Monday, June 21, 2010

Washington tips its hand

When Hillary Clinton says it is "extremely difficult" to walk the line between supporting the people of Zimbabwe and undermining Zanu-PF and President Mugabe she knows American actions are first and foremost designed to make the people suffer.

This, in turn, would sway them against those champions of historical and social justice.

The Herald

By Tichaona Zindoga
Last Monday, United States Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton stated that her country was finding it "extremely difficult" to "walk a line between supporting the people, (and) keeping the pressure on the (President Robert) Mugabe leadership".

Speaking at a Diplomacy Briefing Series Conference on Sub-Saharan Africa at the State Department in Washington, Clinton regretted that "the ruling party (Zanu-PF), the ruling clique within that party continues to benefit from aid, benefit from the diamond trade, benefit from corruption to a very significant degree".

She said: "We're trying to walk a line between supporting the people, keeping the pressure on the (Robert) Mugabe leadership, working with South Africa to try to get that message across."

She admitted it was a tricky proposition.

"But I'm not going to stand here and say we have some perfect formula, because it's extremely difficult to try to do what we're doing, and (make) a difference for the people of Zimbabwe, but we're going to persist in doing so," she said.

There are some interesting aspects in Clinton's statements.

The first relates to the false sense of morality and obligation to protect the people of Zimbabwe, and the rest of the world, by this giant country responsible for the illegal and often-violent overthrow of scores of developing world countries' leadership in the past 50 years.

Not unconnected to this, the US assumes that the people in these poor countries, including Zimbabwe, should support the foreign cause despite the obvious contradiction and the glaring illegitimacy and high-handedness of the superpower.

In a word, the people must trust their lives not with the leaders they choose but foreigners who come to "save" them from these leaders, the "Whiteman's burden."

Incidentally, they might as well suffer the collateral damage of US wars on their leaders, but the people must be prudent enough to see the greater good of the onerous task of the superpower.


The US tries to buy the allegiance of the people by providing the so-called humanitarian aid, which is a rather curious act of tying people to a life support machine appended to a system that destroys the very same lives and livelihoods.


The US has consistently boasted that despite sanctions it imposed in 2001, buttressed by a 2003 presidential decree, they have increased aid to Zimbabwe, which Clinton repeated during the seminar on Monday.

Clinton chooses to ignore how denial of balance of payments support to Zimbabwe and the embargo on companies and their leaders have precipitated hyperinflation (before dollarisation), capital and human resources flight and general decline in the country.

This economic annihilation, including the limitation on Government capacity to deal with preventable crises such as the 2008 cholera outbreak, form the collateral damage.

It is the high premium of this damage on the people, which has already been witnessed, that makes it "extremely difficult" to "walk a line between supporting the people, (and) keeping the pressure on the (President Robert) Mugabe leadership".

Add the US' demonic determination to deny Zimbabwe any form of economic prosperity, which cause sanctions have not exactly helped, and the chasm between the reality of sabotage and myth of support for the people of Zimbabwe is ever yawning.


The reason for this is that there is basically no line between the country's economy, the leadership and the people in general.

For this reason, the US decision to assault Zimbabwe's economy by blacklisting certain influential individuals and companies was a direct offensive on Zimbabweans.

Similarly, efforts to deny Zimbabwe access to lines of credit from multilateral lending institutions and right to exploit and benefit from the rich diamond resources in Chiadzwa are nothing more than blatant attacks on Zimbabweans.

But these attacks on Zimbabwe are the Americans' way of "keeping pressure" on President Mugabe's leadership.

On the balance of things, which can also be interpreted from Clinton's statements, US interference in Zimbabwe has made life difficult for the masses.

Where America has tried to hoodwink, bribe or reassure the people, it has cultivated and cherished hate against Zanu-PF and President Mugabe.

While ignoring and vilifying the genuine African revolutionary need of the people of Zimbabwe of ownership of land and its resources, the West has created, nurtured and glorified a captive coalition of mercenary forces who should crowd the African movement out.

The coalition is also charged with spreading the ideals of the so-called human rights and free and fair elections but never in the primacy of the indigenous ownership of resources.

The US would like the world to believe that it is this latter group of individuals that represents the best interests of the country.

Apart from the often so "generous" donations and support, they also receive special mentions.

The so-called civil society, comprising scores of US-sponsored outfits, has the distinction of having cropped up in the era of the West's onslaught on developing nations in the 1960s and responsible for American ideological wars and colour revolutions.

These dogs of war and overthrow activists include NGOs, human rights organisations and pseudo-political and economic analysts who line their pockets with filthy lucre from the National Endowment for Democracy.

They use their "high standing" to block the voice from the village crying for a share of the national heritage in the name of human rights and donor support.

Their role is to continuously paint a picture that justifies not only their receipt of donor money but also US meddling in Zimbabwe.

The case of diamonds in Chiadzwa gives this opportunity to bloody Zimbabwe for the American shark.

The attempts to portray Zimbabwe's diamonds as emanating from a war situation are very much part of the game.

There is a very keen aspect in the Western world's reference to Zanu-PF as the "ruling" party and MDC formations as the opposition despite the formation of the inclusive Government last year.

It is not that the opponents of the revolutionary party are any comfortable with its continued existence or exercise of power.

Rather the tag justifies the continued interference in Zimbabwe based on the bad image the West has carved in the party.

It would defeat the purpose of interference to highlight, as it stands, that Zanu-PF is part of a coalition government that shares power and processes.

The party must thus be painted as all-pervasive and resisting of change or reform thereby warranting not only its punishment but also the systematic support of the "forces of change" by the US.

The punishment of Zanu-PF is by way of punishing people and stirring their emotions against the revolutionary party which the US and its local and international allies fault and scapegoat.

This brings the issue to its full turn.

When Hillary Clinton says it is "extremely difficult" to walk the line between supporting the people of Zimbabwe and undermining Zanu-PF and President Mugabe she knows American actions are first and foremost designed to make the people suffer.

This, in turn, would sway them against those champions of historical and social justice.

US Congresswoman Cynthia A. McKinney of Georgia saw through this fraud when she challenged ZDERA in the House of Representatives on December 4, 2001.

She said that the "real reason why the United States Congress is now concentrating its time and resources on squeezing an economically-devastated African state under the hypocritical guise of providing a 'transition to democracy' was for the maintenance of illegal Anglo-Saxon settler property rights to land they stole from indigenous Zimbabweans.

"When we get right down to it," she said, "this legislation is nothing more than a formal declaration of United States complicity in a programme to maintain white-skin privilege."

"We can call it an 'incentives' Bill, but that does not change its essential 'sanctions' nature. It is racist and against the interests of the masses of Zimbabweans.

"In the long run the Zimbabwe Democracy Act will work against the United States having a mutually beneficial relationship with Africa."

That goes for US actions on Zimbabwe in the name of helping the people, legislative or otherwise. They can only be as fraudulent as they are racist and regressive.

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