West uses media to create enemies

 The other means for making disasters pay is to use differential framing and discriminatory labels in order to be able to magnify, stretch-out and globalise otherwise insignificant conflicts and incidents whose exploitation is seen as beneficial to the empire.
Angry demonstrations against governments in Greece, Ireland, France, Britain, Canada, Portugal and Spain are to be under-reported, and treated by media as ordinary, pedestrian indications of "democratic expression" while being put down ruthlessly by the security arms of the state.
The Herald

By Tafataona Mahoso
SOUTH AFRICA, Nigeria, Gabon and the Arab League have all expressed surprise that the US, UK and Nato have used UN Security Council Resolution 1973 on Libya in ways which are not supported by the resolution, in ways which these African and Arab countries had not foreseen.
The attempts by these countries to distance themselves from what the US, UK and Nato are doing in Libya are like attempts to say that we only gave a known habitual burglar enough keys to allow him to sleep in one room of the palace, and we are shocked that he has ransacked the entire palace and is looking for more palaces to ransack in the same manner.
It means that our African and Arab brothers and neighbours have not been reading the geo-political situation, which has unfolded and spread especially since September 11 2001, when New York and the Pentagon were bombed.
The Western neo-liberal system (including the military, the media and the global corporations) have so heavily invested in war and conflict that they will stretch and globalise any local quarrel between brothers or cousins into an opportunity for full scale war especially if it is not within their own borders.
As the author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise Disaster Capitalism warned four years ago:
"The truth is at once less sinister and more dangerous. An economic system that requires constant growth, while bucking almost all serious attempts at . . . regulation, generates a steady stream of disasters all on its own, whether military, ecological or financial.
"The appetite for easy, short-term profits offered by purely speculative investments has turned the stock currency and real estate markets into crisis creation machines . . . Given the boiling temperatures, both climatic and political, future disasters need not be cooked up in dark conspiracies. All indications are that simply by staying the (neoliberal corporatist) course; (disasters) will keep coming with ever more ferocious intensity. Disaster generation can therefore be left to the market's invisible hand. This is one area in which it (the myth of the invisible hand) actually delivers (frequent and tangible results)."
What Naomi Klein is claiming here is that imperialism has found a way of delaying its own collapse by creating profitable "business" out of the very same crises which are supposed to destroy it.
One of the means used to make disasters pay is privatising and commercialising the responses, which were once reserved for the state and for volunteers, while socialising the responses, which used to be private and reserved for private companies.
In the US, "homeland security" after September 11 was out-sourced, but rescuing of global multinationals such as Ford and AIG from bankruptcy was made the responsibility of tax-payers because these conglomerates were labelled as "too big to be allowed to fail".
They would bring down the entire system with them if they were not rescued by the taxpayers.
The other means for making disasters pay is to use differential framing and discriminatory labels in order to be able to magnify, stretch-out and globalise otherwise insignificant conflicts and incidents whose exploitation is seen as beneficial to the empire.
Angry demonstrations against governments in Greece, Ireland, France, Britain, Canada, Portugal and Spain are to be under-reported, and treated by media as ordinary, pedestrian indications of "democratic expression" while being put down ruthlessly by the security arms of the state.
On the other hand, even one-man demonstrations, hunger strikes and mass protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan and elsewhere in areas considered peripheral to the empire must be milked to the last drop of innuendo and invective, directed by the same media and hired provocateurs toward regime change.
Readers in Zimbabwe are familiar with this pattern: the bilateral quarrel between Zimbabwe and Britain involving white British settlers (calling themselves Rhodesians) was globalised to rope in the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the entire European Union. NGOs were set up in the form of "Crisis Coalition Zimbabwe" and located here in Zimbabwe in order to transfer perceptions of permanent "crisis" away from Britain to Harare.
The tag of "ethnic cleansing" was attached to Zimbabwe because a few white settlers died while refusing to let Zimbabweans - owners of land stolen over one hundred years - retake and reoccupy it.
But in South Africa, where more than 1 000 whites have also died while resisting Africans who demand their land back, there is no crisis; no "ethnic cleansing" because blowing out that real crisis is currently not in the interests of Europe and North America. South Africa, with its large white population is needed by the empire as a perceived counter against Zimbabwe.
Most graphically, a local programme of slum clearance in Harare in 2005 was so blown out of size that two "UN Special Envoys" were appointed, Anna K Tibaijuka and Jan Egeland, to investigate it with a view to taking Zimbabwe to the UN Security Council and charging the Government with crimes against humanity.
Likewise, Zimbabwe's decision to leave the British Commonwealth in 2003 was pictured as the ultimate catastrophe for the people.
But were an objective survey to be conducted today, no one, except a few leaders of the MDC formations, still remembers with any regret that we left the Commonwealth. Most people do not miss it because it had no common wealth to share. It was meant to share our wealth with the British instead.
So, Zimbabweans must be among the first to point out that Nigeria, South Africa and Gabon made a huge and costly mistake when in the name of protecting civilians, they voted to allow Nato to declare a so-called "no-fly zone" over Libya.
That vote gave a habitual burglar and thief some keys to one room in Africa's palace in the belief that this "United Natos" would restrict itself to that one room or one palace.
That vote helped to transfer perceptions and manifestations of grave crisis from the North Atlantic states to Africa.
The three African countries and the Arab League at the UN should have remembered Mick Hume's warning six years ago, when Hume wrote in June 2005:
"Why Africa, why now? Why has the continent suddenly come to dominate the political agenda in Britain . . .? It seems the crisis that has brought all this (fixation) about is not in Africa but in Britain (in the North). There is a crisis of authority afflicting the political (and economic) class, and a crisis of common values in our (Western) society. There is a poverty of leadership at every level, and a dearth of any sense of purpose that is bigger than oneself. Against this background . . . Africa has become an all purpose stage on which everybody from a pop star (Madonna) to a politician (Nicolas Sarkozy) can try to show off their moral worth and sincerity . . . the impetus for this comes from the top downwards."
So we find that Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, George W Bush, and now Sarkozy, Barrack Obama and William Hague are in agreement with the embedded journalists at BBC, CNN, Aljazeera English and Euronews as well as the embedded activists at the International Crisis Group - that Africa is where "the action" must be, otherwise "the international community" will count for nothing.
Long before things became as dangerous as we see now in Libya, Dutch philosopher Paul Treanor warned the world to stop the US and Nato from replacing the UN Charter with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the doctrine of "the responsibility to protect civilians."
He warned at the time of a similar "crisis" concocted over Kosovo and former Yugoslavia, that the UN Charter at least pretends to incorporate appeal procedures for injured parties while the UDHR does not. The UDHR has no appeal procedures because it has never been acceded to:
"If the UN decides tomorrow that it is necessary to destroy Beijing with a nuclear weapon to enforce human rights, then no-one can take any legal steps against this decision. Neither the individual residents nor the Chinese Government, nor an organisation can appeal . . . The UDHR is considered beyond appeal, in fact beyond all legal procedure . . . If the United States recolonises Africa over the next 15 years (from the year 2000), it will most certainly refer to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the ‘legal' basis for its actions."
The experiment which set the precedent for Libya today was conducted in 1999 over former Yugoslavia and Kosovo. This is the case where an act of blatant military aggression produces its own justification, after the fact, precisely because the blatant act of aggression is presented and dutifully covered by the white racist media as an act of charity, "the right to protect."
As Noam Chomsky pointed out in Imperial Ambitions, (2005):
"Take, say, the bombing of Serbia in 1999, again under Bill Clinton. What was the point of that? The standard (Northern) line is that the United States intervened (through Nato) to prevent ethnic cleansing, but to hold that view you have to invert the chronology (and the cause-effect logic) . . . the worst ethnic cleansing followed the Nato bombing and, furthermore, was the anticipated consequence of it. So, (stopping ethnic cleansing) can't have been the reason."
Nato bombed Yugoslavia in 1999 in order to force mass displacement of Albanians who were then framed and reported as victims of ethnic cleansing who needed Nato's protection in the name of the UN.
Chomsky concluded that the real reason was to maintain the "credibility" and "authority" of the US and Nato in global politics and to open the way for Nato and the EU to expand to the east European republics of the former Soviet Union which were seen as full of rich pickings in oil.
Now, there is a question still begging for an answer. Yugoslavia at 1999 had already been reduced by secessions to more or less the same population as Zimbabwe and it had been impoverished through US-EU sanctions.
Why would Nato, including the US and 19 European countries, unleash their most sophisticated jet-bombers on such a small and weakened state for a whole month in order to regain or maintain their authority and credibility as well as to clear a geo-strategic path to the rich oil fields of the Caspian basin?
Why could these objectives not be met through negotiations?
After, all Yugoslavia was most eager to negotiate throughout the period of the provocations and aggression!
The same question arises over Libya. In 2003, the US, UK and EU forced Libya to negotiate agreements, which were highly beneficial to these countries and very costly to Libya.
Why have the same countries now elected to bomb Libya? They could have easily returned to negotiations again?
The answers to this question are important for Zimbabwe as well. First of all, in 2005 it was necessary to negotiate with Libya instead of bombing it because the world and the home populations of the US, UK and Europe had already been worked-up enough over the Iraq invasion by the US and UK and Nato occupation of Afghanistan.
These wars were stimulating enough military spending for the military industrial complex to keep going and thereby keep the capitalist system growing.
The prestige, authority and credibility which had to be restored or maintained through bombing Yugoslavia rather than negotiating with it had to be maintained or regained in the eyes of tax-payers at home and in the eyes of potentially defiant states around the world. The tax-payers had to be impressed enough to allow their governments to escalate military spending. As Chomsky says in Understanding Power:
"Well, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, (the Pentagon) had to change the computer disk (explaining increased military spending) for the first time . . . So, in 1990, the reason they gave was no longer, ‘The Russians are coming,' it was what they called ‘technological sophistication of Third World powers' - especially in the Middle East, where they said our problems could no longer be laid at the Kremlin's door."
A perceived big enemy had just disappeared from the radar. So, little ones had to be invented, provoked, demonised and magnified through the media to fit the bill.
The meaning of the global financial tsunami which hit the US and Europe in 2008 suggests that the military spending stimulated through September 11, through the Nato occupation of Afghanistan, through the illegal invasion of Iraq and through the global terror campaign called the war on terror - all have failed to stimulate enough spending to make neoliberal corporate cannibalism sustainable.
Moreover, in hyperinflationary times, the stimulation of industrial output through military spending alone has become too slow to cope with the escalating crisis of the global casino economy.
That is why Obama was elected to try and handover "stimulus packages" directly to all bankrupt global corporations which have been classified as "too big to be allowed to fail."
In the past, these behemoths had to wait for escalating military budgets to be approved by Congress and to be spent by the Pentagon on slow research, which would reach high-tech production lines after some years, if not decades.
That method can no longer ward off the threatening collapse of the entire edifice of neo-liberal capitalism. So, Obama had to scare tax-payers enough to force them to allow direct stimulus packages to global multinational companies.
But these handouts have provoked jealousy and resistance among the traditional arms researchers and manufacturers who cannot qualify for such stimulus packages.
These arms researchers and manufacturers have therefore been compelled not only to attack the stimulus packages for inciting tax-payers against neo-liberal capitalism, they have also mobilised the media houses and journalists they own to provoke and incite armed conflicts, to incite violence, in the hope of maintaining perceptions of an evil and dangerous world out there, thereby justifying high military spending.
Stimulus packages given to failing banks and automobile manufacturers are viewed as dangerous by the military industrial complex because they do not have the prestige and mystique of escalating military budgets spent on high-tech military research and technology development.
People understand what purpose a bank, insurance firm or real estate company is supposed to serve.
They do not have time or expertise to understand research on cyber-warfare, stealth bombers or weapons designed to make telecommunications systems, cellular systems and satellites inoperable.
In other words, the military-industrial complex has rebelled against stimulus packages because they are easy for tax-payers to understand and to oppose them as an open rip-off.
The military industrial complex would rather rely on open terror and violence to create perpetual panics which create mass media hysteria in order to force citizens to agree to pay for increased military spending.
Direct results of terror and open violence include the threat that if tax-payers do not pay up, energy sources and mines producing strategic minerals will be taken over by foreign despots, or that there will be massive invasions of Europe by African and Arab refugees running away from despots.
So, it is better to bomb the despots and all those surrounding them before there are floods of refugees entering Europe and before civilisation grinds to a halt for lack of fuel.
Unfortunately, as Chomsky has said, it is the same bombs which actually terrify the people into opting to run away and become refugees; just as it is the illegal sanctions in Zimbabwe which produced the so-called border jumpers whom CNN and Aljazeera filmed crossing the fence out of Zimbabwe into South Africa in 2004-2007.
Therefore what we are seeing in Libya is a shameless display of criminal "humanitarianism" which must be condemned as such.

Jacob Zuma: new pawn in Western regime change agenda in Zimbabwe?

As mediator, his role is to encourage dialogue and amity among the three parties to Zimbabwe’s Global Political Agreement. His role is not to meddle and dictate. By pandering to the idle chatter of some political players here, Mr Zuma is compromising his integrity as Sadc mediator. 

Dancing to new tune..."With such leaders Africa is in mortal danger."

President Jacob Zuma’s erratic behaviour is the stuff of legends.
Bemused people have often asked: how does the disaster-prone Zuma manage to run Africa’s biggest economy? The answer is really simple: he does not run anything, not even a tuckshop in Soweto. South Africa’s economy is still owned and controlled by the architects of apartheid and global capitalism.

If President Zuma’s bungling were confined to his personal life — for instance the scandalous belief that a post-coital shower offers protection from HIV — most people would laugh off his actions as the predictable antics of a primitive leader.

But the problem with Mr Zuma now is that his disconcerting behaviour has become a huge liability, not only to South Africa but also to the rest of the continent.
Let’s look at President Zuma’s recent actions against Libya and Zimbabwe.
President Zuma, in his Solomonic wisdom, votes for the bombardment of Libya. The following week, after supposedly realising his monumental blunder, he lamely condemns the use of military force on Libya by Western powers.

Mr Zuma’s duplicity is astounding. With such leaders, Africa is in mortal danger. When President Zuma, together with Nigeria and Gabon, voted in favour of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1773 which effectively authorised the re-colonisation of Libya, what in the name of God did they think they were doing?
The same President Zuma who voted for the bombardment of Libya is now speaking out against the use of military force by the United States, Britain, France and their allies. His ludicrous stance has left political scientists scratching their heads in puzzlement. Does South Africa have a foreign policy at all or has the ANC entered the era of Mickey Mouse posturing?

Speaking at a rally to mark Human Rights Day in Cape Town last week, Mr Zuma ridiculously changed tact, urging the UN members not to go beyond the enforcement of a no-fly zone. His statement was a contradiction in terms, because a no-fly zone can never be enforced without the use of military force.

Addressing the same rally, President Zuma made utterances that would have shocked any self-respecting African. With everyone still wondering why South Africa has voted for the bombardment of a fellow African nation, President Zuma resorted to cheap politicking, saying long-tern stability in Libya could only be achieved through a peaceful and political solution based on the will of the Libyan people.

If President Zuma really believes that Libya’s problems can only be resolved by the people of Libya, why then is he ganging up with the West to bombard that independent country? And Mr Zuma must tell us why South Africa has unilaterally frozen the assets and bank accounts of the Libyan state.
On Zimbabwe, President Zuma is showing himself to be a dishonest broker.

As mediator, his role is to encourage dialogue and amity among the three parties to Zimbabwe’s Global Political Agreement. His role is not to meddle and dictate. By pandering to the idle chatter of some political players here, Mr Zuma is compromising his integrity as Sadc mediator.

President Mugabe has clearly stated that President Zuma has no mandate to craft an election roadmap for Zimbabwe.
The people of Zimbabwe won their independence in 1980. We are not a colony — whether under the direct control of the West or by South African proxy.
Zimbabwe is a sovereign state; the will of our people is supreme and absolute. President Zuma and Sadc — individually and collectively — have no legal or moral authority to meddle in Zimbabwe’s internal affairs.

In this era of “humanitarian interventionism”, a euphemism for neo-imperialist conquest, Western governments and their agents are always exploring possibilities for creating the false pretext for unleashing war on small countries.

The strategy of the Western powers is now a public secret: instruct your puppet political parties in Africa to claim that the elections have been rigged, incite hundreds of people to riot and, when the police intervene, cry genocide. The Western governments will then gang up under Nato or the UN and bombard the targeted nation. This is the grand plan, and Africans should brace for a bumpy ride ahead.

The US, France and Britain have been emboldened by the way the Libya issue has been handled under the UN system. This is bad news for the progressive world.
We all remember how the West has lied to the world since the year 2000, claiming that Zimbabwe posed a threat to international peace and security in the (Sadc) region. For a while, the Anglo-Saxon cabal abandoned that tired line, deflated by China and Russia’s veto power, but the Libya experience has re-energised the warmongers.

Increasingly, we will see regional blocs play a leading role in doing the West’s bidding.
We have seen what Ecowas has done to the Ivory Coast, we have seen what the East African Community has done to the Congo, we have seen what the African Union and the Arab League have done to Libya.
Tragically, there are Africans who still believe Western propaganda on “democracy, human rights and rule of law”.

William Blum, a leading historian, says since 1945 the US has destroyed or subverted more than 50 governments, many of them democracies, and used mass murderers like Mobutu, Suharto and Pinochet to dominate by proxy. In the Middle East, every dictatorship and pseudo-monarchy has been sustained by America.
Is President Jacob Zuma aware of this?

SEE ALSO:
SADC: Zim must re-think its relations

SADC: Zim must rethink its relations

Following the Livingstone Sadc Troika on Zimbabwe and the African vote on Resolution 1973 against Libya, it has become very clear that Zimbabwe's national security interests do not lie in Sadc or AU pacts given the Judas Iscariot fact that is now rampant in the region and the continent. The time to forge strategic partnerships that really matter in today’s geopolitics has come. The summit in Livingstone was an early warning signal for our country to move rapidly to make defence pacts with real friends with real power.
The Sunday Mail



By Professor Jonathan Moyo
If regime change consultants out there thought they would get away with sending a subliminal but pointed neo-colonial message to Zimbabweans by having Livingstone in Zambia as the ironic venue of last Thursday’s summit of the Sadc Troika on politics, defence and security co-operation, then they must have been stung by the revolutionary spirits of Mbuya Nehanda and King Lobengula which took hold of the colonially named city to remind the ghost of David Livingstone that Zimbabwe will never be a colony again by ensuring that the summit failed in a big way.


The roots of this failure are to be found in the incomprehensible fact that the Sadc mandarins kept the Zimbabwean delegation led by President Robert Mugabe waiting for the whole day until 8pm when the official session was convened for no more than an hour during which the troika reported its decisions without much dialogue, which is traditionally essential for the success of such summits.
This was despite the fact that President Mugabe’s delegation had arrived the previous day after having been informed that the summit would be held in the morning on Thursday.

The unprecedented anomaly was made worse by the fact that the report of the Sadc facilitator, President Jacob Zuma, on the political and security situation in Zimbabwe, was not shared with the Zimbabwean delegation before, during or after the summit. Against this backdrop, it is no wonder that the summit ended in unmitigated failure not least because it lacked all the necessary political features and diplomatic ingredients that usually foreshadow a successful summit.
In effect, the Livingstone summit was one of the worst Sadc meetings on Zimbabwe in recent years which set a dangerous precedent whose trappings will make it very difficult for Sadc to play a meaningful role in the unfolding events in our country unless immediate and visible steps are taken by the regional group’s highest levels to reverse the anomaly and ensure that it does not repeat.

What this means is that notwithstanding the predictable claims that the summit was a huge success by Zimbabwe’s usual detractors in the media and among regime change donors that have imposed illegal economic sanctions that are causing untold suffering among ordinary Zimbabweans, the fact is that the summit was a catastrophic failure for Sadc simply and only because the Republic of Zimbabwe cannot implement or in any way be part of any external decision which comes as an imposition to the detriment of our national sovereignty.
That we will never do as Zimbabweans not least because we know that, within the confines of international law, no other self-respecting sovereign country, including those in Sadc, will ever do.


In this connection, there is one utterly sinister decision that the Sadc Troika made in Livingstone which must not see the light of day not only because it was made without prior consultation or subsequent agreement with the Republic of Zimbabwe but also because it is a clear and evil attempt to open a treacherous window for regime change donors to trample on our sovereignty in the vain hope of influencing the organisation and outcome of the forthcoming general election. The offensive and unacceptable decision was cast in the following words under paragraph 17(e) of the troika’s communiqué issued last Thursday: “The troika of the organ shall appoint a team of officials to join the Facilitation Team and work with the Joint Monitoring and Implementation Committee (JOMIC) to ensure monitoring, evaluation and implementation of the GPA. The troika shall develop the Terms of Reference, time frames and provide regular progress report, the first, to be presented during the next Sadc extraordinary summit. Summit will review progress on the implementation of the GPA and take appropriate action.”

This intrusive decision is a nullity not only because it is an imposition with suspicious regime change roots but also because it is a blatant violation of the GPA itself, an unacceptable affront to Zimbabwe’s sovereignty. While some sell-outs and puppets have celebrated this so-called Sadc decision as if it has come from God in heaven, the fact is that it is not worth the paper it is written on because it cannot be implemented without the willingness and co-operation of the Republic of Zimbabwe.

If there is anybody out there in Sadc or elsewhere that imagines that the Republic of Zimbabwe will cooperate in implementing a decision that attacks its sovereignty, then that person is a lost cause because nothing of the sort will happen. Ask any student of public policy and they will tell you that it is very dangerous for any authority anywhere to make a decision that it has no capacity to implement.
The so-called team of officials, that is proposed to join the Facilitation Team and to work with JOMIC in Zimbabwe, will need diplomatic and other facilitation by the Republic of Zimbabwe to be able to work in our country but this won’t happen, given how the decision for the team’s appointment and deployment has been made, let alone the motives thereof.

If past experiences in Zimbabwe and elsewhere are anything to go by, then nobody needs to be a rocket scientist to see that the presumed Sadc team of officials, if allowed to come into our country, will be nothing but a bunch of regime-change spies deployed to distort things and lie about Zimbabwe on behalf of the US and the EU to craft false evidence in the vain hope of making Zimbabwe a “UN Chapter VII” case while conveniently riding on Sadc’s treacherous back authored in Livingstone.


What makes this more than a sickening possibility is that, President Zuma, the Sadc facilitator on Zimbabwe who apparently made the proposal for a Sadc team of officials in a report that has thus far been kept secret from the Republic of Zimbabwe, recently authorised his representative at the United Nations to join the representatives of Nigeria and Gabon to underhandedly vote for the UN Resolution 1973 which essentially authorised the US and NATO members to individually or collectively bomb and kill Libyans under the pretext of enforcing a “no-fly zone” to ostensibly protect the very same Libyans that are now being killed by the US and NATO bombs on a daily basis.

This is very painful when you consider that the world has helplessly watched the slaughter of civilians by brutal Israel forces with US and EU support in Gaza and other Palestinian territories without anything like UN Resolution 1973 being invoked. Why have the African puppets that have supported a no-fly zone in Libya not also supported the same in the Gaza strip in the Middle East? Why is there no-fly zone in Afghanistan to protect innocent civilians that the US and NATO forces are killing like flies from the air day and night?

The nauseating logic effectively supported by South Africa, Nigeria and Gabon is that while it is indeed wrong for the government of Libya to kill civilians in pursuit of its survival, it should be right for the US and NATO forces, with Britain and France taking the leading murderous role, to allegedly defend Libyans from the self-indulgent Colonel Gaddafi by killing them.
With all due respect, and please take note that there is a lot of it, the mere fact that President Zuma of South Africa voted for the atrocities that the US and its NATO allies are committing in Libya under UN Resolution 1973 makes him an undesirable Sadc facilitator on the political and security situation in Zimbabwe. Zuma can no longer be trusted if he ever was.

Are we to believe that any rebel group or treacherous political party that wants to kill civilians or any government that wants to kill its own people or any country that wants to sell out another country or any former colonial power that seeks regime change in its former colony must use the UN to outsource the killing of innocent people to the US and its NATO allies as has happened in the Libyan case? Is that what regional bodies such as Sadc, African Union and the UN have become: conduits of regime change politics and mass killings by former colonial powers that want to plunder our natural resources?
Let's face it.


President Zuma is now tainted beyond recovery by the Libyan situation and his commitment to the African cause has become as questionable as South Africa's suitability for a permanent seat at the UN Security Council.

The same applies to Nigeria. While Africa cannot be expected to support South Africa and Nigeria to become permanent members of the UN Security Council given their treachery in Libya where the least they should have done was to abstain from the vote as did Brazil, China, India, Germany and Russia; Zimbabwe cannot be expected to accept an intrusive Sadc team of so-called officials funded by regime change donors to come and work in our country to plot the so-called electoral roadmap with a view to ensuring that the forthcoming general election is decidedly organised in a manner that ensures regime change with President Zuma’s endorsement simply because he has been used to make the ridiculous proposal. We will not allow that to happen. Never ever!

And let those who are entertaining this folly remember that, unlike Libya or even the likes of Tunisia and Egypt whose violent protestocracies have excited idle minds in our country, Zimbabwe got its independence whose 31st anniversary we are celebrating in two weeks only in 1980 and that the combatants who won that independence are not only still alive but also that their critical mass occupies critical space in key sectors of the State.

These comrades know the caves, mountains and township spots from which to defend their liberated motherland without using any air power. Zimbabwe was not liberated from the air but from the ground. And this ground of ours which we shall forever control as liberated sons and daughters of the soil is the one terrain we know only too well. If you ask Americans about their ill-fated campaign in Afghanistan, they'll confirm that he who controls the ground through the caves, the bushes, forests and the mountains is far better than he who is exposed in the air with all his his hi-tech weapons to “awe and shock” while God is watching it all. There’s therefore no need for anyone whether in Sadc or elsewhere to play neo-colonial games here on behalf of imperialists who are seeking illegal regime change through their puppets in the MDC.

Zimbabweans expect Presidents Zuma, Hifikepunye Pohamba of Namibia and Armando Guebuza of Mozambique to know this only too well because Zimbabwe’s current onslaught from imperialists in the US, the EU and their allies also mirrors theirs if not today certainly tomorrow.
Back to the offensive communiqué of the Sadc Troika issued last Thursday, what was unacceptable about it was not only its decision to appoint a foreign team of officials who are for all intents and purposes

Western spies to join JOMIC without consultation or agreement with the Republic of Zimbabwe but also the expectation that our country would implement a decision it did not make. What is even more infuriating is the fact that this unacceptable decision which cannot be implemented was made without consultation or agreement with the Republic of Zimbabwe on the basis of the following three equally unacceptable background findings made by the Sadc Troika without any foundation whatsoever.

In the first place, paragraph 14 of the troika’s communiqué says that “the summit appreciated the frankness with which the report was presented by the Sadc facilitator and commended him for the work that he has been doing on behalf of Sadc”. It is preposterous in the extreme for the Sadc mandarins to describe as “frank” a report that was kept away from the Zimbabwean delegation before, during and after the Livingstone summit.

Furthermore, it is mischievous in the extreme to claim that a report that was presented under patently opaque and disrespectful circumstances in apparent pursuit of opaque Western interests was done on behalf of Sadc. No sane person should expect the Republic of Zimbabwe to implement alleged Sadc recommendations based on a report whose authorship and contents are not known. We know the difference between dictatorship and facilitation and we are determined to resist the latter.
In the second place, paragraph 15 of the troika’s communiqué says that, “summit recalled past Sadc decisions on the implementation of the GPA and noted with disappointment insufficient progress thereof and expressed its impatience in the delay of the implementation of the GPA”. Wow, this is very rich in a sick way!


What delay in the implementation of the GPA? It is a shame that the Sadc communiqué makes a bald generalisation over a matter that is crying for specifics. The GPA commits its signatories, Zanu-PF and the two MDC formations, and its guarantors — which are Sadc and the AU — to seek the removal of the illegal and evil economic sanctions. Has that been done? Who is responsible for the delay in implementing this fundamental pillar of the GPA whose non-implementation has caused untold suffering among ordinary Zimbabweans?

Sadc undertook to set up a ministerial team to engage the Western countries that imposed illegal and evil economic sanctions against Zimbabwe to remove them. Does President Zuma, who has occasionally spoken out forcefully against these biting sanctions imposed with the support of the MDC and which have not been removed, expect the world to now pretend that the illegal and evil economic sanctions are no longer an issue in Zimbabwe even though they have not been removed? How can the GPA be fully implemented when the illegal and evil economic sanctions remain with no roadmap towards removing them?

Who is fooling who on this matter? If it is true that Sadc has lost its impatience in the delay of the implementation of the GPA, so have the people of Zimbabwe who now think that Sadc sups with the devil by saying one thing during the day and doing the opposite at night.
In the third place, paragraph 16 of the communiqué of the troika says, “summit noted with grave concern the polarisation of the political environment as characterised by, inter alia, resurgence of violence, arrests and intimidation in Zimbabwe.”

Now, if there’s a resurgence of violence, why should there not be any arrests? Are arrests not a logical consequence of any resurgence of violence? Surely violence should beget arrests! And if there’s a political party, such as the MDC, which instigates violence to get international attention and then uses that as a political manifesto for the forthcoming general election, should the law enforcement agencies fold their arms and play politics by not arresting the obvious culprits for fear that Sadc and other Western puppets will cry foul by alleging that there’s intimidation or selective arrests and prosecution?

Is it now Sadc policy at the behest of its facilitator, President Zuma, that the MDC should violate the laws of Zimbabwe with impunity such that its officials or Cabinet ministers should be treated as if they are diplomats who cannot be arrested under the Geneva conventions? What’s going on here and what geopolitical nonsense is this?
Already the US and EU regime change donors have put together a dossier of political violence in Zimbabwe in 2011 whose catalogue has gory pictures and images not only taken from the brutal violence committed in KwaZulu Natal in South Africa between 1994 and 1999 but also used before by the US, EU and their allies to justify illegal and evil economic sanctions against Zimbabwe. It is a shame that

President Zuma, who happens to be from KwaZulu Natal, is falling for this over-used trick when he is in a position to know better.
The way that the Sadc Troika is behaving on the Zimbabwean situation against the backdrop of how South Africa, Nigeria and Gabon voted with the African enemy on UN Resolution 1973 against Libya, shows beyond doubt that the time has come for a major rethink in Zimbabwe on who our friends are or should be. Just because someone is your neighbour does not make them your friend. Cuba and the US are neighbours, but they are not friends. But of course Zimbabwe prefers to be friends with everyone anywhere, especially those countries with which it shares its borders, yet it takes two to tango.

Meanwhile, Zimbabwe should start seriously considering the fact that the only countries whose national security is assured today fall only in two categories. One category is made up of countries with weapons of mass destruction which have the capacity to wage nuclear or biological warfare. The US, EU and their allies will always think twice before instigating regime change or enforcing no-fly zones in such countries.
The other category is made up of countries that have defence pacts with countries that have a capacity for nuclear or biological warfare as more or less exemplified by the India-US defence pact signed in 2005.

Following the Livingstone Sadc Troika on Zimbabwe and the African vote on Resolution 1973 against Libya, it has become very clear that Zimbabwe's national security interests do not lie in Sadc or AU pacts given the Judas Iscariot fact that is now rampant in the region and the continent. The time to forge strategic partnerships that really matter in today’s geopolitics has come. The summit in Livingstone was an early warning signal for our country to move rapidly to make defence pacts with real friends with real power.

SEE ALSO:
Has Sadc been penetrated?