No To Britain’s Interference in Zimbabwe!

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No To Britain’s Interference in Zimbabwe!

Hands Off Zimbabwe!

For Your Information:
Poll Results – UK's Hidden Hand Exposed
Observation Team Plays Down Chances of Fraud
"Defend Your Independence" – Call of President Mugabe

The Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, made a statement to the House of Commons last week on the elections in Zimbabwe. At that time, as the Foreign Secretary was compelled to acknowledge, the results of the elections were still unknown, although there was every indication that they were closely contested. He also admitted that there was no reported unrest or violence in the country and in such circumstances a neutral observer might be baffled as to why the Foreign Secretary of the British government felt it necessary to make any statement at all. Miliband then went on to claim that there was no dispute between Britain and Zimbabwe; that the British government was not endorsing one particular candidate in that country’s presidential election; and even that Britain, the former colonial power in what was then Southern Rhodesia, has “always supported the Zimbabwean people”.

            But in fact Miliband’s statement openly praised and supported one candidate, condemned the Zimbabwe Election Commission for not releasing the election results, which he referred to as a “deliberate and calculated tactic”, and without any evidence described the elections as manifestly not “free and fair”. In addition, the Foreign Secretary denounced the President of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, and his party ZANU-PF for economic mismanagement and alleged human rights abuses, and encouraged other countries, especially those in Southern Africa to interfere in Zimbabwe’s internal affairs. As for the government’s alleged concern for the people of Zimbabwe, Miliband declared that “when there is real and positive policy change on the ground Britain will play a full part in supporting recovery”. In other words, if the election result is the one that the British government has created conditions for, then the government will fully support the creation of the kind of Zimbabwe that it wishes to establish. It should be added that there was unanimous support for Miliband’s statement from all the big parties in parliament. Representatives of the three main parties were completely united in their plans for the international “rehabilitation” of Zimbabwe if the election results are to their liking and for continued bullying and attacks if they are not.

            A tri-partisan consensus has long been a characteristic of the way that the British ruling class has approached the issue of Zimbabwe. The most well-known example being the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD), the organisation established in 1992 by parliament and supported by all the big parties. It receives over £4m in state funding every year with the aim of “building pluralist democratic institutions abroad”. As is well known the WFD openly supported the creation of the opposition to the government of Zimbabwe.  Another example is the Zimbabwe Democratic Trust (ZDT), which was established in London in 2000 as “a non-partisan pro-democracy group set up to campaign internationally for the rights of Zimbabweans to live in civic peace and freedom”.  The ZDT emerged as one of the main backers of opposition to the Zimbabwe government. Its patrons include former leading Conservative politicians Lords Howe, Hurd and Carrrington, as well as Sir Joshua Rifkind. Lord Steele, the former Liberal Democrat leader is another patron. Although the Trust is now based in the US, it retains strong British ties and its current chairman is Lord Renwick, a former Ambassador to South Africa and advisor to the British government during the Lancaster House talks in 1979 that led to the creation of Zimbabwe. Renwick is also a board member of several banks and monopolies that have interests in southern Africa including JP Morgan, Harmony Gold and Richemont, three of the world’s largest monopolies.

            The WFD and the ZDT openly interfere in the economic and political affairs of Zimbabwe almost as if it were still a British colony. Indeed it is a great achievement that Zimbabwe is able to hold simultaneous council, parliamentary, senate and presidential elections at all, with such levels of political interference in its internal affairs. At the same time there are still around 400 major British monopolies present such as Rio Tinto, Anglo American, BP and British American Tobacco, which continue to dominate Zimbabwe’s economic life, as they did during the colonial period. Standard Chartered Bank, for example, has been in the country since 1892 and created the conditions for the colony of Rhodesia to be established.

            The Foreign Secretary speaks of the problems facing Zimbabwe’s economy as if they were all the result of the activities and bad judgement of the president of Zimbabwe and says nothing about the legacy of colonialism and the continued domination of Zimbabwe’s economy by British monopolies. Nor is there any mention of the impact of neo-liberal globalisation and the interference and attacks which have been launched on Zimbabwe by international financial institutions and by the Anglo-American imperialists and the other big powers. For many years major financial institutions such as the IMF have refused to offer any facilities to Zimbabwe while the curiously named Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act, passed by the US Congress in 2001, specifically prohibits any financial support to Zimbabwe from US financial institutions and international financial institutions to which the US contributes.

            The facts of history show that it has been the people of Zimbabwe who have fought for democracy and the economic and political independence of their country. Many laid down their lives or, like the current president, spent many years in prison to rid their country of British colonial rule. In the period since the waging of the armed national liberation struggle, the government of Zimbabwe has also taken measures to restore land to the people of their country and take control of Zimbabwe’s economy and resources, the recently passed Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Act being an obvious example. The resistance to such measures has been spearheaded by the governments of Britain and the US, as well as the other big powers, acting on behalf of the monopolies and financial institutions and attempting to deny the people of Zimbabwe their right to determine their own future.

            In order to justify such interference a massive campaign of disinformation has been mounted over the course of several years, the historical facts are obscured, truth is turned on its head and the representatives of the monopolies that have exploited the people of this part of Africa for over a century present themselves as the greatest friends of the people of Zimbabwe. It is in this context that the nature of the government’s “democratic imperative” and defence of “universal values” can be most clearly seen. What must be demanded is an end to all colonial and neo-colonial interference in Zimbabwe. Hands Off Zimbabwe!

The Marxist-Leninist Daily , On-Line Newspaper of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist), April 3, 2008

Disinformation carried by the monopoly media abounds regarding Zimbabwe's harmonised national elections held on March 29 to elect 210 House of Assembly seats, 60 Senate seats, the national president and local councils.

            The Anglo-American imperialist political and media focus has been to discredit the government of Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) headed by President Robert Mugabe and present the election as unfair and rigged. This has already been substantially refuted by the Southern African Development Community election observation team. So far, the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) announced that ZANU-PF has won 93 of 210 seats in the House of Assembly, whilst the Opposition parties combined have won 105 seats. This makes it the first time since independence in 1980 that the ZANU-PF has not had a parliamentary majority. Furthermore, as of the time of writing, reports are indicating the prospects of a run-off election for president between Robert Mugabe and the lead Opposition candidate Morgan Tsvangirai representing the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). All of it is being used to step up the disinformation campaign about what is at stake in Zimbabwe.

            According to one of the western news agencies, the issue is that now Robert Mugabe is facing "the greatest crisis of his 28-year rule”. Why "of his rule" and not "of Zimbabwe"? How can Mugabe's rule be judged outside the context of the problems Zimbabwe is facing? Making the colonial arrangements inherited by Zimbabwe a matter of an alleged "Mugabe dictatorship" is cruel indeed. These are very complex questions. They not only intimately concern the people of Zimbabwe in particular and the security of southern Africa, but all of humankind. This is a country where two percent of settlers from the time of the former racist regime control 80 percent of the land, 400 British companies continue to rule the roost, the former colonial power, Britain, is in contempt of its own Lancaster House Agreement signed in 1979 and chaos reigns are a result of draconian international sanctions and the interference of the US, Canada, Britain and other countries in Zimbabwe's internal affairs. The media's rendering of the situation also ignores the vote result, which would seem to indicate that the country is divided more or less in half as concerns the way forward for Zimbabwe.

            ZANU-PF was formed through a union of the two main national liberation movements in the 1972-1980 war for national liberation against Ian Smith's racist settler regime called Rhodesia. Since it came to power in 1980, ZANU-PF has represented a political orientation against colonialism and especially Anglo-American imperialism, with an emphasis on returning to the indigenous African population agricultural lands seized by force by the Euro-settler occupiers dating from the 1890s. As a result of the self-sacrificing armed struggle of Zimbabwe patriots in which some 50,000 people died, the 1979 Lancaster House Agreement (LHA) was signed which, amongst other things, upheld the principle of majority rule on the basis of one-person/one-vote. Robert Mugabe, ZANU leader imprisoned by the Smith regime for 11 years before independence in 1980, became the first elected prime minister in the one-person/one-vote system. He later became president and has retained that position through five consecutive terms to the present time.

            The current strident assault against the Zimbabwe government began over the expropriation of Euro-settler farms begun in earnest in 2002. The ZANU-PF government agreed in the LHA to re-distribute the Euro-settler lands seized from the indigenous African population in a slow, regulated manner, with Britain agreeing to cover the costs of paying settler farmers for properties they had turned into profitable capitalist enterprises through the employment of landless Zimbabwean wage-labour. Developed capitalist agriculture based on key export crops was the backbone of old Euro-settler dominated Rhodesia. Contrary to the LHA, for nearly 30 years, the British government has weaselled their way out of meeting their commitment to land transfers.

            There is no question that over the past 28 years Zimbabwean society required serious and systematic measures to renew not only its economic relations, but the entire organisation and mobilisation of its population to make head-way in its nation-building project. Many accomplishments were made during the early years of independence, especially in health care, education and other social services. Some efforts were also undertaken to establish "parastatals" – companies such as Zimbabwe Airlines and over a dozen others combining private and government ownership directed to assisting the public good. Old ways of doing things could no longer meet the increasing demands of the Zimbabwean workers, peasants and intellectual strata. A failure to renew the society, especially the inherited colonial political superstructure, was bound to give rise to divisions within the polity. Further, the 1990s saw internationally a major neo-liberal offensive against governments and societies around the world, focusing on privatisation of social assets and imposition of increasing onerous trade policies, foreign-loans and other instruments of robbing the countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean by the imperialist states, especially the Anglo-American alliance, the European Union and Japan.

            Therefore, in addition to carrying the ongoing legacy of Euro-settler control of most private enterprise in Zimbabwe and foreign corporate control, especially over wholesale trade with the preponderance of consumer goods being imported, the ZANU-PF government has had to face this neo-liberal offensive. The legacy of old colonial political institutions and privilege associated with governance inherited from the old society continues to undermine the people's capacity to meet the increasing economic difficulties and challenges of building a prosperous future for themselves.

            Faced with an accumulating set of problems, ZANU-PF went to the nation in March 2002 with a proposal for a constitutional reform, one aspect of which sought government power to expropriate Euro-settler seized land and turn it over to African farmers. This after all had been at the heart of the national liberation war: it was fundamentally a war to repatriate the land seized by force of arms by the invading Europeans, mainly Scots-English settlers who arrived with Cecil Rhodes in the 1890s. The liberation war (Chimurenga) was the second to resist the settlers, the first being defeated in 1895. But the referendum for constitutional reform in 2002 failed. The government then adopted a programme of expropriation of Euro-settler capitalist farms and distributed the land to Africans. This indigenisation programme set the Anglo-American imperialists screaming and they imposed a number of political and economic embargoes against the ZANU-PF government and President Mugabe. The agenda to Africanise the land goes directly opposite to the neo-liberal agenda. The neo-liberal demand for a "willing seller" to a "willing buyer" remains the "free market" capitalist cry to negate compensated expropriation and reparations due to the indigenous peoples.

            The hysteria of the Anglo-American media, mobilisation of "civil society" through imperialist financed "NGOs," "human rights" and other fronts carrying out ideo-political aggression and provocations formerly committed directly by the CIA is now being focused against the ZANU-PF government and its president, Robert Mugabe.

            But the imbalance in the economy remained and remains today with some 80 percent of the economic assets of the country in the hands of some two percent of the Euro-settler population and Anglo-American corporations. The fixation of the big powers who benefit from the old arrangements is part of their agenda to effect "regime change" in Zimbabwe so as to defend their positions of privilege and power. They preside over the robbery and super-exploitation of the resources of Zimbabwe such as gold, platinum, uranium and diamonds and of its labour power.

            A glimpse of imperialism's plans for a regime-change in Zimbabwe can be seen in the following quotation from Michelle Gavin, International Affairs Fellow and Adjunct Scholar on Africa at the US Council on Foreign Relations: "Zimbabwe's regeneration would have to be an all-hands-on-deck effort. International financial institutions and donors, which ended their involvement to protest the regime's corruption and human rights abuses, would be likely to step in with emergency programmes to bring Zimbabwe back from the brink. And already international investors sense a bargain in the making. LonZim, an investment fund set up by the Lonrho mining group last December, has already raised $65 million to invest in Zimbabwe. 'We're very bullish that Zimbabwe as a country will become very strong again,' said LonZim director Geoffrey White. 'Any economy that is in the position that Zimbabwe is in will recover. That's the opportunity. Zimbabwe retains a solid base of infrastructure, and considerable mineral deposits."[1]

            Progressive humanity which fought hard to end the racist Apartheid regime in Zimbabwe and South Africa and to achieve the independence of Angola, Namibia and Mozambique must take their stand all over again in support of the principle of majority rule – one person, one vote. Let the people decide in a peaceful atmosphere how to sort out bringing into being the conditions which favour the people of Zimbabwe.

            TML calls on the Canadian people to once again stand with the people of Zimbabwe against foreign interference. How the enlightened and patriotic forces in Zimbabwe rally the people and push their project forward during these extremely difficult days is their decision to make. Our duty is to support their efforts by opposing the Anglo-American attempts to deprive them of real independence and control over their own affairs.

Hands Off Zimbabwe!

Note

1. Perry, Alex, "Zimbabwe waits to exhale," Time Magazine, April 3, 2008.

 

Caesar Zvayi, Herald (Harare), April 3, 2008

The British government and its prime minister, Gordon Brown, have now come out in the open as the real power behind the MDC Tsvangirai faction, demanding the release of the results of Zimbabwe's elections that show an opposition victory.

            Almost the entire British state machinery – from the BBC to its House of Commons – was almost going hysterical over the delay in announcing the election results by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission.

            Britain's three main political parties united in urging Brown to approach South African President Thabo Mbeki to press him "to deal with the crisis in Zimbabwe”. It was these three British parties that set up the so-called Westminster Fund for Democracy that bankrolled the launch of the MDC from a ZCTU platform in September 1999 after the Government announced it would compulsorily acquire white-held farms for redistribution to landless black families.

            Brown told the BBC that the "eyes of the world" are on Zimbabwe, saying the election results should be published without delay.

            Liberal Democrats leader Nick Clegg urged Brown to increase pressure for a "swift and transparent" declaration of results, even though ZEC has been hailed by observer missions for the manner in which it conducted the election and managed the release of the results.

            "Gordon Brown must seek urgent discussions with Thabo Mbeki and other leaders of the Southern African Development Community to ensure that maximum pressure is applied to ensure a swift and transparent declaration of results," Clegg said.

            Brown's office said the British premier had discussed "the situation" with President Mbeki on Monday, but would not give details of the talks. British Foreign Secretary David Miliband and former Labour cabinet minister Peter Hain called on Africa and the rest of the world to express their support for the MDC.

            Miliband told the BBC's Newsnight programme: "It is long overdue for the rest of the world to stand shoulder to shoulder with the spirit of democracy which has expressed itself in Zimbabwe and which is now about to be traduced by President Mugabe and his ruling clique."

            At a meeting in Paris, foreign ministers from France, Italy, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain issued a joint statement, along with Miliband, saying: "We call on the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission to swiftly announce all the election results, especially the results of the presidential election. The future of the Zimbabwean people depends on the credibility and transparency of the electoral process."

            The BBC said Brown's spokesman had hinted at possible increases in aid for Zimbabwe in the event Tsvangirai wins.

            Zimbabwe's election results have become a top story on all international media networks, drawing far more attention than Kenya was accorded when over 1,500 people were hacked or speared to death while 600,000 others were displaced following the disputed re-election of incumbent president Mwai Kibaki on December 27 last year.

            Given the intimate relationship between the global media structures, Western politics and the quest for world domination, analysts say this vindicates the view that what is at stake in Zimbabwe is far bigger than what the contestants, with the notable exception of those in Zanu-PF, realise.

            A view vindicated by the conspicuous flow of many white former commercial farmers who trooped back into Zimbabwe once the MDC prematurely claimed victory. Some of them have headed to the farms where they threatened to evict newly resettled farmers particularly around Chegutu and Kariba, as many are coming through Chirundu Border Post.

            Zimbabwe, the analysts say, represents the last frontier of resistance between the black nationalist struggle and Western neo-colonial encroachment under the guise of globalisation and the parochial discourse of democratisation.

            Following the government's decision to bar all news networks hostile to Zimbabwe from covering the elections, many of them are encamped right round the borders with flushed correspondents giving feverish coverage to all sorts of conspiracy theories and utterances by the opposition and its allies.

            The BBC, the public face of British foreign policy, yesterday devoted the entire day to non-stop coverage of Zimbabwe before splashing hourly updates to claims of electoral victory by the MDC. The BBC, in fact, dispatched its main news anchor to report from Johannesburg.

            Yesterday all major news networks ran hourly updates on Zimbabwe eclipsing even US President George W. Bush's visit to Europe for a NATO conference that is supposed to resolve some contentious issues between the world's major military powers.

            What has raised eyebrows is the fact that the Western leaders are basing their premature pronouncements on results compiled by the MDC and its civil society compatriots, yet ZEC – the only organisation legally and constitutionally mandated to issue the results – has not declared a winner, let alone the winner of the presidential contest.

            What makes the pronouncements from the West even more glaring is that African leaders, many of whom have a lot to gain or lose from the political dynamics in Zimbabwe, have not spoken, obviously waiting to issue their statements once the full outcome is in the public domain.

Angola Press (ANGOP), March 31, 2008

The chances of fraud in the presidential, legislative and autarchic elections held simultaneously last Saturday in Zimbabwe "can be set aside".

            ANGOP learnt of the information in Harare from the co-ordinator for the electoral observation mission of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) for Zimbabwe, José Marcos Barrica.

            The head of the SADC mission said that he based his affirmation on what was observed during the voting process, countrywide.

            "We were at 16 polling stations. And what we saw, especially due to the presence of observers and political parties' officials, at least the main parties and candidates, who guaranteed us that everything was in order, we can say that if we analysed until the voting process, there were no reasons to think about fraud," stressed the official.

            Marcos Barrica said he expects the same control among observers and political parties during the counting of the votes.

            The environment that preceded the holding of elections in Zimbabwe was wrapped in fraud allegations from opposition parties, with highlight to two political parties such as the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), of Morgan Tsvangirai and Arthur Mutambara and Simba Makoni, independent candidate.

            Marcos Barrica, who is also the Angolan minister of Youth and Sports, added that the peaceful manner how the voting occurred confirms the observation team's assurance that the conditions were created for the carrying out of elections in Zimbabwe.

            As explained before, the observation mission does not subject its performance to the publishing of the results by the official entity, the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC), outlining that it (the mission) ends with voting process.

            The chairmanship of the SADC observation mission for the elections in Zimbabwe was entrusted to Angola in its capacity of co-ordinator of the organ of Political Cooperation, Defence and Security of the Regional organisation.

            SADC comprises Angola, South Africa, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, DRC, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Zimbabwe Herald, March 29, 2008 (excerpts)

President Mugabe rounded off a well-subscribed election campaign that saw him address over 40 rallies countrywide, in Highfield – the bastion of nationalist resistance from the 1960s till independence in 1980 – by reminding all Zimbabweans to reflect on their history as they cast ballots today.

            Addressing thousands of party supporters at Gwanzura Stadium in Highfield on the last leg of a triad of star rallies in Harare yesterday, Cde Mugabe urged Zimbabweans to defend their independence and sovereignty in the ballot box, saying the erstwhile coloniser was at the door anticipating victory by his stooge opposition. [...]

            Cde Mugabe chronicled the critical role played by Highfield in the struggle, saying it was sacrilege that the suburb appeared to have forgotten its legacy.

            He said Government had resolved to empower people, particularly urbanites, through the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Act, so that they can be full masters of their destiny.

            He said gone are the days when black people should be content with only being managers in white-owned companies.

            Government, he said, had not failed the people, but had been bogged down by illegal sanctions imposed at the instigation of the MDC, and it had taken time to bust them as the economy was controlled by over 400 British companies, many of which worked in cahoots with London in its bid to effect regime change in Zimbabwe.

            He warned such companies that if they continued to squeeze the people; they faced nationalisation as the Government would not allow them to hold the people to ransom. [...]

            He said Government had embarked on the farm mechanisation programme after realising that many beneficiaries of the land reform programme, particularly war veterans, did not have the means to use on the farms.

            Government, he said, would soon launch a massive housing development programme complemented by a fund to assist prospective homeowners build houses of their choice. He said Government was shifting from building houses for the people, as was done under Operation Garikai/Hlalani Kuhle, to giving people plots to build houses of their choice.

            Cde Mugabe assured voters that they would not be disenfranchised by power cuts as all polling stations had been supplied with generators so that those who are always ready to find fault will not use unforeseen blackouts to discredit the poll by claiming that Zanu-PF stuffed ballots in the dark. [...]

            He said rigging claims were the MDC leaders' way of echoing their masters' voice. He said the opposition was the source of some of the lies peddled about Zimbabwe by the West, along with some organisations and church leaders like disgraced Roman Catholic Bishop Pius Ncube. [...]

            Cde Mugabe said his only sin, in the eyes of the likes of Bishop Ncube and his handlers, was that he was dispossessing their kith and kin to empower indigenous Zimbabweans.

            Government, he said, had resolved not to invite observers from countries that imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe as they already have preconceived positions on the electoral process.

            Earlier at two well-attended rallies in Epworth and Greendale, Cde Mugabe told supporters that the outcome of today's landmark elections should put the final nail in British neo-colonial machinations as Zimbabwe embarks on the second phase of its historic indigenisation programme.

            Cde Mugabe said he was aware of attempts by whites to circumvent the indigenisation process, but these would come to nought.

            "This is a vote against the British. [...] They are coming here clandestinely with their plots and machinations, but they will not succeed.

            "We are not going back to the days when whites treated us like we were not people. No. We are moving ahead. [...]

            "Yes, there are some whites who have citizenship here. They have said they want to be part of us and they want to work with us and there is no problem there. It is not just whites. [...]

            Cde Mugabe said the land was too precious a resource to be given away and people should vote in defence of it as well as a sign of their sovereignty. [...]

            The ruling party House of Assembly candidate for Harare Central, Cde Estella Nyandoro, earlier said residents in the constituency were mainly concerned about water and electricity deficits as well as the tendency by landlords to charge rentals in foreign currency.

            However, Cde Mugabe assured those who had gathered for the rally that the ruling party was committed to improving the welfare of the citizenry.

            Cde Mugabe said programmes were already in place to alleviate the situation in hospitals that had run out of drugs, and generators had been purchased to ensure the steady supply of electricity for health care centres as well as residential dwellings and industrial facilities.

            "Every hospital and every major clinic across the country is going to be supplied by these generators. The generators are already here and [...] we were told they had already been delivered. [... Y]ou will get them soon. The issue of water supply is also being taken care of," Cde Mugabe said.

            Cde Mugabe reiterated that the indigenisation programme would go into full swing next week.

            "We have just passed into law the Indigenisation Act. [...] if they want they can take the maximum 49 percent [...]," he said.

            Cde Mugabe assured the people of Epworth that the ruling party was working hard to improve their situation, especially in terms of water supply, transport, electricity and food security.

            He said they had set aside a total of 35 buses per province but seeing as Harare was the biggest more would soon be delivered. Cde Mugabe said the buses should charge 50 percent of Zupco fares, or even lower.