Beware Of West’s Posturing: Zimbabweans Warned Against The US, The UK Indirection

11 January 2010

By Reason Wafawarova

THE 2008 cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe and the dawn of the inclusive Government were both met with enthusiastic, if not bragging, announcements of support pledges from a few of the Western countries.

It is not like the sanctions-ravaged country had not needed any aid since the illegal sanctions were imposed in 2001.

Organisations like Oxfam, Save the Children and others had been involved with providing humanitarian aid in many parts of the country over that period.

During this time, the US-led Western alliance had their governments largely involved in the acrimonious rhetoric that all the lack and want in Zimbabwe was President Mugabe’s fault, not a result of the economic strangulation that had been collectively launched on Zimbabwe.

Now that the Prime Minister of Zimbabwe has publicly admitted not only to the fact that sanctions are real and harmful, but also that him and his party mobilised them against Zimbabwe, it is time to analyse the timing of the latest announcements of indirect government aid from the US, the UK and in a little way, countries like Australia.

At the risk of being viewed as one wont to vitiating the GPA and its inclusive Government, and in the process frustrating the helping hand we believe the West is, this writer will interrogate the posturing of humanitarian intervention we saw when Prime Minister Tsvangirai visited the White House earlier in the year, together with pledges made by other Western governments — all supposedly expected to come through unnamed Western NGOs operating in Zimbabwe.

In international relations, states are rarely considered as moral agents; they are vehicles of power, which operate in the interests of the particular internal power structures of their respective societies.

So anybody who intervenes in another country is most likely going to be doing so for their own purposes — and that has always been true in history.

When the US decided to intervene in Somalia in 1992; that was sold in heartland America as "humanitarian intervention" just as was the promised US$73 million to Zimbabwe by President Barrack Obama.

For Somalia, the United States waited very carefully as the Somali famine ravaged the country between 1991 and 1992, the same way they waited patiently as the economy of Zimbabwe crumbled under ruinous sanctions from 2001 up to 2008.

The same major international aid organisations like the Red Cross, Save the Children and others were doing a lot of work in Somalia just like they have been in Zimbabwe, albeit not enough to halt the demise in both cases.

So if the US government had had any humanitarian feelings with regard to Somalia, it had plenty of time to show it, in fact they could have shown it from 1978 through to 1990, when the US was Siad Barre’s chief international supporter.

When the US-supported strongman collapsed, the US pulled out, a civil war erupted and has not yet ended up to today, there was mass starvation; and the US did nothing.

The famine and the civil war reached peak levels in 1992, and still the US waited cleverly until around the November 1992 Presidential election in the US.

Then Somalia became a favourite place to do impressive photo shoots for the election.

The campaign managers reckoned that if the US government sent 30 000 Marines into Somalia when the famine was declining and the feuding fighters were getting weary, that would be a nice opportunity to get nice shots of Marine colonels handing out cookies to starving children.

People like Colin Powel publicly said the mission would be "good for the Pentagon".

Equally if the US government had had any humanitarian feelings for Zimbabwe, then it should never have even thought of enacting ZDERA, the 2001 sanctions law that stops US companies from doing any business with Zimbabwean business entities.

The US, the UK and other Western countries publicly celebrated the suffering in Zimbabwe as "Mugabe’s unsound policies" for about eight years, and they waited very carefully for an opportune time to play public relations with the lives of Zimbabweans.

So they waited until the cholera outbreak reached its peak, killing around 4 000 people, and they reckoned this was an opportune time for photo shoots of a helping hand underlined by a strong media baseline of "it’s all Mugabe’s fault".

With the inclusive Government coming in place in early 2009, they reckoned it was perfect timing for photo shoots announcing their scepticism of the whole arrangement covered in impressive announcements of financial pledges destined for Zimbabwe’s suffering masses — albeit via routes that have nothing to do whatsoever with the inclusive Government.

What a way of showing the world humanitarian love for Zimbabweans while showing disdain for President Mugabe and everything associated with the man.

These poor masses of Zimbabwe can be massacred by murderous sanctions when it suits the purposes of Western governments, but they can also come in handy when it suits Western public relations to posture as humanitarians of the highest order.

This tactic does not always work out well.

For Somalia it was a nightmare when the US lost 18 marines in one Somali strike and they were forced into a hasty and unplanned humiliating retreat.

When you put a foreign military force into another country, it will not be long before they are fighting the local population, never mind that the population may have welcomed the invaders in the first place.

Take Northern Ireland; where the British were invited by the Catholic population in August 1969.

Two months later, the British were murdering the Catholic population.

The same happened with the invasion of Iraq. No sooner did we see the celebrating masses at the deposition of Saddam Hussein than we saw American troops murdering the same masses in Baghdad.

Some Zimbabweans might have celebrated the imposition of sanctions in the vainglorious hope that the embargo would put MDC-T in power, but it has taken just these few months of 2009 for most people to see that the sanctions were not a good move at all. People are angry at both the West and MDC-T for their role in the destruction of the economy in the last eight years.

The public relations posturing will not impress Zimbabweans at all, and MDC-T’s belated decision to call for the lifting of sanctions will only help unveil the deception in this mischievous posturing by Western governments.

We were told by the Australian government that they were going to support only the ministries run by members of Mr Tsvangirai’s party.

That announcement was calculated not only at isolating President Robert Mugabe and Zanu-PF government officials, but also at painting the picture that Australia has humanitarian feelings for the people of Zimbabwe.

This is the country whose Prime Minister, John Howard, worked so tirelessly to have Zimbabwe expelled from the Commonwealth, and they even punished innocent cricketers in the name of punishing President Mugabe.

The public relations posturing has manifested in a number of ways. We have heard this earth shuttering gospel about human rights abuses in Zimbabwe and how the West would never rest until all Zimbabweans are exposed to freedom and liberty.

The number one evidence of these human rights abuses are the thousands of Zimbabweans who have told dramatised stories of how they escaped "Mugabe’s murderous men" as they fled to various Western destinations.

These are the asylum seekers that have told drama stories of living "dead parents and family members" all killed by Mugabe.

Their stories need no verification because they are good enough for public relations.

The West must be seen to be offering refuge to unfortunate escapees feeling the "murderous regime’.

All these people know for a fact that they fled Western sanctions, but they cannot say so to Western immigration officials.

That would betray the whole cause and it certainly would not do.

What is needed for Zimbabwe is support for Sadc in helping end the crisis in the country.

It would be easier and more prudent for Western Government to at the very least channel any help through Sadc structures since they are the guarantors of the GPA.

One would have thought that the West would at least trust that Zimbabweans knew what they wanted when they signed the GPA on September 15 2008.

Zimbabwe may in the end benefit or be harmed by these Western machinations and this writer is not certain what the outcome will be.

Whatever it is, the reality is that humanitarianism is not part of it.

The country just happens to offer excellent props for photo opportunities and good publicity back in Western communities.

Any benefits that may come our way may be purely incidental.

 

 

©  EsinIslam.Com

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