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President demonised for his anti-imperialist stance This article, the second in a series of stories, looks
at how the West has been trying to demonise President Mugabe because of his
anti-imperialist stance.
Even at this point, the hope was that Britain would fulfil its obligations once it was made clear to them that land redistribution would go ahead. But of course, Britain responded not. The final order to white farmers to surrender their surplus farms was not made until August last year, after giving "the international community" more than enough time to do the decent thing. Since the international community, however, is nothing other than the hyenas of imperialism, it was only too happy to see President Mugabe, the leader of the Zimbabwean liberation struggle to whom they had had to concede defeat, discomfited. And although he was only doing what was logical and necessary and in accordance with the demands of his people, he was depicted in the western media as a power-crazed despot. Of course, what really turned him in the eyes of imperialism from what Margaret Thatcher called the "perfect African gentleman" into a major hate figure was his intervention in sending troops to the Democratic Republic of Congo in support of the latter's nationalist government against imperialist determination to seize control of its vast mineral wealth through the encouragement of secessionist movements and proxy aggression by Rwanda and Uganda. This was an act of tremendous self-sacrifice on the part of Zimbabwe in support of a just anti-imperialist cause. Financially there was no way Zimbabwe could afford to do it. Morally there was no way it could afford not to. The cost of military intervention was tremendous, and could only be to some extent at the expense of ordinary Zimbabweans. Imperialism saw an opportunity to create a rift between Zanu-PF and the Zimbabwean people and lost no time trying to exploit it by mounting a scurrilous media blitz to demonise President Mugabe. Typical of this media blitz, which has been going on for two or three years now, as if endless repetition could turn lies into truth, is The Guardian, the oh so liberal Guardian, of 25 June 2003 uncritically reviewing the South African Press, and citing such gems as "Thabo Mbeki knows very well that (President) Mugabe is an unscrupulous dictator" and referring to President Mugabe's Government as "a rogue government". Yet we know that President Mugabe's only sin is in consistently standing up to imperialism in the interests of his people. This is the reason why when, as a result of the successes of the liberation war of the Zimbabwean people, the Second Chimurenga, as it was called, imperialism decided it would be counter-productive to continue supporting white minority rule in Rhodesia, it struggled in a determined manner to prevent President Mugabe from coming to power. One of the few points of agreement between white Rhodesians and the British government was that victory for President Mugabe was a terrifying prospect. In the words of Lord Carrington: "I viewed it with the greatest possible horror. One felt he was a Marxist and one wondered how awful he was going to be". Another tactic was to proclaim that Zanu-PF intended to abolish Christmas! The details of the serious struggle to keep President Mugabe out were documented at the time by a Zanu-PF support organisation in London called the Zimbabwe Solidarity Front, and relevant articles from its journal will later this year be published in book form by Lalkar Publications. Suffice it to say at this stage, that every effort was made to sideline Zanu-PF by forcing it, for instance, into alliance with "moderates" in an effort to palm off on the people of Zimbabwe a government that could be guaranteed to put the interests of imperialism above the interests of the people. Then more "flexible" black leaders — Bishop Abel Muzorewa and the Reverend Ndabaningi Sithole — were taken on board by the settler government into a government of "national unity", in the hope that this would satisfy the masses and undermine the liberation war. All that happened, however, was that these reverend gentlemen lost what little support they had left. Elections were held, and these were won by an overwhelming majority by the Zanu-PF party, which had taken 57 seats. Zapu, the other party that supported the armed liberation struggle, took 20 seats, ie., all but one of the seats in the Ndebele heartlands of Matabeleland, while Muzorewa was reduced to the holder of three seats. All the South African money that had clandestinely helped to finance his campaign came to nothing in the face of a genuine desire for change. Nothing imperialism or the South African white supremacists could do could prevent the anti-imperialist President Mugabe from taking power from Independence. Neither imperialism nor white supremacist South Africa reconciled themselves to defeat, and they immediately set about, in their different ways, trying to destabilise the Zimbabwean Government. Obviously reactionaries exploit every weakness they can to try and cause difficulties to their enemies. The obvious fault line in Zimbabwe was the traditional tribal rivalries between the majority Shona tribe (70 percent of the population) and the minority Ndebele tribe (16 percent of the population). The Ndebele were many years ago the rulers of Zimbabwe, and some cherished dreams of becoming so again. The two large provinces that constitute the west of Zimbabwe are Matabeleland North and Matabeleland South. The majority population there are Ndebele, of Zulu ancestry. Near the provincial capital, Bulawayo, . . . lie the Matopos Hills, an area of great spiritual significance and sweeping beauty. Here, there are natural columns of great boulders sitting on top of one another. Lobengula, the last great king of the Ndebele, was deceived and defeated by Rhodes, despite his ambassadors being kindly received by Queen Victoria. Once a generation, a female shaman is meant to appear at Matopos to anoint the spiritual heir of Lobengula, the one who would restore his reign and extend it over all Zimbabwe. Every year the late Vice President Joshua Nkomo would go to the great rock columns, hoping to be greeted by the shaman — who never came to him. These are just the kind of chauvinistic dregs that reactionaries love to exploit to cause their enemies to fight each other, and in the early days of Zanu-PF rule in Zimbabwe, it was by incitement of the Ndebele to rebellion that South Africa, itself still a white supremacist state at that time, was hoping to be able to teach a salutary racist lesson to its own black majority population, i.e., that black majority rule is a recipe for disaster. Following the victory of the liberation struggle, Zanu-PF, ever with an eye to maintaining the unity of the Zimbabwean people as they fought to better life for themselves in the teeth of opposition from imperialism and white supremacist South Africa, offered Dr Nkomo the post of president of Zimbabwe. He, however, turned that down. Instead he became Home Affairs Minister, responsible for law and order. — www.lalkar.demon.co.uk/issues/contents/jul2003/zim.html - To be continued The
Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Uganda is in anarchy" Groupe de communication Mulindwas "avec Yoweri Museveni, l'Ouganda est dans l'anarchie" |
