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| Merchant of Violence...Raila Odinga is likely to give practical tips on post-election violence |
By Tichaona Zindoga
ANYBODY who has been disconcerted by the violent trends in the MDC led by Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai both internally as characterized by skirmishes to the run up to its forthcoming congress, and externally as lately exhibited by the violence against mourners at Warren Hills Cemetery in Harare, should be afraid.
And be much afraid.
The first and immediate reason for this is that the intraparty violence can only get worse with the congress, following this trajectory, having the capacity to give a bloodbath of some kind.
National organising secretary for the party, Elias Mudzuri seemed to have a premonition of this regrettable possibility when he told the world last week that his party could not guarantee a peaceful congress.
Even God, he invoked the name of the Almighty, cannot guarantee peace!
Many observers have resigned to the fact that violence is MDC-T’s second nature, although the man at the helm, Tsvangirai, who is infamously remembered for once calling for the violent removal of President Mugabe, sometimes seeks to portray his party as a host of angels while ZanuPF are “merchants of death”.
The second and chief reason why Zimbabweans and other peaceloving people of the world should be afraid is the expected presence of Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga as “Guest of Honour” during the MDCT congress.
The presence of Odinga will have so much significance.
Odinga is the man who in December 2007 after alleging vote rigging by incumbent Mwai Kibaki incited violence by his supporters which led to the death of around 1 000 people and the displacement of thousands others.
There was eventually a powersharing agreement between the two rivals which yielded Odinga’s premiership.
“Doing a Kenya” in reference to postelectoral crises has thus become reference to an orgy of violence by those that might think or claim that they have been robbed of victory.
MDCT has not hidden admiration for this, and Odinga per se as Tsvangirai once visited his opposite number to “consult” during the drawnout post electoral negotiations that gave birth to the GPA in 2009.
So Odinga is likely to be giving practical tips on violence when he addresses delegates in Bulawayo during the congress.
That might also include just how to savage each the Kenyan way we saw on television.
There is a lot of symbolism to MDCT’s attachment to Odinga in whom Tsvangirai seeks mentorship, notwithstanding his vaunted admiration for pacifist and Nobel laureate former South African president Nelson Mandela and his portrayal of his party as a host of angels.
Tsvangirai and Odinga are birds of the same feather.
Zimbabwe is only lucky to have not met a Kenya much earlier than Odinga’s brew in December 2007, if only Zimbabweans whether out of the love for peace, being cowardly or by some divine will should have been plunged into senseless violence by Tsvangirai.
It could have happened when he called for the violent removal of President Mugabe in 2000 or through the socalled “pushes” or the “prayer meeting” in Highfield in March 2007.
Both politicians are a creation of the West in trying to effect the socalled “colour revolutions” that the West uses for regime change purposes worldwide.
The National Endowment for Democracy in the US, the Westminster Foundations in Britain are some of the central figures in the regime change projects of the colour revolutions type.
A definition and description of these, as given by French political analyst Thierry Meyssan will suffice.
He explains: “‘Colour revolutions’ are to revolutions what Canada Dry is to beer. They look like the real thing, but they lack the flavour. “They are regime changes which appear to be revolutions because they mobilize huge segments of the population but are more akin to takeovers, because they do not aim at changing social structures. “Instead they aspire to replace an elite with another, in order to carry out proAmerican economic and foreign policies.”
He notes that the main mechanism of the “color revolutions” consists in focusing popular anger on the desired target, an aspect of the psychology of the masses which destroys everything in its path and against which no reasonable argument can be opposed.
“The scapegoat is accused of all the evils plaguing the country for at least one generation. The more he resists, the angrier the mob gets. After he gives in or slips away, the normal division between his opponents and his supporters reappears,” says Meyssan.
He pinpoints that Raila Odinga’s party the Orange Democratic Movement was created by NED in 2006, as America reorganized the opposition to Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki.
“He (Odinga) received the support of Senator Barack Obama, who was accompanied by destabilization experts (Mark Lippert, current chief of staff for the national security adviser, and general Jonathan S. Gration, current [as of 2009] US special envoy to Sudan).
“During a meeting with Odinga, the Illinois Senator invented a vague family relationship with the proUS candidate. However Odinga was defeated during the 2007 legislative elections. Supported by Senator John McCain as president of the IRI (the NED’s Republican pseudopod), he disputed the validity of the vote and called for his supporters to take to the streets. This is when anonymous text messages were sent en masse to ethnic Luo voters.
“(The texts read:) ‘Dear Kenyans, the Kikuyu have stolen the future of our children…we must treat them in the only way that they understand… with violence’.”
The result was of course what the world saw on television as December 2007 washed blood into the following year, and the subsequent negotiations and powersharing.
The same was almost replicated in Zimbabwe after the March 29 2008 elections as MDCT a creation of the same AngloSaxon forces and coded red, rallied its supporters over false and premature election results to create conditions ripe for protests over “stolen elections”.
Giving such a casus belli is within the modus operandi of the socalled revolutions which but need a spark to take off.
With these dynamics in mind, it wouldn’t come as a surprise then that Odinga called for the stepping down of President Mugabe to pave way for Tsvangirai as solidarity with a comrade in the mutual service of the AngloSaxon empire.
But then Tsvangirai might have more to identify with Odinga.
They are the same blundering, megaphonic kind.
While Odinga might be noted for such undiplomatic and highhanded instances as the recent howler he put up when he was controversially made a “facilitator” in Ivory Coast which culminated in his unceremonious sacking, Tsvangirai will be remembered for his calling for Zimbabwe’s neighbours to cut essential supplies to the country, among other sanctions.
Was he not the same Tsvangirai whose party called Sadc a club of dictators and wrote to facilitator Thabo Mbeki calling Sadc resolutions a nullity?
(Mbeki had to admonish Tsvangirai and his party that “…it does not help Zimbabwe, nor will it help you as prime minister of Zimbabwe, that the MDC (T) contemptuously repudiates very serious decisions of our region, and therefore our continent, describing them as ‘a nullity’.”)
There could be more examples on both sides.
If the US were objective they would recall the criticism that former Ambassador Christopher Dell leveled against Tsvangirai that he has poor choice of his advisors and hangers on.
Only Tsvangirai and Odinga share a master in the West and they can’t be so bad around each other as viewed by the latter.
For those outside of the system, it is clear as day that Tsvangirai and Odinga make statesmen whom no selfrespecting African would really be proud of or feel honoured to be around.
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