The Sunday Mail
AFRICAN FOCUS
By Tafataona P. Mahoso
Mines and Mining Development Minister Cde Obert Mpofu and his delegation to the latest Kimberley Process meeting in Tel Aviv in the fourth week of June 2010 should be congratulated for the way they fought off an attempted lynching of Zimbabwe by a US-led Anglo-Saxon cartel over Chiadzwa diamonds.
However, the nasty experience and abuse they had to endure at the hands of the white racist minority in the KP system should compel the nation to adopt a long-term strategy for handling and anticipating such abuse and sabotage. The strategy of the racist minority was to turn the whole process and the conference on its head, by rejecting the official legal documents and replacing them with unofficial and clandestine ones obtained through fraud and espionage. The strategy first revealed itself when two Western spy-linked organisations demanded the rewriting of KP rules and the redefinition of “blood diamonds” especially against Zimbabwe and for the purpose of vengeance against Zimbabwe. These two spy-linked organisations are the British Global Watch and the Canadian Partnership Africa Canada. They were soon followed by yet another pair, the British Amnesty International and the US-based Human Rights Watch.
When the Zimbabwean delegation got to Tel Aviv, they discovered that the racist countries had conspired to treat the official KP monitor, Mr Abbey Chikane, and his reports on Zimbabwe as mere decoys which were used to keep the Zimbabwean state from noticing an alternative and clandestine network of spies and compromised officials operating secretly inside Zimbabwe and working on a fraudulent report or reports which would then be introduced abruptly and dramatically at the meeting in order to force a displacement and rejection of the officially sanctioned KP monitor’s report. Farai Muguwu of the so-called Centre for Research and Development was a key figure in the clandestine and fraudulent network. The bogus “Chief Chiadzwa” by the name of Newman Chiadzwa was another key player. Then there were some officials in the inclusive Government and the Parliament of Zimbabwe who had also been roped in to concoct the fraudulent report(s) which were supposed to bury Mr Chikane’s official and professional report in muck.
What the Anglo-Saxon racists did not count on was that the state would uncover enough of the clandestine and criminal network to force the isolation of the US and its allies at the conference. What was uncovered demonstrated to the majority of the members of the KPCS that the US-led operations to tarnish Zimbabwe’s diamonds were not only illegal but also diabolic, bordering on economic terrorism and total contempt for the rules of international trade, diplomacy and decorum.
Tel Aviv 2010 A Repeat of Past Tactics
Zimbabwean patriots must realise that the US and its white allies have used the same strategy and tactics before and succeeded in turning the majority at similar conferences to become a “coalition of the unwilling”. This time they failed to pull it off, but they will not stop there. They will make other attempts at other meetings. That is why it is important to remember similar incidents in the past and to think of a long-term strategy against future attacks. Similar attacks in the past include the following:
l Anglo-Saxon attacks on the Presidential election of 2002 and the Parliamentary elections of 2005 were based on a similar strategy where Western lies or Western-sponsored lies were orchestrated in order to drown official and legitimate Sadc and AU reports declaring the elections to be free and fair . . .
l The events at the conferences which convinced Zimbabwe to leave the British Commonwealth in 2003 were similarly staged and equally diabolic and fraudulent.
l The attachment in 2002 of a negative anti-Zimbabwe addendum to the otherwise favourable “Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and other Wealth of the Democratic Republic of Congo” was based on similar fraud and coercion at the level of the UN Security Council.
l Mrs Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka’s 2005 “Report of the Fact-Finding Mission to Zimbabwe to assess the Scope and Impact of Operation Murambatsvina by the UN Special Envoy on Human Settlement Issues in Zimbabwe”, was based on a similar strategy and tactics, whereby most of the evidence from credible state institutions was either ignored or misrepresented while lies from donor-sponsored originations and “activists” were accepted without question. The Tibaijuka’s report was justified formally as an inquiry on behalf of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan but submitted straight to the very same Anglo-Saxon gang which just attempted to lynch Zimbabwe at the June 2010 KP meeting in Tel Aviv. The same powers in March 2006 tried to manipulate the UN Secretary-General into visiting Zimbabwe without invitation in order to worsen the propaganda damage which Tibaijuka had inflicted on the country on behalf of Britain and the US but under the cover of the UN.
What is common among the events just listed is the fact that Zimbabwe was ambushed and lynched by the Anglo-Saxon forces through the subversion of events and processes which were supposed to be governed by normal rules of diplomacy, mutual respect and decorum. Thinking ahead, it is important for Africans to relate the Zimbabwean experience over diamonds and the KP system to other developments led by the same US and its allies. The alleged involvement of Farai Muguwu in acts that go against Zimbabwe’s economic and security interests suggests a link between imperialism’s use of NGOs and its use of spies, soldiers and terrorists. There is a link between sponsored “civil society” and sponsored military and intelligence programmes for destabilisation.
That is why in each of the five regional divisions of the US military programme called African Command (Africom), the commander is a soldier who is deputised by a civilian. This link also explains why USAID is linked to both the sponsored NGO network (civil society) and to the US-sponsored military command and network called Africom. The process of ambushing and lynching other countries for economic or geopolitical reasons is not limited to civilian conferences and civilian negotiations alone. It also uses the military and, of course, spy networks.
Investigations carried out by the Chinese show that the incident between North and South Korea, where a South Korean submarine was hit by a torpedo or mine, killing 46 sailors, was staged by the US in order to create a political-military situation which could justify not only the lynching of North Korea but also the overthrow of a newly elected Japanese Prime Minister who had been elected on a pledge to remove US military bases from Japan. In the context of apparently credible media reports that North Korea was about to wage war on its southern neighbour and sister nation of South Korea, a Japanese politician mobilising the masses against US military bases in the same region came to be seen as a mad man. Indeed, he was removed soon after being elected.
Africa is opening itself to much worse manipulations than those recently inflicted on North-East Asia if it allows the US Africom project to grow and spread on African soil.
The Anglo-Saxon powers, led by the US, already control a continental network and superstructure of “civil society” throughout Africa. It ranges from individual activists and NGOs at the village level to national headquarters of the same NGOs operating on a nation-wide basis; it ranges from donor-funded, quasi-judicial human rights commissions to regional bodies such as the Sadc Tribunal, all the way to the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights (ACHPR.)
What to do? The Need for a Strong State
It is no coincidence that all the attacks on Zimbabwe over the Chiadzwa diamonds have been meant to weaken the role of the State in securing national assets and to persuade Zimbabweans who are engaged in national constitution writing to create a constitution which elevates NGOs to demi-gods while whittling down the State to a minimal necessary evil.
While the Africom proposal would mean the global extension of the US state on African soil from Kisangani to Chimanimani, the people of this region (Zimbabwe in particular) are being advised by activists funded by the same US state to downsize their own state and its laws while multiplying the number of NGOs and “independent” tribunals which are totally dependent on foreign and mostly Anglo-Saxon donors for their survival. It is important for Zimbabweans to recall that the same Anglo-Saxon cartel which admitted its ownership of Farai Muguwu and others in the anti-Chiadzwa network also looted Angola’s diamonds for 31 years under the guise of fighting communism through Jonas Savimbi's Unita. The Western hypocrisy and racism did not begin in Tel Aviv in 2010.
As John Peck once wrote in his October 2000 Z Magazine article: “This spring 2000, De Beers promised to certify that all its consignments of diamonds do not include any diamonds controlled by rebel forces rebelling against the legitimate and internationally recognised government of the relevant country.”
This De Beers certification was not true. But the same Western media and governments looked the other way because Savimbi’s Unita was seen as a Western anti-communist client movement. In Angola as in Zimbabwe, there were attempts made by the Western cartels to make the legitimate Government appear to be the rebel or terrorist movement simply because it was supported by Cuba, the OAU and the former Soviet Union.
Zimbabwe has been a target of similar destabilisation attempts for the last 10 years. The current Anglo-Saxon hostility arises from the realisation that the destabilisation efforts have failed so far.
Precisely because the entire Anglo-Saxon axis and its NGO-media cohorts were willing to look the other way, Unita helped the West to loot diamonds valued at more than US$4 billion, counting just the period between 1992 and 1998 alone. The tendency for the West to treat sovereign states as rebels while supporting illegal regime change forces as human rights defenders is exactly what Zimbabwe confronted at Tel Aviv in June 2010. A country can cope with such mischief only if it builds a strong and competent central state.
According to African Business editor Anver Versi in his editorial called “On Knocking African Leaders” (February 1998): “The quality of leadership needed to deal with any one major social or economic convolution is staggering — Africa, however, is undergoing at least three or four major convolutions at the same time. This is unprecedented in history and therefore the type of (African) leadership that has emerged over the last 40 years has been unprecedented . . . Leaders who have grown up from their native soils cannot (and should not) be put in the same category. Many of them suffered great tribulations and made enormous sacrifices for their people and countries. The challenges they faced have been far more daunting than anything any Western leader has had to confront since the Second World War.”
This is true of Zimbabwe. It is true of DRC. It is true of Angola. It is true of most countries in Southern Africa. This is the context within which Zimbabweans embark on constitution making and it must guide the controls they put in place to safeguard the resources of the people such as the Chiadzwa diamonds and the coal reserves in Hwange, Gokwe and Chiredzi.
As we embark on national constitution making, it helps to listen to the Nigerian Pan Africanist writer Chinwezu, who says: “Have the Africans not yet learnt the central lesson of the last 500 years of global history: that if a people sit upon great resources and neglect to build the power to defend themselves, then their goose is cooked whenever the powerful want those resources? I propose to start by focusing on the following . . . that to lose sovereignty is to lose everything . . . A people’s sovereignty is their most precious possession, even more precious than their land; for without sovereignty, they can be deprived even of the opportunity to breathe the free fresh air. Sensible people risk their last ounce of treasure and their last drop of blood to protect or recover their sovereignty; fools part lightly with it.”
This was also Zimbabwe’s message to the racist cartel trying to scuttle the Kimberley Process against Chiadzwa diamonds.
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