Category: Zimbabwe

New Imperialism, Old Justifications

The old imperialism, backed up by an old set of racist justifications, is back in fashion.

By Stephen Gowans

British politicians say Britons must stop apologizing, and start celebrating, their imperial past. Conservative historians say Africa was better off under British rule. Top political advisors promote renewed colonialism as a solution to Africa’s problems. Journalists write nostalgically about “the lost paradise of the big white chief” (Rhodesia’s Ian Smith) and point to the descent of Zimbabwe into economic chaos as a cautionary tale about what happens when enlightened white administration is ceded to benighted, corrupt natives.

“Barely a generation after the ignominious end of the British empire,” observes Guardian columnist Seamus Milne, “there is now a quiet but concerted drive to rehabilitate it, by influential newspapers, conservative academics, and at the highest level of government.” (1)

Why has the drive occurred?

One reason is that intervention in other countries is now more of a possibility than it was three decades ago when the Soviet Union was still around. Jonathan Powell, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s longtime chief of staff, argues that Britain should not fear to intervene in Zimbabwe and Myanmar to defend “our interests” and promote “our values” because “intervening in another country no longer risks tipping the two superpowers into global war, because there is only one superpower.” (2)

The other reason is because the structural compulsion to exploit other countries economically has never gone away.

With the compulsion still there, and a major deterrent to exercising it gone, an ideology is needed to justify it.

The Ideology

“In the Ancient world, order meant empire,” observes the man who served as Blair’s foreign policy guru, Robert Cooper. “Those within the empire had order, culture and civilization. Outside it lay barbarians, chaos and disorder.” (3)

Today chaos is found in what Cooper classifies as “pre-modern states” — “often former colonies – whose failures have led to a Hobbesian war of all against all.” (4)

Writer Peter Godwin thinks the chaos in pre-modern states is attributable to Britain abandoning its colonies. “The disengagement from Africa was irresponsible,” he writes. It was “little more than a hasty jettisoning of colonies, however ill-prepared they were for self-rule, and a virtual guarantee that they would fail as autonomous states.” (5)

British historian Andrew Roberts echoes Godwin’s reasoning. “Africa,” he says, “has never known better times than during British rule.” (6)

Top politicians also seem to agree. Gordon Brown sprang to the defense of Britain’s colonial record in Africa after South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki justifiably complained about British imperialists “doing terrible things wherever they went.” Brown, then chancellor of the exchequer, used a trip to former British colony Tanzania to declare that “the days of Britain having to apologize for its colonial history are over,” and that “we should celebrate much of our past, rather than apologize for it.” (7)

Godwin points specifically to Zimbabwe to make the case that Africa was better off under white rule. “The terrible situation in Zimbabwe,” he writes, “today conforms in many ways to the worst of everything Ian Smith had feared of black majority rule, and is the very specter that inspired him to fight so hard to prevent it.” (8)

The Telegraph’s Graham Boynton seconds Godwin’s point, arguing that Ian Smith, who said blacks could never rule themselves successfully, “has sadly been proved right.” (9)

“Today, Zimbabwe is a failed state with a non-functioning economy, a once flourishing agricultural sector now moribund, and a population on the brink of starvation….So much for liberation.” (10)

If Boynton and his empire-nostalgics are to be believed, the natives can’t be trusted to run their own affairs. But there are many other places bedeviled by war, poverty, misery and chaos that are never pointed to as crying “out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets,” as former Wall St. Journal editor, Max Boot, once put it. (11)

One such troubled land is Ethiopia. Its army invaded Somalia, contrary to the UN Charter (a crime on par with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait), and is fighting an anti-insurgency war in the Ogaden region of the country that has provoked a humanitarian disaster. The country’s leader, Meles Zenawi, jails political opponents, threatens them with the death sentence, limits press freedom, and has been accused of rigging elections.

Ethiopia sounds like one of Cooper’s pre-modern states, complete with a Hobbesian war of all against all raging within its bosom. But Ethiopia — which receives hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid from the US and Britain — is not on the empire-nostalgics’ radar screen. Could it be that the “failed” states empire-boosters say need to be brought under the wing of enlightened Western rule are simply states that aren’t doing the West’s bidding? Is it chaos, or independence, that’s the problem?

Iraq, too, is a troubled land, one for which the idea of a Hobbesian war of all against all seems especially fitting. And yet chaos in Iraq is a product of the “enlightened” Western rule people like Max Boot call for.

The Solution

“The most logical way to deal with chaos, and the one employed most often in the past, is colonization,” writes Cooper boldly. Today, colonialism needs to be practiced as “a new kind of imperialism…an imperialism which aims to bring order and organization.” (12)

Cooper sets out his case in an article titled “Why we still need empires.”

“The postmodern world has to start to get used to double standards. Among ourselves, we operate on the basis of laws and open cooperative security. But, when dealing with old-fashioned states outside the postmodern continent of Europe, we need to revert of the rougher methods of an earlier era – force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the nineteenth century world of every state for itself. Among ourselves, we keep the law but when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle.” (13)

That the rougher methods of an earlier era have already been deployed against Zimbabwe is fairly obvious. The US, Britain and other “postmodern” states organize, fund and provide support to civil society groups within and outside Zimbabwe to bring down the Mugabe government. In place of the current government, Britain seeks a new government willing to accommodate “our values” and “our interests.”

As prime minister, Tony Blair even went so far as to privately argue for an invasion of Zimbabwe, but the head of the armed forces, General Sir Charles Guthrie, counseled Blair against it. You’d lose too many African allies, he warned. (14)

The Nazi Theory of International Relations

While Cooper seeks to give a pleasing gloss to his “we still need empires” view, it is at odds with the foundations of post-war international law. More than that, it is tantamount to the Nazi’s theory of international relations.

The Nuremberg Tribunal’s affirmation “of national sovereignty as the cornerstone of the international system…stood in marked contrast to the political philosophy of the Nazis, who had treated the concept of state sovereignty with contempt,” explains John Laughland.

Any state that intends to intervene in the affairs of other states for the purpose of dominating them will, naturally, express contempt for national sovereignty. This, NATO, and other “postmodern” states, began to do so in the run up to the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia – and have been doing so since.

“One can say,” adds Laughland, “that the commitment to non-interference in the internal affairs of states…is an attempt to institutionalize an anti-fascist theory of international relations.” (15) By the same token, an attempt to establish a justification for forcibly re-imposing colonial domination on independent Third World countries is an attempt to revivify a Nazi theory.

If you’re going to knock down the doors of other countries, you have to find some pretty reasons for doing so. People like Cooper, Roberts, Max Boot in the US, and liberals like Michael Ignatieff, are only too happy to supply the justification.

Our Interests and Values?

The imperial ideologues always eventually get around to pinning the necessity of the new imperialism on the pursuit of “our interests” and “our values,” implying that the interests of everyone in the West are common and that our values (also assumed to be homogeneous) have something vaguely to do with human rights. But are the interests of a bus driver in Liverpool the same as those of a London investment banker who collects board appointments? Which of these two has the greatest chance of shaping British foreign policy?

In a certain sense it is true that we all share interests in common. We share an interest in being free from violence. Pro-imperial ideologues cite this interest to justify the unapologetic resurrection of open imperialism. Unless we bring the war to them, they’ll bring the war to us. Unless we impose order, chaos will spread.

This is a good argument, if you’re trying to sell a Nazi theory of international relations. But it’s more likely that “our interests” and “our values” refer to the interests and values of the economic class that has a firm grip on the media and state. It’s not our interests and values that are being pursued, but theirs.

Investors, financial houses and corporations – tied to the media, universities and state in a thousand different ways — suck mountains of profits out of Third World countries. They have an interest in a muscular foreign policy to safeguard their investments and to open doors that have been closed by communist, socialist and economic nationalist governments that pursue social improvement, rather than foreign investment-friendly, objectives. Is it any surprise, then, that the media, conservative academics and state officials are rehabilitating colonialism?

In an article on Ian Smith in the Sunday Times, RW Johnson draws an invidious comparison between Smith’s Rhodesia and Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. Smith, he tells us, had “run the country and economy surprisingly well in the face of tough international sanctions,” unlike Mugabe, who has presided over an economy that has faltered under the weight of sanctions.

When “Mugabe gained power in 1980, Smith…rolled up every day at Government House to offer his help” and “Mugabe was delighted to accept” it. Significantly, “the two men worked happily together for some time, until one day Mugabe announced plans for sweeping nationalization. Smith told him bluntly he thought this a mistake. Their cooperation ended on the spot.” (16) And Zimbabwe, we’re to believe, from that point forward, began its descent into economic chaos.

In a certain respect, this is true. Britain, which still dominated Zimbabwe’s economy, had no truck for Mugabe’s nationalizations, and nor for his refusal to follow IMF prescriptions or his expropriation of farm land. These sins against private property — which Smith would have steered clear of — set off Britain’s resort to the rougher methods of an earlier era to push Mugabe aside. Along with its imperialist senior partner, the United States, Britain schemed to make Zimbabwe’s economy scream, hoping to galvanize Zimbabweans to throw Mugabe out of office, either at the polls or in the streets. Drought and region-wide energy shortages helped crank up the misery.

But what was the real problem? That Mugabe, as a black man, was too stupid to know how to run the country? Or that Mugabe took on white economic interests?

Conclusion

Politicians, journalists and academics, have launched an ideological assault to justify a new imperialism — an aggressive and expansionary foreign policy whose aim is to bring to heel countries resisting integration into the Anglo-American orbit.

Under the “enlightened” domination of the US and Britain these countries will be expected to open their doors to foreign investment, privatize state-owned enterprises, tear down tariff walls, and rescind performance requirements on foreign firms. Above all, they’ll be expected to respect the property Western investors and the decendants of white settlers lay claim to.

The assault is based on two deceptions.

The first is that that Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets once provided enlightened administration. The second is that we need (an American-led) empire to impose organization and order on chaos.

But much of the chaos in the Third World is a product of, not a reason for, Western intervention. Iraq was once a thriving modern secular state, until Anglo-American imperialism visited upon it chaos of unprecedented scope.

“We hear a lot about the rule of law, incorruptible government and economic progress, but the reality was tyranny, oppression, poverty and the unnecessary deaths of countless millions of human beings,” points out Cambridge historian Richard Drayton. (17)

And so it goes.

1. Seamus Milne, “New Labour, Old Britain,” Le Monde Diplomatique, May 2005
2. Jonathan Powell, “Why the West should not fear to intervene,” Observer, November 18, 2007
3. Robert Cooper, “Why we still need empires,” The Observer, April 7, 2002
4. Cooper
5. Peter Godwin, “If only Ian Smith had shown some imagination, then more of his people might live at peace,” The Observer, November 25, 2007
6. Quoted in Milne
7. Daily Mail, January 15, 2005
8. Godwin
9. Graham Boynton, “Ian Smith has sadly been proved right,” Telegraph, November 25, 2007
10. Ibid
11. Max Boot, “The case for American empire,” The Weekly Standard, October 15, 2001
12. Cooper
13. Ibid
14. Milne; Agence France Presse, November 21, 2007
15. John Laughland, Travesty: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the Corruption of International Justice, Pluto Press, 2007, p. 66
16. RW Johnson, “Lost paradise of the big white chief”, The Sunday Times, November 25, 2007
17. Quoted in Milne

Inversion of Perspective

By Stephen Gowans

According to today’s Washington Post “nearly three weeks after (Pakistan’s President Pervez) Musharraf declared emergency rule, sacked members of the Supreme Court and began a roundup of journalists, lawyers and human rights activists” George Bush said that Musharraf “truly is somebody who believes in democracy.”

Also today, The New York Times ran an obituary of Ian Smith, the former prime minister of apartheid Rhodesia, suggesting that compared to Mugabe, Smith wasn’t such a bad fellow after all.

You’d get the impression from the Times obituary that Smith and Mugabe are cut from the same repressive cloth, only Smith (a white man) knew how to run the economy while Mugabe (a black man) doesn’t.

“Political opposition to Mr. Mugabe’s regime has been suppressed with the same zeal as Mr. Smith himself once displayed in the fight against African nationalist strivings for majority rule,” the obituary says, with a breathtaking blindness to the true nature of the Smith regime.

Smith, as prime minister of an apartheid government, jailed Mugabe, but Mugabe, as president of an independent Zimbabwe, allowed Smith to go about his business, a free man, who continued to farm freely on two estates. If Mugabe was running a black supremacist apartheid state that oppressed whites and killed those who resisted, he would have long ago been hauled before a Western war crimes tribunal and shown the hangman’s noose.

Mugabe drew attention to this when he addressed the 62nd session of the UN General Assembly in September.

“Ian Smith is responsible for the death of well over 50,000 of my people. I bear scars of his tyranny which Britain and America condoned. I meet his victims everyday. Yet he walks free. He farms free. He talks freely, associates freely under a black government. We taught him democracy. We gave him back his humanity.

“He would have faced a different fate here (in the US) and in Europe if the 50,000 he killed were Europeans. Africa has not called for a Nuremberg trial against the white world which committed heinous crimes against its own humanity.

“It has not hunted perpetrators of this genocide, many of whom live to this day, nor has it got reparations from those who offended against it. Instead, it is Africa which is in the dock, facing trial from the same world that persecuted it for centuries.”

Smith was a racist to the end and the Times obituary gave him a platform to promote the ideology of white (Western) rule over Africa from the grave.

“I’m pleasantly surprised at the number of people who come to me and say, when you were in the chair, we thought you were too inflexible and unbending; we now see that you were right,” (about blacks being unable to manage their own affairs) he’s quoted as saying.

The obituary ends with Smith telling us that “There are millions of black people who say things were better when I was in control. I have challenged Mugabe to walk down the street with me and see who has most support. I have much better relations with black people than he does.”

When the New African magazine carried out a public opinion poll asking who the greatest Africans were, Smith’s name, not surprisingly, didn’t come up. Mugabe was ranked third, behind Nelson Mandela and Kwame Nkrumah.

So, what are we to make of this?

The West’s newspaper of record intimates that Smith and Mugabe share an equal brutality, but that the country was better off under Smith.

Musharraf truly does what Mugabe is only accused of doing, but, all the same, is rewarded with over $10 billion in US aid and is called someone who truly believes in democracy.

Musharraf (who Pakistanis call Busharraf for a reason) is acting as Washington’s strongman in Pakistan, promoting the project of Western domination. Mugabe, who would never be called Bush’s or Brown’s strongman, (except by certain leftist groups suffering from collective detachment from reality) is doing the opposite. For this crime against privileged interests in the West, he’s called the leader of a brutal regime.

It would be truly surprising if the local collaborators with Western imperialism weren’t rewarded with aid and honors, and equally surprising if fighters against Western imperialism weren’t vilified by West’s state officials and mimetic media.

Musharraf is a brutal dictator. Smith was a vile racist. Mugabe is neither of these things.

Looking For Evil In All The Wrong Places

There are dozens of US client states whose leaders fit the description “cruel dictator” who most people don’t know rig elections, jail opponents, close newspapers and start wars. On the other hand, there are a few leaders, invariably elected, who preside over governments that pursue traditional leftist goals of socialism or escape from neo-colonialism or both who many people understand incorrectly to be cruel dictators (Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, Alexander Lukashenko, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Robert Mugabe.) Government officials, news media and even many leftists in the West reserve the term cruel dictator for the opponents of imperialism, while saying virtually nothing about the real dictators who defend and promote Western strategic and economic interests at the expense of their own people. This essay focuses on Robert Mugabe, one leader the West vilifies as a cruel dictator, and compares the accusations made against him with the records of such US allies as Hosni Mubarak, Meles Zenawi, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, Mikheil Saakashvili and Pervez Musharraf.

By Stephen Gowans

The government of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe is accused by Western governments and assorted left-wing groups of breaching the civil and political liberties of Zimbabweans and of operating a human rights horror show. Were all of the accusations against Mugabe’s government true, Harare’s actions would still pale in comparison to those of scores of other governments that imperialist powers support and the anti-Mugabe left says nothing about. While the left critics of Mugabe are vociferous in their condemnation of the Zimbabwean president, and prepared to accept uncritically all damning accusations against him, they remain virtually silent on the grave assaults on civil and political liberties carried out by US client states.

The charge sheet against Mugabe includes intimidation of political opponents, restrictions on press freedoms and electoral fraud. But there are dozens of US client states whose leaders steal elections, shut down newspapers, arrest bloggers, jail opposition leaders and ban opposition political parties. These assaults on civil and political liberties are as grave, if not graver, than anything the Mugabe government has been accused of, and yet the leaders of these governments are not widely vilified in the West (though they are in their own countries.) The point, here, is not to engage in apologetics by saying that even if we assume all the charges against Mugabe are true his actions are still minor in comparison to those of scores of other governments, but to ask why imperialist powers, their media, and assorted left-wing groups remain virtually silent on the grave human rights violations committed by scores of other governments. Why Mugabe and not Seles or Mubarak?

North Africa

Those who rail against Mugabe as Africa’s great anti-democratic Satan appear to have failed to recognize that, in every country in north Africa, Islamist opposition parties have been banned. Significantly, these parties are acknowledged to be sufficiently popular to win large parliamentary blocs, if not outright majorities. (1) While Mugabe is accused of using the state to intimidate Zimbabwe’s main opposition party, he has never banned it, though some would say as a Western-created and funded organization, Zimbabwe’s Movement for Democratic Change, the MDC, ought to be banned. The MDC was cobbled together through funding provided by the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, the British equivalent of the US National Endowment for Democracy. The NED does overtly what the CIA used to covertly (i.e., destabilize foreign governments.) Both the Bush administration and the British government acknowledge that they are working with the opposition to bring down the Mugabe government. (2) Certainly, neither the US nor Britain would tolerate outside interference in their own electoral politics. Zimbabwe, held to a higher standard, is expected to, and does.

While Zimbabwe is sanctioned and demonized by the US, Egypt’s government, whose leader Hosni Mubarak rules with an iron fist, is showered with Washington’s largesse, and only occasionally shows up on the radar screens of the West’s anti-Mugabe left. Mubarak, and his son Gamal — who is expected to succeed his father as president, and not through means that would be considered fair in the West — are regarded by Egyptians as US lackeys. (3) Mubarak bans the Muslim Brotherhood, a party strong enough to unseat him, and by implication, to end US domination of Egypt. He also jails opposition figures, locks up bloggers who criticize him, but receives over $1 billion a year in US military aid. The US may present itself as the world’s champion of civil and political liberties, but it rewards dozens of states that severely limit formal political rights with billions of dollars in aid. In return, foreign strongmen keep their countries open to US trade and investment, carry out proxy wars on Washington’s behalf, and repress their own populations.

Late last year, Mubarak announced a full-scale retreat from the social security gains of the 50s and 60s. The socialist principles the country adopted in the 60s would be scrapped to establish conditions more favorable to the profit-making interests of US banks, corporations and investors. (4) This came in the wake of strides the government had already taken to impose neo-liberal reforms, which have seen illiteracy rise and social services crumble, in a country teeming with the poor.

The Muslim Brotherhood, banned since 1954, has moved in to fill the gaps left by the retreating state, setting up clinics, nurseries and after-school tutoring. (5) Hezbollah, in a similar way, has built support in southern Lebanon by providing social services the state won’t provide. Not surprisingly, the Muslim Brotherhood’s popularity has soared. Its members, running as independents, contested 161 seats in the 454 member Egyptian parliament, and won 88 of them. Mubarak countered by rounding up hundreds of party members (paralleling the Israeli practice of jailing Hamas legislators.)

The comparison with Zimbabwe is instructive. The MDC operates freely and has contested elections. But unlike the banned Muslim Brotherhood, the freely operating MDC favors a neo-liberal tyranny. This is no surprise, given the MDC’s connections to the dominant economic interests in Britain and the United States.

In September, an Egyptian “judge ordered a year’s hard labor for the editors of four leading opposition newspapers, saying they had made the ruling party, Mubarak, and his son Gamal, appear dictatorial.” (6) Had Mugabe jailed the editors of Zimbabwe’s opposition newspapers, complaining they had portrayed him as a dictator, the story would be blanketed across the Western media, state officials in the West would howl with outrage, and demands would be made for immediate intervention to turn back Mugabe’s intolerable tyranny. Soon after, three more opposition journalists were sentenced to two year prison terms for impugning Egypt’s justice system. On top of this, an Egyptian human rights organization was banned. One thousand of its members have been jailed over the past year. Perhaps all the indignation of newspaper editorial writers, Western state officials, and various left-wing groups was exhausted in denunciations of Mugabe. It certainly hasn’t been exhausted in denunciations of Mubarak.

Jordan

Jordan, a centralized monarchy with a largely ceremonial parliament, jailed government critic Toujan al-Faisal for criticizing the state’s auto-insurance policies. Author Ahmad Oweidi, who wrote e-mails critical of the government, was arrested for harming the government’s reputation. (7) By comparison, the Mugabe government not only tolerates critics but also tolerates those who openly call for its forcible removal. Hajia Aminata Sow, a retired Guinean jurist attended NGO meetings in Zimbabwe at which “speaker after speaker openly advocated for forcible removal of Mugabe’s government.” She was astonished the speakers weren’t arrested. (8) The principal leaders of the opposition routinely threaten violence to drive Mugabe from office, but nevertheless remain free to continue to call for insurrection. MDC faction leader Morgan Tsvangirai’s threats began early on, and have continued since. In 2000, he told Mugabe that if he didn’t step down peacefully, “we will remove you violently.” (9) The then Archbishop of Bulawayo Pius Ncube told the London Sunday Times that he thought “it is justified for Britain to raid Zimbabwe and remove Mugabe.” He complained that though he was ready “to lead the people, guns blazing” nobody was willing to follow him. (10) Last Easter, the Roman Catholic Church posted messages on church bulletin boards around the country calling on Mugabe to leave office or face “open revolt.” Mugabe’s failure to step down, the Church warned, would lead to bloodshed and a mass uprising. (11) Arthur Mutambara, leader of a breakaway MDC faction, pledged to “remove Robert Mugabe…with every tool at my disposal.” Asked what tools he was referring to, Mutambara replied, “We’re not going to rule out or in anything – the sky’s the limit.” (12) Unlike Jordanians Toujan al-Faisal and Ahmad Oweidi, who were jailed for merely criticizing their government, Tsvangairai, Ncube and Mutambara are free to issue threats to remove the Mugabe government through extra-constitutional means, to call on foreign powers to impose sanctions, and to importune a former colonial power to intervene militarily – a freedom few governments, including those in the West, are willing to grant. In light of revelations that Britain has considered attacking Zimbabwe on several occasions (13) and that the US is bankrolling opposition activities aimed at regime change (14) some measure of restriction on fifth column activities is wholly justified and is a necessary part of defending the gains of Zimbabwe’s program of breaking free of neo-colonial domination. If Mugabe is to be criticized, he should be criticized for allowing agents of imperialism too much latitude, not too little.

On top of the Jordanian government’s other affronts to civil and political liberties, it can be faulted for drawing electoral boundaries to favor rural areas in which support for pro-government parties is strong, threatening to ban election monitors, and ordering soldiers to vote for pro-government candidates. (15) Such blatant contempt for basic standards of representative democracy, displayed by the Mugabe government, would elicit howls of outrage from Whitehall and indignant editorials calling for immediate action, from an escalation of sanctions to military intervention. But Jordan, a US ally, can practice a tyranny that exceeds anything Mugabe is accused of, without comment. George Bush calls Mugabe’s government “a brutal regime.” (16) Washington’s March 2006 National Security Strategy refers to Zimbabwe as a “stronghold of tyranny.” Jordan, which fits these categories, is called neither of these things.

The Philippines

In the Philippines another US ally, president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, is waging an all-out war against communist militants. Karapatan, a Philippines human rights organization, has documented 900 cases of extra-judicial killings, in which the Philippine military has hunted down militants and summarily executed them. Human Rights Watch complains that in failing to prosecute members of the military implicated in the killings, Arroyo has failed to uphold international law. But the larger crime lies in the fact that an all-out war (i.e., one outside the rule of law) is being waged to eliminate a militant opposition. (17) Dispatching the military to take out members of a political opposition, even if it is a militant one, would be loudly decried as a heinous crime, meriting military intervention on humanitarian grounds, if undertaken by a leader of a country resisting imperialist domination. Were the Zimbabwean military to hunt down MDC militants for summary execution, there would be no end to the incensed cries for justice from the West. It’s no so outlandish to suggest a war crimes tribunal would be established, and the accused dragged before the court. Arroyo, however, can hunt down and exterminate as many militant opponents as she likes, with little fear anyone in the West will notice, and even less fear of being dragged before a tribunal. Tribunals are reserved for leaders who resist imperial domination, not accept, welcome and promote it.

In Zimbabwe, “there are frequent calls by the opposition party and its allied trade unions for street protests. Once, in what they termed as the ‘Final Push’, the opposition called for a march on the State House, the seat of government, for its overthrow. No government folds its arms in the face of such provocations. And when the police are used to restore law and order, it becomes a human rights violation.” (18) That is, in Zimbabwe and elsewhere outside the US imperial orbit. Inside, it becomes a justified police action to restore law and order.

The Mugabe government was roundly criticized earlier this year for a crackdown on demonstrators, especially when police beat Morgan Tsvangirai, who had tried to force his way past police lines into a police station. Demonstrations had been banned in the wake of several fire-bombing incidents, but the opposition chose to defy the ban. When the police moved in to disperse demonstrators, the opposition, predictably, cried foul, and the Western media, NGOs (funded by Western governments), opposition newspapers, and Western state officials echoed the cry.

Not too many weeks later, 900 German police officers swept down on 40 sites in half a dozen German cities in a “show of force against potentially violent demonstrators” who were planning to protest outside the G8 summit. German authorities said they were investigating 18 people they believed were planning fire-bombings. (19) Although clearly intended to intimidate a civil opposition movement, no hue and cry was raised at the heavy-handed tactics of the German police. The protests that accompanied the actions of Zimbabwe’s authorities were, however, deafening, even though actual, and not anticipated, fire-bombings had occurred in Zimbabwe. A show of force by 900 Zimbabwean police swooping down on hundreds of MDC activists to prevent possible fire-bombings would have been denounced by state officials, journalists and various left groups in the West as blatant political intimidation, the work of a strongman. The German incident passed virtually unnoticed.

Ethiopia and Somalia

The Meles government of Ethiopia receives hundreds of millions of dollars in military and humanitarian aid from the US and Britain. These injections have been used to build one of the largest and strongest armies in Africa, which stands ready to be deployed to enlarge and defend US and British economic and strategic interests in the Horn of Africa. Ethiopian forces invaded neighboring Somalia late last year at the behest of US officials, a blatant violation of international law on par with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, for which Ethiopia has not been censured at the UN, bombed by a coalition of the willing, or sanctioned by the international community. No one has denounced Meles as a strongman, said the world would be a better place without him, or deplored the humanitarian disaster the invasion has touched off. An estimated 850,000 Somalis have been displaced, almost one-tenth of the population. (20) The New York Times acknowledges that “the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa may not be unfolding in Darfur” but in Somalia. (21) The head of the United Nations humanitarian operations in Somalia complains that “if this were happening in Darfur, there would be a big fuss.” (22) But it’s not happening in Darfur, it’s happening in Somalia, as a result of an illegal invasion undertaken by Ethiopia, assisted by US military forces, and at the request of the United States. It’s for this reason there has been no big fuss. Washington had pushed for the invasion to oust a popular Islamist government Somalis had embraced and to restore the rule of the unpopular US-backed government that US firms had been planning undercover missions to support, with the full knowledge of the CIA. (23) For doing the West’s bidding in this and other ways, the murderous Meles was handpicked by then British Prime Minister Tony Blair to sit on Britain’s Commission for Africa, to lead the “African renaissance.”

Meles’ repugnant behavior goes further than this. Following Ethiopia’s May 2005 general election, which the opposition claimed was rigged, Ethiopian authorities opened fire on protesters, killing 193 people. Thousands of opposition supporters and leaders were rounded up and jailed. Meles asked that the death penalty be imposed on 38 opposition leaders, including the founder of the Ethiopian Human Rights Council, a former UN war crimes prosecutor and the mayor-elect of Addis Ababa. The court rejected Meles’ request, but imposed life sentences (overturned after the US, embarrassed by its client’s actions, intervened.)

Meles is all that Mugabe is accused of being, and more. He’s a strongman who rigs elections, and then beats, shoots at, jails and threatens to execute the opposition when it protests. He’s a war criminal. And he’s the architect of an unfolding humanitarian tragedy. Yet 99 percent of those who rail against Mugabe have never heard of Meles. How curious that Meles, whose government has engaged in far more repressive actions than any Mugabe has even been accused of, is showered with honors and aid, while Mugabe is treated as Africa’s version of Hitler. How curious that such patently silly charges as come from some fairly visible Western leftists can be made (among them that Mugabe is, appearances aside, an agent of imperialism ), while the same people have next to nothing to say about such conspicuous agents of imperialism as Meles and Mubarak.

Pakistan

Only recently, after Pakistan’s military ruler Pervez Musharraf invoked a state of emergency, has Western media coverage and left-wing commentary got around to lambasting Musharaff for his restrictions on civil and political liberties. Significantly, this sudden concern for human rights coincides with Washington’s realizing that Musharraf has lost control and bungled the war against militants on Afghanistan’s border. The Bush regime is making clear to Pakistan’s military, and in particular, to the favored successor to Musharraf, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, that the $1 billion in military aid it receives every year is in jeopardy, unless Musharraf is gently pushed aside. Washington would like a civilian president to be appointed to douse the flames of growing civil unrest, who would call for new elections. De facto power, however, would remain with the military, and, by implication, with Washington, through the leverage over Pakistan’s military its substantial military aid provides.

One would think the sudden flowering of concern for human rights in Pakistan is a reflection of Musharaff doing a sudden about-face, but the Pakistani strongman is doing nothing new. He has been arresting opposition activists and blocking transmission of TV coverage critical of his rule for some time, and he has been doing so with the full knowledge of his paymasters in Washington. (Pakistanis call their president Busharraf, an acknowledgement of Musharraf’s role as a proxy for Washington.) Even so, the various left-wing groups, and the Western media, who seem to know no limit when it comes to denouncing Mugabe’s government for imagined lapses, have been largely silent on the human rights violations of Musharraf’s government, until now. Now that it serves US interests to harp on Musharraf’s generous abridgment of liberties in Pakistan in order to justify his removal have the Western media and pro-imperialist left decided to loudly condemn Musharraf.

Press Freedom

While there are two state-owned newspapers in Zimbabwe, The Herald and Sunday Mail, most newspapers, including the Zimbabwe Independent, The Standard, Financial Gazette, The Zimbabwean and The Mail & Guardian of South Africa are pro-opposition and are sold freely on the streets. You would think, from the tales that are told about Zimbabwe, that there are no opposition newspapers and that they have all been closed by a tyrannical government that brooks no opposition. On the other hand, press freedoms are restricted in dozens of countries in which US strongmen rule as virtual dictators, and yet these affronts against freedom of the press are barely acknowledged, let alone condemned. This is another case of the Mugabe government being demonized for something it hasn’t done, while those who are actually engaged in practices the Mugabe government is accused of, get a pass because they are US client states.

The list of US allies that have jailed journalists or banned newspapers or both is endless. An impartial list, counting only recent crackdowns on press freedoms: Saudi Arabia, a human rights horror show if ever there was one, but one that rarely provokes much complaint from Western state officials, the media and the left groups that deplore the Mugabe government, recently banned a leading Arab newspaper, al-Hayat, because one of the newspaper’s columnists criticized the government.” (24) In September, Egypt’s Mubarak government sentenced four newspaper editors to one year jail sentences, and sentenced three journalists to two-year prison terms, because they criticized the government and made Mubarak look like a dictator. (25) In Georgia, the darling of the Rose Revolution, Mikheil Saakashvili, has moved to crush the Rose Revolution II, in part by violently closing down the country’s most popular television station, because, he said, it was fomenting a coup. (26) Predictably, the people power enthusiasts who thrilled at protests against US target governments in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine and Zimbabwe, have shown no interest in the people power protests of Hezbollah supporters against the US-supported Lebanese government or of Georgians against Washington’s man in Tbilisi, Saakashvili. It seems that what represents a genuine expression of people power depends on whether it is instigated and bankrolled by the West and elevated to significance by the Western media.

Saakashvili deserves more attention from the anti-Mugabe left than he gets. The color revolution poster boy is described by many of the tens of thousands of demonstrators who marched against his government in early November in a way that is reminiscent of the picture the anti-Mugabe forces paint of Mugabe. He is described as “domineering and abrasive.” His opponents accuse him of “hoarding and abusing power, and of running the nation through a clique that will neither tolerate dissent nor engage in dialogue with the opposition, which Mr. Saakashvili has repeatedly made clear he despises and considers weak.” On top of that “the government also faces pressure from rising prices and lingering underemployment” and “economic conditions remain difficult enough that many Georgians travel abroad for work.” (27) Surely, those who thunder against Mugabe should be expressing their outraged indignation at Saakashvili, for, in the real world, Saakashvili is all they imagine Mugabe to be. Tony Blair’s chief of staff for 10 years, Jonathan Powell, says that Britain should intervene militarily in Zimbabwe, rather than standing back and watching Zimbabweans suffer. (28) He’s silent on Georgia.

Charges of Economic Mismanagement

On top of accusing Mugabe of rigging elections, repressing the opposition and stifling a free press, the Zimbabwean president is also accused of grossly mismanaging the Zimbabwean economy, turning the breadbasket of southern Africa into a basket-case. Even if you show that all the other accusations against Mugabe are gross hyperbole at best, and that there are dozens of other governments doing with impunity what Mugabe’s government is falsely accused of, one charge remains: Mugabe has wrecked Zimbabwe’s economy by carrying out a misguided land redistribution program.

There’s no doubt Zimbabwe is in the grips on an economic crisis. Food and electricity shortages plague the country. But not all of Zimbabwe’s economic problems are unique. In fact, many of its problems are part of a wider pattern of scarcity in sub-Saharan Africa. Last summer, The Washington Post (29) pointed out that “daily power outages are forcing Zimbabweans to light fires to cook and to heat water.” The result is that wood poaching has stripped nearly 500 acres of conservation woodland. But what the Post didn’t point out was that it’s not only Zimbabweans, but people throughout sub-Saharan Africa, who are stripping forests bare to provide heat and cooking fuel. (30) Because rolling power blackouts are depriving southern Africans of electricity to cook their food, they’re turning to wood fires. Drought, climbing oil prices, and the chaos caused by the privatization of formerly state-owned power companies have created an “unprecedented” power crisis that not only affects Zimbabwe, but Zambia, Nigeria, Angola, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Uganda and Togo. Even South Africa was hit by rolling blackouts in January and sporadic power failures continue to bedevil the country.

But it is in Zimbabwe alone that the electricity shortages are attributed to economic mismanagement. The Washington Post noted that Zimbabwe’s “power, water, health and communications systems are collapsing,” and that “there are acute shortages of staple foods and gasoline.” These problems are attributed to economic mismanagement and Harare’s land reform policies. But acute food and gasoline shortages are common to neighboring countries. If Zimbabwe is short of gasoline, “Uganda’s gas stations are…short of diesel for vehicles.” (31) If there are shortages of food staples in Zimbabwe, there are close to two dozen other sub-Saharan countries that are contending with food scarcity, according to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization. Since neighboring countries have not pursued Zimbabwe’s fast track land reform policies, and have tended to shy away from the economic indigenization policies Harare favors, gasoline, electricity and food shortages can hardly be attributed to policies uniquely pursued by Harare.

Sanctions

The US and its Western allies use sanctions to pressure Zimbabwe to adopt policies that welcome, promote and defend foreign ownership. The former US ambassador to Zimbabwe, Christopher Dell, urged Mugabe to “implement the market reforms the IMF and others, including the United States, have been recommending.” Dell emphasized “the importance of a free-market economy and security of property,” which is to say, abandonment of the expropriation policies Harare has used to redistribute land to Africans. (32) It’s clear that sanctions would be lifted if Mugabe were to return Zimbabwe to neo-colonialism.

The sanctions, imposed by the US and EU, deny Zimbabwe access to international development aid. NGOs, following the Western governments that provide their funding, have also cut off assistance. These aren’t trade sanctions, but even so they have a devastating bite, making region-wide drought and the oil-price-rise-induced energy shortages more acute. It may seem as if Mugabe has mismanaged the economy, but Zimbabwe’s economic troubles are exogenous: drought and oil price increases, worsened by economic sanctions. In a pastoral letter issued last spring, 13 Anglican bishops and one canon of the Anglican Church, observed that Zimbabwe’s economic troubles have “been exacerbated by the economic sanctions imposed by the Western countries” which have “affected the poor Zimbabweans who have borne the brunt of the sanctions.” The clergymen called upon “the Western countries to lift the economic sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe.” (33) To paraphrase Tim Beal, who has followed the effects of sanctions on north Korea, sanctions have three great advantages for the West. They cause virtually no pain to Americans and Europeans, they produce no Western casualties, and the results – the misery of ordinary Zimbabweans – can be blamed on Mugabe, which in turn is produced as evidence the sanctions are desirable and necessary. (34)

Conclusion

Edward Herman points out that “in the real world, both Musharraf and the Shah of Iran fit comfortably the category of ‘cruel dictator,’ whereas (Iranian president Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad does not.” And yet when Ahmadinejad visited Columbia University this year he was a called a ‘cruel dictator’ by university president Lee Bollinger. When Musharraf visited Columbia, Bollinger showered the Pakistani strongman with praise, calling him “a leader of global importance” and gushed “it is rare we have a leader of his stature at campus.” (35) Likewise, while in the real world Musharraf, Mubarak and Seles fit the description of cruel dictators, Mugabe, who was elected in a contest the Southern African Development Community declared to be free and fair, does not. Still, if you polled 100 people who claim to be well-informed, 99 would, like Bollinger, echo a line that reflects the interests of Western powers in demonizing a leader who opposes “our interests” and “our values”, to borrow the rhetoric of Blair advisor Jonathan Powell. What it’s important to recognize is that “our” does not refer to you and me, but to the dominant economic interests of the US and Britain, who would profit from Mugabe adopting IMF reforms, a free market, and safeguarding the property rights (of foreign firms and descendants of European settlers.)

What Western state officials and the media who amplify their words say about Zimbabwe should be considered critically and treated with the skepticism that is due highly partial sources that have well-established records of making false accusations (Western governments) and uncritically propagating them (the Western media.) One need point no further than the weapons of mass destruction that never were to make the case that what the US and Britain say and the media passes on should be considered with a healthy dose of skepticism. In taking on the project of liberating the country from neo-colonial domination, the Mugabe government has challenged powerful interests in the West. We should expect that Western governments, Western news media and NGOs (which are funded by wealthy Westerners to promote their privileged interests under the guise of doing good works) to be hostile to the Mugabe government, and to portray it accordingly. By the same token, we should expect these same forces to portray the affronts against international law and civil and political liberties of states that act to defend and promote privileged interests in the West in a dispassionate, if not, apologetic manner, according them little notice. The Bollingers and Blairs of the world will continue to bestow honors and flattery upon cruel dictators who serve US and British interests, while reserving the label ‘cruel dictator’ for leaders of struggles against imperial domination. We need not follow the same pro-imperialist practice. Politicians, state officials, university presidents, CEOs, NGOs, and editorial writers are not politically neutral. When we mimic their positions on foreign affairs, we’re not showing solidarity with all oppressed people, though we might think we are in opposing the people dominant Western interests call ‘cruel dictators’. More often than not we’re showing solidarity with people who are accepting money from Western powers to oppose governments motivated by traditional leftist values of socialism or national liberation. At the same time, we’re failing to show solidarity with people oppressed by strongmen the US has brought to power to ensure Western corporate and financial interests prevail over the interests of local populations.

1. New York Times, April 15, 2007
2. Guardian, August 22, 2002
3. New York Times, September 20, 2006
4. Al-Ahram Weekly, February 21, 2007
5. Guardian, July 19, 2007
6. Washington Post, October 1, 2007
7. Los Angeles Times, August 14, 2007
8. Hajia Aminata Sow, “Zimbabwe: Burying the truth,” New African, November 2007
9. BBC, September 30, 2000
10. The Sunday Times, July 1, 2007
11. The Herald, April 15, 2007
12. Times Online, March 5, 2006
13. According to General Lord Charles Guthrie, The Sunday Mail, November 18, 2007
14. US State Department, “Supporting Human Rights and Democracy: The US Record, 2006”, http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/shrd/2006/
15. New York Times, November 11, 2007
16. Address to the United Nations General Assembly, September 25, 2007
17. New York Times, June 29, 2007
18. Hajia Aminata Sow
19. New York Times, May 10, 2007
20. Washington Post, November 14, 2007
21. New York Times, November 20, 2007
22. Ibid
23. New York Times, December 14, 2006; Observer, September 10, 2006
24. Financial Times, August 29, 2007
25. Washington Post, October 1, 2007
26. New York Times, November 8, 2007; New York Times, November 18, 2007
27. New York Times, November 3, 2007
28. Jonathan Powell, “Why the West should not fear to intervene,” Observer, November 18, 2007
29. July 28, 2007
30. New York Times, July 29, 2007
31. Ibid
32. Christopher Dell, “Response to Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe monetary policy statement,” February 7, 2007
33. Pastoral letter issued by 14 Anglican bishops and one canon of the Anglican Church, Province of Central Africa, April 12, 2007
34. Pyongyang Report, October, 2007, http://www.vuw.ac.nz/~caplabtb/dprk/pyr9_4.mht
35. “More Nuggets From A Nut House, reprinted from Z Magazine at http://www.globalresearch.ca, November 17, 2007

Blair’s Goebbels Justifies Wars of Aggression

The Nazis held the idea of national sovereignty in contempt and would have had little patience with a national sovereignty-based international law. The reasons are obvious. The Nazis needed to justify their wars of aggression and the idea of the inviolability of national sovereignty stood in the way.

In the following essay, Jonathan Powell, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s chief of staff for 10 years, embraces Nazi foreign policy, without actually mentioning (or recognizing) it’s Nazi foreign policy he’s embracing. He argues that military interventions in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq were just, and that interventions elsewhere, including in Zimbabwe, would defend “our” interests and values, and should be pursued without hesitation.

Although he doesn’t say it, “our” does not refer to you and me, but to the dominant economic interests of the US and Britain, who have an interest in Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe adopting IMF reforms, a free market, and safeguarding property rights. Likewise, NATO’s war of aggression on Yugoslavia served dominant Western economic interests in dismantling Yugoslavia’s socialism, while the conquest of Iraq serves US and British oil interests.

The problem is, it’s difficult to elicit popular support for a policy of plunder, despoliation, renewed colonialism and aggressive war. Imperialist aggression has to be dressed up in the rhetoric of a high moral mission, if the public’s consent, cooperation, and at minimum, acquiescence is to be secured. Goebbels played the role of investing Nazi imperialism with a moral gravitas. Powell does the same for Anglo-American imperialism.  

Why the West should not fear to intervene

Jonathan Powell
Sunday November 18, 2007

Observer
The principle of non-interference in other nations’ affairs was established by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and brought to an end the 30 Years War. Unprecedented devastation had been visited on the continent by armies trying to impose the Reformation or the Counter-Reformation on neighbouring states and the two sides had fought themselves to a draw. The monarchs of the day decided to bring these wars to a permanent end. In future, it would be OK to defend yourself against attack and OK to fight over territory or succession, but countries could no longer fight for ideas.

The principle of non-interference lasted through the succeeding centuries and was regularly invoked by the Soviet Union. We in the West used it as an excuse to avoid doing anything about the Hungarian Uprising or the Prague Spring. It was morally questionable but probably sensible in a nuclear-backed stand-off.

The world has changed since then. Intervening in another country no longer risks tipping the two superpowers into global war, because there is only one superpower. More important, the force of globalisation has changed the world. With 24-hour news, massive global travel and migration, the world has become a much smaller place.

So whether or not isolationism was ever sensible or moral, it is no longer practical. We can’t protect our industries from competition by erecting tariff barriers and we can’t protect our citizens from terrorist attack simply by better border controls. If we stand by while other peoples are brutally suppressed in other parts of the world, from Kosovo to Iraq, and if we turn a blind eye when countries disintegrate into anarchy, as we did in Afghanistan and Somalia, we will face the consequences at home. And that is why what is happening now in Pakistan is so important to us.

Let me look at the lessons to be drawn from the 10 years of the Blair administration and our four wars. First, Sierra Leone. We could hardly claim self-defence for our military action there. As it was a success, no one questioned its theoretical justification. Now, with a democratic change of government in Sierra Leone, and democratic government established in neighbouring Liberia, there is real hope for the people of that part of West Africa.

Kosovo was trickier. First, the Clinton administration did not want to deploy ground troops after what had happened in Somalia. We applied pressure because we believed, correctly, it was impossible to win the war from the air. They did the right thing and Milosevic crumbled. But we never managed to secure UN support for the war because of the Russian veto. No one in the West questioned that because the operation was a success.

Afghanistan, again, was not self-defence. The ultimatum to the Taliban was clear – give up al-Qaeda or we will topple your regime. And that is what the US did. This time, no one complained, even though the intervention has not yet been a sustained success.

Iraq was the most difficult, even if not very different theoretically from our other interventions. No one in their right mind would wish to see the blood-letting and chaos that is going on in Iraq today. There is no point in trying to pretend it is all a wonderful success. But equally, I don’t think there are many people in Iraq or the rest of the world who want Saddam back. There was, however, a problem with the justification of the invasion – the holding of weapons of mass destruction in breach of UN resolutions. We now know Saddam didn’t have them. But to suggest it was all a conspiracy between Tony Blair and George W Bush to pretend he did is nonsense. We believed he had them, as did pretty much every other government in the world, whatever they say now. We didn’t kit our troops up in chemical warfare suits in the desert every time a missile was fired just for fun. So suggesting it was all a matter of Alastair Campbell cobbling together a dossier to pretend there were weapons of mass destruction is nonsense.

We should have been clear we were removing Saddam because he was a ruthless dictator suppressing his people. But the lawyers said there was no legal basis for proceeding on these grounds, and so we were not able to make this case as wholeheartedly as I would have liked.

Next the UN. The argument goes that we should not have intervened without a second United Nations Security Council resolution. But we intervened in Kosovo without such a resolution. The two crucial differences from Afghanistan and Kosovo were that a) we could not get a majority of countries on our side and b) we were not successful on the ground.

One of the reasons we argued so hard for a second resolution and tried so hard to get countries such as Mexico and Chile on side was that we believed if things got difficult in Iraq, we would do much better if we had the balance of the international community with us. And it is clearly true that if we had secured that support, we would be in a different place today, with a major UN role in Iraq and majority support around the world.

So if success on the ground was one of the big differences with Kosovo, why were we so relatively unsuccessful in Iraq? The biggest failing in my view was not fully to understand the consequences of our intervention. When you remove a brutal dictator who has annihilated all opposition for 30 years, it is inevitable you will face a period of anarchy when he is gone. All the basics of an ordinary society and law and order are not there. And when you superimpose that on a country where the minority, the Sunni, have ruled the majority, the Shia, for centuries, and you are trying to replace that with a majoritarian regime, it takes a long time to shake out the problems.

Let me draw some lessons from our 10 years of experience. We need a rules-based system. As other big countries rise to be superpowers they will have very different value systems from us. So it is in the US interest, as it is in the interest of medium-sized powers like the UK, to have the rule of law applied internationally as it is domestically.

We need a strong and reformed UN Security Council with the addition of Japan, Germany, India and Brazil. We need to make sure we have effective alliances that allow intervention to be undertaken when it can’t be done by medium-sized countries like ours alone. That means working with France to develop effective European intervention forces. And most of all it means trying to ensure that the US does not revert to isolationism. If it withdraws into itself as it did after Vietnam and Somalia, I fear it will face another 9/11 and all the rest of us will suffer.

We need to be better prepared for the aftermath of intervention. We weren’t properly prepared in Kosovo, in Afghanistan or in Iraq. It is no good saying as Donald Rumsfeld did, ‘We don’t do nation building.’ That is exactly what we do need to be able to do.

In making the argument for interventionism, I am not suggesting we should go around invading countries willy-nilly. Tony Blair’s Chicago speech of 1998, in which he made the case for liberal interventionism, set out five conditions in which intervention may be appropriate and I think these still hold:

1. We need to be sure of our case. War is a very imperfect instrument for righting wrongs, but armed force is sometimes the only way of replacing dictatorships.
2. Have we exhausted all diplomatic options? We should always give peace every chance.
3. Are there practical and sensible military options? Sending gunboats to Zimbabwe won’t work.
4. Are we prepared for the long term? We talk about exit strategies, but we cannot just walk away when a fight is over.
5. Do we have national interests engaged? That does not mean oil, but do we promote our own security better by protecting the rights of others in a particular situation?

I think there are cases today where the application of those tests would lead to a more robust approach.

Take Burma. What about actually doing something about the obscene regime of the generals? Are we just spectators as the monks march and are killed? Of course, the primary responsibility lies in the hands of its neighbours, but we can do far more to encourage them to be more robust in their attitudes.

Or Zimbabwe? Mugabe can use anything we say or do to stir the dying embers of anti-colonialism. And again, the primary responsibility lies with its neighbours, particularly South Africa, but are we really saying we just have to watch while his people suffer?
What are we going to do in Iraq? The first thing is to recognise that the solution is political rather than military. Now the danger of the country splitting apart is past, it is the moment to concentrate on trying to get the Shia and Sunni to come to an accommodation. Once the Sunnis have come to terms with sharing power with the Shia, our task will be done. It is only when there is a political settlement that we will be able to leave.

In Iran, I am not in favour of a military option because I don’t think it is practical. No one is suggesting invading Iran to overthrow the regime. That is the task of the overwhelmingly young population that wants to be rid of the corrupt mullahs. The difficulty we face is one of timelines. The regime will be overthrown. And if there was a democratic and stable regime in place, I suppose, as in the case of India, we would not object so much to a nuclear-armed Iran. But we don’t know when it will be overthrown. In the meantime, they are developing nuclear weapons, helping attacks on our troops in Iraq and in Afghanistan and supporting Hizbollah and Hamas. Western policymakers have yet to come up with a way of dealing with these different timelines and I do not have the answer either, although I suspect it lies in a combination of sanctions targeted on the regime. There is nothing like measures that affect the bank accounts of the Republican Guard to get their attention quickly.

My former boss is fond of saying that the political divide that matters in the world now is not that between left and right but that between open and closed. The threat we face is from those that advocate isolationism, protectionism and nativism – and it is striking how the debate on immigration has taken off in Europe and in the US. The enemy are the people who want to divide us into groups, to turn people against one another and take society backwards. The only hope we have is that those who want openness, tolerance and progress still have the political will to fight that battle and resist the tide of Luddism.

I believe the idea of liberal interventionism will survive as the best way of defending our interests and the moral way of promoting our values.

Darfur vs. Ogaden, Mugabe vs. Meles

If the neutral left is really neutral, why does it keep coming down hard on the West’s official enemies while ignoring the West’s henchmen?

By Stephen Gowans

Many left activists and progressives claim to be equally opposed to oppression, whether practiced by the friends of imperialist powers or their enemies, but are virtually silent on the well documented oppressions of such US client states as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Ethiopia, while exhibiting an uncritical zeal in denouncing the enemies of Anglo-American imperialism, often for crimes that have been exaggerated or invented to be used as pretexts for Western intervention and fulfillment of imperialist goals.

There is no better illustration of this tendency to profess principled neutrality while regularly exhibiting a pro-imperialist bias, than the current obsession with the alleged genocide in Darfur and the claims of unjustified political oppression in Zimbabwe, while a virtually unremarked series of crimes and oppressions is carried out by the US and British client government of Meles Zenawi in Ethiopia.

In an anti-guerilla war conducted in the country’s Ogaden region, “Ethiopian troops are burning villages, raping women and killing civilians as part of a systematic campaign to drive them from their homes.” Refugees say dozens of villages have been destroyed and have “accused the Ethiopian government of forcibly starving its own people by preventing food convoys reaching villages and destroying crops and livestock.”*

“A former Ethiopian soldier who defected from the army said how he had been ordered to burn villages and kill all their inhabitants. He said the Ethiopian air force would bomb a village before a unit of ground troops followed, firing indiscriminately at civilians. ‘Men, women, children – we killed them all,’ he said.”

The little-known conflict in Ogaden parallels the more widely known war in Darfur. The conflict began when rebels killed scores of Ethiopian guards and Chinese employees at a Chinese-run oil field. The government replied with a harsh crackdown.

“Human rights investigators are gathering evidence of widespread use of rape, with women reporting gang-rapes by up to a dozen soldiers. In some villages, men have been abducted at night, their bodies dumped in the village the next morning.

“While in Darfur, aid agencies have been able to establish camps and provide humanitarian support, they have been blocked from setting up operations in the Ogaden. The International Committee of the Red Cross has been thrown out and Medicins Sans Frontieres has also been prevented from working. Journalists trying to enter have also been banned – those that have tried have been promptly arrested.”

But while neutral leftists have worked themselves into a state of high moral dudgeon over Sudan’s counter-insurgency in Darfur, which “has been described by the US as ‘genocide’ and by the UN as ‘crimes against humanity’”, they have been virtually silent on Ethiopia, a recipient of US and British military and humanitarian aid.

“America’s top official on African affairs, assistant secretary of state, Jendayi Frazer, visited one town in the Ogaden last month.

“On her return to Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, she criticized the rebels and said the reports of military abuses were merely allegations. ‘We urge any and every government to respect human rights and to try to avoid civilian casualties but that’s difficult in dealing with an insurgency,’ she said.”

The West’s official enemies are never allowed the same latitude in dealing with their own (often US and British financed and instigated) insurgencies – a double standard backed by neutral leftists through their voluble condemnations of the anti-insurgency efforts of official enemies and comparative silence on those of Western client states.

“The US provides some $283m (£140m) in military and humanitarian aid to Ethiopia and has trained its military – one of the largest and strongest in Africa.”

Compare Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe with Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. For trying to invest Zimbabwean independence with real content (land reform and indigenization of the economy), Mugabe has been calumniated by British and US officials and the Western media as a strongman who will do anything to stay in power, from stealing elections to repressing the opposition. The elections Mugabe was said to have stolen were endorsed by the South African Development Community, an organization of neighboring states, and the opposition operates freely, despite being openly backed and financed by Western powers in pursuit of a regime-change, anti-independence agenda.

For doing the West’s bidding in the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia’s Meles is showered with US and British aid and was handpicked by Tony Blair to sit on Britain’s Commission for Africa, to lead the “African renaissance.” Neutral leftists say little about “the British Government’s – and the West’s – favorite African leader”, channeling their energies instead into calling on the US to intervene militarily in Darfur and in competing to see who can exercise the greatest stridency in denouncing the Mugabe government (contributing to the program of ushering Mugabe and his pro-independence policies out and the MDC and its pro-Western dependence policies in.) Somehow, the end result of all this is to put the West more firmly in control of Africa.

And yet the political repressions of which Mugabe is accused are practiced ardently by Meles. Indeed, even if every charge leveled against Mugabe were true (and most are not), he would still be an angel against Meles.

Following Ethiopia’s May 2005 general election, which the opposition claimed was rigged, “security forces opened fire on protesters, killing 193 people.” Thousands of opposition supporters and leaders were rounded up and thrown in jail.

“More than 100 opposition leaders were put on trial for treason while the police crackdown intensified. Text messages, which had been used to organize the demonstrations in 2005, were banned.”

The state asked that the death penalty be imposed on 38 opposition leaders, including the founder of the Ethiopian Human Rights Council, a former UN war crimes prosecutor and the mayor-elect of Addis Ababa. The court rejected the prosecution’s recommendation, but sentenced the opposition leaders to life imprisonment. They were later freed, but only after the US intervened.

“Britain still gives Ethiopia £130m in humanitarian aid each year – more than any other African country,” while carrying out an unremitting campaign of demonization against Robert Mugabe and blocking Zimbabwe’s access to international credit.

How it is it that Meles, who has carried out much graver crimes than any Mugabe has been accused of, is showered with honors and humanitarian aid, while Mugabe is treated as Africa’s version of Hitler and his country is subjected to a campaign of economic warfare?

The answer lies in the reality that Meles acts as Washington’s attack dog in the Horn of Africa, invading Somalia to put down a pro-independence government, while Mugabe pursues an independent foreign policy and implements reforms to give Zimbabwean independence meaningful content.

How is that many left activists and progressives, though professing neutrality, channel much of their energy into campaigns deploring the official enemies of Anglo-American imperialism, while remaining virtually silent on oppressions carried out by US and British client states?

The answer has much to the do with the media and how left activists and progressives react to it. The news media are structured to report on what state officials say and do. To garner support for their policies, state officials make public statements on issues they want to draw public attention to, while steering clear of events they prefer remain unnoticed. Because Western state officials make frequent references to Zimbabwe, and few, if any, to Ethiopia, dozens of media news stories appear on Zimbabwe for every one that appears on Ethiopia. In this way, state officials, working through the media, are able to establish a public agenda, not only for the media but for the neutral left to follow – one which places Mugabe scores of rungs ahead of Meles, and Darfur much higher than Ogaden. Left activists and progressives talk about Mugabe and Darfur because the media do and the media do because Western state officials do. But neutral leftists hardly ever talk about Meles and Ogaden because the media hardly do, and the media hardly do because Western state officials almost never do (and don’t want to.) The result is that while professing neutrality, many left activists and progressives have been unwittingly recruited into agendas set in Washington and London.

These are the conditions that, in part, lead the neutral left to channel considerable energy into denouncing the official enemies of Western governments, while spending little time talking about or campaigning against oppressive regimes that receive Western aid and support. Neutral leftists are quick to denounce the military government of Myanmar (an official enemy) for its crackdown on a religious group, while saying virtually nothing about the military government of Pakistan (a client state) for an equally bloody crackdown on a religious group. Neutral leftists are acutely sensitive to the humanitarian crisis in Darfur (officially condemned), while saying virtually nothing about the much larger humanitarian crisis in Iraq (officially ignored) or the humanitarian crisis in Ogaden (also officially ignored.) Neutral leftists say virtually nothing about Meles Zenawi, a strongman accused of rigging elections who threatens political opponents with the death penalty, has invaded another country, and carries out crimes against humanity within his own borders (and is supported by the West) while spitting out contempt for Robert Mugabe, who has done none of these things (but isn’t supported by the West).

In all it does, despite professions of neutrality, the neutral left is pro-imperialist, not neutral. The moment its members devote half as much energy to railing against the governments of Egypt, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey as they do against Zimbabwe, the Taliban, north Korea, Belarus and Iran, will be the moment their claims to support neither imperialism nor its official enemies unconditionally become something more substantial than deceptive rhetoric.

* All quotes from Steve Bloomfield, “Ethiopia’s ‘own Darfur’ as villagers flee government-backed violence,” The Independent, October 17, 2007, http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/article3067244.ece

Slandering Zimbabwe’s Fight for Independence

By Stephen Gowans

Zimbabwe is in the grips on an economic crisis. Food and electricity shortages plague the country, but because Zimbabwe is singled out in the Western media for special attention, it seems as if its problems are unique, not part of a wider pattern of scarcity in sub-Saharan Africa, but the product of the misguided policies of the Mugabe government. There’s a message in the Western media spin on Zimbabwe: reclaiming land and working to put the economy into hands of nationals leads to economic meltdown. It’s best to leave historical patterns of domination alone, and to adapt to the prevailing balance of power.

In a July 28, 2007 article on the regrettable state of Zimbabwe’s economy, The Washington Post points out that “daily power outages are forcing Zimbabweans to light fires to cook and to heat water.” Wood poachers have stripped nearly 500 acres of conservation woodland.

But what the Post doesn’t point out is that it’s not only Zimbabweans, but people throughout sub-Saharan Africa, who are stripping forests bare to provide heat and cooking fuel. (1)

The reason why is rolling power blackouts. “Perhaps 25 of 44 sub-Saharan nations face crippling electricity shortages.” (2) Drought, climbing oil prices, and the chaos caused by privatization of formerly state-owned power companies have created an “unprecedented” power crisis that not only affects Zimbabwe, but Zambia, Nigeria, Angola, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Uganda and Togo.

Even South Africa was hit by rolling blackouts in January and sporadic power failures continue to bedevil the country.

Yet, as a mark of how the Western media frame their reporting to discredit Zimbabwe, it is in Zimbabwe alone that the electricity shortages are attributed to the policies of the government.

Zimbabwe’s “power, water, health and communications systems are collapsing,” the Post notes, “and there are acute shortages of staple foods and gasoline.” The newspaper points to critics who say economic mismanagement and Harare’s land reform policies are to blame.

But acute food and gasoline shortages are common to neighboring countries. If Zimbabwe is short of gasoline, “Uganda’s gas stations are…short of diesel for vehicles.” (3) If there are shortages of food staples in Zimbabwe, there are close to two dozen other countries in sub-Saharan Africa that are contending with food scarcity, according to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization.

Since neighbouring countries have not pursued Zimbabwe’s fast track land reform policies, and have tended to shy away from the economic indigenization policies Harare favors, gasoline, electricity and food shortages can hardly be attributed to policies uniquely pursued by Harare. The aim of the media’s propaganda is clear: to discredit the Mugabe government’s economic independence policies by suggesting they are to blame for the country’s economic difficulties.

Unlike other sub-Saharan countries, Zimbabwe is a target of economic sanctions, which have made the region-wide drought and oil-price-rise-induced crises more acute. The sanctions, imposed by the US and EU, deny Zimbabwe access to international development aid. NGOs, following the Western governments that provide their funding, have also cut off assistance, amplifying the sanctions’ effects.

Are the sanctions justified?

The West’s opposition to Zimbabwe began in the mid-90s, when the Mugabe government failed to undertake pro-foreign investor (often called neo-liberal) economic reforms as quickly as the International Monetary Fund prescribed.

The IMF expected Zimbabwe to pare back government social spending, reduce the size of the civil service, devalue its currency, and move strongly toward an export-oriented economy – measures that would benefit international investors but would increase the hardships Zimbabweans already faced.

The IMF also insisted that Zimbabwe pay full market value for the land it sought to acquire as part of its program to resettle the rural poor – land that had been stripped from indigenous Africans by European settlers.

Zimbabwe had received assurances in 1979 from the Thatcher government that Britain would fund the purchase of land from white settlers, but the Blair government reneged, proposing instead that it lend Zimbabwe money in return for Harare enacting policies to enhance investor confidence (i.e., policies to increase the profits foreign investors could extract from Zimbabwe.) Since this would amount to taking on new debt to buy back what had been stolen in the first place, the offer was refused. Farmland was reclaimed without compensation (except for improvements the European settlers had made.) The expropriated farmers were told to seek compensation from London.

By 1997, Harare was in open revolt. IMF-prescribed programs the government deemed to be injurious to Zimbabweans were rejected and the IMF’s prohibitions on pursuing economically nationalist policies were ignored. Mugabe announced new tariffs to protect domestic businesses from foreign competition and introduced an affirmative action program that differentially benefited domestic firms at the expense of foreign investors. Western governments, ever vigilant about promoting the export and foreign investment interests of their own corporations, saw red.

By 1998, the EU had had enough. Mugabe’s land reform program – and now, the military aid Harare was providing to the young government of Laurent Kabila in the Democratic Republic of Congo – bid that steps be taken to force the independence-minded Mugabe out. Kabila, who the US and Britain were trying to overthrow, was following economically nationalist policies reminiscent of those of Patrice Lumumba, who the West had deposed in a CIA-sponsored coup decades earlier. Washington and London recruited Uganda and Rwanda as proxies to invade the DR Congo, but their plans were frustrated when Zimbabwe intervened militarily on the side of the Kabila government. To counter Mugabe, the EU set out to build civil society — the unions and NGOs — as opposite poles of attraction to Mugabe’s government of national liberation.

Soon, Morgan Tsvangirai, head of the Zimbabwe Trades Union Congress, emerged as leader of a new political party, the Movement for Democratic Change. The white commercial farmers abandoned their old party, the Rhodesian Front, and lined up behind their new vehicle, the MDC. With a war chest filled with generous funding from Western governments and corporations, the MDC was to lead the opposition to the Mugabe government from within Zimbabwe.

By 2001, the Sunday Times was urging London to spearhead a worldwide economic boycott of Zimbabwe. “Until decisive action is taken,” the newspaper warned, “the whole region is a high-risk area for investment.” (4)

The same year, the US enacted the US Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act. The arch-conservative Jesse Helms was a co-sponsor, along with Hilary Clinton. The act obligates US officials to vote against assistance to Zimbabwe at the IMF and World Bank; allows the president to fund groups and individuals working to overthrow the Mugabe government; and makes respect for the rule of law (i.e., reversal of Zimbabwe’s land reform program) a condition of ending sanctions. US Representative Cynthia McKinney asked legislators what law European settlers had respected when they seized the land by force.

Sanctions have one aim: to make the lives of Zimbabweans miserable so they’ll oust Mugabe. The MDC, which supports the sanctions, and is indefatigable in calling for additional punishments, uses the economic hardships sanctions have aggravated to call for Mugabe’s departure.

Mugabe’s program has always been one of independence. As a leader of the guerrilla movement that fought for national liberation, the goal was an end to Rhodesian apartheid. As leader of the government, the goal since the mid 90s has been economic independence; to be secured, first, by reclaiming the land the indigenous population had been dispossessed of by European settlers; and second, by putting the economy in the hands of Zimbabweans as owners, not just employees.

The inevitable consequence of this project has been the backlash of foreign corporations, Western investors and their governments.

While the Western media would have you believe Zimbabweans are champing at the bit to oust Mugabe, the reality is that Mugabe is widely supported, not only in Zimbabwe, but throughout Africa. His credentials as the leader of a national liberation movement have established his reputation, his land reform policies have strengthened his support among the rural poor (who make up the majority of Zimbabweans) and his insistence on pursuing an independent foreign policy have made him a rallying point for anti-imperialist sentiment in Africa. As recently as August 2004, Mugabe was voted number three in the New African magazine’s poll of the 100 greatest Africans (behind Nelson Mandela and Ghana Kwame Nkrunah, the first president of post-colonial Ghana.) One of Mugabe’s most vehement critics, Archbishop Pious Ncube, grudgingly acknowledges his popularity. “The United Nations should take (Mugabe) out but that will not happen because Africa supports Mugabe.” (5)

It is fashionable in some circles to profess admiration for Mugabe, as the leader of the armed national liberation struggle, while denouncing Mugabe, the politician. Mugabe once fought for national liberation, it’s said, but as a politician, he simply clings to power for power’s sake. Power has corrupted him.

This is the typical screed against the leaders of all really-existing movements that seek to end the oppression of class or nations. They are invariably accused of demagogy and corruption and of betraying their movement’s goals. The revolution betrayed is the constant theme. The purpose of these accusations is to breed cynicism, disillusionment and ultimately pessimism, passivity and capitulation. It’s all in vain, the detractors say. You’ll simply end up with something worse that you started with. Your movement will be hijacked by authoritarian strongmen who utter leftist-sounding phrases while enriching themselves and their cronies.

The goal Mugabe has pursued, whether in the armed struggle or in government, has never changed: independence. Placing the economy in the hands of Zimbabweans, as Mugabe is working to do now, is just as much – indeed, is even more significantly a part – of national liberation as achieving nominal political independence is. Zimbabweans got their own flag in 1980, their land after 2000, and now are working to secure control of their mines and businesses. To say, then, that Mugabe was true to the goals of national liberation once, but is no longer, reveals either a miscomprehension of the centrality of land reform and indigenization to national liberation, a surrender to the barrage of propaganda against Zimbabwe’s national liberation movement, or an absent commitment to true national liberation.

(1) New York Times, July 29, 2007.
(2) Ibid.
(3) Ibid.
(4) Cited in Rob Gowland, “Zimbabwe: The Struggle for Land, the Struggle for Independence,” November, 2002. http://www.cpa.org.au/booklets/zimbabwe.pdf
(5) Cited in The Sunday Mail, July 28, 2007. http://www.sundaymail.co.zw/index.aspx

Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and the Politics of Naming

By Stephen Gowans

When Africa scholar Mahmoud Mandani looks at the slaughter and displacement of civilians in Darfur he notices something odd. The mass death of civilians in Darfur has been called a genocide, but slaughters of civilians of similar magnitude in Iraq and on a larger scale in Congo have not.

According to the World Food Program, about 200,000 civilians have died in Darfur, 80 percent from starvation and disease, and 20 percent from violence. Close to 700,000 have been displaced(1). This, the US government, calls a genocide.

But 600,000 Iraqis have died since 2003 as a result of violence related to the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq (2) and 3.7 million have either fled to neighboring countries or are internally displaced (3).

“I read about all sorts of violence against civilians,” says Mamdani, “and there are two places that I read about – one is Iraq, and one is Darfur … And I’m struck by the fact that the largest political movement against mass violence on US campuses is on Darfur and not on Iraq.” (4)

If Darfur is modest in comparison to Iraq, both are pipsqueeks compared to Congo. There, some four million civilians have been slaughtered over several years, largely as a result of intervention by US proxies, Uganda and Rwanda.

In Somalia, 460,000 civilians have been displaced by fighting sparked by a US-backed and assisted invasion by Ethiopia (5). That invasion was aimed at ousting the popularly-backed Islamic Courts Union, which had brought a measure of stability to Somalia. “In the six months the Islamic courts (governed Somalia), less than 20 people lost their lives through violence. Now, that many die in 10 minutes,” observes Hussein Adow, a Mogadishu businessman (6).

Why is there is a Save Darfur Campaign, but no Save Congo Campaign and no Save Somalia Campaign?

Mamdani says that people in the West don’t react to the mass slaughter of civilians but to the labels their governments and media attach to them.

“Genocide is being instrumentalized by … the United States,” he explains. “It is being instrumentalized in a way that mass slaughters which implicate its adversaries are being named as genocide and those which implicate its friends or its proxies are not being named as genocide.”

Mandani calls this “the politics of naming.”

The politics of naming isn’t limited to the question of which slaughters are named genocide and which aren’t. It applies too to the question of which regimes are called dictatorial, repressive and brutal (and so must be changed), and which are not (and so should be left in peace.)

Take the case of Ethiopia and Zimbabwe. Tons of printer’s ink have been consumed by Western newspapers denouncing Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe. According to the Western narrative, he is as a dictator who steals elections, represses the opposition and cracks heads to stay in power.

But Mugabe’s government, in view of concerted efforts from outside and within to overthrow it, is remarkably restrained. Archbishop Pious Ncube, one of the government’s most vociferous critics, recently called on Zimbabwe’s former colonial master, Britain, to remove Mugabe through military means. “We should do it ourselves,” he added, “but there’s too much fear. I’m ready to lead the people, guns blazing, but the people are not ready.” (7) (Imagine Noam Chomsky calling for a coalition of Russia, China, Venezuela, Iran and north Korea to invade the US to force Washington to end its occupation of Iraq. “I’m ready to lead the people, guns blazing,” he might say, “but the people are not ready.” How long would it be before Chomsky was hustled off to jail?)

Ncube isn’t the first government opponent to threaten a campaign of violence to oust Mugabe. And yet Ncube and others remain at liberty to call for sanctions, outside military intervention and insurrection to depose the government.

Ethiopia, on the other hand, is a cipher. It receives little coverage from the Western media, and even less attention from people who routinely denounce the Sudanese and Zimbabwean governments from the left.

That’s odd, for the Ethiopian government has all the flaws the Zimbabwean government is said to have that arouse so much moral indignation.

Ethiopia “jails it citizens without reason or trial, tortures many of them, and habitually violates its own laws.

“The government was … severely criticized for a 2005 crackdown in which tens of thousands of opposition members were jailed and nearly 200 people killed after elections in which the opposition made major gains.

“Ethiopian officials … have expelled many foreign journalists and representatives of human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.” (9)

Disputed elections, crackdowns on the opposition, expulsion of journalists: this resembles the charge sheet against Mugabe. So why isn’t Melawi as thoroughly excoriated as Mugabe is?

A July 9th Reuters’ report says, “Ethiopian prosecutors demanded the death penalty for 38 opposition officials convicted of trying to overthrow the government, treason and inciting violence.

“The officials were convicted last month of charges relating to violent protests over disputed elections in 2005 that the opposition says were rigged.

“Nearly 200 people were killed in clashes between protestors and security forces over the vote.

“Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said he regretted the post-poll violence, but blamed it on opportunistic rioters and an opposition conspiracy to topple him by force.”

I read the Reuters’ article to a friend, but replaced Ethiopia with Zimbabwe and Zenawi with Mugabe. There seemed nothing out of the ordinary to her. And indeed, it’s likely that most people in the West would not have detected the deception. It meshes with the Western narrative on Zimbabwe. If you’ve been reading Western press accounts, you would expect Mugabe to round up the opposition (whose leaders have long threatened the violent overthrow of the government), charge them with treason, and seek their execution. But he hasn’t.

Had he, a storm of indignation would have swept the Western world. Yet Zenawi does the same, and no politician works himself up into high moral dudgeon, no calls are made for sanctions or Western military intervention, and no emergency meeting of the UN Security Council is convoked. Just a solitary Reuters’ dispatch. Why?

The answer is that Ethiopia is fully within Washington’s orbit, acting as a reliable proxy enforcing US geopolitical interests in the resource-rich Horn of Africa. Zimbabwe, by contrast, pursues the opposite tact, implementing policies that seek to free itself from Western domination and to frustrate US imperial designs on the continent.

Zimbabwe indigenizes its agriculture and economy; Ethiopia intervenes militarily in Somalia at the behest of Washington, to restore a US-puppet government.

Weeks before Ethiopia invaded Somalia, US General John P. Abizaid flew to Addis Ababa to arrange for Zenawi to unleash the US-trained Ethiopian military on Somalia. Washington even went so far as to shelter Ethiopia, whose military relies on equipment made in north Korea, from penalty for violating UN-sanctions against north Korean arms sales. Ethiopia needed to import replacement parts from north Korea if the invasion was to go ahead without a hitch. Washington, which championed the sanctions, said “go ahead.” (9)

Numberless people are being manipulated by Western governments and media, their outrage harnessed to achieve geopolitical goals that have nothing whatever to do with human rights and democracy, and everything to do with the question of who gets to control the oil spigot, mining concessions and vast tracts of fertile land.

Mamdani calls those caught up in the Save Darfur Campaign innocents. The same could be said of those caught up in the dump Mugabe campaign.

1. UN High Commissioner for Refugees’ estimate, cited in The Guardian, June 20, 2007.
2. Johns Hopkins study, published online by The Lancet, cited in The Guardian October 12, 2006.
3. UN High Commissioner for Refugees, cited in Workers World, February 15, 2007.
4. Interview with Mahmoud Mandani, Democracy Now! June 4, 2007.
5. According to the UN High Commission for Refugees (Guardian, June 20, 2007).
6. Quoted in the The London Times, cited in Party for Socialism and Liberation, July 3, 2007.
7. The Sunday Times, July 1, 2007.
8. The Globe and Mail, May 29, 2007.
9. The New York Times, April 8, 2007.

Unusual Sources Radio Program

Brendan Stone interviews Stephen Gowans on the subject of left and support for demonized regimes.

http://tinyurl.com/33uy7w

Zimbabwe and the Politics of Demons and Angels

By Stephen Gowans

Soon after I wrote an article titled “Mugabe gets the Milosevic Treatment,” posted at Counterpunch.org, I received an e-mail from a representative of SW Radio Africa, who said I should visit Zimbabwe before writing articles about the country. This was followed by a Patrick Bond reply to my article in Counterpunch, invoking the same argument, though in an indirect way. Gowans’ views are nonsense, Bond fumed, at least, as he saw them, sitting across the Limpopo river, where, he said, he had managed to establish a pretty good handle on what was going in Zimbabwe.

Had I been writing a travelogue both of my critics would have made a good point, but inasmuch as I was writing about Washington and London having dragooned civil society – and in some cases, having created it from the ground up – for the purpose of ousting the government of Robert Mugabe, their criticism was wide of the mark. You don’t have to travel to Zimbabwe to figure out that Mugabe is getting the Milosevic treatment.

Even Bond, in his characteristically haughty way, acknowledged the US intrigues in Zimbabwe with a dismissive “tell us something we don’t already know.”

For the record, the British newspaper The Guardian revealed as early as August 22, 2002 that, “The United States government has said 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.”

Washington confirmed its own civil society-assisted regime change plans for Zimbabwe in an April 5, 2007 report, revealing that in 2006 “The U.S. government continued to support the efforts of the political opposition, the media and civil society,” including providing training and assistance to the kind of grassroots “pro-democracy” groups the US had used to bring down the government of Slobodan Milosevic, and that Bond had celebrated in his Counterpunch article as “the independent left.”

There are three key reasons why the US is trying to oust the Zanu-PF government:

(1) The Zanu-PF government has expropriated land from white commercial farmers for redistribution to the rural poor.

(2) It has pursued economically nationalist policies at odds with IMF demands.

(3) It has been a rallying point for anti-imperialist sentiment in southern Africa.

SW Radio Africa is a UK-based radio station, funded by the USAID Office of Transition Initiatives to broadcast anti-government propaganda into Zimbabwe. Violet Gonda, one of the station’s interviewers, has been sending me transcripts of her interviews ever since my Milosevic Treatment article appeared on the Counterpunch site. In an April 10 interview with Zimbabwe’s Home Affairs Minister Kembo Mohadi, UK-based Gonda was challenged by Mohadi to “come to Zimbabwe and witness this for yourself and don’t be talking about things that you don’t know,” turning the argument Gonda’s colleague had made to me against her. Mohadi was referring to Gonda’s allegations that MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai had been beaten and that MDC supporters had been tortured.

Amusing as it was to see the same argument used against SW Radio Africa, the “come to Zimbabwe before you say anything” demand is based on the startlingly naïve view that someone else’s perspective must align with your own if only he visits the same piece of real estate. The view of the rural poor in Zimbabwe, or of veterans of the guerilla war for national liberation, can hardly be expected to be the same as those of white commercial farmers, even though they live in the same country. It is experience, race, which side of colonialism you’ve been on, and what opportunities imperialist countries offer you, that account for why the views of Zimbabwe’s rural poor and of Zanu-PF supporters are different from those of comfortable white professors ensconced in foundation-supported positions across the Limpopo river, and of young black Africans from Harare who travel to the US on US State Department sponsored trips to study civil disobedience techniques.

If my article  resonated with anyone, it  resonated with black Africans, members of the African Diaspora and anti-imperialists. White commercial farmers and anyone linked to the civil society apparatus deployed to unseat Mugabe’s government angrily dismissed it. But why? Why would opponents of Mugabe – including Bond, who acknowledges that the US is acting to drive Zanu-PF from power (that is, when he’s not arguing the exact opposite) — take exception to someone drawing attention to something that is a matter of public record?

The reason, I think, has everything to do what different groups of people value more: the thwarting of imperialist designs (and the land reform, redress of colonial injustices, and national sovereignty that are thereby given space to come to fruition), or ousting Mugabe. If you want Mugabe to go, you’ll oppose anything that reveals efforts to unseat him as being illegitimate. It won’t be enough to say, “Yes, you’re right, Washington and London are engaged in intrigues to topple the Mugabe government, but all the same I dislike him and his program and here’s why.” Instead, you’ll fulminate, “This is nonsense!”

You’ll probably also practice the politics of demons and angels – the division of the world into two camps: bad guys and good guys, black hats and white hats. The objective is to describe leaders, governments, movements and programs you want to see the end of as demons, and those who are acting to achieve this end as angels. However, because those that lean to the left of the political spectrum are unlikely to regard imperialist governments as angels (although this is far from being invariably true) civil society groups are recruited as proxies. They appear to be independent, to do good works, and they have a “socialism from below” feel that resonates with the Western left. Patrick Bond, who directs a center for civil society, is a master of invoking the kind of rhetoric about social movements being an “independent left” operating in spaces between neo-liberal Third World governments and neo-liberal First World governments that appeals to the Z-Net congregation.

The politics of demons and angels is terribly unsophisticated. That should be enough to keep 100 paces away from it. But it should also be eschewed for an even more compelling reason: because it’s used to build support for imperialist interventions in other countries — interventions that have nothing whatever to do with promoting human rights, building democracy, and keeping the peace, and everything to do with opening up space for the intervening countries’ corporations, banks and investors to make a profit.

Yugoslavia was transformed by Western intervention from a country with a large socially and publicly owned sector, whose government balked at IMF reforms, into a neo-liberal workshop of growing economic insecurity and domination by Western capital. Iraq, brutalized by sanctions, terrorized by war, and humiliated by occupation, may in time yield its prize of a bonanza of oil profits to British and US oil firms. These prizes could not have been won without campaigns of vilification to manufacture consent for intervention. The bases for these interventions – that Milosevic was orchestrating a genocide in Kosovo and that Saddam Hussein was hiding banned weapons – were lies.

In the real world there are three kinds of views on the struggle in Zimbabwe: those that demonize Mugabe; those that angelize him; and those that do neither. In the Manichean world of the politics of demons and angels there are only two: those that demonize Mugabe and those that angelize him. Anyone who expresses a view that neither demonizes nor angelizes Mugabe is accused, by those who demonize him, of angelizing him.

A person who notes, quite accurately, and with the weight of evidence behind him, that Washington, London and the EU have built and enlisted civil society in Zimbabwe to oust Mugabe, will be called by those who demonize him, a pro-Mugger, Mugophile, or practitioner of the basest enemy of my enemy is my friend politics. And yet there is no justification for making these accusations. Repeating what has been said over and over by the US State Department and in newspaper reports about US and British intrigues in Zimbabwe is hardly the same as saying Mugabe is my friend, Mugabe is my hero, or Mugabe is a great guy, let’s organize a celebration in his honor.

When demonizers of Mugabe accuse those who point out that what Washington and London admit to openly, as being Mugabe-angelizers, we have to ask why? Is it because their Manichean worldview allows them to see the world in no other way (if you don’t call him a demon you must think he’s an angel, because there are only angels and demons in my world), or is it because they’re so embittered toward Mugabe that they don’t care who gets rid of him or how or what follows him, just so long as he goes, and therefore anyone who would regard him as something other than a demon must be stopped from doing so in case he persuades other people?

To be sure, these are not mutually exclusive alternatives. Both may be true. But what’s significant is that both mesh nicely with the openly admitted plans of Washington and London to oust Mugabe’s government. If Mugabe is universally understood to be a demon, we can hardly marshal the energy to stop plans to oust him. Why bother? You’ll only soil yourself by association. And who wants to back a demon?

The claim made by Z Magazine’s Michael Albert, that human psychology isn’t this simple – that people recognize that a foreign leader’s being a demon doesn’t justify an intervention to remove him – reveals Albert to be either disingenuous or the last person on earth you would want to invite into an advertising firm as a human relations expert. You don’t have to talk to too many people, including readers of Z Magazine (especially readers of Z Magazine?) to hear it said: “Oh sure, maybe the bombing of Yugoslavia, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the war on Iraq, were done for the wrong reasons, but all the same, they served the useful function of ridding the world of monsters.”

Given a zeitgeist that favors a never-ending series of demons for people to vent their moral outrage on, it comes as no shock to find professed anti-imperialists combing their archives to dredge up whatever dirt they can find on Mugabe. One found an article that exposes Mugabe as a homophobe. But what have Mugabe’s views on homosexuals to do with the struggles in Zimbabwe that connect the rural poor, white commercial farmers, Zanu-PF, civil society, and the imperialist machinations of the US and the UK?

The answer, of course, is nothing. But there is a political function and also a psychological function to be served in good old-fashioned dirt-slinging. Politically, the object is to personify a movement to discredit it by drawing attention to the revolting features of the person the movement has been equated to. There’s a Pavlovian character to this. The pairing of the bell with food, eventually leads to the bell alone calling forth the dogs’ salivation. Likewise, the pairing of the person with the movement, or class, or nation, eventually leads to the negative features of the person being transferred to what he has been equated to. Were one to dredge up articles on Castro and Che being homophobes, Cuba-supporters would immediately recognize the political nature of the act. They don’t, however, seem to recognize the political nature of the act of visibly parading one individual’s failings about, under the guise of a making a significant contribution to understanding the struggle in Zimbabwe — or do, but go about doing it anyway because their commitment to anti-imperialism is fair-weather (strong when there’s no danger of being demonized by association, absent otherwise.)

The psychological as opposed to political function of dirt-slinging is to socially affirm oneself as a decent human being by denouncing those who express indecent values. This is particularly attractive to people on the far left, who are already mistrusted by the larger community for holding dangerous and unsettling views. How better to affirm one’s place in decent society than by leading the chorus in denouncing those vilified by conservative forces as leftist and anti-imperialist “monsters.” See, not all of us are monsters. We hate the monsters just as much as the rest of you do.

Let’s be clear. The very fact that I’m questioning the practice of personifying groups of people in order to demonize the individuals equated to them will be used to denounce me as a thug-hugger, apologist, and lionizer of monsters. In other words, if you’re not with us in vilifying the latest Satan, you’re against us. The great irony is that people who rail against those who refuse to participate in campaigns of vilifying those calumniated as left and anti-imperialist “monsters” accuse people like me, of practicing a with-us-or-against-us politics of the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

“Unhappy is the land that needs heroes,” remarked Brecht. He might have added, unhappy is the land that needs demons (but then, the land that needs heroes, must, per force, need demons as their heroes’ antithesis.) The movie The Motorcycle Diaries, about Che Guevera’s trip through South America with his friend Alberto Granado in the early 50s, has been justly criticized for angelizing the Argentine revolutionary. When those enchanted with Che the angel discover Che the human being, a man with warts – though, as is true of all larger-than-life figures, uglier than those of the rest of us – they become disillusioned, embittered and, if strongly committed to a Manichean view of the world, swing radically to the other pole, denouncing their fallen angel as Satan incarnate, rather than recognizing him as a human being.

The best that can be said about discussions of Zimbabwe, or north Korea, or Sudan, or Iran that reduce to a set of accusations about the demonic character of some leader is that they’re superficial and frivolous. What can also be said is that they’re products of manipulation by forces seeking to manufacture consent for interventions in other countries – interventions that have nothing to do with human rights and democracy and have everything to do with securing advantages for the intervening countries’ corporations, banks and investors. When we dissociate ourselves from “unsavory” regimes – and there’s not one government, Western or otherwise, free from unsavory features that would not allow any of them to be demonized – we isolate really-existing projects for national and class emancipation and thereby undermine the potential for the success of progressive struggles in the real world. It’s true that in behaving in this way we can avoid demonization by association and thereby splatter-proof our own vision – a strategy that may serve the purpose of making our vision more saleable to a skeptical public — but it cannot be safeguarded from vilification forever. The moment it too becomes a threat, it will be vilified as vigorously as all real-world threats to imperialism are. The idea that you can escape being vilified by those you oppose is true only so long as you don’t oppose them in any kind of serious or effective way. Utopian visions – and those whose left politics amount to nothing more than pious expressions of benevolence and goodwill to men – are no threat.

What’s more, the view that the success of the independent (which is to say, the US government and ruling class foundation supported) left in Zimbabwe in toppling the Zanu-PF government is something to be wished for, is naïve or (given the foundation-connections of those who express this view) disingenuous. A successful civil society-executed regime change operation will not produce a decentralized, participatory democracy committed to egalitarianism, but a neo-colonial regime headed by an Anglo-American puppet which will immediately handcuff land reform and abrogate every policy at odds with neo-liberalism and ownership of Zimbabwe’s assets by US and British capital.

The models are Poland and Yugoslavia (among others.) There, trade unions and civil society also managed to enchant the Western left while bringing down governments that were the only serious obstacle to the installation of comprador regimes — regimes whose agenda was one of shutting down shipyards, selling off socially and publicly owned enterprises, and ushering in an era of growing inequality and subservience to Western capital. You don’t hear much about these places anymore. You should. They’re what Zimbabwe will become if civil society topples another anti-imperialist government.

Talk Left, Funded Right

By Stephen Gowans

In their zeal to demonize Zimbabwe’s Zanu-PF government it sometimes seems that members of the “independent left” are working for the US government. The reason why is that many are.

At the same time, Trotskyites peddling bizarre theories that say the country’s president Robert Mugabe is in league with the same governments that are trying to overthrow him, might as well be.

An April 5th US State Department report [1] confirms what has been revealed in scattered press reports for years: that civil society groups and media some left scholars misrepresent as “the independent left” are actually puppets of the US governments.

That’s not to say these groups don’t believe they’re independent, or that all of their members know that the funding for their expensive websites, magazines, newspapers and radio programs are financed by Uncle Sam. However, knowingly or not, they’re doing Washington’s work.

Only the wilfully blind or naïve would believe the US government lavishes money on groups that aren’t going to be of some service in promoting its agenda. And only the wilfully blind or naïve believe that Uncle Sam’s agenda has anything to do with promoting democracy, freedom of expression and good governance.

Patrick Bond, director of the right-wing funded Center for Civil Society at the University of Natal — whose case against Mugabe is formulated in the same language of hunger for power leading to betrayal and corruption that characterized Trotsky’s case against Stalin — points to such US-funded groups as Sokawanele as the “independent left” in Zimbabwe [2]. Is he wilfully blind, naïve or is he grinding the usual Trotskyite axe against really-existing socialist governments and national liberation movements?

The US and EU use civil society to effect color revolutions – to do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly. An integral part of any color revolution is to demonize target governments to facilitate their replacement by local politicians prepared to open or re-open their country to imperialist penetration [3]. Bond is thoroughly integrated into the civil society apparatus. His Center for Civil Society (whose web site links to Zimbabwe’s US- and EU-funded MDC opposition party) is connected to the ruling class Kellogg and Ford foundations, the South African NGO coalition, the South African bank, ABSA and the South African Chamber of Commerce [4]. It could be said of Bond that he talks left and is funded right.

Last year, according to the US State Department, Washington was busily interfering in Zimbabwe’s internal affairs, funding the opposition, backing civil society groups, showering money on “alternative” media, and seeing to it that Bond’s “independent left” was well greased with lucre [5].

“The U.S. Government continued to support the efforts of the political opposition, the media, and civil society.” (That the efforts pertained to replacing the Zanu-PF government with one that would effectively shelf land reform, lift tariffs, abolish performance requirements on foreign investment, and privatize state-owned enterprises, should be spelled out. That these policies would benefit the corporations, investors and banks connected to Bond’s Center for Civil Society should also be spelled out.)

“The United States sponsored public events that presented economic and social analyses discrediting the government’s excuses for its failed policies, (which is to say, absolving US and EU sanctions of undermining the country’s economy.)

“The U.S. Government sponsored … and supported … several township newspapers” and worked to expand the “listener base” of “Voice of America’s Studio 7 radio station” (by distributing short-wave radios to expose the population to anti-Zanu-PF propaganda.)

“U.S. programs provided funding to NGOs that collected and circulated information on civil society, human rights, and government actions,” (groups like Sokwanele.)

The US “supported workshops to develop youth leadership skills necessary to confront social injustice through nonviolent strategies,” a reference to the “grassroots” “pro-democracy” activist groups the US has previously trained and funded in Yugoslavia (Otpor), Belarus (Zubr) and Ukraine (Khmara), to carry out color revolutions with the intention of installing local politicians that favor pro-US trade and investment policies. The Zimbabwean equivalents are Bond’s favored Sokwanele, and its counterpart Zvakwana.

The State Department also “sponsored an … exchange program to learn about activism by civil society groups in the United States,” groups that one might infer are as deeply embedded in Uncle Sam’s pocket as their counterparts in Zimbabwe are.

Any doubt that these civil society regime change operations are motivated by purely economic considerations should be laid to rest by the State Department’s observation that “A growing number of like-minded donors now agree that fundamental political and economic changes are a prerequisite to reengagement by the international community with the government.” In other words, once Zimbabwe shelves its land reform program, opens its doors to unfettered US investment and exports, and stops interfering in US imperial designs in Africa, funding to civil society and Bond’s “independent left” will dry up.

The actions of some Trotskyite groups and Trotskyite-inspired scholars serve the same ends.

Australia’s Green Left Weekly, and the Zimbabwe International Socialist Organization, have both backed the opposition MDC from the start (in fact, the ISO is a founding member) [6]. The problem with the MDC is that it’s the US and EU vehicle for strengthening a neo-colonial domination of Zimbabwe and of white farmers for stopping land reform.

The ISO and Bond use language to rail against Mugabe that seems to be drawn from the same bag of clichés. Bond’s “Mugabe talks radical — especially nationalist and anti-imperialist–but acts reactionary” [7] is almost a word for word recycling of the ISO’s “Mugabe is compromising with the bosses at the expense of the workers – not only the local capitalists, but with foreign investors,” and “he speaks left but his policy is pro-capitalist” [8].

If Mugabe is as useful to imperialism as his Trotskyite detractors say he is, (Bond says “The Zim counter-example, frankly, is a useful one for imperialism to keep alive” [9]) why are imperialists in Washington and London lavishing money and support on the political opposition, “independent” media and “independent left” to overthrow him?

The anti-Mugabe screed is a replay of the Trotskyite narrative about pure revolutionaries opposing a revolution that has been hijacked and betrayed by an unworthy power-mad monster (Stalin being the Trotskyites’ archetype.) In this view, all revolutions are corrupt and must be overthrown – that is, all but the one that will never happen.

Trotskyites have always been useful to Washington and London: many are reliably against the same revolutions (though for different reasons), and therefore serve the useful function of whittling away at left support.

To discourage left support for Third World anti-imperialist movements, many Trotskyites invoke the argument that those who support Zanu-PF, the DPRK and sometimes even Cuba, are reflexively placing a plus sign beside the enemy of my enemy and that they ought to be more selective in who they support. Since many Trotskyites often have trouble with really-existing socialist governments and national liberation movements, this amounts to a prohibition against putting a plus sign beside any such movement.

The truth of the matter, however, is that anti-imperialists support national liberation movements, not because Washington or London dislike them, but because national liberation movements are anti-imperialist, period.

By comparison, misnamed independent left groups that depend for their existence or funding on the US, the EU and Western ruling class foundations, and those Trotskyites who can be reliably counted upon to oppose all revolutions except those they lead or influence, do what they accuse Zanu-PF of doing: talking left, and walking right.

1. US Department of State, “The U.S. Record, 2006,” http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/shrd/2006/
2. Bond, Patrick (a), “Mugabe: Talks Radical, Acts Lie a Reactionary: Zimbabwe’s Descent,” Counterpucnh.org, March 27, 2007, http://www.counterpunch.org/bond03272007.html
3. Gowans, Stephen, “Zimbabwe’s Lonely Fight for Justice,” March 30, 2007, https://gowans.wordpress.com/2007/03/30/zimbabwe%e2%80%99s-lonely-fight-for-justice/
4. Center for Civil Society at the University of Natal, http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs/
5. US Department of State
6. Gowland, Rob, “Zimbabwe: The struggle for land, the struggle for independence,” http://www.cpa.org.au/booklets/zimbabwe.pdf
7. Bond (a)
8. Gowland
9. Bond, Patrick (b), Reply to “Gowans, Stephen, “Grassroots Lieutenants of Imperialism, April 2, 2007, https://gowans.wordpress.com/2007/04/02/grassroots-lieutenants-of-imperialism/ , https://gowans.wordpress.com/2007/04/02/grassroots-lieutenants-of-imperialism/#comment-14