Robert Mugabe, yet another man the West loves to hate by William Bowles

[Joanne98]

Sunday, June 29, 2008

Robert Mugabe is bit like Osama bin Laden, if he didn’t exist they’d have to invent him, and invent him they have, with a vengeance.

Now I’m not a supporter of Zanu-PF, for me their politics have always been suspect. Back during the Apartheid years, Zanu-PF never acknowledged the ANC as the leader of the liberation struggle in South Africa, preferring instead to support the PAC (the Pan Africanist Congress). Well you win some, you lose some.

Zanu-PF has oscillated wildly in its choice of political position, veering from the quasi-Trotskyist to the Maoist and ending up as Mugabeism. Since gaining independence in 1980, Zanu-PF have had well over twenty years to do something about real land re-distribution (the Lancaster House ‘agreement’ notwithstanding), and whilst recognizing the conniving and hypocritical role of the Brits in the process (what else is new?), Mugabe, who cares not a whit about what the rest of the world thinks about his policies, has his sights firmly fixed on the Zimbabweans themselves and staying in power at all costs.

And as long as Mugabe left Britain’s ‘kith and kin’ alone (the settler farmers), it was quite happy to let Zanu-PF spout all kinds of socialist rhetoric, as long as he didn’t actually implement any of it. Thus all the statements out of the West about the ‘miracle’ of Zimbabwe, the “bread basket” of Southern Africa.

Zimbabwe, like its neighbor, South Africa, has (or at least had) a highly mechanized agricultural economy geared for export, with over 80% of the most productive land owned by a handful of white farmers. But here the parallel ends, for unlike South Africa, Zimbabwe’s rural population are largely peasant, subsistence farmers and importantly Zanu-PF’s power base. The divide between urban and rural could not be starker with the majority of the MDC’s supporters members of Zimbabwe’s small, urban working class.

And this is what it’s all about — land and the political power that goes with those who control it. Unfortunately, since independence, Zanu-PF has done little to actually deal with this issue failing, until recently to return the land to its rightful owners and then making a right mess of it because it did it for all the wrong reasons.

Ever since independence was gained in 1980, Zimbabwe has been a one-party state with Mugabe long proclaiming an allegedly socialist, anti-Western message without a single bleat of protest from the UK, even knighting the guy (just this week withdrawn by the ‘Queen’). So what changed? Why has Mugabe become the man the West loves to hate?

Basically, it’s sheer convenience together with a deeply ingrained racism that has propelled Mugabe into the media meat grinder and for no other purpose than to rationalize its own illegal actions of intervention and mass murder in the name of human rights and democracy.

We saw the same demonization of Myanmar (or Burma as the West chooses to continue calling it) even as major Western oil cartels continue to suck oil from the ground.

The pattern is plain for all to see: keep diverting attention away from the actions of the pirates by making a big song and dance about other countries’ when the reality is that the West doesn’t give a damn about the people of Zimbabwe, Myanmar, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Venezuela, Cuba, or any country that fits the profile—allegedly anti-democratic, trashing human rights, this is after all, the current propaganda line of the West, a case of do as I say but don’t do as I do.

I think the following sums up one of the the results of interfering so blatantly in what are the internal affairs of the sovereign state of Zimbabwe regardless of what you think of the Zanu-PF,

“And yet the effective cancellation of the election , followed by Tsvangirai’s calls for the United Nations, the African Union and South Africa to intervene in order to prevent a ‘genocide’, also shows up the dangers of internationalising local conflicts. The events of the past 24 hours demonstrate that Western governments’ relentless exploitation of the Zimbabwe crisis has helped to disenfranchise the Zimbabwean people. Literally. The logic of Western pressure has made the MDC reliant on the favour and flattery of external forces, rather than on the grit and the votes of its own mass support base.” — ‘Disenfranchising the people of Zimbabwe’ By Brendan O’Neill, Spiked, 23 June, 2008

But then this is the entire point of the exercise, to back Mugabe into a corner, make Mugabe the centre of attention. Had the UK really wanted to solve the land issue in Zimbabwe, it could have assisted the Zimbabwean government in compensating the settlers and helped the government in the development process (as it promised to do), for example in training and education to assist Zimbabwean peasant farmers in making the transition to mechanized farming.

As for the MDC, I think their leader Morgan Tsvangirai is a political half-wit, he should have stuck to running the trade unions. He has so compromised himself with his choice of ‘friends’, let alone his judgement, or lack of it, that he has really screwed up what was, in the early days at least, a real opportunity to create a viable alternative to Mugabeism, which as a political (let alone economic) solution to post-colonial Zimbabwe, has clearly failed.

Accusations that Tsvangirai is in the pay of foreign agents, may or may not be true, I have no way of knowing but regardless, it’s his political cowardice that undermines him and finally calling for foreign intervention reveals his complete lack of political courage.

The land question, something that is at the core of existence in every agrarian society, has been used by Mugabe to win votes and by so doing he has played right into the hands of the Western powers. Contrast Zimbabwe’s Mugabe with Venezuela’s Chavez. Sure, they’ve tried their damnest to demonize him too, but because his real power resides in the people, Western propaganda campaigns have not achieved the desired result, to isolate and present him as an ‘extremist’.

Mugabe for his part, has been very astute at exploiting the ‘Pan Africanist’ position viz a vis the black-white issue, again this is all for domestic consumption but still it’s up to the Zimbabwean people to decide what happens. More’s the pity that Tsvangarai is an inept and totally compromised politician.

As usual it’s the role of the Western media that is central to the process. Without its active complicity in covering up the crimes of the West and its participation in the Mugabe diversion, the USUK axis could not get away with its own anti-democratic and illegal actions around the planet.

The BBC are the worst culprits, conducting an endless diatribe against Mugabe, even accusing him of genocide. It’s reached the point where I just can’t watch the BBC news anymore, nearly every news broadcast opens with a story about Mugabe in what has to be a government-inspired propaganda blitz. The last BBC diatribe I watched found the reporter calling for military intervention.

Continued>>>
http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2008/06/29/robert-mugabe-yet-another-man-the-west-loves-to-hate-by-william-bowles/

Finally. A realistic explanation for why the media whores are harping about Zimbabwe everyday!

[FarrenH]

1. The most obvious error in that error-stricken blog entry

is its parroting of Zanu-PF propaganda about land transfer and the West's unfulfilled promises.

The money was available and Western powers were willing to spend it, especially the UK. When "willing buyer, willing seller" policies proved ineffective in acquiring land for landless indigenous people, the Zimbabwean government enacted laws allowing forceful expropriation with fair remuneration (which could be settled in the courts if necessary).

In truth, Zanu-PF were responsible for funds evaporating. Large tracts of land were acquired that, instead of serving as homes for the landless, ended up in the hands of already wealthy politicians and their families. Farming equipment was sold off and fields lay untended. Corruption was rampant. Countries supplying aid complained and were ignored. Aid was frozen.

From there it was downhill all the way. Increasingly draconian laws. Land invasions by so-called "war veterans" backed by the Mugabe regime (many of these so called veterans were too young to have fought in the liberation war). More and more land mysteriously ending up not being farmed by the poor but in the possession of the political elite and their families. And eventually, collapse of the rule of law.

And even without looking at the land issue at all there are plenty of reasons to despise Mugabe and his cronies. Zanu-PF has passed a whole bouquet of laws worthy of the worst kind of banana republic, making it illegal to insult the dignity of the president, criticise the police and in some case even campaign for political office.

The secret police and their informers are everywhere. When I was in Zimbabwe in 1999 I found Zimbabweans a very friendly open people. But mention politics and they clammed up immediately. Everyone was aware that your friends, your work colleagues or even your children could snitch on you, resulting in you "disappearing". Atrocities committed against the opposition-supporting civilians in Matabeleland proved well ahead of the current troubles that Mugabe and company had no problems with using terror tactics against political opponents.

Zimbabwe has spiralled downwards from that point, become an ever more paranoid police state, with ever more corruption and looting of her diminishing economic assets by those in power, to the point where the Zimbabwe I visited a decade ago, with its muted fear and shortages, is practically heaven compared to the tragic failed state it is today.

Massive, institutional kleptocracy and state terrorism has destroyed Zimbabwe. Its a testimony to the scale of ineptness and criminality that the majority of people whom land reform would benefit do not believe a word the Mugabe regime's (which has now officially lost an election but refuses to relinquish control, laying bare their illegitimacy) propaganda. Those who would frame outrage at Zimbabwe as some kind of cynical Western political conspiracy would do well to visit my country (South Africa), where something like 4 MILLION Zimbabweans have fled to (which is around a third of Zimbabwe's population if I'm not mistaken)

Whatever one feels about the correct kind of diplomacy towards or intervention in Zimbabwe should be, it ill-serves Zimbabweans to repeat the lies of a brutal, inept, kleptocratic government headed by a paranoid, power-crazed madman.