MDC-T conduit in US foreign policy

Unfortunately, MDC-T is not mentioned in any of these structures. They are a mere conduit for the realisation of US foreign policy objectives in Zimbabwe and the region, and are a dispensable lot in Washington’s eyes. The sooner they realise this, the better for everybody.

The Herald

By Itayi Garande
SECRET documents released by whistle blowing Wikileaks on Monday show MDC-T as an unwitting puppet in the US plan for regime change in Zimbabwe, a charge President Mugabe has been making for the better part of the last decade.
A leaked cable sent to Washington by Christopher W. Dell, former US Ambassador to Zimbabwe, also directed to USAID, selected US embassies in African countries, NGOs like USAID, military centres in Europe, among other agencies reveals the US foreign policy plan and the MDC’s role in that plan. 

The cable was also sent to Dan Mozena, then Director of Southern African Affairs at the US State Department. This is not surprising. During a March 23, 2007 Congressional briefing on Zimbabwe, Mozena and Donald Payne (Democrat), House of Representatives Chairman of the Committee of Foreign Relations, revealed continuing US Government funding for the MDC factions, Lovemore Madhuku’s National Constitutional Assembly, civil society organisations, NGOs and the Voice of America Studio 7 Project through USAID and the US Embassy in Zimbabwe.

They also disclosed ongoing efforts with a number of other African leaders and to co-ordinate efforts with the United Kingdom, European Union, United Nations, African Union, and Sadc to ensure that regime change was achieved in Zimbabwe sooner rather than later. 

Dell’s leaked classified cable was an important and sensitive document, which revealed and confirmed the Zimbabwe Government’s earlier regime change accusations. 

It was sent to American embassies in Abuja (Nigeria), Accra (Ghana), Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Dakar (Senegal), Kampala (Uganda), Nairobi (Kenya). They were also sent to embassies in Canberra (Australia) and France (Paris).

It was also sent to the United States European Command intelligence centre (USEUCOM) in Vaihingen, Germany; the National Security Council in Washington DC and to the American Joint Analysis Centre at Molesworth; the RAF Molesworth (a Royal Air Force station located near Molesworth) in Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom and to the United States UN mission in New York. 

The cable was a highly sensitive piece of information, and Mr Dell classified it under Section 1.4b/d of Executive Order 12958. So the matter is as sensitive as it can get.

The Senior African Director at the National Security Council works closely with the US President. The NSC is part of the Executive Office of the President of the United States. This means that the Zimbabwean issue is dealt with at the highest level within the US administration.

It seems that the embassies that received Dell’s cable, represent countries that were sympathetic to the MDC-T. Between 2007-2008, the MDC-T embarked on a major offensive in the African region and in the West with Tsvangirai declaring that he wanted "to cut Mugabe’s umbilical cord with Africa".

He visited the countries quoted in Dell’s leaked cable.

Tsvangirai himself, or senior MDC-T officials, visited all these countries in 2007-8. The trip to Ghana was briefly interrupted as MDC-T founding chairman, Isaac Matongo had died. Tsvangirai was to later visit that country in 2008, where he told a news conference in Accra that: "We believe the time has come for him (President Mugabe) to have an honourable exit," in line with US foreign policy. He added: "We are calling ... on every head of state in Africa to stand in defence of the people of Zimbabwe." 

MDC-T secretary general Tendai Biti held "consultative talks" with Kenya’s then new Prime Minister Raila Odinga on July 21, 2008. Tsvangirai visited Uganda (November 21, 2007), Nigeria (April 21, 2010) where he met with then President Olusegun Obasanjo, Ghana (April 22, 2008), Senegal (July 31, 2008), etc.

These trips, however funded, seemed congruent with Dell’s recipients of the leaked cable.

These revelations echoed similar pronouncements further afield in Europe made by Tony Blair, Lord Triesman and Sir Ian McCartney in the United Kingdom House of Commons between March 12 and 26 2007, and the publication of a report of the International Crisis Group entitled "Zimbabwe: An End to the Stalemate?"

The report marked the roots of Dell’s regime change move and a full description of the "managed change" formula was contained in that ICG report of March 6, 2007.

The idea of taking Zimbabwe to the UN Security Council was hatched in the House of Lords, after this report was published, and Dell travelled to London to discuss the US’ role in the post-Mugabe era.

It seems there was a "final push" now being envisaged as "the end of Mugabe was nigh".

Dell and Lord Triesman spoke with the same voice during that period. Dell’s idea was that the economy would eventually destroy President Mugabe and Lord Triesman retorted in the House of Lords: "I have also heard that Mugabe anticipates carrying on in power well beyond 2008. I do not know whether that will happen, because his economy has more or less imploded."

Lord Lea of Crondall seconded Lord Triesman’s contention by declaring that Tsvangirai "is a former friend of ours, a trade union official and a great democrat".

The web was quite intricate.

Dell, in his communication, also reveals that he was working with Zanu-PF so-called "moderates" who had come together with the MDC to draft a "new constitution" as a basis for internationally supervised elections in 2010 — which would see Tsvangirai installed as president. 

It has now emerged that the idea of an internationally supervised election was the work of Dell, who reported in the leaked cable that "The End is Nigh". It was not an MDC-T baby. This also sheds light on the US regime change strategy in Zimbabwe, and its possible hand in the harmonised elections of 2008.

In line with this design, the MDC formations were encouraged to unite behind the so-called "people-driven constitution" in an effort to postpone the harmonised elections from 2008 to 2010. 

Tsvangirai failed to follow this US plan as Sadc, through former South African President Thabo Mbeki, was pushing for a negotiated solution.

This led Dell to conclude that "Tsvangirai is ... a flawed figure, not readily open to advice, indecisive and with questionable judgement" in the 2007 cable to Washington.

It seems that Dell, at his departure, was quite sure that his regime change agenda had succeeded, and that, with the help of the donor community, especially USAID, ‘change’ was in the offing.

He wrote: "Change is in the offing, we need to step up our preparations. The work done over the last year on transition planning has been extremely useful, both for stimulating a fresh look at our own assumptions and plans and for forging a common approach among the traditional donor community. 

He makes an interesting revelation that was dismissed at the time — the revelation that NGOs were directly involved in regime change activities, in concert with the MDC-T. 

Government briefly banned NGO work and asked all NGOs to re-register. 

The MDC-T criticised government’s move, but it is now clear that government was right in stating that NGOs were exceeding their mandate and meddling in internal politics.

Dell’s leaked cable further reveals: "But the (regime change) process has lagged since the meetings in March in London and should be re-energised. It is encouraging in this respect that USAID Washington has engaged the Mission here in discussing how we would use additional resources in response to a genuinely reform-minded government."

He added: "I hope this will continue and the good work done so far will survive the usual bloodletting of the budget process."

While Dell admitted that African diplomacy was taking over the negotiating space, via mechanisms like Sadc, he however felt that the US should lead the regime change process in Zimbabwe, citing countries like Australia and Britain and supra-governance structures like the EU and UN as failing to "pack enough punch".

This puts a stop to academic arguments that the US was merely responding to a bilateral dispute between Zimbabwe and its ally, Britain. The US, it can now be categorically stated, has its own interests in changing the government of Zimbabwe, divorced from the stand-off between Zimbabwe and Britain. 

That means any negotiations on sanctions removal, e.g. the EU - Zimbabwe talks, are mere moot points unless they involve the US as well. Dell concluded: "The Africans are only now beginning to find their voice. Rock solid partners like Australia don’t pack enough punch to step out front and the UN is a non-player. 

"Thus it falls to the US, once again, to take the lead, to say and do the hard things and to set the agenda."

Unfortunately, MDC-T is not mentioned in any of these structures. They are a mere conduit for the realisation of US foreign policy objectives in Zimbabwe and the region, and are a dispensable lot in Washington’s eyes. The sooner they realise this, the better for everybody.

itayig@hotmail.com

SEE ALSO:
Tsvangirai: the star that will fade in Bethlehem

Tsvangirai: the star that will fade in Bethlehem

Tsvangirai might be useful now, but the system that follows thereafter is complex and he will be an albatross, Dell says. One cringes at the idea of how poor Tsvangirai, will be shunted aside, with disgust.

Pawn in power game...Morgan Tsvangirai

The Herald

REFLECTIONS with Tichaona Zindoga

MANY people have largely tended to view Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai in less-than-complimentary light, especially as a man who relishes the prospect of leading this country some day, which might never come, anyway.

This is because, in that unlikely event, he will be trying on the shoes of President Robert Mugabe.

For all we know, these are the big shoes of an academic and statesman par excellence, a visionary and icon of African humanism.

This is not to mention his liberation war credentials on which Zimbabwe was founded and remains proud of the legacy, what with the never-ending quest for dominance that the West, architects of slavery and colonialism, continue to direct at us.

By contrast, while President Mugabe and other cadres waged war on the evil forces Tsvangirai kept in the safety of his mother’s skirts back home and later in his life distinguished himself in serving tea to the colonialists in the mines. Those are generational results and stubborn facts about a good servant of the white man.

This latter attribute earned him the sobriquet of "Tea Boy", which those with a proud history of resisting the alien enemy quite used with heartless mirth, and perhaps, given the broader scheme of things, justifiably.

It goes without saying that Tsvangirai did not deploy the time he cowed from the battlefront to earn himself some respectable education, at a time when those languishing in Ian Smith’s prisons managed to further their studies.

But then the big time came.

Tsvangirai, by whatever means, rose from the obscurity of a tea-boy at some mine or the other to become the leading trade unionist in the country. That was a meteoric rise that propped up his ambition to eventually lead the country. Ambition is made of sterner stuff, as Shakespeare would have aptly put it.

Being no more lettered than any ordinary man or woman on the street, it must be owned, Devil-due-giving, that it must have been brawn that led to Tsvangirai’s rise to the top.

Ironically, he lacked just the same when we wanted to chase away the colonialists.

But the same courage led to him being the leader of the MDC when the party was formed in one September day in 1999 after of course preparations that dated to his championing of crippling worker strikes in the previous years.

He had become a subject in Western capitals looking for an alternative to an increasingly insurmountable President Mugabe.

In him, the West saw an opportunity to defeat from within Zimbabwe’s course to total liberation and emancipation but the project has been akin to pushing a mountain.

In Tsvangirai, the whites who wanted to hold on to the land they stole from our, and his ancestors, saw a flicker of hope — which they fuelled by their ill-gotten money to try to reduce to ashes the revolutionary spirit of Zimbabwe.

In short, the whites knew Tsvangirai’s own fawning spirit and decided they had found their pawn.

A cursory look at his profile now reveals that he is not as crude as in the former days, with those who have interacted with him, like this writer albeit for a moment, having to admit that he has taken some polishing.

He even has a face of a President, at least according to some sympathetic comment on some of his campaign posters.

He is the "face of democratic struggle", and undisputed leader of the MDC, some chip in.

But then this "face of the democratic struggle in Zimbabwe" is no more than that, a mere front of American and its allies’ interests in Zimbabwe.

And he is very dispensable after his present "indispensability" as the face of the not-so-democratic struggle, ask Christopher Dell, the cowboy masquerading as a diplomat.

In the recently-leaked classified cable, America’s "Mr Fix it" who has been to trouble spots around the world to fix his country’s imperialist interests, believes that Tsvangirai is "a flawed figure, not readily open to advice, indecisive and with questionable judgment in selecting those around him".

"He is the indispensable element for opposition success, but possibly an albatross around their necks once in power…Zimbabwe needs him, but should not rely on his executive abilities…"

Does that sound familiar?

Of course, that is what has been pointed out so many times over.

Tsvangirai and his MDC, many of whom are not endowed with talent, as Dell notes (except Biti and Chamisa), will be used and thrown away.

Just like used condoms; and has someone not drawn such analogy before? Tsvangirai’s benefactors in the West would not let him overgrow his tea-boy pedigree.

They would rather he dies as such, or even serve teas to the likes of Kagoro, Magaisa and Mufuka.

One might be prompted to think that the West are snobbish, much the same as those back home.

Yet the hard facts are there.

Under the present scenario, when the country is in the hands of black people, we can’t risk going back to the days of colonialism. And he that could not fight colonialists cannot be trusted with keeping the treasure.

On the other hand, if that unfortunate day comes to pass when we surrender our sovereignty, our enemies know that we must not get it back.

Unfortunately, that task is too big for Tsvangirai.

The enemy knows it, and would rather trust brainwashed Diasporans.

Tsvangirai might be useful now, but the system that follows thereafter is complex and he will be an albatross, Dell says. One cringes at the idea of how poor Tsvangirai, will be shunted aside, with disgust.

Poor, poor Tsvangirai!

He but a pawn in the larger game!

He must take time to reflect on this.

The West, led by the US who feel better placed to achieve regime change in Zimbabwe than Britain, Australia or the EU, urges him on.

They provide him all the goodies and pampering he did not think possible in his days at Nerutanga Village in Buhera, or in the seclusion of mines in Bindura.

They give him all the courage and phoney awards one can think of.

Back in their minds, they know that one day they would demand their pound of flesh and leave Tsvangirai to rot.

In fact, they are quite disgusted because they know that with someone better than Tsvangirai, which Zimbabwe can offer, they could have landed Africa’s jewel in Zimbabwe.

Tsvangirai is a walking dead.

He is walking to a destination that, if ever he arrives at, will have the door shut right at his face.

Dell might say that Tsvangirai is a "star" quality, but he knows that this star will only lead to a Bethlehem and dim to obscurity.

Perhaps for Tsvangirai "The End is Nigh!"

tichaona.zindoga@gmail.com

SEE ALSO:

MDC-T: Conduit in US foreign policy

European Union has double standards on democracy, human rights

It is generally accepted that Africans do not observe elections in Europe and do not make pronouncements on the conduct of such polls, and yet it is assumed that Europeans have the inalienable right to observe and endorse the outcome of elections on the African continent.

• Part of speech delivered by President Robert Mugabe at the Africa-European Union Summit in Libya on 1 December 2010.

 ...as far as our partnership on good governance and human rights is concerned, the declaration that we adopt today as well as to some extent the Second Plan of Action, do not reflect the debate that has taken place on the floor. 

This is because these documents were finalised by experts long before we came to this meeting. 

The hope is that consideration will be given to improving our management of the partnership in so far as it affects the final outcomes of our deliberations.

I say this, Mr Chairman, because a number of African speakers have made critical comments about what amounts to double standards in European views of democracy and human rights, about the failure to respect the cultural diversity of African societies including religious and political systems and practices. 

Genuine democratic governance cannot and will not be a product of processes engendered by outsiders for Africans on the basis of values outsiders seek to inculcate. 

It can only be a product of the internal process of development in a country. 

In Europe, democratic governance came out of a long history of bloody wars and other forms of struggle. 

In Africa, our history of struggles for freedom from colonialism are well known, as are the brutalities that were perpetrated against Africans. 

Europeans, therefore, cannot take a moral high ground and develop amnesia when it comes to the brutalities that Africans suffered in the colonial period.

It is for Africans to design and build their own democratic institutions.

That sense of ownership will impel them towards development within their own circumstances. 

Having gone through a history of oppression and injustice that drew Africa back in terms of its development and in evolving democratic institutions, Africans know only too well the value of respect for human rights and tolerance. 

Besides, Africa is also a signatory to the major international conventions on human rights and as such no one can preach to it about its obligations on the subject.

Democratic processes in our countries are constantly under threat partly due to interference from outsiders. 

In the case of my country, Zimbabwe, heinous crimes of interference have been undertaken in the name of good governance and human rights and some such values. 

Zimbabwe currently reels under illegal sanctions imposed on it by the European Union and the United States of America whose primary motive is to bring about regime change as a response to a just land reform programme my government embarked upon in the interest of social justice.

We in Zimbabwe have learnt the hard way that notions of democracy, human rights and rule of law have no universal meaning for Europeans, but are conveniently invoked against small states which dare challenge their global interests on our soils.

Equally illustrative is the issue of my country’s sovereign right over her sub-soil assets, specifically the recently discovered diamond deposits. 

This vital natural resource deposited in our country by the un-sanctioning Almighty, obviously to benefit His children, the same way oil and other abundant African resources do or are supposed to do, is being placed beyond us in the name of the Kimberley Certification Process. 

We have done everything expected of us under the process, itself voluntary, and yet we remain in the dock facing ever shifting charges laid out against us by some countries in Europe and America. 

Again the notions of democracy, human rights and good governance are invoked. 

We face the real risk of giving these noble notions a very bad name.

Our commitment to democratic governance and respect for human rights ought to be based on the premise that African people must not see these values simply as abstract concepts that have no bearing on their well-being and material conditions. 

Democratic governance must, therefore, mean more than people taking part in an election. 

The people must have a direct stake in the development process not merely as providers of labour but as economically empowered citizens and people in charge of their own resources, including land and mineral wealth. 

That would ultimately give meaning to democratic governance it, therefore, goes without saying that poverty and the unequal control of resources in our countries militates against democratic governance.

Our priority as a continent and of our partners should, therefore, be focused on attaining development and economic freedom, so that governments will be in a better position to guarantee the economic and social rights of their citizens. 

Finally, Mr Co-Chairperson, democratic governance and human rights must never be used as tools to influence processes in our countries. 

The EU side needs to demonstrate sincerity and transparency in their political dealings with the continent. 

What we have witnessed over the past years is the tendency to dictate policy on African countries and to attach unrealistic conditions on development assistance. 

For true and successful dialogue to occur in areas of governance and democracy, the EU should do away with double standards and selective application of these principles. 

It is generally accepted that Africans do not observe elections in Europe and do not make pronouncements on the conduct of such polls, and yet it is assumed that Europeans have the inalienable right to observe and endorse the outcome of elections on the African continent.

The right to determine our own governance systems and the sovereign right to shape our own futures free from outside interference are sacred to us. 

The EU’s pre-occupation with human rights should, therefore, translate into concrete action through assistance in the development processes in Africa in order to change the material conditions of African people.