UNITE! Info #296en:

J. D. Kuvita: The True Zimbabwe Story

Intro note:

20 November 2007

OVERVIEW OF THE ZIMBABWE SITUATION

Zimbabwe has endured a sustained multi-pronged regime change assault conceived, funded and orchestrated by successive British governments in reaction to its Land Reform Programme since 2000.

This campaign seeks to depose the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) Government and all that it represents as a way of reversing the Land Reform. It manifests in mutually supporting external and internal activities targeting Zimbabwe’s politics, economy, national cohesion, international image and diplomatic standing, amid calls for more drastic forms of coercive intervention.

On the ground, however, the government has been compelled to adopt a Look East Policy which, along with supporting economic policies, is keeping the besieged economy going. The SADC-mandated dialogue has already yielded significant breakthroughs. Government remains in full control. The security forces are on top of the situation and there is no risk of a sudden change of Government in the foreseeable future.

By contrast, however, the behaviour of the BROWN government, belies this positive outlook and is threatening the integrity and credibility of both the dialogue and the harmonised elections in 2008. This is buttressed by fabrications of human rights abuses that continue to be peddled externally by the MDC and its affiliate formations as a way of justifying continued donor funding.

Zimbabwe is currently experiencing severe economic hardship. This is characterised by hyperinflation, high formal unemployment, rampant profiteering by business, foreign currency shortage, black marketeering, shortage of basic commodities, investor flight induced by negative publicity and the impact of the declared and undeclared sanctions imposed against the country by the Western countries. Consequently, the country has survived on a cash basis, without any balance of payment support, since 2003.

Britain’s strategic design seeks to strangle the economy in order for the people to rise, under the MDC’s leadership, to unseat the Government. This has failed largely because the people of Zimbabwe have seen through these machinations for what they are: a neo-colonialist scheme to reverse the gains of the Liberation Struggle.

The government is implementing broad based economic measures aimed at restoring economic viability. These include increasing productivity on the farms through Operation Maguta/Inala and provision of inputs and equipment to farmers, people-empowering regularisation of the mining sector along with stringent measures to curb loss of revenue through illegal dealings in precious minerals, as well as tight fiscal management by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe.

Meanwhile, Government’s efforts to keep prices of basic commodities at affordable levels are being vigorously resisted by industrialists who often cite viability challenges. In July, business reacted to Government’s efforts to enforce fair prices by creating artificial shortages of essential commodities, which resurfaced on the black market at exorbitant prices. These shortages still persist in spite of a Central Bank Facility introduced to restore production of essential commodities.

The sabotage activities of retailers and industry are also seriously undermining the Social Contract that Government, Labour and Industry signed in June 2007. Consequently, Government is concerned that the massive profiteering, which affects the majority of the ordinary people ahead of the 2008 elections, has a political objective. This comes amid indications that Britain, using funds laundered into the country through the Department of Foreign and International Development (DFID), has been bankrolling some of the industries in order to enable them to pay wages and other expenses while they are closed.

The United States government’s Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act (ZDERA), enacted on 21 December 2001, is the mainstay of the West’s declared and undeclared sanctions against Zimbabwe. The Act purports to prescribe US policy to support the people of Zimbabwe in their struggle to effect a peaceful, democratic change, achieve broad-based and equitable economic growth and restore the rule of law.

Essentially, however, ZDERA is a sanctions law that provides for cutting off multilateral aid to Zimbabwe until the US president certifies to appropriate Congressional Committees that the rule of law has been restored in Zimbabwe, that certain election and pre-election conditions have been met, that the Government of Zimbabwe has demonstrated a commitment to an equitable, legal and transparent Land Reform Programme that is consistent with agreements reached at the International Donors Conference on Land Reform and Resettlement in Zimbabwe held in Harare, in September 1998, that such Government is making a good faith effort to fulfill the terms of the Lusaka Agreement for ending the DRC War; and that the Zimbabwe Armed Forces, the National Police of Zimbabwe, and the other state security forces have become subordinate to the elected civilian Government.

Section 3(1) of the Act, dealing with the prohibition of assistance, provides that “no US assistance may be provided for the Government of Zimbabwe”. Section 3(2) goes on to name the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the International Development Association, the International Finance Corporation, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Investment Corporation, the African Development Bank, the African Development Fund, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency, thus obligating them to that cause.

The European Union followed suit by issuing an executive order imposing sanctions on Zimbabwe in February 2002. These have been renewed annually since then. Countries of the White Commonwealth, namely Australia, Canada and New Zealand subsequently also imposed their own battery of declared and undeclared sanctions against Zimbabwe, thus turning what was originally a bilateral quarrel between Britain and one of its former African colonies into a white racist supremacist crusade. These sanctions are strangling Zimbabwe’s economy.

Britain and its allies, however, are always quick to deny any responsibility for Zimbabwe’s current economic situation, instead conveniently blaming it on bad Government policies. Quite to the contrary, Zimbabwe’s economic challenges are a direct result of these illegal sanctions, which the MDC vigorously campaigned for. The sanctions have resulted in a sudden drying up of all balance of payment support and development assistance from the West, hence Zimbabwe’s resort to a cash economy and the Look East Policy.

The Look East Policy represents a fundamental paradigm shift from the traditional technological, diplomatic, political and economic relationship with the west to begin to focus on countries of the East and South. This is beginning to pay dividends as it coincides with China’s new drive into Africa.

It is indefensible for Britain and its allies to deny that the illegal measures they have applied against Zimbabwe are at the heart of the poor performance of the country’s economy. These sanctions are not ‘smart’ and ‘targeted’ at the ruling elite and its inner circle as they want the world to believe. Rather, they are affecting the whole society, especially vulnerable groups, such as the poor, the elderly, women, orphaned children, the infirm and people living with HIV/AIDS.

[Note: Last in this sentence, the author made a certain, though in this context insignificant, error. In fact there are no people "living with HIV/AIDS", neither in Zimbabwe nor anywhere else. The proposition that there are is part of another one of the big misinformation and terror campaigns of the imperialists, the US imperialists in particular, a terror campaign whose most massively disseminated lies unfortunately have not yet been become exposed as lies to most people internationally. Uncorrupted scientists in the field of medicine however since long have pointed out that there is no "HIV" and nothing that might justifiably be called "AIDS". On this, see the lastmentioned subject in my homepage's section "Subjects in postings" and several scientific websites which I'm linking to. - RM]

It is now a matter of historical record that, on the political front, the British government of Tony Blair conceived and funded the formation of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) through the Westminster Foundation for Democracy on 11 September 1999 as its principal vehicle for effecting regime change in Zimbabwe.

The MDC’s political fortunes have, however, been in constant decline since its fluky surges in the Constitutional Referendum and the Parliamentary Elections of 2000. This has been evidenced by the successive failures of all its attempts at mass insurrection, declining performance in all subsequent polls, its split into two bitterly rival factions on 25 October 2005 and, lately, the failure of British efforts in July 2007 to reunite the two factions so as to present a single candidate and a united front against ZANU-PF a the 2008 harmonised polls.

In August 2006, Britain sponsored the coming together of the MDC formations and regime change oriented civil society organisations under the umbrella of the Save Zimbabwe Campaign. This gave the forces that are arrayed against Zimbabwe a hydroid character, which allowed them to execute a myriad of security threatening activities in and outside the country under the guise of civic action. The United States Congress and the Australian government, through the Canberra-based Zimbabwe Information Centre, systematically laundered funds into Zimbabwe to sustain the Save Zimbabwe Campaign.

The declared aim of the Save Zimbabwe Campaign was to spearhead a civil disobedience campaign, which sought to render the country ungovernable and ultimately unseat the Government through a Ukraine-style coloured revolution. The so-called ‘prayer meeting’ of 11 March 2007, and the MDC’s foiled attempt at insurgency-like insurrection through widespread petrol-bombings of public and private installations and personalities that followed throughout April 2007, are cases in point. Zimbabwe’s Security Forces, however, managed to nip this MDC attempt at insurgency in the bud, although reports of clandestine military training of Zimbabweans under the banner of the MDC in Britain and a number of African countries persist.

The Save Zimbabwe Campaign itself fell apart in September 2007, after the majority of its decidedly anti-Government NGOs pulled out in protest at the MDC formations’ collaboration with ZANU-PF in the joint sponsorship of Constitutional Amendment No. 18 in Parliament on 18 September 2007. The Mutambara faction had already pulled out in July 2007, citing intractable differences with the Tsvangirai faction following the collapse of the British-sponsored reunification efforts.

Well placed sources within the MDC volunteer that the Tsvangirai faction of the MDC came under intense British and US pressure for having cosponsored Constitutional Amendment No. 18 with ZANU-PF. This pressure has reportedly taken the form of numerous phone calls, visitations by Harare-based western diplomats to various party officials and other overtures made through the MDC’s erstwhile civil society partners. As a result, the Tsvangirai faction finds itself torn between continuing to run with the west in the regime change project and the money that comes with it or assuming a new patriotic agenda and committing themselves fully to the ongoing dialogue. All indications are that Morgan Tsvangirai has opted for the latter, which, while assuring the MDC of continued Western funding, also seriously erodes its chances of winning as the 2008 elections draw near.

The Gordon Brown administration has not only inherited but has significantly escalated this policy of confrontation, instead of engagement, on Zimbabwe’s Land Question. Notably, only in July 2007, the government pronounced that it did not expect the Mbeki initiative to succeed and was only waiting for the mediator to announce his failure before the end of September 2007. In a House of Commons debate on Zimbabwe on 9 October 2007, Meg Munn, Junior Minister for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office reaffirmed that official British policy was to continue to seek political change in Zimbabwe and to support all internal and foreign forces that subscribe to the same agenda.

The MDC, meanwhile, appears unable to rid itself of its Western yoke, hence its unusual balancing act of pretending to genuinely take part in the dialogue while, at every opportunity, peddling fabrications of human rights abuses that undermine the dialogue, cast aspersions on the South African mediation and nuance a possible boycott of the 2008 elections.

ZANU-PF, by contrast, still retains firm control of the rural areas, where 70% of the electorate resides. It has also, over the years, capitalised on the MDC’s misfortunes and failure to rid itself of its foreign label to make significant inroads into the MDC’s former strongholds.

President MUGABE has been selected as the party’s candidate for the 2008 Presidential elections. All indications are that the Extraordinary Congress set for December will endorse his candidature. The War Veterans, the Women’s League, the Youth League, Former Detainees and War Collaborators and over 90% of the ZANUP-PF provinces have all declared their support. There is no evidence, in the meantime, to substantiate rumours of factionalism within the party.

Constitutional Amendment No, 18 is now law. The Electoral Act Amendment Bill, which is also a bipartisan product of the Dialogue, has also become law as of 16 November 2007. These two laws have unlocked the electoral processes, including the dissolution of Parliament and the delimitation of constituencies. Voter registration has already been done. Campaigning has already started but this should gather momentum towards the end of the year.

In spite of the current economic hardships, ZANU-PF appears poised to win the 2008 elections with a landslide. As such, there is no risk of any change of the Zimbabwe Government, sudden or electoral, in the foreseeable future.

Britain’s regime change crusade rides on a sustained campaign to isolate the country diplomatically, buttressed by fervent disinformation. This seeks to turn the country into a pariah, demonise its leaders and eclipse the morality of the Land Reform behind fabricated or exaggerated allegations of human rights violations.

On the diplomatic front, Britain has succeeded in Europeanising and westernising its anti-Zimbabwe policy by winning over the EU, the USA and the white Commonwealth. Britain and its allies have been engaged in sustained attempts to not only to win over SADC, the African Union and the UN but also to leverage Zimbabwe’s neighbours, regional partners and its friends in the wider international arena to withdraw all forms of support and solidarity.

For the past 18 months, Britain has sponsored the coordination of international donor efforts against Zimbabwe through a regular series of local and international meetings of the so-called ‘Fishmonger Group’ in Harare and the ‘Like-minded Ginger Group’ in various international venues. This has resulted in the placement of Zimbabwe on the OECD/DAC Fragile States Pilot Project, as well as the issuance of joint statements resurrecting international condemnation of Operation Murambatsvina, attacking alleged human rights abuses in Zimbabwe, contesting perceived inadequacies in the UN’s approach to the Zimbabwe question and flagging massive economic benefits for the people of Zimbabwe should they change their government sooner rather than later.

Britain, through the above coordination mechanisms, has also sponsored a new wave of thinktank activism on the Zimbabwe issue. This part of the campaign is churning out copious amounts of literature on such subjects as a post-Mugabe dispensation, exaggerated or fabricated human rights abuses and bad governance, President Mugabe’s invitation to the EU-Africa Summit and ways in which the Commonwealth may continue to be involved in Zimbabwe. Britain has subcontracted its megaphone diplomacy on these key policy issues to such institutions as the Royal Commonwealth Society, the International Bar Association, the World Economic Forum, the MDC’s Zimbabwe Institute in South Africa, the Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House), the International Crisis Group, the Royal African Society and many other academic institutions and NGOs.

At play presently, within this diplomatic-information arena, is the new din by all structures of the Tsvangirai faction alleging an uneven electoral playing field for 2008, massive human rights abuses, including torture, state-sponsored rape and extra-judicial killings. Morgan Tsvangirai made these claims repeatedly during his recent North American tour. A publication sponsored by his affiliate NGOs claimed that over 4000 abuses, including 69 rapes, had been perpetrated by government agents and ruling party supporters against his own supporters since March 2007.

Government is genuinely concerned about the threat that these lies pose to the dialogue and the elections. When called upon by the Minister of Home Affairs on 24 October 2007 to substantiate their allegations in order to facilitate due processes of the law, the MDC delegation only managed to single out twelve cases out of all the allegations. Of these, only two had trappings of political violence and the rest were purely criminal matters. As it is beginning to turn out, the MDC has embarked on a campaign to claim every corpse as a case of political violence, regardless of the actual cause or circumstances of the death. It has even stooped so low as to include beer drink brawls in its list of so-called human rights violations.

Quite to the contrary, Zimbabwe remains one of the most peaceful places on earth, with comparatively low rates of the violent crimes that the MDC alleges. To claim that 69 politically motivated rapes occurred in a single month, in a country in which the crime of rape itself is a minimal occurrence, borders on political pedestrianism.

The truth is that, except for the now customary practice of MDC grandstanding ahead of major international events by fomenting violence in order to attract a police response, all indications are that Zimbabwe’s 2008 elections will be peaceful and free form violence. Of course, as CHOGM 2007 gets underway in Kampala, Uganda, and the African-EU Summit scheduled for Lisbon in December approaches, the MDC should be expected to stir up some unrest with the aim of forcing Zimbabwe on the agenda.

Regarding Zimbabwe’s participation at the Africa-EU Summit, Gordon Brown made a major mistake by signaling his intention to boycott if President MUGABE is invited. Clearly, with over 10 of the 27 EU members and SADC, the AU and a significant number of African states having pronounced themselves variously in support of Zimbabwe’s participation, Portugal had no choice but to invite the President or risk a failed summit. President Mugabe has been invited and is promising a real tragedy for any leader who tries to make Zimbabwe an issue in his presence. It is now up to Brown to follow through his threat, which would only expose his hypocrisy on Zimbabwe and further isolate his country.

Meanwhile, the SADC-mandated dialogue between ZANU-PF and the MDC formations, which began in May 2007 is well underway and has already yielded significant breakthroughs. So far, over 44 meetings have been held of which only six have been outside Zimbabwe and under mediation. The rest have been local and bilateral. These have yielded all the achievements that have been registered so far.

Constitutional Amendment No. 18, which has stolen the media limelight, is only one of many achievements. It provides for harmonized presidential, lower house, senate, local government and, for urban areas, mayoral elections to be held on a single day in March 2008, in conformity with SADC Guidelines on the Conduct of Free and Fair Elections. It increases the Lower House from the present 150 seats (120 elected and 30 nominated by the President) to 210, all directly elected. It also increases the Senate from 60 to 93, of whom five will be nominated by the President. The President will enjoy the prerogative to nominate members of his Cabinet from either house. The Amendment also vests the appointment of members of statutory commissions, including the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, in the Parliamentary Committee on Standards and Regulations. It also vests the power of delimitation of constituencies in the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission instead of the ad hoc commissions of the past.

The two sides have also agreed and initialed a Draft Constitution, which will form the basis of a national constitution-making process by whichever party to win the 2008 elections. They have also agreed on amendments to hitherto contested provisions of the Public Order and Security Act (POSA), the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA), the Broadcasting Services Act, the Interception of Communications Act and the Electoral Act, which usher in a wide range of confidence-building measures and a level the playing field for the 2008 elections.

There are only a few outstanding substantive issues in the quarrel between ZANU-PF and the MDC. These include such issues as Britain’s Lancaster House obligations to compensate white farmers, the lifting of western sanctions, cessation of British interference in Zimbabwe’s politics and national consensus on the way forward on the Land Question. These issues have already been discussed within the dialogue and a framework of an agreement is already taking shape on them. The breakthroughs cited above should constitute the main business of the mediated session that is currently underway in South Africa.

The most worrying thing, however, is that in deliberate denial of the progress that has been achieved in the dialogue the British government of Gordon Brown has continued to escalate its anti-Zimbabwe activities. These include its threat to boycott the EU-Africa Summit, failed attempts to table Zimbabwe at CHOGM 2007, the political and financial support it continues to give to the Tsvangirai faction against the tide of both the dialogue and preparations for the 2008 elections, as well as the new thinktank activism described above.

By: John Dziva-Kuvita

International Research Agency

dzivaku2010@yahoo.co.uk

+2634700689

____________________________

20 November 2007

BACKGROUND TO BRITAIN’S ‘REGIME CHANGE’ ASSAULT ON ZIMBABWE

An understanding of Zimbabwe’s colonial legacy of the ‘Land Question’, the Land Reform; as well as the domestic and international reactions to that Land Reform is essential to a full appreciation of the British orchestrated threat of ‘regime change’ against Zimbabwe and the pernicious role that is being played by Western-funded rogue NGOs thereof.

During the colonial era, from 1890, Britain and its Rhodesian successor settler regimes presided over the structural distortions and skewed distribution of wealth and resources in favour of Whites that Zimbabwe inherited at its independence in 1980. Significantly, by December 1979, only 4 500 commercial farmers from the 242 000-strong White population of Rhodesia, which constituted less than 1% of Zimbabwe’s estimated 7 260 000 population at the time, owned over 75% of Zimbabwe’s total arable area of 33 million hectares, out of the country’s total land area of 39.6 million hectares. This small clique also governed the country, had the franchise and owned industry, the mines, banks and markets. It also had the best of Zimbabwe while Blacks became increasingly marginalised, disempowered and disenfranchised.

Clearly, this was both politically indefensible and unsustainable in an economy where agriculture contributes about 33 percent of formal employment and accounts for over 40 percent of national exports. Zimbabwe’s ‘Land Question’, therefore, reaches beyond the parochial boundaries of the physical acquisition and redistribution of white owned land that often dominate all attempts by observers to understand it, by delving into deeply entrenched psychological issues, over and above the more visible matters of governance, commerce, legislation and all other socio-cultural aspects.

The ‘Land Question’ also strikes an emotive chord amongst patriotic Zimbabweans because the indigenous Black population had to resort to Armed Struggle from 1966 to 1979, in order to wrest their dignity, political power, democratic rights, human rights, as well as their entitlement to ‘rule of law’ from the tenacious grip of the Rhodesian Government. These considerations, therefore, shape the Zimbabwe Government’s world view and, most pertinently, mark the difference between its insistence on primary social rights dealing with such bigger issues as land reform, education, health care, shelter, debt, development and nutrition, as opposed to the secondary rights that its detractors prefer to emphasise as the justification for ‘regime change’.

To illustrate the importance of the ‘Land Question’, the talks that culminated in the Lancaster House Agreement (LHA) in November 1979 nearly broke down several times over this issue until the British and US governments promised to fund land acquisition for redistribution to Blacks to the tune of £500 million. The LHA, however, prevented the new Zimbabwe Government from legislating for the compulsory acquisition of land or assailing White privileges, at least for the first 10 years up to 1990. The key provisions that frustrated early attempts to address the ‘Land Question’ were to do with a 10-year Moratorium on Constitutional Reform, a clause Protecting White Privileges and a ‘Willing Seller-Willing Buyer’ provision that bound the Government only to acquire land from a willing White seller.

As it turned out, between 1980 and 1989, not many Whites were willing to sell their land. Instead, they conspired to increase unit prices of land beyond the reach of the Government’s dwindling coffers. America simply did not honour its pledge. The Conservative Government of Britain only paid £41 million under a clumsy counterpart funding arrangement agreed in 1981, which required the Zimbabwe Government to spend its own funds up front first, only to be reimbursed by Britain at the end of each year after a rigorous audit. Tony Blair’s Labour government, in 1998, terminated this arrangement with three million pounds still unspent.

Consequently, during that period, the Zimbabwe Government was only able to acquire a few farms, totaling 3.1 million hectares, on which it resettled 70 000 families, against a target of 162 000 families on 10 million hectares. By 1997, an additional 20 000 families had been resettled on 400 000 hectares acquired in the early to mid 1990s.

By 2000, Zimbabwe’s ’Land Question’ remained unresolved. Just over 4 000 large scale White commercial farmers, representing less than one percent of the population which had by then grown to 13 000 0000, still occupied 29% of Zimbabwe’s most fertile land in the productive high-rainfall Central Watershed. Simultaneously, more than one (1) million Black families, representing over 75 % of the country’s population, were crammed on less than 42% of Zimbabwe’s land area, in the arid, infertile and less productive rural areas.

One of the first substantive acts undertaken by the Labour Government of Tony Blair as soon as it took office in 1997 was to unilaterally abrogate the Lancaster House Agreement and to categorically deny any colonial responsibility for Zimbabwe’s Land Reform. In a letter addressed to then Minister Kumbirayi Kangai dated 5 November 1997, former British Secretary of State for International Development, Claire Short, declared:

“I would make it clear that we do not accept that Britain has a special responsibility to meet the costs of land purchase in Zimbabwe. We are a new Government from diverse backgrounds without links to former colonial interests. My own origins are Irish and, as you know, we were colonised, not colonisers.”

With this letter, the Blair Administration’s abandoned the policy of ‘constructive engagement’ that had been pursued by the Tories since 1980 for one of ‘confrontation’ with the people of Zimbabwe over the ‘Land Question’. By 1998, there was, clearly, growing hostility between Zimbabwe and Britain over this issue. Illustratively, first, the Zimbabwe Government, under increasing pressure from the population and War Veterans through isolated farm occupations, announced the compulsory acquisition of 1,471 farms. Second, the British Government launched a disinformation campaign, alleging that the Zimbabwe Government had deliberately delayed the land reform and President Mugabe had presided over the misuse of the funds that they had paid and given the few farms that had been acquired to his cronies.

These developments, among other factors, led to the holding of the Land Donors Conference of September 1998, in Harare, with the aim of securing funding and building consensus over the technical modalities of the reform. At that Conference, the international community, including Britain, the UN and the European Union, reaffirmed its commitment to the LHA and pledged £9 million to accelerate the purchase of land, with a priority target of 118 farms intended for the communities that had begun the farm occupations.

None of these pledges were forthcoming, as the divergence between the Government and the donors, particularly Britain, degenerated into an impasse. Such countries as South Africa, which had faith in the Donors Conference, worked hard, albeit in vain, to secure new pledges from other donors. A UN initiative launched to coordinate the donor effort subsequently fizzled out within the intricacies of UN diplomacy and due to the media and diplomatic din that the Blair Government of Britain had started to generate in support of its new confrontational policy. Meanwhile, the farm occupations exploded to revolutionary proportions by February 1999. The Government initially arrested and charged the first farm occupiers, but was compelled to pass legislation for what came to be known as the ‘Fast Track Land Reform or Third Chimurenga’.

In order to pre-empt the compulsory acquisition of White owned land, which was becoming increasingly overdue and inevitable following the expiry of the Lancaster House Agreement’s 10-year moratorium in 1990, the British government and the White farmers orchestrated two years of labour despondency and student activism championed by the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) under Morgan Tsvangirai’s leadership, which led to the formation of the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) in the first quarter of 1999 and, ultimately, the Movement for Democratic Change, on 11 September 1999. The Westminster Foundation for Democracy, which brings together Labour, the Conservative and the Liberal parties of Britain, provided the funds, the political idea and the strategic objectives for the formation of the MDC.

A British consortium called Africa Media Investments (AMI) also provided founding finance for the Daily News, in March 1999. With a rabidly anti-Government editorial policy that bordered on subversion, the Daily News and its sister paper in the Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe Group, the Daily News on Sunday, became major purveyors of negative opinion in Zimbabwean politics. They flaunted the country’s media laws with palpable contempt, while playing victim to a predictably sympathetic international gallery, until closed by a Supreme Court ruling on 11 September 2003.

Concurrently with the establishment of the Daily News, and with particular impetus following its closure, at least three clandestine western funded radio stations started beaming messages of ethnic division, hate and disorder into Zimbabwe’s airwaves. The first was called Voice of the People (VOP), a proxy of Radio Netherlands (RN), which used RN’s Madagascar-based relay station. The second was Short Wave Radio Africa (SWRA), broadcasting from BOREHAMWOOD in the UK. This station uses British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Voice of America (VOA) studios, transmitters, frequencies and global communications facilities located throughout Southern and Central Africa.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID)’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) also funded the establishment of the third station, a Voice of America proxy called Studio 7, which transmits in Shona, Ndebele and English on short-wave and medium wave frequencies every night. The MDC’s founders also sponsored a plethora of MDC-linked anti-Zimbabwe websites on the Internet, giving it cyber-presence that is bewildering and way beyond the budgetary capacity of most African Governments, Zimbabwe included.

The foregoing developments also coincided with the mushrooming of a plague of decidedly anti-government NGOs focusing on matters relevant to the “regime change” agenda since 2000. To illustrate, from the enactment of the Private and Voluntary Organisations (PVO) Act of 1967 to July 1980, only 800 NGOs had registered. From 1981-2000, only 150 more registered. However, after the launch of the Fast Track Land Reform in 2000, 450 new organisations registered, to bring the total to 1 400.

The above opposition conglomeration, led by the MDC, spearheaded the rejection of the Zimbabwe Government’s first attempt at a homegrown Constitution that was intended to replace the Lancaster House Constitution in February 2000. It misled the electorate into voting ‘NO’ on the pretext that President Mugabe was amending the Constitution in order to perpetuate his rule and consolidate his hold on power. Quite to the contrary, however, the real issue was to do with a clause in that Draft Constitution, which would have empowered the Government to compulsorily acquire White owned land.

In April 2000, the Zimbabwe Government, nonetheless, subsequently invoked its Parliamentary majority to make the first of a series of relevant amendments to the Constitution, which allowed it to compulsorily acquire land and only to pay the former owners for improvements, placed the onus for compensating the dispossessed White farmers for the land on the British Government, nationalised all Zimbabwean land by vesting all title in the state and, by 2006, removed the right to litigation from affected former land owners.

‘Regime change’ epitomises the Britain’s reaction to the Fast Track Land Reform Programme. Because Zimbabwe’s Land Reform, besides hurting the interests of over 20 000 British companies operating in Zimbabwe, also assails white privileges and violates the sanctity of private property, it has been quite easy for Britain to enlist the support of the USA, the EU and the White Commonwealth countries behind its anti-Zimbabwe crusade.

The following observation, sounded over twenty years ago by the US President in an address to the US Institute for Food and Development Policy, is particularly revealing with regards to the driving ideology behind this Western anti-Zimbabwe partnership:

“…What if an emerging third-world order were to offer greater opportunities for citizens to be involved in shaping economic policy than either US-style capitalism or Soviet-style statism. Or expanded human rights protection to include the right of every rural person to farmland sufficient to live in dignity.... putting people’s need for land, jobs, and food first? And what if such policies were pursued with broad popular support, not repressive measures, so that people felt their freedom expanded. To US policymakers, only the market and private control over productive property are consistent with freedom and democracy. To do things differently is to undermine both. Such a development almost certainly would give hope to oppressed peoples throughout the world”

Zimbabwe’s Land Reform presents capitalism with this worst nightmare scenario, hence the ‘regime change’ crusade. Not surprisingly, President George W Bush (Junior) has repeatedly asserted that Zimbabwe threatens US Africa interests in a unique way. His Administration classifies Zimbabwe, along with five other countries, as ‘outposts of tyranny that are targeted for ‘regime change’.

His government enacted the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act (ZDERA) on 21 December 2001. The Act declares US policy to support the people of Zimbabwe in their struggle to effect a peaceful, democratic change, achieve broad-based and equitable economic growth and restore the rule of law.

Essentially, ZDERA is a sanctions law that provides for cutting off multilateral aid to Zimbabwe until the US president certifies to appropriate Congressional Committees that the rule of law has been restored in Zimbabwe, that certain election and pre-election conditions have been met, that the Government of Zimbabwe has demonstrated a commitment to an equitable, legal and transparent Land Reform Programme that is consistent with agreements reached at the International Donors Conference on Land Reform and Resettlement in Zimbabwe held in Harare, in September 1998, that such Government is making a good faith effort to fulfill the terms of the Lusaka Agreement for ending the DRC War; and that the Zimbabwe Armed Forces, the National Police of Zimbabwe, and the other state security forces have become subordinate to the elected civilian Government.

Section 3(1) of the Act, dealing with the prohibition of assistance, provides that “no US assistance may be provided for the Government of Zimbabwe”. Section 3(2) goes on to name the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the International Development Association, the International Finance Corporation, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Investment Corporation, the African Development Bank, the African Development Fund, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency, thus obligating them to that cause.

The means employed in pursuit of ‘regime change’ include sustained disinformation, diplomatic isolation, political interference, economic strangulation, as well as technological and socio-cultural machinations. These are intended to divide and weaken Zimbabwe by undermining the morale of the population, its cohesion and support of the population for the Government in order to create suitable conditions for revolutionary ‘mass action’ Serbia-style.

In Zimbabwe, the strategic end state of ‘regime change’ is the removal and negation of what the West sees as the Liberation War cult from Zimbabwean politics. They regard the ZANU (PF) Government, with its leadership and Pan African ideology hailing from Zimbabwe’s Liberation Struggle, as embodying this cult. The West believes that ‘regime change’, if successful, would either reverse or stop the Land Reform and restore White privileges. Besides, and more pertinently, the West fears that if emulated elsewhere, Zimbabwe’s ‘land grab’ example threatens to shake the foundations of capitalism.

The MDC and its network of local and international NGOs, along with academics, church organisations and pressure groups, have allowed themselves to act as paid foot soldiers of this anti-Zimbabwe crusade. They specialise in fabricating the evidence that supports the allegations of bad governance, human rights violations, rule of law, Government interference with the judiciary, denial of press freedom, corruption, political intolerance and repression of the opposition, selective enforcement of existing laws, enactment of draconian and repressive legislation, lack of democracy and electoral fraud, corruption, as well as lack of transparency and accountability that now pervade international opinion on Zimbabwe.

The information campaign also devotes substantial resources to whipping up Shona-Ndebele confrontation. It is illustrative, in this regard, that between 2000 and 2004, the MDC enjoyed a commanding support base in Matabeleland largely by using externally funded hate media to whip up Shona-Ndebele hatred around the excesses allegedly committed by the Security Forces during the anti-Dissident Campaign of the early to mid-1980s. The people have since seen through this charade, leading to a palpable decline of the MDC’s fortunes in that region over the past few years.

One, therefore, does not need to be a rocket scientist to notice that this harem of Western agents has descended upon Kampala during the current CHOGM Summit, in their numbers, to earn breadcrumbs by selling out on their birthright, against Zimbabwe’s national interests and at the behest of their Western paymasters.

By: John Dziva-Kuvita

International Research Agency

dzivaku2010@yahoo.co.uk

+2634700689

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On the "UNITE! (etc) Info" posting series, see Note.

Previous English-language items, see UNITE! Info series, 1995 -.