Emerson Mnangagwa of ZANU-PF, President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe will hold national elections on March 29, 2008.
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos
AFRICAN FOCUS By Tafataona P Mahoso
Zimbabwe Sunday Mail
BY the globalisation of Anglo-Saxon terror we mean that the North Atlantic states led by the United States of America and Britain are terrorising Zimbabwe and they are terrified by the country’s example; they are terrorising the world (as in Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan) and they are terrified by that world outside of the North Atlantic.
This is the context in which Zimbabwe must protect and preserve her resources, protect and preserve her independence and sovereignty. Long before this terror was expressed in the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, before this terror was shown in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, before it was demonstrated in the racist imposition of the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of the USA — the Western and Western-sponsored mass media were already engaged in "reporting as self-fulfilling prophecy".
They were already engaged in what we called in the last instalment the provision of an escort service to world public opinion, so that what the British and their cousins were planning and going to do to the world would appear natural, acceptable and even inevitable when it was eventually done. The world would believe and accept that it was bound to happen. The world would believe that it deserved the action or decision.
But what is the problem?
From the point of view of Zimbabwe, the problem is simple and clear. The First Enclosure Movement set up capitalism using slavery as one of its means. The Second Enclosure Movement set up colonialism and neo-colonialism. The Third Enclosure Movement launched a new imperialism renamed globalisation or global integration with its doctrine of unipolarism and unilateralism.
Zimbabwe has experienced the Third Enclosure Movement in the form of the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (Esap) and the regime change onslaught based on sponsored political parties, sponsored NGOs and sponsored church factions. The logic of the Third Enclosure Movement is the exact opposite of that of the Third Chimurenga.
In the Third Enclosure Movement land once stolen by settlers is not supposed to be returned to its owners and the huge and strategic mineral resources in our soil are supposed to be handed over to global corporations who should be offered long tax holidays in exchange only for creating "jobs" and "alleviating poverty".
But the three enclosure movements are historically sequenced and dependent on each other. For instance, in 1951, as Africans began to tear apart the Second Enclosure of colonialism and to prepare for the Second Chimurenga, apartheid South Africa’s ambassador to the UK presented a lecture before the Royal Empire Society in London.
The imperialist magazine East Africa and Rhodesia of February 22 1951 reproduced parts of Dr A. L. Geyer’s lecture in an article entitled "South Africa’s Role in African Defence and Development". The white ambassador, representing South Africa at Whitehall, said, among other things: "There was a time when it was fashionable for Britons to speak of ‘the white man’s burden’ . . . It had a kernel of downright sincerity. What is more, the burden is there . . . Refuse to continue carrying that burden, succumb to the nonsensical talk that the days of colonies are over, and you become untrue to yourselves. And you betray Black Africa.
"One fact can be put quite dogmatically: in the interest both of Europe and Africa, the latter must be kept within the European orbit. Europe needs Africa. Africa needs Europe no less.
"South Africa and Southern Rhodesia (meaning Zimbabwe) are not part of Black Africa. Both have built up a permanent white population and established a modern state on European lines."
I need not remind our readers that the African liberation movement breached those so-called "European lines" and overthrew the apartheid and UDI power of the so-called permanent white population.
Nevertheless, imperialism was already working out the Third Enclosure Movement which would not have to depend on a permanent white population as such. But it would still require a continuing enclosure within "European lines".
As academics Richard J. Barnet and Ronald E. Muller concluded in their book Global Reach, the Power of the Multinational Corporations, right in the middle of our Second Chimurenga, in 1974, the Third Enclosure Movement was going to be far smarter than the first and the second.
Barnet and Muller wrote: "The goal of corporate diplomacy (especially in the South) is nothing less than the replacement of national loyalty with corporate loyalty. If global monopolies are to succeed in integrating the planet, loyalty to the global enterprise must take precedence over all political loyalties."
This means, for Zimbabwe, political loyalties were already being made a taboo long before we had yet established our own national political class and state.
Now, just as the African liberation movement here refused to be bound by the European lines laid down by apartheid’s ambassador to the UK in 1951, so President Robert Mugabe, Zanu-PF and the African land reclamation movement have also refused to replace loyalty to Zimbabwe and Zimbabweanness with loyalty to the descendants of the British South Africa Company who are represented here by Anglo-American Corporation, Old Mutual Plc, the United Dominion Company and the 500 or so North American and British companies doing business here.
For refusing to discard our loyalty to Zimbabwe, for refusing to adopt loyalty to Anglo-American and the BSA Company, Zimbabweans have committed a crime in the eyes of the British and the North Americans. That crime is spelled out clearly, not only in the racist piece of US legislation called the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act; it is also spelled out in black and white in Ambassador Andrew Pocock’s magazine called Britain and Zimbabwe, Issue Number 23, First Quarter 2007, where the UK ambassador says:
"This (regime change recipe) has nothing to do with alleged plots against Zimbabwean sovereignty or non-existent economic sanctions. Denying the law of gravity will not stop you (Zimbabweans) from falling off a cliff. Why should denying (imperialist) economic laws be different? Zimbabwe is not the victim of international malevolence.
"On the contrary, it continues to benefit from international benevolence (over £500 million from Britain alone since 1980, including over £120 million in the last five years) . . . The Zimbabwean Government is denying itself and its people the benefits of development and partnership."
In his embassy magazine, the British ambassador to Zimbabwe was trying to achieve three goals:
-Helping the MDC to dodge the sanctions issue in the 2008 elections by calling the devastating sanctions non-existent.
-Pointing out that President Mugabe’s crime is his daring to place national interest and national loyalty above loyalty to Euro-American capital.
-Intimidating the voting population of Zimbabwe in order to force them to abandon President Mugabe and his vision of indigenisation and empowerment.
Yet, there was a time when the British-sponsored MDC used to boast openly that it invited sanctions upon the people of Zimbabwe in order to make them suffer until they abandoned or overthrew the Zanu-PF Government for its audacity to defy white economic and military power in the land revolution.
Cathy Buckle, a white supporter of the opposition MDC, wrote about the way Western companies in Zimbabwe would enforce sanctions from within Zimbabwe and against the Government and the people.
These companies helped the regime change forces, including the MDC, to organise workers’ stayaways in which the companies stopped production by locking out their workforce.
Buckle confirmed this arrangement in The Daily News of March 25 2003. And, as Peta Thornycroft was to admit and regret in 2007, The Daily News and other "independent" media adopted the MDC as their special project to promote on behalf of the sponsors.
This is what Buckle wrote: "Zimbabweans (meaning Rhodesians in Zimbabwe) must assume that companies who stayed open (during the foreign-sponsored shut-out) approve of the African farm seizures; that they agree with the oppression of the opposition MDC and murder and torture of its supporters.
"We must assume that these companies do not care about the misnamed Public Order and Security Act . . . The (regime change) call for a national stayaway was not designed to sabotage the country and its almost dead economy but to save it."
In plain language, the stayaways were intended to save the white Rhodesian economy from the revolutionary development of the Zimbabwean economy being built upon land reclamation and upon a revolutionary land tenure which are now being followed by the Indigenisation and Empowerment Act of 2008.
Buckle praised those companies who shut out their workers while attacking those who remained at work. But another supporter of the opposition MDC, being an African himself who stood to benefit from the very same indigenisation and empowerment policies of Zanu-PF which his own party opposed, decided to reveal what the British, the North Americans and their European allies wanted the sanctions to achieve.
Denford Magora responded to Buckle in The Daily News of September 4 2003, in part, as follows: "She (Buckle) surely does not expect us to believe now her reasoning that Zimbabwe is not under real economic sanctions . . . Britain and America have a tried and tested method of getting rid of . . . regimes they do not like. The game plan always involves making sure that the population of a country suffer enough to rise up against the incumbent government.
"That was the plan in Iraq and, when it failed, US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair dropped all pretence and invaded that country . . .
"These sanctions have nothing to do with Mugabe or Zanu-PF. They are designed (by the MDC’s sponsors) to ensure that the people of Zimbabwe do not feel comfortable, with the result that they rise up against Mugabe and chase him out of the country.
"Has Cathy Buckle not heard of all sorts of aid organisations from Europe and the US who have stopped doing work in Zimbabwe?
"They have abandoned orphanages and other institutions . . . What is ‘targeted’ about that, unless the target is orphans?"
In other words, what Magora and Buckle were saying in 2003 was that Britain, the US, the EU, MDC, private companies and NGOs supporting the MDC in Zimbabwe were all clear from the start in 2000 that the so-called targeted sanctions against President Mugabe and his "cronies" were, in fact, an economic blockade against the people.
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