[R-G] Zimbabwe at War

[Anthony Fenton]

Zimbabwe at War
By Stephen Gowans
http://gowans.blogspot.com/2008/06/zimbabwe-at-war.html
June 24, 2008

This is a war between revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries;  
between nationalists and quislings; between Zimbabwean patriots and  
the US and Britain.

Should an election be carried out when a country is under sanctions  
and it is has been made clear to the electorate that the sanctions  
will be lifted only if the opposition party is elected? Should a  
political party which is the creation of, and is funded by, hostile  
foreign forces, and whose program is to unlatch the door from within  
to provide free entry to foreign powers to establish a neo-colonial  
rule, be allowed to freely operate? Should the leaders of an  
opposition movement that takes money from hostile foreign powers and  
who have made plain their intention to unseat the government by any  
means available, be charged with treason? These are the questions that  
now face (have long faced) the embattled government of Zimbabwe, and  
which it has answered in its own way, and which other governments, at  
other times, and have answered in theirs.

The American revolutionaries, Thomas Jefferson among them, answered  
similar questions through harsh repression of the monarchists who  
threatened to reverse the gains of the American Revolution. There were  
600,000 to 700,000 Tories, loyal to the king and hostile to the  
revolutionaries, who stood as a threat to the revolution. To  
neutralize the threat, the new government denied the Tories any  
platform from which to organize a counter-revolution. They were  
forbidden to own a press, to teach, to mount a pulpit. The professions  
were closed to them. They were denied the right to vote and hold  
political office. The property of wealthy Tories was confiscated. Many  
loyalists were beaten, others jailed without trial. Some were  
summarily executed. And 100,000 were driven into exile. Hundreds of  
thousands of people were denied advocacy rights, rights to property,  
and suffrage rights, in order to enlarge the liberties of a larger  
number of people who had been oppressed. [1]

Zimbabwe, too, is a revolutionary society. Through armed struggle,  
Zimbabweans, like Americans before them, had thrown off the yoke of  
British colonialism. Rhodesian apartheid was smashed. Patterns of land  
ownership were democratized. Over 300,000 previously landless families  
were given land once owned by a mere 4,000 farmers, mainly of British  
stock, mostly descendents of settlers who had taken the land by force.  
In other African countries, land reform has been promised, but little  
has been achieved. In Namibia, the government began expropriating a  
handful of white owned farms in 2004 under pressure from landless  
peasants, but progress has been glacially slow. In South Africa,  
blacks own just four percent of the farmland. The ANC government  
promised that almost one-third of arable land would be redistributed  
by 2000, but the target has been pushed back to 2015, and no one  
believes it will be reached. The problem is, African countries,  
impoverished by colonialism, and held down by neo-colonialism, haven’t  
the money to buy the land needed for redistribution. And the European  
countries that once colonized Africa, are unwilling to help out,  
except on terms that will see democratization of land ownership pushed  
off into a misty future, and only on terms that will guarantee the  
continued domination of Africa by the West. Britain promised to fund  
Zimbabwe’s land redistribution program, if liberation fighters laid  
down their arms and accepted a political settlement. Britain, under  
Tony Blair, reneged, finding excuses to wriggle out of commitments  
made by the Thatcher government. And so Zimbabwe’s government acted to  
reverse the legacy of colonialism, expropriating land without  
compensation (but for improvements made by the former owner.)  
Compensation, Zimbabwe’s government declared with unassailable  
justification, would have to be paid by Britain.

In recent years, the government has taken steps to democratize the  
country further. Legislation has been formulated to mandate that  
majority ownership of the country’s mines and enterprises be placed in  
the hands of the indigenous black majority. The goal is to have  
Zimbabweans achieve real independence, not simply the independence of  
having their own flag, but of owning their land and resources. As a  
Canadian prime minister once said of his own country, once you lose  
control of the economic levers, you lose sovereignty. Zimbabwe isn’t  
trying to hang onto control of its economic levers, but to gain  
control of them for the first time. Jabulani Sibanda, the leader of  
the association of former guerrillas who fought for the country’s  
liberation, explains:

“Our country was taken away in 1890. We fought a protracted struggle  
to recover it and the process is still on. We gained political  
independence in 1980, got our land after 2000, but we have not yet  
reclaimed our minerals and natural resources. The fight for freedom is  
still on until everything is recovered for the people.” [2]

The revolutionary government’s program has met with fierce opposition  
– from the tiny elite of land owners who had monopolized the country’s  
best land; from former colonial oppressor Britain, whose capitalists  
largely controlled the economy; from the United States, whose demand  
that it be granted an open door everywhere has been defied by  
Zimbabwe’s tariff restrictions, investment performance requirements,  
government ownership of business enterprises and economic  
indigenization policies; and from countries that don’t want Zimbabwe’s  
land democratization serving as an inspiration to oppressed indigenous  
peoples under their control. The tiny former land-owning elite wants  
its former privileges restored; British capital wants its investments  
in Zimbabwe protected; US capital wants Zimbabwe’s doors flung open to  
investment and exports; and Germany seeks to torpedo Zimbabwe’s land  
reforms to guard against inspiring “other states in Southern Africa,  
including Namibia, where the heirs of German colonialists would be  
affected.” [3]

The Mugabe government’s rejecting the IMF’s program of neo-liberal  
restructuring in the late 1990s, after complying initially and  
discovering the economy was being ruined; its dispatch of troops to  
the Democratic Republic of Congo to help the young government of  
Laurent Kabila defend itself against a US and British-backed invasion  
by Uganda and Rwanda; and its refusal to safeguard property rights in  
its pursuit of land democratization and economic independence, have  
made it anathema to the former Rhodesian agrarian elite, and in the  
West, to the corporate lawyers, investment bankers and hereditary  
capitalist families who dominate the foreign policies of the US,  
Britain and their allies. Mugabe’s status as persona non grata in the  
West (and anti-imperialist hero in Africa) can be understood in an  
anecdote. When Mugabe became prime minister in 1980, former leader of  
the Rhodesian state, Ian Smith, offered to help the tyro leader.  
“Mugabe was delighted to accept his help and the two men worked  
happily together for some time, until one day Mugabe announced plans  
for sweeping nationalization.” From that point forward, Smith never  
talked to Mugabe. [4]

Overthrowing the Revolution

The British, the US and the former Rhodesians have used two  
instruments to try to overthrow Zimbabwe’s revolution: The opposition  
party Movement for Democratic Change, and civil society. The MDC was  
founded in September 1999 in response to Harare announcing it would  
expropriate Rhodesian farms for redistribution to landless black  
families. The party was initially bankrolled by the British  
government’s Westminster Foundation for Democracy and other European  
governments, including Germany, through the Social Democratic Party’s  
Friedrich Ebert Foundation (Ebert having been the party leader who  
conspired with German police officials to have Rosa Luxemburg and Karl  
Liebknecht murdered, to smother an emerging socialist revolution in  
Germany in 1918.) Party leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who had been  
elevated from his position as secretary-general of the Zimbabwe  
Congress of Trade Unions to champion the West’s counter-revolutionary  
agenda within Zimbabwe, acknowledged in February 2002 that the MDC was  
financed by European governments and corporations, which funneled  
money through British political consultants, BSMG. [5] Today, the  
government of Zimbabwe charges NGOs with acting as conduits through  
which Western governments pass money to the opposition party.

The MDC’s orientation is decidedly toward people and forces of  
European origin. British journalist Peta Thornycroft, hardly a Mugabe  
supporter, lamented in an interview on Western government-sponsored  
short wave radio SW Africa that:

‘When the MDC started in 2000, what a pity that they were addressing  
people in Sandton, mostly white people in Sandton north of  
Johannesburg instead of being in Dar es Salaam or Ghana or Abuja. They  
failed to make contact with Africa for so long. They were in London,  
we’ve just seen it again, Morgan Tsvangirai’s just been in America.  
Why isn’t he in Cairo? Maybe he needs financial support and he can’t  
get it outside of America or the UK and the same would go for (leader  
of an alternative MDC faction, Arthur) Mutambara. They have not done  
enough in Africa. [6]

A look at the MDC’s program quickly reveals why the party’s leaders  
spend most of their time traipsing to Western capitals calling for  
sanctions and gathering advice on how to overthrow the Mugabe  
government. First, the MDC is opposed to Zimbabwe’s land  
democratization program. Defeating the government’s plans to  
expropriate the land of the former Rhodesian elite was one of the main  
impetuses for the party’s formation. Right through to the 2002  
election campaign the party insisted on returning farms to the  
expropriated Rhodesian settlers. [7]

The MDC and Land Reform

These days Tsvangirai equivocates on land reform, recognizing that  
speaking too openly about reversing the land democratization program,  
or taxing black Zimbabweans to compensate expropriated Rhodesian  
settlers for land the Rhodesians and other British settlers took by  
force, is detrimental to his party’s success. But there’s no mistaking  
that the land redistribution program’s life would be cut short by a  
MDC victory. “The government of Zimbabwe,” wrote Tsvangirai, in a  
March 23, 2008 Wall Street Journal editorial, “must be committed to  
protecting persons and property rights.” This means “compensation for  
those who lost their possessions in an unjust way,” i.e., compensation  
for the expropriated Rhodesians. Zimbabwe’s program of expropriating  
land without compensation, he concluded, is just not on: it “scares  
away investors, domestic and international.” [8] This is the same  
reasoning the main backer of Tsvangirai’s party, the British  
government, used to justify backing out of its commitment to fund land  
redistribution. The British government was reneging on its earlier  
promise, said then secretary of state for international development  
Claire Short in a letter to Zimbabwe’s minister of agriculture and  
lands, Kumbirai Kangai, because of the damage Zimbabwe’s fast-track  
land reform proposals would do to investor confidence. Lurking none  
too deftly behind Tsvangirai’s and London’s solicitude over impaired  
investor confidence are the interests of foreign investors themselves.  
The Mugabe government’s program is to wrest control of the country’s  
land, resources and economy from the hands of foreign investors and  
Rhodesian settlers; the program of the MDC and its backers is to put  
it back. That’s no surprise, considering the MDC was founded by  
Europe, backed by the Rhodesians, and bankrolled by capitalist  
governments and enterprises that have an interest in protecting their  
existing investments in the country and opening up opportunities for  
new ones.

Civil Society

There is a countless number of Western NGOs that either operate in  
Zimbabwe or operate outside the country with a focus on Zimbabwe.  
While the Western media invariably refer to them as independent, they  
are anything but. Almost all are funded by Western governments,  
wealthy individuals, and corporations. Some NGOs say that while they  
take money from Western sources, they’re not influenced by them. This  
is probably true, to a point. Funders don’t dangle funding as a bribe,  
so much as select organizations that can be counted on to behave in  
useful ways of their own volition. Of course, it may be true that some  
organizations recognize that handsome grants are available for  
organizations with certain orientations, and adapt accordingly. But  
for the most part, civil society groups that advance the overseas  
agendas of Western governments and corporations, whether they know it  
or not, and not necessarily in a direct fashion, find that funding  
finds them.

Western governments fund dozens of NGOs to discredit the government in  
Harare, alienate it of popular support, and mobilize mass resistance  
under the guise of promoting democracy and human rights. Their real  
purpose is to bring down the government and its nationalist policies.  
The idea that Britain, which, as colonial oppressor, denied blacks  
suffrage and dispossessed them of their land, is promoting rights and  
democracy in Zimbabwe is laughable. The same can be said of Canada.  
The Canadian government doles out grants to NGOs through an  
organization called Rights and Democracy. Rights and Democracy is  
currently funding the anti-Zanu-PF Media Institute of Southern Africa,  
along with the US government and a CIA-linked right wing US think  
tank. While sanctimoniously parading about on the world stage as a  
champion of rights and democracy, Canada denied its own aboriginal  
people suffrage up to 1960. For a century, it enforced an assimilation  
policy that tore 150,000 aboriginal children from their homes and  
placed them in residential schools where their language and culture  
were banned. Canadian citizens like to think their own country is a  
model of moral rectitude, but are blind to the country’s deplorable  
record in the treatment of its own aboriginal people; it’s denial of  
the liberty and property rights of Canadian citizens of Japanese  
heritage during WWII; and in recent years, its complicity in  
overthrowing the Haitian government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide and  
participation in the occupation of Afghanistan. As for the United  
States, its violations of the rights of people throughout the world  
have become so frequent and far-reaching that only the deaf, dumb or  
insane would believe the US government has the slightest interest in  
promoting democracy and human rights anywhere.

Consider, then, the record of the West’s self-proclaimed promoters of  
democracy and human rights against this: the reason there’s universal  
suffrage in Zimbabwe and equality rights for blacks, is because the  
same forces that are being routinely decried by Western governments  
and their NGO extensions fought for, bled for, and died for the  
principle of universal suffrage. “We taught them the principle of one  
man, one vote which did not exist” under the British, Zimbabwe’s  
president points out. “Democracy,” he adds, “also means self-rule, not  
rule by outsiders.” [9]

Regime Change Agenda

The charge that the West is supporting civil society groups in  
Zimbabwe to bring down the government isn’t paranoid speculation or  
the demagogic raving of a government trying to cling to power by  
mobilizing anti-imperialist sentiment. It’s a matter of public record.  
The US government has admitted that “it wants to see President Robert  
Mugabe removed from power and that it is working with the Zimbabwean  
opposition…trade unions, pro-democracy groups and human rights  
organizations…to bring about a change of administration.” [10]  
Additionally, in an April 5, 2007 report, the US Department of State  
revealed that it had:

• “Sponsored public events that presented economic and social analyses  
discrediting the government’s excuse for its failed policies” (i.e,  
absolving US and EU sanctions for undermining the country’s economy);

• “Sponsored…and supported…several township newspapers” and worked to  
expand the listener base of Voice of America’s Studio 7 radio station.  
(The State Department had been distributing short-wave radios to  
Zimbabweans to facilitate the project of Zimbabwean public opinion  
being shaped from abroad by Washington’s propagandists).

Last year, the US State Department set aside US$30 million for these  
activities. [11] Earlier this year, British Prime Minister Gordon  
Brown announced that the UK had increased its funding for civil  
society organizations operating in Zimbabwe from US$5 million to US 
$6.5 million. [12] Dozens of other governments, corporations and  
capitalist foundations shower civil society groups with money,  
training and support to set up and run “independent” media to attack  
the government, “independent” election monitoring groups to discredit  
the outcome of elections Zanu-PF wins, and underground groups which  
seek to make the country ungovernable through civil disobedience  
campaigns. One such group is Zvakwana, “an underground movement that  
aims to resist – and eventually undermine” the Zanu-PF government.  
“With a second, closely related group called Sokwanele, Zvakwana’s  
members specialize in anonymous acts of civil disobedience.” [13] Both  
groups, along with Zubr in Belarus and Ukraine’s Pora, whose names, in  
English, mean ‘enough’, “take their inspiration from Otpor, the  
movement that played a major role in ousting Slobodan Milosevic in  
Serbia.” [14] One Sokwanele member is “a white conservative  
businessman expressing a passion for freedom, tradition, polite  
manners and the British royals,” [15] hardly a black-clad anarchist  
motivated by a philosophical opposition to “authoritarian rule,” but  
revealing of what lies beneath the thin veneer of radicalism that  
characterizes so many civil society opposition groups in Zimbabwe. In  
the aforementioned April 5, 2007 US State Department report,  
Washington revealed that it had “supported workshops to develop youth  
leadership skills necessary to confront social injustice through non- 
violent strategies,” the kinds of skills members of Zvakwana and  
Sokwanele are equipped with to destabilize Zimbabwe.

In addition to funding received from the US and Britain, Zimbabwe’s  
civil society groups also receive money from the German, Australian  
and Canadian governments, the Ford Foundation, Freedom House, the  
Albert Einstein Institution, the International Center for Nonviolent  
Conflict, Liberal International, the Mott Foundation, the Rockefeller  
Brothers, South African Breweries, and billionaire financier George  
Soros’ Open Society Institute. All of these funding sources, including  
the governments, are dominated by Western capitalist ruling classes.  
It would be truly naïve to believe, for example, that the  
International Center for Nonviolent Conflict and Freedom House, both  
headed by Peter Ackerman, member of the US ruling class Council on  
Foreign Relations, a New York investment banker and former right hand  
man to Michael Milken of junk bond fame, is lavishing money and  
training on civil society groups in Zimbabwe out of humanitarian  
concern. According to Noam Chomksy and Edward Herman, Freedom House  
has ties to the CIA, “and has long served as a virtual propaganda arm  
of the (US) government and international right wing." [16]

Political lucre doesn’t come from Western sources alone. The Mo  
Ibrahim Foundation awards a prize yearly for “achievement in African  
leadership” to a sub-Saharan African leader who has left office in the  
previous three years. The prize is worth $500,000 per year for the  
first 10 years and $200,000 per year thereafter – in other words, cash  
for life. Ibrahim, a Sudanese billionaire who founded Celtel  
International, a cellphone service that operates in 15 African  
countries, established the award to “encourage African leaders to  
govern well,” something, apparently, Ibrahim believes African leaders  
don’t do now and need to be encouraged to do. What Ibrahim means by  
govern well is clear in who was selected as the first (and so far  
only) winner: Mozambique’s former president Joaquim Chissano. He  
received the prize for overseeing Mozambique’s “transition from  
Marxism to a free market economy.” [17] While there may seem to be  
nothing particularly amiss in this, imagine billionaire speculator  
George Soros establishing a foundation to bribe US and British  
politicians with cash for life to “govern well.” It wouldn’t elude  
many of us that Soros’ definition of “govern well” would almost  
certainly align to a tee with his own interests, and that any  
politician eager to live a comfortable life after politics would be  
keen to keep Soros’ interests in mind. Under these conditions there  
would be no question of democracy prevailing; we would be living in a  
plutocracy, in which those with great wealth could dangle the carrot  
of a cash award for life to get their way. As it happens, this kind of  
thing is happening now in Western democracies (that is, plutocracies.)  
Handsomely paid positions as corporate lobbyists, corporate executives  
and members of corporate boards await Western politicians who play  
their cards right. There are Mo Ibrahims all over, who go by the names  
Ford, GM, Exxon, General Electric, Lockheed-Martin, Microsoft, IBM and  
so on.

Threat to US Foreign policy

Why does the government of the US consider Zimbabwe to pose “an  
unusual and extraordinary threat to the foreign policy of the United  
States”? The answer says as much about the foreign policy of the  
United States as it does about Zimbabwe. The goal of US foreign policy  
is to provide profit-making opportunities to US investors and  
corporations. This is accomplished by pressuring, cajoling, bribing,  
blackmailing, threatening, subverting, destabilizing and where  
possible, using violence, to get foreign countries to lower or remove  
tariff barriers, lift restrictions on foreign investment, deny  
preferential treatment to domestic investors, allow repatriation of  
profits, and provide the US military access to the country. The right  
of the US military to operate on foreign soil is necessary to provide  
Washington with local muscle to protect US investments, ensure  
unimpeded access to strategic raw materials (oil, importantly), and to  
keep doors open to continued US economic penetration. It is also  
necessary to have forward operating bases from which to threaten  
countries whose governments aren’t open to US exports and investments.

The Zanu-PF government’s policies have run afoul of US foreign policy  
goals in a number of ways. In 1998, “Zimbabwe – along with Angola and  
Namibia – was mandated by the (Southern African Development Community,  
a regional grouping of countries) to intervene in Congo to save a  
fellow SADC member country from an invasion by Uganda and Rwanda,”  
which were acting as proxies of the United States and Britain. [18]  
Both countries wanted to bring down the young government of Laurent  
Kabila, fearing Kabila was turning into another Patrice Lumumba, the  
nationalist Congolese leader whose assassination the CIA had arranged  
in the 1960s. Zimbabwe’s intervention, as part of the SADC contingent,  
foiled the Anglo-American’s plans, and earned Mugabe the enmity of  
ruling circles in the West.

The Zanu-PF government’s record with the IMF also threatened US  
foreign policy goals. From 1991 to 1995, Mugabe’s government  
implemented a program of structural adjustment prescribed by the IMF  
as a condition of receiving balance of payment support and the  
restructuring of its international loans. The program required the  
government to cut its spending deeply, fire tens of thousands of civil  
servants, and slash social programs. Zimbabwe’s efforts to nurture  
infant industries were to be abandoned. Instead, the country’s doors  
were to be opened to foreign investment. Harare would radically reduce  
taxes and forbear from any measure designed to give domestic investors  
a leg up on foreign competitors. The US, Germany, Japan and South  
Korea had become capitalist powerhouses by adopting the protectionist  
and import substitution policies the IMF was forbidding. The effect of  
the IMF program was devastating. Manufacturing employment tumbled nine  
percent between 1991 and 1996, while wages dropped 26 percent. Public  
sector employment plunged 23 percent and public sector wages plummeted  
40 percent. [19] In contrast to the frequent news stories today on  
Zimbabwe’s fragile economy, attributed disingenuously to “Mugabe’s  
disastrous land policies”, the Western press barely noticed the  
devastation the IMF’s disastrous economic policies brought to Zimbabwe  
in the 1990s. By 1996, the Mugabe government was starting to back away  
from the IMF prescriptions. By 1998, it was in open revolt, imposing  
new tariffs to protect infant industries and providing incentives to  
black Zimbabwean investors as part of an affirmative action program to  
encourage African ownership of the economy. These policies were  
diametrically opposed, not only to the IMF’s program of structural  
adjustment, but to the goals of US foreign policy. By 1999, the break  
was complete. The IMF refused to extend loans to Zimbabwe. By  
February, 2001, Zimbabwe was in arrears to the Bretton Woods  
institution. Ten months later, the US introduced the Zimbabwe  
Democracy and Economic Recovery, a dagger through the heart of  
Zimbabwe’s economy. “Zimbabwe,” says Mugabe, “is not a friend of the  
IMF and is unlikely to be its friend in the future.” [20]

Zanu-PF’s willingness to ignore the hallowed status of private  
property by expropriating the land of the former Rhodesians to  
democratize the country’s pattern of land ownership also ran afoul of  
US foreign policy goals. Because US foreign policy seeks to protect US  
ownership abroad, any program that promotes expropriation as a means  
of advancing democratic goals must be considered hostile. Kenyan  
author Mukoma Wa Nguyi invites us to think of Zimbabwe “as Africa’s  
Cuba. Like Cuba, Zimbabwe is not a… military threat to the US and  
Britain. Like Cuba, in Latin America, Zimbabwe’s crime is leading by  
example to show that land can be redistributed - an independence with  
content. If Zimbabwe succeeds, it becomes an example to African people  
that indeed freedom and independence can have the content of national  
liberation. Like Cuba, Zimbabwe is to be isolated, and if possible, a  
new government that is friendly to the agenda of the West is to be  
installed.” [21]

The Comprador Party

If Zanu-PF is willing to offend Western corporate and Rhodesian  
settler interests to advance the welfare of the majority of  
Zimbabweans, the MDC is its perfect foil. Rather than offending  
Western interests, the MDC seeks to accommodate them, treating the  
interests of foreign investors and imperialist governments as  
synonymous with those of the Zimbabwean majority. A MDC government  
would never tolerate the pursuit in Zimbabwe of the protectionist and  
nationalist economic programs the US used to build its own industry.  
The MDC’s goals, in the words of its leader, are to “encourage foreign  
investment” and “bring (Zimbabwe’s) abundant farmland back into  
health.” [22] “It is up to each of us,” Tsvangirai told a gathering of  
newly elected MDC parliamentarians, “to say Zimbabwe is open for  
business.” [23]

Encouraging foreign investment means going along with Western demands  
for neo-liberal restructuring. “The key to turning around Zimbabwe’s  
economy…is the political will needed to implement the market reforms,  
the IMF and others, including the United States, have been  
recommending for the past few years,” lectured the former US  
ambassador to Zimbabwe, Christopher Dell. This means “a free-market  
economy and security of property to investment and economic  
growth.” [24]

Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown has developed an economic  
program for Zimbabwe to be rolled out if Western regime change efforts  
succeed. Brown says his recovery package will include measures to:

(1) help Zimbabwe restart and stabilize its economy;
(2) restructure and reduce its debt;
(3) support fair land reform. [25]

What Brown is really saying is that:

(1) Sanctions will be lifted, and the resultant economic recovery will  
be attributed to the MDC’s neo-liberal policies.
(2) Zimbabwe will resume the structural adjustment program Mugabe’s  
government rejected in the late 90s.
(3) Either land reform will be reversed or black Zimbabweans will be  
forced to compensate white farmers whose land was expropriated.

The reality that Brown has developed an economic program for Zimbabwe  
speaks volumes about who will be in charge if the MDC comes to power  
-- not Zimbabweans, not the MDC, and not Tsvangirai, but London and  
Washington.

Not surprisingly, MDC economic policy is perfectly simpatico with the  
prescriptions of its masters. Eddie Cross, formerly vice-chairman of  
the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries, who became a MDC spokesman,  
explained the party’s economic plans for Zimbabwe, in advance of 2000  
elections.

“We are going to fast track privatization. All 50 government  
parastatals will be privatized within a two-year time-frame, but we  
are going to go beyond that. We are going to privatize many of the  
functions of government. We are going to privatize the central  
statistical office. We are going to privatize virtually the entire  
school delivery system. And you know, we have looked at the numbers  
and we think we can get government employment down from about 300,000  
at the present time to about 75,000 in five years.” [26]

Of course, the intended beneficiaries of such a program aren’t  
Zimbabweans, but foreign investors.

The MDC’s role as agent of Western influence in Zimbabwe doesn’t stop  
at promoting economic policies that cater to foreign investors. The  
MDC has also been active in turning the screws on Zimbabwe to  
undermine the economy and create disaffection and misery in order to  
alienate Zanu-PF of its popular support. Arguing that foreign firms  
are propping up the government, the MDC has actively discouraged  
investment. For example, Tsvangirai tried to discourage a deal between  
Chinese investors and the South African company Implats, that would  
see a US$100 million platinum refinery set up in Zimbabwe, warning  
that a MDC government might not honor the deal. [27] The MDC leader,  
true to form, was following in the footsteps of his political masters  
in Washington. The United States has pressed China and other countries  
to refrain from investing in Zimbabwe “at a time when the  
international community (is) trying to isolate the African  
state.” [28] Washington complains that “China’s growing political and  
commercial influence in resource-rich African nations” [29] is  
sabotaging its efforts to ruin Zimbabwe’s economy. More damning is the  
MDC’s participation in the drafting of the principal piece of US  
legislation aimed at torpedoing the Zimbabwean economy: The Zimbabwe  
Democracy and Economic Recovery Act. Passed in 2001, the act instructs  
“the United States executive director to each international financial  
institution to oppose and vote against--

(1) any extension by the respective institution of any loan, credit,  
or guarantee to the Government of Zimbabwe; or

(2) any cancellation or reduction of indebtedness owed by the  
Government of Zimbabwe to the United States or any international  
financial institution.” [30]

The effect of the act is to cut off all development assistance to  
Zimbabwe, disable lines of credit, and prevent the World Bank and  
International Monetary Fund from providing development assistance and  
balance of payment support. [31] Any African country subjected to this  
punishment would very soon find itself in straitened circumstances.  
When the legislation was ratified, US president George W. Bush said,  
“I hope the provisions of this important legislation will support the  
people of Zimbabwe in their struggle to effect peaceful democratic  
change, achieve economic growth, and restore the rule of law.” [32]  
Since effecting peaceful democratic change means, in Washington’s  
parlance, ousting the Zanu-PF government, and since restoring the rule  
of law equates, in Washingtonian terms, to forbidding the  
expropriation of white farm land without compensation, what Bush was  
really saying was that he hoped the legislation would help overthrow  
the government and put an end to fast-track land reform. The  
legislation “was co-drafted by one of the opposition MDC's white  
parliamentarians in Zimbabwe, which was then introduced as a Bill in  
the US Congress on 8 March 2001 by the Republican senator, William  
Frist. The Bill was co-sponsored by the Republican rightwing senator,  
Jesse Helms, and the Democratic senators Hilary Clinton, Joseph Biden  
and Russell Feingold.” Helms, a notorious racist, had a penchant for  
legislation aimed at undermining countries seeking to achieve  
substantive democracy. “He co-authored the Helms-Burton Act of 1996,  
which tightened the blockade on Cuba.” [33]

The Distorting Lens of the Western Media

Western reporting on Zimbabwe occurs within a framework of implicit  
assumptions. The assumptions act as a lens through which facts are  
organized, understood and distorted. Columnist and associate editor  
for the British newspaper The Guardian, Seamus Milne, points out that  
British journalists see Zimbabwe through a lens that casts the  
president as a barbarous despot. “The British media,” he writes, “have  
long since largely abandoned any attempt at impartiality in its  
reporting of Zimbabwe, the common assumption being that Mugabe is a  
murderous dictator at the head of a uniquely wicked regime.” [34] If  
you began with these assumptions, ordinary events are interpreted  
within the framework the assumptions define. An egregious example is  
offered in how a perfectly legitimate exercise was construed and  
presented by Western reporters as a diabolical exercise. Zanu-PF held  
campaign workshops to explain what the government had achieved since  
independence and what it was doing to address the country’s economic  
crisis. The intention, according to Zimbabwe’s Information and  
Publicity Minister Sikhanyiso Ndlovu, was to “educate the people on  
the illegal sanctions as some of them were duped to vote for the MDC  
in the March elections.” [35] But that’s not how the British  
newspaper, The Independent, saw it. “The Zimbabwean army and police,”  
its reporter wrote, “have been accused of setting up torture camps and  
organizing ‘re-education meetings’ involving unspeakable cruelty where  
voters are beaten and mutilated in the hope of achieving victory for  
President Robert Mugabe in the second round of the presidential  
election.” [36] Begin with the assumption that Mugabe is a murderous  
dictator at the head of a uniquely wicked regime and campaign  
workshops become re-education meetings and torture camps. Note that  
The Independent’s reporter relied on an accusation, not on  
corroborated facts, and that the identity of the accuser was never  
revealed. The story has absolute no evidentiary value, but  
considerable propaganda value. The chances of many people reading the  
story with a skeptical eye and picking out its weaknesses are slim.  
What’s more likely to happen is that readers will regard the  
accusation as plausible because it fits with the preconceived model of  
Mugabe as a murderous dictator and his government as uniquely wicked.  
How do we know the accuser wasn’t a fellow journalist repeating gossip  
overheard on the street, or at MDC headquarters? How do we know the  
accusation wasn’t made by the US ambassador to Zimbabwe, James McGee,  
or any one of scores of representatives of Western-funded NGOs, whose  
role is to discredit the Zimbabwe government? McGee is a veritable  
treasure trove of half-truths, innuendo, and misinformation. And yet  
the Western media, particularly those based in the US, have a habit of  
treating McGee as an impeccable source, seemingly blind to the reality  
that the US government is hostile to Zimbabwe’s land democratization  
and economic indigenization programs, that it has an interest in  
spinning news to discredit Harare, and that its officials have an  
extensive track record in lying to justify the plunder of other  
people’s countries. To paraphrase Caesar Zvayi, if George Bush can lie  
hundreds of times about Iraq, what’s to stop him (or McGee or the NGOs  
on the US payroll) from lying about Zimbabwe? That the Western media  
pass on accusations made by interested parties without so much as  
revealing the interest can either be regarded as shocking naiveté or a  
sign of the propaganda role Western media play on behalf of the  
corporate class that owns them. If the US and British governments and  
Western media are against the democratization and economic  
indigenization programs of Zanu-PF, it’s because they’re dominated by  
a capitalist ruling class whose interests are against those of the  
Zimbabwean majority.

It is typical of Western reporting to attribute the actions of the  
Zanu-PF government to the personal characteristics of its leader: his  
alleged hunger for power for power’s-sake; demagogy; incompetence in  
matters related to economic management; and brutality. The  
government’s actions, by contrast, are never attributed to the  
circumstances, the conditions in which the government is forced to  
maneuver, or to the demands of survival in the face of the West’s  
predatory pressures. This isn’t unique to Zimbabwe; every leader the  
West wants to overthrow is vilified as a “strongman,” “dictator,”  
“thug,” “war criminal,” “murderer,” or “warlord” and sometimes all of  
these things. All of the leader’s actions are to be understood as  
originating in the leader’s deeply flawed character. If Iran is  
building a uranium enrichment capability, it’s not because it seeks an  
independent source of fuel for a budding civilian nuclear energy  
program, but because the country’s president is to be understood as a  
raving anti-Semite who seeks to acquire nuclear weapons to carry out  
Hitler’s final solution by wiping Israel off the face of the map. The  
same reduction of international affairs to a moral struggle between  
the West and what always turns out to be a nationalist, socialist or  
communist country headed by a leader whose actions are invariably  
traced by Western reporters to the leader’s evil psychology applies  
equally to Zimbabwe. If the Mugabe government has banned political  
rallies, it is not because the rallies have been used by the  
opposition as an occasion to firebomb police stations, but because the  
president has an unquenchable thirst for power and will brook no  
opposition. If opposition activists have been arrested, it’s not  
because they’ve committed crimes, but because the leader is repressive  
and dictatorial. If Morgan Tsvangirai is beaten by police, it’s not  
because he tried to break through police lines, but because the leader  
is a brutal dictator and ordered Tsvangirai’s beating because that’s  
what brutal dictators do. If an opposition leader is arrested and  
charged with treason, it’s not because there is evidence of treason,  
but because the president is gagging the opposition to cling to power  
because it is in the nature of dictators to do so. If the economy  
falls into crisis, it’s not because the West has cut off the country’s  
access to credit, but because of the leader’s incompetence. If  
agricultural production drops, it’s not due to the drought,  
electricity shortages and rising fuel costs that have bedeviled other  
countries in the region, but because the leader is too stupid to  
recognize his land reform policies are disastrous.

A New York Times story published three days before the March 29  
elections shows how Western governments and mass media cooperate with  
civil society agents on the ground to shape public opinion. The aim of  
the March 26, 2008 article, titled “Hope and Fear for Zimbabwe Vote,”  
was to discredit the elections that Zanu-PF seemed at the time likely  
to win.

Harare had barred election monitors from the US and EU, but allowed  
observers from Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, South Africa and the  
SADC to monitor the vote. The Western media pointed to the decision to  
bar Western observers as indirect evidence of vote rigging. After all,  
if Zimbabwe had nothing to hide, why wouldn’t it admit observers from  
Europe and the US? At the same time, Western reporters suggested that  
Zimbabwe was only allowing observers from friendly countries because  
they could be counted on to bless the election results. By the same  
logic, one would have expected that a negative evaluation from  
observers representing unfriendly countries would be just as automatic  
and foreordained, especially considering the official policy of the US  
and EU is to replace the current government with one friendly to  
Western business interests. Indeed, it is this fear that had led  
Harare to ban Western monitors.

With Western observers unable to monitor the elections directly,  
governments in North America and Europe found themselves on the horns  
of a dilemma. How could they declare the vote fraudulent, if they  
hadn’t observed it? To get around this difficulty, the US, Britain and  
other Western countries provided grants to Zimbabweans on the ground  
to monitor the vote. These Zimbabweans, part of civil society,  
declared themselves to be independent “non-governmental” observers,  
and prepared to render a foreordained verdict that the election was  
rigged. Cooperating in the deception, the Western media amplified  
their voices as “independent” experts on the ground. The US Congress’s  
National Endowment for Democracy — an organization that does overtly  
what the CIA used to do covertly — provided grants to the Zimbabwe  
Election Support Network “to train and organize 240 long-term  
elections observers throughout Zimbabwe.” The NED is also connected to  
the Media Monitoring Project through the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition,  
which it funds, and the Media Institute of Southern Africa, which is  
funded by Britain’s NED equivalent, the Westminster Foundation for  
Democracy and Canada’s Rights and Democracy. The Media Monitoring  
Project calls itself independent, but is connected to the US and  
British governments, and to billionaire speculator George Soros’ Open  
Society Initiative for Southern Africa.

When the New York Times needed Zimbabweans to comment on the upcoming  
election, its reporters turned to representatives of these two NGOs.  
Noel Kututwa, the chairman of the Zimbabwe Election Support Network,  
told the newspaper that his group would be using “sampling techniques  
to assess the accuracy of the results announced nationally.” Yet, Mr.  
Kututwa also told the newspaper that, “We will not have a free and  
fair election.” If Kututwa had already decided the election would be  
unfair and coerced, why was he bothering to assess its accuracy?  
Andrew Moyse, a regular commentator on Studio 7, an anti-Mugabe radio  
station sponsored by the US government’s propaganda arm, Voice of  
America, was quoted in the same article. “Even if Mugabe only gets one  
vote,” Mr. Moyse opined, “the tabulated results are in the box and he  
has won.”

Moyse, on top of acting as a US mouthpiece on Voice of America, heads  
up the Media Monitoring Project. While part of the NGO election  
observer team the US and EU were relying on to ostensibly assess the  
fairness of the vote, he had already decided the vote was rigged.

Kutatwa and Moyse were the only experts the New York Times cited in  
its story on the upcoming elections. Yet both represented NGOs funded  
by hostile governments whose official policy is to replace Robert  
Mugabe and his government’s land reform and economic indigenization  
policies. Both presented themselves as independent, though they could  
hardly be independent of their sources of foreign government and  
foundation funding. Both declared in advance of the election that the  
vote would be coerced and unfair and that the tabulated results were  
already in the box. Their foreordained conclusions – which turned out  
to be wildly inaccurate -- happened to be the same conclusions their  
sponsors in the US and Britain were looking for, to obtain the consent  
of a confused public to intervene vigorously in Zimbabwe’s affairs.  
This is emblematic of the symbiotic collaboration of media, Western  
governments, and NGOs on the ground. Western governments, corporations  
and wealthy individuals fund NGOs to discredit the Zanu-PF government,  
and the Western media present the same NGOs as independent actors, and  
provide them a platform to present their views. Meanwhile, the Western  
media marginalize the Zanu-PF government and its supporters on the  
ground, denying them a platform to present their side. To publics in  
the West, the only story heard is the story told by the MDC and its  
civil society allies, who reinforce, as a matter of strategy, the view  
that Mugabe is a murderous dictator at the head of a uniquely wicked  
regime. The MDC, civil society, the Western media, the British and US  
governments, and imperialist think tanks and foundations, are all  
interlocked. All of these sources, then, tell the same story.

Safeguarding the Revolution

After the revolutionary war, would the Americans who led and carried  
out the revolution have allowed loyalists to band together to seek  
public office in elections with a program of restoring the monarchy?  
We’ve already seen that the answer is no. When the Nazis were ousted  
in Germany, was the Nazi party allowed to reconstitute itself to seek  
the return of the Third Reich through electoral means? No. Countries  
that have gone through revolutionary change are careful, if the  
revolution is to survive, to deny those who have been overthrown an  
opportunity to recover their privileged positions. That often means  
denying former exploiters and their partisans opportunities to band  
together to contest elections, or constitutionally prescribing a  
desired form of government and prohibiting a return to the old. The US  
revolutionaries did both; they repressed the loyalists and declared a  
republic, which, as a corollary, forbade a return to monarchy. Even if  
every American voter decided that George Bush should become king, the  
US constitution forbids it, no matter what the majority wants. The gun  
(that is, the violence employed by the American revolutionaries to  
free themselves from the oppression of the British crown) is more  
powerful than the pen (Americans can’t vote the monarchy back in.)

In Zimbabwe, the former colonial oppressor, Britain, has been working  
with its allies to restore its former privileges through civil society  
and the MDC. Britain doesn’t seek a return to an overt colonialism,  
complete with a British viceroy and British troops garrisoned  
throughout the country, but to a neo-colonialism, in which the local  
government acts in the place of a viceroy, safeguarding and nurturing  
British investments and looking after Western interests under the  
rubric of managing the economy soundly. Britain, then, wants the MDC,  
for the MDC is British rule by proxy. Many Zimbabweans, however, are  
vehemently opposed to selling out their revolution to a party that was  
founded and is financed by a country to which they were once enslaved.

Western media propaganda presents Zimbabwe as a pyramidal society, in  
which an elite at the apex, comprising Mugabe, his ministers and the  
heads of the security services, brutally rule over the vast majority  
of Zimbabweans at the base who long for the MDC to deliver them from a  
dictatorship. A fairer description is that Zimbabwe is a society in  
which both sides command considerable popular support, but where Zanu- 
PF has an edge. This may sound incredible to anyone looking at  
Zimbabwe through the distorting lens of the Western media, but let  
Munyaradzi Gwisai, leader of the International Socialist Organization  
in Zimbabwe, a fierce opponent of the Mugabe government, set matters  
straight.

“There is no doubt about it - the regime is rooted among the  
population with a solid social base. Despite the catastrophic economic  
collapse, Zanu-PF still won more popular votes in parliament than the  
MDC in the March 29 parliamentary elections. Mugabe might have lost on  
the streets, but if you count the actual votes, his party won more  
than the MDC in elections to the House of Assembly and Senate. Zanu-PF  
won an absolute majority of votes in five of the country’s 10  
provinces, plus a simple majority in another province. By contrast,  
the MDC won two provinces with an absolute majority and two with a  
simple majority. But because we use first past the post, not  
proportional representation, Zanu-PF’s votes were not translated into  
a majority in parliament. It was only Mugabe himself, in the  
presidential election, who did worse in terms of the popular vote.” [37]

Those in the thrall of Western propaganda will dismiss strong support  
for Zanu-PF in the March 29 elections as a consequence of electoral  
fraud, not genuine popular backing. But it would be a very inept  
government that rigged the election and lost control of the assembly  
and had to face a run-off in the presidential race. No, Mugabe’s  
support runs deep.

“According to a poll of 1,200 Zimbabweans published in August (2004)  
by South African and American researchers, the level of public trust  
in Mr. Mugabe’s leadership” more than doubled from 1999, “to 46  
percent – even as the economy” was severely weakened by Western  
sanctions. [38] Significantly, it was over this period that the  
government launched its fast track land reform program.  
Notwithstanding Western news reports that Mugabe’s supporters are  
limited to his “cronies”, Zimbabweans participated in a million man  
and woman march last December, where marchers “proclaimed that  
Washington, Downing Street and Wall Street (had) no right to remove  
Mugabe.” [39]

Elsewhere in Africa, Zimbabwe’s president is enormously popular. As  
recently as August 2004, Mugabe was voted at number three in the New  
Africa magazine’s poll of 100 Greatest Africans, behind Nelson Mandela  
and Kwame Nkrumah. [40] The Los Angeles Times, no fan of the  
Zimbabwean president, acknowledges that “Mugabe is so popular on the  
continent…that he is feted and cheered wherever he goes.” [41] That  
was evident last summer when, much to the chagrin of Western  
reporters, who had been assuring their readers that Mugabe was being  
called to a meeting of SADC to be dressed down, that “Mr. Mugabe  
arrived at the meeting to a fusillade of cheers and applause from  
attendees that…overwhelmed the polite welcomes of the other heads of  
states.” [42] A European Union-African Union summit planned for 2003  
was aborted after African leaders refused to show up in solidarity  
with a Mugabe who had been banned by the Europeans for promoting the  
interests of Zimbabweans, not Europeans. The summit went ahead in  
2007, but only after African leaders threatened once again to boycott  
the meeting if Mugabe was barred. With China doing deals with African  
countries, the Europeans were reluctant to sacrifice trade and  
investment opportunities, and laid aside their misgivings about  
attending a meeting at which Mugabe would be present. That is, all  
except British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. He stayed home in protest.  
German leader Angela Merkel did attend, but thought it necessary to  
scold Mugabe to distance herself from him. Senegal’s president  
Abdoulaye Wade sprang to Mugabe’s defense, dismissing Merkel’s  
vituperative comments as untrue and accusing the German leader of  
being misinformed. [43]

Opposition’s Failed Attempts at Insurrection

Mugabe’s popularity, and that of the movement for Zimbabwean  
empowerment he leads, explains Zanu-PF’s strong showing in elections  
and why the opposition’s numerous efforts at seizing power by general  
strike and insurrection have failed. Civil society organizations and  
MDC leaders have called for insurrectionary activity many times. In  
2000, Morgan Tsvangirai called on Mugabe to step down peacefully or  
face violence. “If you don’t want to go peacefully,” the new  
opposition leader warned, “we will remove you violently.” [44] Arthur  
Mutambara, a robotics professor and former consultant with McKinsey &  
Company and leader of an alternative wing of the MDC, declared in 2006  
that he was “going to remove Robert Mugabe, I promise you, with every  
tool at my disposal.” Asked to clarify what he meant, he replied,  
“We’re not going to rule out or in anything – the sky’s the  
limit.” [45] Three days before the March 29 elections, Tendai Biti,  
secretary general of Tsvangirai’s MDC faction, warned of Kenya-style  
post electoral violence if Mugabe won. [46] In the US, where United  
States Code, Section 2385, “prohibits anyone from advocating abetting,  
advising, or teaching the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety  
of overthrowing or destroying the government of the United States by  
force or violence,” opposition leaders like Tsvangirai, Mutambara and  
Biti would be charged with treason (Biti has been.)

Leaders of civil society organizations which receive Western funding  
have been no less diffident about threatening to overthrow the  
government violently. Last summer, the then Archbishop of Bulawayo,  
Pius Ncube, said he thought it was “justified for Britain to raid  
Zimbabwe and remove Mugabe. We should do it ourselves but there’s too  
much fear. I’m ready to lead the people, guns blazing, but the people  
are not ready.” [47] Ncube complained bitterly that Zimbabweans were  
cowards, unwilling to take up arms against the government. This was a  
strange complaint to make against a people who waged a guerilla war  
for over a decade to achieve independence. Zimbabweans’ unwillingness  
to follow Ncube, guns blazing, had nothing to do with cowardice, and  
everything to do with the absence of popular support for Ncube’s  
position.

Recently, the International Socialist Organization, one of the  
founding members of the MDC along with the British government, argued  
in its newspaper that “the crisis was not going to be resolved through  
elections, but through mass action.” ISO - Zimbabwe leader Munyaradzi  
Gwisai “said that the way forward for the Movement for Democratic  
Change and civil society was to create a united front and mobilize  
against the regime.” [48] The ISO makes the curious argument that  
Zimbabweans should take to the streets to bring the MDC to power,  
recognizing the MDC to be a comprador party (one the ISO helped  
found). A comprador party, in the febrile reasoning of the ISO, is  
preferable to Zanu-PF. Gwisai’s offices were visited by the police,  
touching off howls of outrage over Mugabe’s “repressions” from the  
ISO’s Trotskyite brethren around the world. Followers of Trotsky are  
forever siding with reactionaries against revolutionaries, the  
revolutionaries invariably failing to live up to a Trotskyite ideal.  
If they can’t have their ideal, they’ll settle for imperialism. While  
Gwisai wasn’t arrested, Wellington Chibebe, general secretary of the  
Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, was. He too had urged Zimbabweans  
to take to the streets to bring down the government.

Some opponents of Mugabe’s government go further. An organization  
called the Zimbabwe Resistance Movement promises to take up arms  
against the Zanu-PF government if “the poodles who run the Zimbabwe  
Electoral Commission,” fail to declare Tsvangirai the victor of the  
presidential run-off election. [49] The Western media have been silent  
on this form of oppositional intimidation and threats of violence.

The opposition has also tried other means to clear the way for its  
rise to power. In April, 2007 it called a general strike, as part of  
the Save Zimbabwe Campaign. The strike fizzled, accomplishing nothing  
more than showing the opposition’s program of seizing power extra- 
constitutionally had no popular support. The campaign “was a joint  
effort of the opposition, church groups and civil society… As a body… 
it (did) not…have widespread grassroots support,” reported the Toronto  
newspaper, The Globe and Mail. [50] While depicted in the Western  
media as a peaceful campaign of prayer meetings, the campaign was  
predicated on violence. MDC activists carried out a series of fire  
bombings of buses and police stations, events the Western press was  
slow to acknowledge. A May 2 2007 Human Rights Watch report finally  
acknowledged that there had been a series of gasoline bombings, but  
questioned whether the MDC was really responsible. By this point, as  
far as Western publics knew, peaceful protests had been brutally  
suppressed by a uniquely wicked government. To keep matters under  
control, the government banned political gatherings. The opposition  
defied the ban, calling their rallies “prayer meetings.” It was a  
result of this defiance that Arthur Mutambara was arrested, and Morgan  
Tsvangirai roughed up by police when he tried to force his way through  
police lines to demand Mutambara’s release. The MDC took full  
advantage of the event to play up to the Western media, claiming  
Tsvangirai had been beaten up as part of a program of political  
repression, rather than as a response to his tussling with the police.  
As the Cuban ambassador to Zimbabwe explained, “What happened in  
Zimbabwe of course is similar to what groups based in Florida have  
done in Cuba. They put many bombs in some hotels in Cuba. They were  
trying to…generate political instability in Cuba, so I see the same  
pattern in Zimbabwe.” [51]

Making the Economy Scream

While quislings work from within the country to make it ungovernable,  
pressure is applied from without. Western governments say they’ve  
imposed only targeted sanctions aimed at key members of the  
government, nothing to undermine the economy and hurt ordinary  
Zimbabweans, but as we’ve already seen, the US Zimbabwe Democracy and  
Economic Recovery Act has far-reaching economic implications. On top  
of this, other, informal, sanctions do their part to make the economy  
scream. As Robert Mugabe explains:

The British and their allies “influence other countries to cut their  
economic ties with us…the soft loans, grants and investments that were  
coming our way, started decreasing and in some cases practically  
petering out. Then the signals to the rest of the world that Zimbabwe  
is under sanctions, that rings bells and countries that would want to  
invest in Zimbabwe are being very cautious. And we are being dragged  
through the mud every day on CNN, BBC, Sky News, and they are saying  
to these potential investors ‘your investments will not be safe in  
Zimbabwe, the British farmers have lost their land, and your  
investments will go the same way.’” [52]

In March 2002, Canada withdrew all direct funding to the government of  
Zimbabwe. [53] In 2005, the IT department at Zimbabwe’s Africa  
University discovered that Microsoft had been instructed by the US  
Treasury Department to refrain from doing business with the  
university. [54] Western companies refuse to supply spare parts to  
Zimbabwe’s national railway company, even though there are no official  
trade sanctions in place. [55] Britain and its allies are now planning  
to escalate the pressure. Plans have been made to press South Africa  
to cut off electricity to Zimbabwe if the MDC doesn’t come to power.  
Pressure will also be applied on countries surrounding Zimbabwe to  
mount an economic blockade. [56] The point of sanctions is to starve  
the people of Zimbabwe into revolting against the government to clear  
the way for the rise of the MDC and control, by proxy, from London and  
Washington. Apply enough pressure and eventually the people will cry  
uncle (or so goes the theory.) You can’t say Zanu-PF wasn’t  
forewarned. Stanley Mudenge, the former foreign minister of Zimbabwe,  
said Robin Cook, then British foreign secretary, once pulled him aside  
at a meeting and said: “Stan, you must get rid of Bob (Mugabe)…If you  
don’t get rid of Bob, what will hit you will make your people stone  
you in the streets.” [57]

Harare’s Options

Those who condemn the actions of the Zanu-PF government in defending  
their revolution have an obligation to say what they would do.  
Usually, they skirt the issue, saying there is no revolution, or that  
there was one once, but that it was long ago corrupted by cronyism.  
Their simple answer is to dump Mugabe, and start over again – a course  
of action that would inevitably see a return to the neo-liberal  
restructuring of the 1990s, a dismantling of land reforms, and a neo- 
colonial tyranny. Not surprisingly, people who make this argument find  
favor with imperialist governments and ruling class foundations and  
are often rewarded by them for appearing to be radical while actually  
serving imperialist goals.

Throughout history, reformers and revolutionaries have been accused of  
being self-aggrandizing demagogues manipulating their followers with  
populist rhetoric to cling to power to enjoy its many perks. [58] But  
as one writer in the British anti-imperialist journal Lalkar pointed  
out, “The government of Zimbabwe could very easily abandon its  
militant policies aimed at protecting Zimbabwe’s independence and  
building its collective wealth – no doubt its ministers would be  
rewarded amply by the likes of the World Bank and the IMF.” [59] If  
Mugabe is really using all means at his disposable to hang on to power  
simply to enjoy its perks, he has chosen the least certain and most  
difficult way of going about it. Lay this argument aside as the  
specious drivel of those who want to bury their heads in the sand to  
avoid confronting tough questions. What would you do in these  
circumstances?

In retaliation for democratizing patterns of land ownership,  
distributing land previously owned by 4,000 farmers, mainly of British  
stock, to 300,000 previously landless families, Britain has “mobilized  
her friends and allies in Europe, North America, Australia and New  
Zealand to impose illegal economic sanctions against Zimbabwe. They  
have cut off all development assistance, disabled lines of credit,  
prevented the Bretton Woods institutions from providing financial  
assistance, and ordered private companies in the United States not to  
do business with Zimbabwe.” [60] They have done this to cripple  
Zimbabwe’s economy to alienate the revolutionary government of its  
popular support. For years, they have done this. Soni Rajan, employed  
by the British government to investigate land reform in Zimbabwe, told  
author Heidi Holland:

“It was absolutely clear…that Labour’s strategy was to accelerate  
Mugabe’s unpopularity by failing to provide him with funding for land  
redistribution. They thought if they didn’t give him the money for  
land reform, his people in the rural areas would start to turn against  
him. That was their position; they want him out and they were going to  
do whatever they could to hasten his demise.” [61]

The main political opposition party, the MDC, is the creation of the  
Rhodesian Commercial Farmers' Union, the British government and the  
Zimbabwe Democracy Trust, whose patrons are former British foreign  
secretaries Douglas Hurd, Geoffrey Howe, Malcolm Rifkind and whose  
chair is Lord Renwick of Clifton, who has collected a string of board  
memberships in southern African corporations. The party’s funding  
comes from European governments and corporations, and its raison  
d’etre is to reverse every measure the Zanu-PF government has taken to  
invest Zimbabwean independence with real meaning. Civil society  
organizations are funded by governments whose official policy is one  
of regime change in Zimbabwe. The US, Britain and the Netherlands  
finance pirate radio stations and newspapers, which the Western media  
disingenuously call “independent”, to poison public opinion against  
the Mugabe government and its land democratization and economic  
indigenization programs. It’s impossible to hold free and fair  
elections, because the interference by Western powers is massive, a  
point acknowledge by Mugabe opponent Munyaradzi Gwisai. [62]

Guns Trump “Xs”

Zimbabweans who fought for the country’s independence and  
democratization of land ownership are not prepared to give up the  
gains of their revolution simply because a majority of Zimbabweans  
marked an “X” for a party of quislings. There are two reasons for  
their steadfastness in defense of their revolution: First, Americans  
can’t vote the monarchy back in, or return, through the ballot box, to  
the status quo ante of British colonial domination. The US  
revolutionaries recognized that some gains are senior to others,  
freedom from foreign domination being one of them. Americans would  
never allow a majority vote to place the country once again under  
British rule. Nor will Zimbabwe’s patriots allow the same to happen to  
their country. Second, no election in Zimbabwe can be free and fair,  
so long as the country is under sanctions and the main opposition  
party and civil society organizations are agents of hostile foreign  
governments. The Zimbabwe Lawyers for Justice has called on the  
government “to consider the possibility of declaring a state of  
emergency,” pointing out correctly that “Zimbabwe is at war with  
foreign elements using local puppets.” [63] Western governments would  
do – and have done – no less under similar circumstances. Patriots  
writing to the state-owned newspaper, The Herald, urge the government  
to take a stronger line. “The electoral environment is heavily tilted  
in favour of the (MDC) because of the economic sanctions,” wrote one  
Herald reader. “If it was up to me there should be no elections until  
the sanctions are scrapped. If we don’t defend our independence and  
sovereignty, then we are doomed to become hewers of wood and drawers  
of water. I stand ready to take up arms to defend my sovereignty if  
need be.” [64] The heads of the police and army have let it be known  
that they won’t “salute sell-outs and agents of the West” [65] – and  
nor should they. And veterans of the war for national liberation have  
told Mugabe that they can never accept that their country, won through  
the barrel of the gun, should be taken merely by an ‘X’ made by a  
ballpoint pen.” [66] Mugabe recounted that the war veterans had told  
him “if this country goes back into white hands just because we have  
used a pen, we will return to the bush to fight.” The former guerilla  
leader added, “I’m even prepared to join the fight. We can’t allow the  
British to dominate us through their puppets.” [67] Zimbabwe, as  
patriots have said many times, will never be a colony again. Even if  
it means returning to arms.

1. Herbert Aptheker, “The Nature of Democracy, Freedom and  
Revolution,” International Publishers, New York, 2001.
2. Herald (Zimbabwe) April 2, 2008.
3. “No Better Opportunity,” German Foreign Policy.Com, March 26, 2007. http://www.german-foreign-policy.com/en/fulltext/56059
4. Times (London), November 25, 2007.
5. Rob Gowland, “Zimbabwe: The struggle for land, the struggle for  
independence,” Communist Party of Australia. http://www.cpa.org.au/booklets/zimbabwe.pdf
6. Herald (Zimbabwe) May 29, 2008.
7. Guardian (UK), March 3, 2008.
8. Wall Street Journal, quoted in Herald (Zimbabwe) March 23, 2008.
9. Talkzimbabwe.com, June 19, 2008.
10. Guardian (UK), August 22, 2002.
11. Herald (Zimbabwe) May 29, 2008.
12. Herald (Zimbabwe), February 22, 2008.
13. New York Times, March 27, 2005.
14. Ibid.
15. Los Angeles Times, July 8, 2005.
16. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, “Manufacturing Consent,” Pantheon  
Books, 1988, p. 28.
17. The Independent (UK), October 22, 2007; New York Times, October  
23, 3007.
18. New African, June 2008.
19. Antonia Juhasz, “The Tragic Tale of the IMF in Zimbabwe,” Daily  
Mirror of Zimbabwe, March 7, 2004.
20. Herald (Zimbabwe) September 13, 2005.
21. Herald (Zimbabwe) August 12, 2005.
22. Morgan Tsvangirai, “Zimbabwe’s Razor Edge,” Guardian (UK) April 7,  
2008.
23. Globe and Mail (Toronto), May 31, 2008.
24. Response to Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe Monetary Policy Statement,”  
Ambassador Christopher Dell, February 7, 2007.
25. The Independent (UK), September 20, 2007.
26. John Wright, “Victims of the West,” Morning Star (UK), December  
18, 2007.
27. Herald (Zimbabwe), July 6, 2005.
28. AFP, July 29, 2005.
29 Ibid.
30. US Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of 2001.
31. Herald (Zimbabwe) June 4, 2008.
32. “President Signs Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act,  
December 21, 2001. www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/12/200111221-15.html
33. www.pslweb.org, October 17, 2006.
34. Guardian (UK), April 17, 2008. Milne is also clear on who’s  
responsible for the conflict in Zimbabwe. In an April 17, 2008 column  
in The Guardian, he wrote, “Britain refused to act against a white  
racist coup, triggering a bloody 15-year liberation war, and then  
imposed racial parliamentary quotas and a 10-year moratorium on land  
reform at independence. The subsequent failure by Britain and the US  
to finance land buyouts as expected, along with the impact of IMF  
programs, laid the ground for the current impasse.”
35. Herald (Zimbabwe), June 11, 2008.
36. The Independent (UK), June 9, 2008.
37. Weekly Worker, 726, June 19, 2008 http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/726/forced.html 
.
38. New York Times, December 24, 2004.
39. Workers World (US), December 12, 2007.
40. Proletarian (UK) April-May 2007.
41. Los Angeles Times, December 15, 2007.
42. New York Times, August 17, 2007.
43. New York Times, December 9, 2007.
44. BBC, September 30, 2000.
45. Times Online, March 5, 2006.
46. Herald (Zimbabwe), March 27, 2008.
47. Sunday Times (UK), July 1, 2007.
48. Weekly Worker, 726, June 19, 2008 http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/726/forced.html
49. The Zimbabwe Times, May 31, 2008.
50. Globe and Mail (Toronto) March 22, 2007.
51. Herald (Zimbabwe) April 15, 2007.
52. New African, May 2008.
53. Herald (Zimbabwe), October 18, 2007.
54. Herald (Zimbabwe), January 28, 2008.
55. Herald (Zimbabwe), January 11, 2008.
56. Guardian (UK), June 16, 2008.
57. New African, May 2008.
58. See, for example, Michael Parenti, “The Assassination of Julius  
Caesar: A People’s History Ancient Rome,” The New Press, 2003.
59. Lalkar, May-June, 2008. http://www.lalkar.org/issues/contents/may2008/zim.php
60. Address of Robert Mugabe to the UN’s Food and Agricultural  
Organization, June 3, 2008.
61. New African, May 2008.
62. Weekly Worker, 726, June 19, 2008 http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/726/forced.html
63. TalkZimbabwe.com, May 15, 2008.
64. Letter to the Herald (Zimbabwe), May 6, 2008.
65. Guardian (UK), March 15, 2008.
66. Herald (Zimbabwe), June 20, 2008.
67. The Independent (UK), June 14, 2008.