of the great hidden questions in history. You can read about six or seven different biographies of Stalin, and they never tell you what he actually did in terms of the programs of the country. You read about his purges of Bukharin and Zinoviev and his fight with Trotsky and this and that. But what were the socio-economic policies he actually pursued? The same with Hitler. I’ve read numerous biographies of Hitler. What did Hitler actually do? What was his political economic program? You find out it was a program in which he cut the taxes for the rich, he cut back wages, he destroyed unions and privatized everything.” [4]

   

  Silence on the political and economic programs of leaders is particularly evident in the case of Zimbabwe, where Western political analyses almost invariably ignore the policies of Zimbabwe’s main political parties and the differences between them. In extreme cases, not only are the policies of the parties ignored, their differences are denied. For example, Shawn Hattingh, a research and education officer at the International Labor Research and Information Group, wrote an August 14, 2008 MRZine article, describing Zanu-PF and the MDC as two sides of the same neo-liberal coin.

• There’s no question the MDC is neo-liberal. The party’s 2000 “Social and Economic Policies for a New Millennium,” makes a commitment to a program of privatization. Foreign direct investment, under a MDC government, would be courted by the appointment of a “fund manager to dispose of government-owned shares in publicly quoted companies.” [5]

   

  Eddie Cross, then the MDC’s Secretary of Economic Affairs, explained the party’s economic plan.

   

  “First of all, we believe in the free market. We do not support price control. We do not support government interfering in the way people manage their lives. We are in favor of reduced levels of taxation. We are going to fast track privatization. All fifty government (enterprises) will be privatized within a two-year frame, but we are going far beyond that. We are going to privatize many of the functions of government. We are going to privatize the Central Statistics Office. We are going to privatize virtually the entire school delivery system. And you know, we have looked at the numbers and we think we can get government employment down from about 300,000 at the present time to about 75,000 in five years.” [6]
• Eight years later, the MDC’s fondness for neo-liberalism remains undiminished. The party set out its core beliefs and proposals in its 2008 election platform, declaring an unwavering commitment to the safety and security of individual and corporate property rights and the opening of industry to foreign direct investment. Expatriation of profits is favored, without restriction. The party promised to privatize postal services, telecom and electronic media and to remove the price controls the Mugabe government has introduced to protect Zimbabweans from the ravages of hyperinflation. The Zanu-PF government’s economic indigenization program, which seeks to place control of the country’s resources in the hands of Zimbabweans, would also be cut by an MDC government. Private enterprise would be the engine of economic growth in a new Zimbabwe – particularly private enterprise owned by foreign investors. [7]

• Zanu-PF, contrary to Hattingh’s delusions, is not neo-liberal. If it were, there would be no public companies for the MDC to promise to privatize, no subsidies for basic goods the MDC could propose to eliminate, and no differential treatment of foreign investors for the MDC to pledge to abolish. Moreover, were Zanu-PF neo-liberal, it would be the first and only case of a neo-liberal party that has rejected, and has been rejected by, the IMF, and the only neo-liberal party that restricts foreign ownership levels in key sectors, pursues public policy goals through state ownership of key enterprises, provides subsidized food baskets, imposes price controls and rejects national treatment of foreign investors.

   

  The fact of the matter is that it is precisely because the Zanu-PF government is not neo-liberal that the US, Britain and EU have campaigned vigorously to drive Mugabe – and his non-neo-liberal policies – out of Harare. No Third World government can generate the following record without running afoul of Washington, London and Brussels.

• o “Total government expenditures, including consumption and transfer payments, are very high. In the most recent year, government spending equaled 50.3 percent of GDP. Privatization has stalled, and the government remains highly interventionist;

   

  o “The government sets price ceilings for essential commodities such as agricultural seeds, bread, maize meal, sugar, beef, stock feeds, and fertilizer; controls the prices of basic goods and food staples; influences prices through subsidies and state-owned enterprises and utilities;

   

  o “The government will consider foreign investment up to 100 percent in high-priority projects but applies pressure for eventual majority ownership by Zimbabweans;

   

  o “Zimbabwe has burdensome tax rates. The top income tax rate is 47.5 percent, and the top corporate tax rate is 30 percent.” [8]

• To be sure, the policies that have been pursued by the Zanu-PF government are not socialist, but they are, at the same time, deeply hostile to neo-liberalism, and lean more strongly in the direction of social democracy than the economic policies of many social democratic and socialist governments elsewhere.

   

  At one point, in the 1990s, the Mugabe government did accept the neo-liberal economic structural adjustment program demanded by the IMF, with devastating consequences. From 1991 to 1995, Mugabe’s government implemented the IMF program as a condition of receiving balance of payment support and the restructuring of its debt. The program required the government to cut its spending deeply, fire tens of thousands of civil servants, and slash social programs. Zimbabwe’s efforts to nurture infant industries were to be abandoned. Instead, the country’s doors were to be opened to foreign investment. Harare would radically reduce taxes and forbear from any measure designed to give domestic investors a leg up on foreign competitors, even though the US, Germany, Japan and South Korea, as young developing countries, had become capitalist powerhouses by adopting the very same protectionist and import substitution policies the IMF was forbidding.
• The effect of the IMF program was devastating. Manufacturing employment tumbled nine percent between 1991 and 1996, while wages dropped 26 percent. Public sector employment plunged 23 percent and public sector wages plummeted 40 percent. [9] In contrast to the frequent news stories today on Zimbabwe’s fragile economy, the Western press barely noticed the devastation the IMF’s disastrous economic policies brought to Zimbabwe. By 1996, the Mugabe government was starting to back away from the IMF prescriptions. By 1998, it was in open revolt, imposing new tariffs to protect infant industries and providing incentives to black Zimbabwean investors as part of an affirmative action program to encourage African ownership of the economy. These policies were diametrically opposed, not only to the IMF’s program of structural adjustment, but to the open door goals of US foreign policy. By 1999, the break was complete. The IMF refused to extend loans to Zimbabwe. By February, 2001, Zimbabwe was in arrears to the Bretton Woods institution. Ten months later, the US introduced the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act, a dagger through the heart of Zimbabwe’s economy, which denied the country lines of credit from international lending institutions and pushed the economy into a tailspin. “Zimbabwe,” says Mugabe, “is not a friend of the IMF and is unlikely to be its friend in the future.” [10]
• While Holland’s goal in writing Dinner with Mugabe is to reinforce the campaign of vilifying Mugabe begun in London, Washington, and Brussels, her biography only accomplishes its aim if the starting assumption of the book – that Mugabe is a monster – is accepted. If you don’t accept it, the book does quite the opposite of what it sets out to do. Through a series of interviews with people who have played significant roles in Mugabe’s life, texture, context and understanding, deeply at odds with the comic-book caricature of the man, emerge. If you read only the transcripts of the interviews Holland builds her book around, and not her interpretation of the transcripts, you come away with an entirely different impression than the one Holland intends. In this, Holland has utterly failed as a demonographer.

• Through the lens of people who have known him, Mugabe is portrayed as a revolutionary forced to make concessions and compromises to deal with the world as it is, not as he would like it to be. Britain often plays the role of spoiling, blocking and undermining the revolutionary aims of Zimbabwe’s national liberation struggle. “Mugabe,” explains Holland, “was not just a political leader, but a revolutionary one, pledged to righting the wrongs of the past.” [11] Britain, however, has made the journey a difficult one.

   

  To balance her sensationalist and demonical caricature of her subject, Holland details the social gains Zimbabwe has achieved under Mugabe’s leadership.

   

  “His administration guaranteed educational opportunities for Zimbabwe’s black population where few had existed before. High school enrollment, which had been about two percent at the time of independence, grew to 70 percent by 1990, and Zimbabwe’s literacy rate rose from 45 percent to nearly 80 percent in the same period.” [12] He “did more to educate his people during his early years in office than any other leader in Africa.’ [13]

• She notes, too, that “Mugabe also developed public health facilities to the point where rural dwellers were able to receive medical attention within walking distance of their villages.” [14]

   

  While Mugabe is sometimes portrayed as an anti-white racist, Holland sets the record straight, pointing out that Mugabe “did his best to persuade the country’s 200,000 whites, including its 45,000 commercial farmers, to remain in Zimbabwe.” [15] She cites Mac McGuiness, the former leader of the notorious anti-insurgency unit of the Rhodesian army, the Selous Scouts. Mugabe

   

  “undertook at independence to let bygones be bygones and he never lifted a finger against his former enemies, including Ian Smith, who was allowed to live in Zimbabwe as long as he pleased and to criticize Mugabe whenever he chose for the rest of his life. He was more generous to Smith than Smith was to him, that’s for sure.” [16]

• Lady Soames, whose husband Lord Soames was the British governor of Zimbabwe until the first elections in 1980, told Holland that Mugabe was a “Marxist utopian…determined to promote state socialism even if he knew he couldn’t practice it.” [17]

   

  On this score, Lord Carrington, the former British foreign minister who represented Britain at the Lancaster House talks which led to Zimbabwe’s independence, noted in conversation with Mugabe’s psychobiographer that Mugabe was forced to rein in his Marxist aspirations after witnessing the experiences of revolutionary governments in neighboring countries. During his exile in Tanzania and Mozambique, Carrington explained that,

   

  “Mugabe had seen exactly what had happened to the economies of those two countries as a result of kicking out the whites and generally introducing pan-African socialism…So I thought, what with him being a Marxist…he was going to be very different indeed in office (but) once in office he became a capitalist, didn’t he?” [18]

• This wasn’t Mugabe’s first encounter with compromise. Lord Carrington explained to Holland that,

   

  “Everyone wanted some sort of solution (at Lancaster House) except Mugabe, who didn’t think it was necessary. And he was probably right. There is no doubt that Mugabe would not have signed the Lancaster House Agreement if presidents Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and Samora Machel of Mozambique hadn’t prompted him to. [19]

   

  They more than prompted him to. The two leaders told Mugabe that the guerilla forces fighting for the principle of one-man-one-vote and return of land confiscated by British settlers could no longer use their countries as bases from which to launch attacks against the Smith regime, forcing Mugabe to the negotiating table just when a military victory was in view. Had the liberation forces been allowed their military victory, much would have been different.

   

  Mugabe was also forced into a compromise over the IMF’s economic structural adjustment program, Esap. Father Fidelis Mukonori, leader of Zimbabwe’s Jesuits, and a friend of Mugabe’s, told Holland that,

• “Mugabe accepted Esap, saying he had little choice because it was imposed by northern hemisphere big-wings who never questioned its wisdom or side effects and who would refuse to work with you – if you didn’t…it caused a lot of suffering and Mugabe believed it marked the beginning of Zimbabwe’s dissatisfaction with Zanu-PF.” [20]

   

  On the MDC, whose founding in 2000 was largely directed by Britain, Holland concedes what Mugabe has complained about for years: that the MDC is a vehicle of Britain and the white commercial farmers. She writes:

   

  “It appears that Mugabe was correct in his belief that the former colonist was aiding and abetting the forces that opposed him, namely the MDC, in cahoots with the predominantly white Zimbabweans who had colonized and financed the party.” [21]

• And further:

   

  “Some European countries, including Britain, had given financial and other forms of support to the MDC. White farmers gave cheques to Morgan Tsvangirai on television during the 2000 election campaign.” [22]

   

  If Holland’s book is largely unintentionally sympathetic to Mugabe in the reflections of those she interviews, it is most sympathetic in its consideration of land reform. Blame for the crises that have attended the Mugabe government’s efforts to democratize patterns of land ownership is laid squarely at the feet of the British government.

• Holland begins by eliciting a favorable assessment of Mugabe by Clare Short, Tony Blair’s secretary of state for international development, who earned notoriety in Zimbabwe for backing away from the commitment made by the Thatcher government to help Harare defray the costs of land redistribution. In a letter to the Zimbabwe government, she wrote, “I should make it clear that we do not accept that Britain has a special responsibility to meet the costs of land purchases in Zimbabwe.” She closed by expressing concern that Mugabe’s land reform policies would impair foreign investor confidence. Interviewed by Holland, Short noted that, “Land was the point of colonialism and all the ugly power issues that went with it. Mugabe was a giant of history who liberated his country from oppression.” [23]

   

  One of the most revealing parts of Holland’s book concerns the experience of Rajan Soni, hired by the British government as a land reform consultant. Once New Labour was in charge, Soni discovered that,

• “It was absolutely clear from the attitude of (Clare Short’s) staff towards his recommendations that Labour’s strategy was to accelerate Mugabe’s unpopularity by failing to provide him with funding for land redistribution…They thought that if they didn’t give him money for land reform his people in the rural areas would start to turn against him. That was their position. They wanted him out, and they were going to do whatever they could to hasten his demise.” [24]

   

  Land reform was a pressing issue in Zimbabwe that could not be ignored. Father Mukonori told Holland that,

   

  “Everywhere…from town to town and village to village, the cry was the same as it had been during the war and throughout our history: ‘The soil is ours. The land question was never resolved. We want it resolved. The constitution was declared in London. We did not vote for it.’” [25]

• While Holland attributes Zimbabwe’s economic meltdown to Mugabe’s excesses, her interview with the Selous Scout’s Mac McGuiness reveals a different view. “I think,” McGuiness told Holland, “that had the promises made to Mugabe been kept by the…British and others, Zimbabwe would not be in the state it is in today.” (26) Dennis Norman, a white farmer who became Zimbabwe’s first agriculture minister, agrees. “Mugabe couldn’t solve the land issue without money and he didn’t have money. I do blame Britain for that.” [27]

   

  The texture, context and understanding offered by McGuiness, Norman and others are nowhere evident in Holland’s own depiction of Mugabe post-1999. While she portrays the early Mugabe as a hero of national liberation keen on righting historical wrongs, she turns sour on him at the point Mugabe takes the first bold post-independence steps to establish a substantive independence by expropriating the land of white commercial farmers for redistribution to black Zimbabweans. Liberation heroes can be feted so long as their actions leave the basic structure of Western economic domination in place. Encroach on capitalist property rights, impose conditions on foreign investment, wall off parts of the economy to foreign investors, favor domestic investors over Western ones, and reclaim stolen land, and honors and admiration soon turn to execration.
• Since independence in 1980, Zimbabwe has been, to a diminishing degree, dominated by the West. Its economy, natural resources and land have historically been controlled by outsiders and settlers who came from outside and took what they wanted. Over the years, the Mugabe government has gradually asserted Zimbabwe’s independence, resisting US and British imperialist intrigues in southern Africa, ultimately rejecting the economic prescriptions of the Bretton Woods institutions (though accepting them at first), promoting black ownership of Zimbabwe’s resources and economy, and democratizing patterns of land ownership. Western governments, representing corporations and investors with interests in open door access to Zimbabwe, and white commercial farmers seeking to recover privileges established under racist Rhodesian rule, have used their considerable resources to thwart the Zanu-PF government’s efforts to build a truly independent Zimbabwe. An important part of the campaign has been to vilify Mugabe, to portray him as liberation hero turned tyrant. In its goals, Heidi Holland’s, Dinner with Mugabe, is part of this campaign. However, anyone who reads the book critically will discover there is much in it to challenge the comic-book caricature the author sets out to reinforce.
• 1. Heidi Holland, Dinner with Mugabe, Penguin Books, 2008. p. xx.
   2. Holland, p. xv.
   3. Stephen Gowans, “The real cause of Zimbabwe’s food crisis,” Race & History, June 4, 2005. http://www.raceandhistory.com/selfnews/viewnews.cgi?newsid1117908112,43270,.shtml
   4. Michael Parenti in Joel Wendland, “Interview with Michael Parenti,” Political Affairs, December, 2004. http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/387/
   5. Social and Economic Policies for a New Millennium,” MDC policy paper, May 26, 2000.
   6. Patrick Bond and Masimba Manyanya, Zimbabwe’s Plunge – Exhausted Nationalism, Neoliberalism and the Search for Social Justice, Merlin Press, 2002.
   7. Noah Tucker, “In the Shadow of Empire,” 21st Century Socialism, August 3, 2008, http://21stcenturysocialism.com/article/in_the_shadow_of_empire_01694.html
   8. http://www.heritage.org/Index/country.cfm?id=Zimbabwe
   9. Antonia Juhasz, “The Tragic Tale of the IMF in Zimbabwe,” Daily Mirror of Zimbabwe, March 7, 2004.
   10. Herald (Zimbabwe) September 13, 2005.
   11. Holland, p. 73.
• 12. Holland, p. xx.
   13. Holland, p. 71.
   14. Holland, p. xx.
   15. Ibid.
   16. Holland, p. 36.
   17. Holland, p. 74.
   18. Holland, p. 65.
   19. Holland, p. 60.
   20. Holland, p. 136.
   21. Holland, p. 104.
   22. Holland, p. 139.
   23. Holland, p. 102.
   24. Holland, p. 105.
   25. Holland, p. 138.
   26. Holland, p. 36.
   27. Holland, p. 121.

• Even at MRZine the ruling ideas on Zimbabwe are the ideas of the ruling class 

   

    Posted in Zimbabwe by what's left on May 5, 2008

   

   

  By Stephen Gowans

   

  On May 4, 2008 MRZine published Chido Makunike’s “The Complexities of Zimbabwe.” Makunike’s analysis had originally appeared at the Ford and Soros foundation-funded Pambazuka News, with help from the European Union and British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, partners with another Pambazuka News sponsor, Fahamu. Pambazuka News’ editor, Firoze Manji, is the director of Fahamu. His views on Africa, very likely reflecting those of the imperialist governments and corporate foundations that pay his salary and sponsor his publication and charity, was published by MRZine on April 28 (“China Still a Small Player in Africa”).

• While the ostensible mission of MRZine is to dissect the politics and culture of capitalism, Makunike, a Western-educated public relations executive living in Africa, strayed no further than the accustomed anti-Zanu-PF line of the New York Times, Times of London, and other ruling class-dominated newspapers in the West.

   

  Since these newspapers recycle the views of the US State Department and British Foreign Office, and rely on so-called “independent” experts on the ground, who in reality, represent corporate foundation- and Western-government supported NGOs, the circle is complete. The British Foreign Office puts forward its views on the Mugabe government, the world’s major media amplify the message, Makunike mimics it, and the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, through Fahamu, provide him a platform to express recycled British Foreign Office views in the apparently left-leaning Pambazuka News.

   

  MRZine then reproduces the article, under the guise of dissecting the culture and politics of capitalism. Anyone exposed to the blanket of negative coverage of the Zimbabwe government and the Zanu-PF program comes to the conclusion that the British Foreign Office view is indisputable; after all, everyone appears to agree on it: other Western governments, Western-educated PR executives living in Africa, the New York Times and Times of London, and MRZine (or at least its editor, Yoshie Furuhashi.)

• What’s happened, however, is that the independent socialist publication has reproduced ruling class ideology, and has put its own stamp on it to make it acceptable to its left-wing constituency. When the British Foreign Office view is passed from one publication to the next, each affixing its own imprimatur, is it any wonder everyone agrees with the British Foreign Office?

   

  To piece together what’s really going on in Zimbabwe, you need to critically examine what’s coming from the opposition, the government and other governments, but what’s usually done is to seek out “independent” sources, who often receive funding from the US or British governments or both, and turn out to be repeating what the mainstream media say, which in turn repeat what the US State Department and British Foreign Office say.

   

  Last March, Z-Net published an analysis on Zimbabwe by Grace Kwinjeh, a founder, along with white commercial farmers and the British government, of the now US- and British-backed Zimbabwean opposition party, the MDC. Z-Net didn’t bother to mention Kwinjeh’s party affiliations, presenting Kwinjeh instead as an “independent” journalist.

• The MDC’s program is to establish conditions agreeable to US and British foreign investment in Zimbabwe. Because Kwinjeh’s analysis was co-authored with leftist scholar Patrick Bond and appeared in an apparently leftist publication, the illusion is created that Zwinjeh’s US and British-backed MDC view is really an independent left view. In the same vein, co-author Patrick Bond, celebrates the underground anti-Zanu-PF groups, Sokwanele and Zvakwana, as an independent left, even though their funding and training comes from Western sources, the same sources that stand to profit from the replacement of Zanu-PF by the MDC.

   

  While committed publicly to dissecting the politics and culture of capitalism, MRZine does nothing of the sort where Zimbabwe is concerned. Instead, it repackages the justifications the US and British ruling class are using to torpedo Zimbabwe’s efforts to invest national liberation with real content, in the service of the bottom lines of Western investment banks, corporations and white commercial farmers.

   

  How is it that “independent” journalists, “independent” experts, “independent” underground movements, “independent” left scholars, “independent” election monitors, “independent” media, and “independent” socialist e-zines, are either funded by or represent the US and British ruling class or repackage ruling class ideas? So pervasive is the use of the word “independent” to disguise the influence of corporations, imperialist governments and their foundations, that “independent” should become a warning sign: Caution: Ruling class interests ahead.

• Ideological Mine Fields 

   

    Posted in Foundation Left by what's left on May 1, 2008

   

   

  By Stephen Gowans

   

  It’s easy to rail against The Times of London, The Telegraph, Canada’s The National Post and scores of US equivalents for being the worst kind of purveyors of right-wing propaganda. These advocates of all that is backward, with their philosophy of unremitting indulgence for the rich and limitless harshness for the poor, wear their reactionary, jingoist attitudes on their sleeves. They strive to be “in your face” – and are. But because they make no secret of their right-wing prejudices, their propaganda value in the larger population is approximately zero. These newspapers consciously cater to a right-wing constituency. There’s no need to worry about stumbling into ideological mine fields here; the mine field has been conveniently fenced off and bright warning signs have been deployed along the periphery.

• More dangerous, like a mine field cleverly concealed beneath an inviting patch of turf sporting signs reading: “Please walk on the grass” are the respectable, seemingly balanced, quality newspapers. They share the same right-wing prejudices, but skillfully disguise them and package them to be palatable to those who aren’t inclined to spout right-wing shibboleths. Chomsky, Herman and others have been dissecting the reporting of these newspapers – the New York Times in particular – to show that the biases of so-called liberal media tilt just as strongly toward ruling class interests as their unabashedly right-wing counterparts do. The genius of the liberal media lies in reproducing ruling class ideology without seeming to – the deception aided by their being starkly different on the surface from their conspicuously right-wing cousins.

   

  The same can be said of progressive and radical sources of information. In societies dominated by hereditary capitalist families and corporate wealth there are few places hived off from the influence of those who own the society’s productive assets. One way in which the corporate ruling class extends its influence to the progressive and radical communities is through buffer organizations. Buffer organizations include foundations, as well as government agencies that have names that appeal to traditional progressive concerns about peace and democracy. The United States Institute for Peace, for example, sounds like it might engage in the kind of work progressives can applaud, but is a buffer organization of the US State Department and Pentagon. The National Endowment for Democracy, which claims to promote democratization around the world, appears to be engaged in praiseworthy work, but works to destabilize foreign countries whose economic policies are not conducive to the interests of US investment banks and corporations.

• It is through these buffer organizations that wealthy individuals like billionaire financier George Soros and former Michael Milken right-hand man Peter Ackerman, hereditary capitalist families like the Fords, Rockefellers and Carnegies, and the governments they dominate, connect with the progressive community. These connections reach into sources of progressive and radical news and analysis.

   

  Consider two recent examples. Last March, Z-Net published an article on Zimbabwe by a founding member of the Movement for Democratic Change, a coalition of foreign-funded civil society organizations that came together in 2000 to oppose Zimbabwe’s Zanu-PF government as it was about to embark on a program of fast-track land reform. The leader of the MDC, Morgan Tsvangirai, acknowledged in 2002 that the MDC is funded by the British government and European corporations. Both Washington and London have since openly admitted to bankrolling Zimbabwe’s opposition and its civil society adjuncts. The author of the piece, Grace Kwinjeh, who has traveled to Washington on George Soros’ tab to confer with Washington’s regime changers on how to get rid of the Mugabe government, failed to acknowledge her MDC credentials, passing herself off as an independent journalist (kind of like Donald Rumsfeld writing commentary on US elections for a Zimbabwean audience while pretending to be an independent US journalist.) To give the article a radical feel, Patrick Bond added his name as co-author. Bond had assured progressives in a Counterpunch article last year that the Western funded Zimbabwean underground movements Zvakwana and Sokwanele, which count among their number “a conservative white businessman expressing a passion for freedom, tradition, polite manners and the British Royals” represent an “independent” left. In Bond’s and Kwinjeh’s lexicon, “US/British funded fifth columnist” equals “independent.”

• In April, MRZine published an article titled “China still a small player in Africa,” by Firoze Manji, the director of Fahamu and editor of Pambazuka News. Pambazuka News operates on grants from the Ford Foundation and George Soros. Fahamu is backed by the US Congress-funded Media Institute of Southern Africa, the European Union, and the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. (You can read Bond on Pambazuka News, too.)

   

  How far does Grace Kwinjeh stray from the views of the MDC when she’s masquerading as an independent journalist, and how far do the views of the MDC stray from its regime change underwriters in Washington and London? Are Manji’s views independent of the corporate foundations, wealthy individuals and imperialist governments who allow Pambazuka News and Fahamu to operate, and provide him a remunerative and interesting job?

• You don’t have to log onto Z-Net to find out what the MDC’s views are and you don’t need to read MRZine to discover what the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, George Soros and the Ford Foundation think about Africa. But if you go to these sources directly, you know what you’re getting into. Not so if you go to Z-Net and MRZine; you might think you’re getting an “independent” left view, but you could be getting a ruling class view, repackaged to be leftist-friendly. This mine field doesn’t come with warning signs.

   

   

   

   

   

  8 comments

• Expressions of imperialism within Zimbabwe 

   

    Posted in Civil Society, Color Revolutions, Imperialism, NGOs, Zimbabwe by what's left on April 27, 2008

   

   

  By Stephen Gowans

   

  Zimbabwe’s Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Patrick Chinamasa on Friday denounced the US and Britain for their interference in Zimbabwe’s elections. At the same time, he decried the Morgan Tsvangirai faction of the main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC-T), and its civil society partner, the Zimbabwe Election Support Network (ZESN), as being part of a US and British program to reverse the gains of Zimbabwe’s national liberation struggle.

   

  “It is no secret that the US and the British have poured in large sums of money behind the MDC-T’s sustained demonization campaign,” Chinamasa said. (1)

• “Sanctions against Zimbabwe (were intensified) just before the elections,” while “large sums of money” were poured into Zimbabwe “by the British and Americans to bribe people to vote against President Mugabe.” (2)

   

  The goal, Chinamasa continued, is to “render the country ungovernable in order to justify external intervention to reverse the gains of the land reform program.” (3)

   

  The justice minister went on to describe opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai and his MDC “for what they are — an Anglo-American project designed to defeat and reverse the gains of Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle, to undermine the will of the Zimbabwean electorate and to return the nation to the dark days of white domination.” (4)

   

  The minister also described the ZESN as “an American-sponsored civil society appendage of the MDC-T.” (5)

   

  Were they reported in the West, it would be fashionable to sneer at Chinamasa’s accusations as lies told to justify a crackdown on the opposition. But, predictably, they haven’t been. For anyone who’s following closely, however, the minister’s charges hardly ring false.

• The ZESN is funded by the US Congress and US State Department though the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Its board is comprised of a phalanx of US and British-backed fifth columnists. (6)

   

  Board member Reginald Matchaba Hove won the NED democracy award in 2006. Described by its first director as doing overtly what the CIA used to do covertly, the NED – and by extension the NGOs it funds — are not politically neutral organizations. They have an agenda, and it is to promote US interests under the guise of promoting democratization. Hove is also director of the Southern Africa division of billionaire financier George Soros’ Open Society Institute, which has been involved in funding overthrow movements in Yugoslavia, Georgia, Ukraine and elsewhere. Soros also has an agenda: to open societies to Western profit making. Indeed, the board members of the ZESN comprise an A-list of overthrow activists, with multiple interlocking connections to imperialist governments and corporate foundations.
• It doesn’t take long to connect Hove to left scholar Patrick Bond (of Her Majesty’s NGOs) and his Center for Civil Society. The Center is a program partner with the Southern Africa Trust, one of whose trustees is ZESN board member Reginald Matchaba Hove. The Center for Policy Studies, whose mission is to prepare civil society in Zimbabwe for political change (that is, to prepare it to overthrow the Zanu-PF government), is funded by the Southern Africa Trust, a partner of Bond’s Center for Civil Society. Other sponsors include the Soros, Ford, Mott, Heinrich Boll (German Green party), and Friedrich Ebert (German Social Democrats) foundations, the Rockefeller Brothers, the NED, South African Breweries and a fund established by the chairman of mining and natural resources company, Anglo-American. Significantly, Zimbabwe is rich in minerals. Zanu-PF’s program is to put control of the country’s mineral resources, as well as its land, in the hands of the black majority, depriving transnational mining companies, like Anglo-American, of control and profits. Everjoice Win, the former spokesperson for the ZESN, is on the advisory board of Bond’s center. The Center supports the Freedom of Expression Institute (FEI), which is funded by George Soros and the British government’s Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD). The FEI is a partner of the Media Institute of Southern Africa (also funded by the British government), whose director Rashweat Mukundu is a board member of the ZESN.

• Bond co-authored a report with Tapera Kapuya, a fellow of ZESN sponsor, the NED. He also contributed to a report titled Zimbabwe’s Turmoil, along with John Makumbe and Brian Kagoro. The report was sponsored by the Institute for Security Studies, which is financed by the governments of the United States, Britain, France and Canada, the Rockefeller Brothers, and of course, the ubiquitous George Soros and Ford foundations. Makumbe has published in the NED’s Journal of Democracy, and is a former director of the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition (funded, not surprisingly, by the NED). The Coalition, like the Center for Policy Studies, is devoted to ousting the Mugabe government under the guise of promoting democracy, but in reality promotes the profits of firms like Anglo-American and the interests of US and British investors. Kagoro is a former coordinator of the Coalition. Significantly, the Coalition is a partner of the ZESN.

   

  Add to this Bond’s celebrating the Western-trained and financed underground movements Zvakwana and Sokwanele as an “independent left” (7) and his co-authoring a Z-Net article on Zimbabwe with MDC founding member Grace Kwinjeh [8] (MDC leader Tsvangirai admitted in a February 2002 SBS Dateline program that his party is financed by European governments and corporations (9)), and it’s clear that Bond links up with the spider web of American and British-sponsored civil society appendages of the MDC-T.
• Chinamasa’s clarification of the connections between the US and Britain and Zimbabwe’s civil society and opposition fifth columnists is a welcome relief from Western newspapers’ attempts to cover them up. The ZESN, despite being generously funded by the US through Congress and the State Department, is described by the Western media as “independent” while ZESN partner, the National Democratic Institute (NDI), is called “an international pro-democracy organization” (10) and “a Washington-based group.” (11) What it really is, is the foreign arm of the Democratic Party. The NDI receives funding from the US Congress (as well as from USAID and corporate foundations), which it then doles out to fifth columnists in US-designated “outposts of tyranny.” Only in the service of propaganda would the Democratic Party be called “a Washington-based group.” One wonders how Americans would have reacted to the British monarchy parading about post-revolutionary Washington as a “London-based” group – an “international good government” organization bankrolling an American NGO to monitor US elections? Would anyone be surprised if the leaders of the British-financed NGO were dragged off to jail, especially were its backers openly working to oust the government in Washington to restore the rule of the British monarchy? In Zimbabwe, the only surprise is that the Zanu-PF government hasn’t reacted with as much force as the Americans would have done under the same circumstances. That Zimbabwe’s government has tried to preserve space for the exercise of political and civil liberties in the face of massive hostile foreign interference is to be commended.

• Washington is quite open in its intentions to overthrow the Mugabe government. Under the 2001 US Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act “the President is authorized to provide assistance” to “support an independent and free press and electronic media in Zimbabwe” and “provide for democracy and governance programs in Zimbabwe.” (12) This translates into the president financing anti-Zanu-PF radio stations and newspapers and bankrolling groups opposed to Zimbabwe’s national liberation movement to inveigle Zimbabweans to vote against Mugabe.

   

  “The United States government has said it wants to see President Robert Mugabe removed from power and that it is working with the Zimbabwean opposition…trade unions, pro-democracy groups and human rights organizations…to bring about a change of administration.” (13)

• Last year, the US State Department acknowledged once again that it supports “the efforts of the political opposition, the media and civil society” in Zimbabwe through training, assistance and financing. (14) And the 2006 US National Security Strategy declares that “it is the policy of the US to seek and support democratic movements and institutions in every nation…with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in…” North Korea, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Belarus and Zimbabwe. (15)

   

  The goal of the overthrow agenda is to reverse the land reform and economic indigenization policies of the Zanu-PF government — policies that are against the interests of the ruling class foundations that fund the fifth columnists’ activities. The chairman of Anglo-American finances Zimbabwe’s anti-Mugabe civil society because bringing Tsvangirai’s MDC to power is good for Anglo-American’s bottom line. Likewise, the numerous Southern African corporations that Lord Renwick of Clifton sits on the boards of stand to profit from the MDC unseating Zimbabwe’s national liberation agenda. Lord Renwick is head of an outfit called the Zimbabwe Democracy Trust (ZDT), also part of the interlocked community of imperialist governments, wealthy individuals, corporate foundations, and NGOs working to reverse Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle. The ZDT is a major backer of the MDC. (16)

• Police raids on the offices of the ZESN and Harvest House, the headquarters of the MDC, seem deplorable to those in the West who are accustomed to elections in which the contestants all pretty much agree on major policies, with only trivial differences among them. But in Zimbabwe, the differences are acute – a choice between losing much of what the 14-year long national liberation war was fought for and settling for nominal independence (that is crying uncle, so the West will relieve the pressure of its economic warfare) or moving forward to bring the program of national liberation to its logical conclusion: ownership of the country’s land, resources and enterprises, not just its flag, by the black majority. In this, there is an unavoidable conflict between “a government which is spearheaded by a revolutionary party, which spearheaded the armed struggle against British imperialism” and “a party that was the creation of the imperialists themselves (that) has been financed the imperialists themselves.” (17)

   

  It’s impossible to achieve independence from foreign control and domination without turmoil, disruption and fighting – not when the opposition and civil society are directed from abroad to serve foreign interests. Can Zimbabwe’s elections honestly be described as free and fair when the economy has been sabotaged by the West’s denying Harare credit and debt relief [18] and where respite from the attendant miseries is promised in the election of the opposition? Are elections legitimate when media are controlled by outside forces (19), and civil society and the opposition have been controlled by foreign powers?

• Chinamasa’s complaints, far from being demagoguery, are real and justified. Zanu-PF’s decision to fight, rather than capitulate, ought be applauded, not condemned. Imperialism cannot be opposed without opposing the MDC and its civil society partners, for they too are imperialism.

   

  1. Herald (Zimbabwe) April 26, 2008.
   2. Ibid.
   3. Ibid.
   4. Ibid.
   5. Ibid.
   6. Michael Barker, “Zimbabwe and the Power of Propaganda: Ousting a President via Civil Society,” Global Research.ca, April 16, 2006. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8675
   See also http://www.ned.org/dbtw-wpd/textbase/projects-search.htm and http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Zimbabwe_Election_Support_Network
   7. Stephen Gowans, “The Politics of Demons and Angels,” April 15, 2007, http://gowans.wordpress.com/2007/04/15/zimbabwe-and-the-politics-of-demons-and-angels/
• 8. Stephen Gowans, “The Company Patrick Bond Keeps,” March 24, 2008, http://gowans.wordpress.com/2008/03/24/the-company-patrick-bond-keeps/
   9. Rob Gowland, “Zimbabwe: The struggle for land, the struggle for independence,” Communist Party of Australia, http://www.cpa.org.au/booklets/zimbabwe.pdf . The MDC is also financed by the British government’s Westminster Foundation for Democracy and the Zimbabwe Democracy Trust, whose patrons include former British foreign secretaries and is headed by Lord Renwick of Chilton, vice-chair of investment banking at JPMorgan (Europe.)
   10. The Globe and Mail (Toronto), April 26, 2008.
   11. The Washington Post, April 26, 2008.
   12. http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=s107-494
   13. The Guardian (UK), August 22, 2002.
   14. US Department of State, April 5, 2007.
   15. http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss/2006/
   16. “Zimbabwe ambassador: Self-determination is at the root of the conflict,” FinalCall.Com News, April 22, 2008. http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/article_4611.shtml

• 17. Ibid.
   18. Under the US Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of 2001, “the Secretary of the Treasury shall instruct the United States executive director to each international financial institution to oppose and vote against–

   

  (1) any extension by the respective institution of any loan, credit, or guarantee to the Government of Zimbabwe; or

   

  (2) any cancellation or reduction of indebtedness owed by the Government of Zimbabwe to the United States or any international financial institution.”

   

  See http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=s107-494

   

  19. The same question can be asked of elections in Western liberal democracies, where the media are controlled by an interlocked community of hereditary capitalist families and corporate board members who share common economic interests inimical to those of the majority.

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