President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe at the African Union summit in Egypt on June 30, 2008.
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos
By Tafataona Mahoso
Zimbabwe Herald
This is the first of a two-part article by Tafataona P. Mahoso highlighting the evils of the Western-sponsored regime change agenda.
WHAT happened to Zimbabwean lecturer and journalist Caesar Zvayi at the hands of the Botswana government is a profound warning to Sadc and Africa about the evils of the Western-sponsored regime change project.
The Botswana President is keeping a shooting list of so-called "cronies of Robert Mugabe" which he has received from the European Union but which has been compiled by opposition parties, sponsored journalist associations and non-governmental organisations for pay.
For Pan-Africanists to appreciate the threat which the EU and its Botswana collaborators pose to African freedom, let us look at an extract from journalist Naomi Klein’s recent book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.
The extract concerns an Egyptian man who was put on a CIA shooting list while visiting Pakistan. He was, therefore, kidnapped from Pakistan and taken to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where it was found, too late, that he should never have been on the CIA list, except for the fact that the CIA was offering good prize money to those who compiled the shooting lists. Here is the extract:
"Do you have any theories about why the government and the Pakistani intelligence folks would sell you out and turn you over to the (North) Americans?"
"Come on, man," he replied, "you know what happened. In Pakistan you can buy people for US$10. So what about US$5 000?"
"So they sold you?" the tribunal member asked, as if the thought had never occurred to him.
"Yes."
But Klein does not stop with just that exchange. She then goes to other research which shows that the Egyptian victim of US kidnapping was released, too late, when it became clear that he had been put on the shooting list by cynical and over-zealous Pakistanis who wanted the US$5 000 prize badly.
"According to the Pentagon’s own figures, 86 percent of the prisoners at Guantanamo were handed over by Afghan and Pakistani fighters or agents after bounties were announced. As of December 2006, the Pentagon had released 360 prisoners. The Associated Press was able to track down 245 of them; 205 had been cleared of all charges when they returned to their home countries.
According to the Chronicle issue of August 13 and Herald of August 15, 2008, the new President of Botswana has ordered the forced expulsion of four Zimbabweans so far for the crime of being labelled supporters of Zimbabwean President Mugabe and being on a white man’s (EU) shooting list.
Those who have studied the histories of apartheid and imperialist "regime change" will not fail to realise that the Botswana leader is now involved in a white man’s crime dating back from the beginning of the Cold War in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
The compilation of a shooting list on a country is one of the key stages in the development of the white imperialists’ regime change and destabilisation plan. It was used in the US-sponsored fascist destruction of democracy in Chile in 1973; it was used in the destruction of the progressive mixed economies of Argentina and Brazil and the imposition of neo-liberalism in those countries in 1976 and 1965 respectively.
It was a critical tool in the enforcement of apartheid in South Africa, with the authors of the book Automating Apartheid accusing the US government and US computer companies of computerising the police, intelligence and military systems of South Africa whose responsibilities included the generation of similar shooting lists of freedom fighters to be eliminated.
Before we look at some of the historical cases, it helps to examine the issues at stake.
Just as the US found that 86 percent of its kidnapped prisoners at Guantanamo Bay were kidnapped after the announcement of prize monies of up to US$5 000, Sadc will also find that the shooting lists of banned Zimbabweans are also being paid for by British, US and EU spies and NGOs serving the regime change project in our region. Even some journalists have also been involved in selling one another to the highest bidder.
But our main concern here is to warn Sadc that some of its members and certain churches, NGOs and associations are engaged in an evil project which has an ugly past of which they may not be fully aware.
Since the document which became the so-called Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act (ZIDERA) was written in 2000, Zimbabweans have been told by MDC-T and its sponsors that the sanctions against Zimbabwe were only "targeted travel bans". The truth is that targeting individuals has always been part and parcel of regime change programmes which also include economic sanctions and financials warfare. Targeting individuals by compiling shooting lists is not in any way inconsistent with economic warfare or with an economic blockade.
Unfortunately, journalists in Zimbabwe have routinely failed to unbundle the concept of targeted sanctions in terms of recent history and practice. What exactly is involved?
First, the compilation of shooting lists was perfected during that part of the Cold War known as the McCarthy era in the US.
Its logic has been revived by George W Bush under the binary doctrine of "You are either with us, the good guys, or you are with them, the terrorists."
So, in each targeted state, the CIA and its collaborators always compile lists of the bad guys on the other side. That list is used for various purposes, some of which we shall demonstrate through real historical cases.
In Chile, the binary processes began with the massive selection on youths who were to be trained to become "the good guys. Using the Ford Foundation and other organisations, the US government selected students from Chile and channelled them to the University of Chicago where they were trained in the neoliberal economic ideology of Milton Friedman and John Williamson.
Chile’s foreign minister in the 1990s was to describe the channelling of Chilean students to the University of Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s as "a striking example of an organised transfer of ideology from the United States to a country within its direct sphere of influence".
But the successful election and inauguration of Salvador Allende and his Popular Unity Government against the US-sponsored opposition in Chile convinced the CIA that it could not win Chile for neoliberal imperialism through the battle for ideas. The people of Chile would have to be forced, through fascism and mass torture, to realise what was "good for the".
The CIA, therefore, started to plan for a coup d’état which eventually overthrew the popular Allende government on September 11, 1973. This was planned carefully between the CIA and rightwing generals in the military. As part of the plan for the coup, a shooting list was compiled by the CIA and given to the rightwing generals led by General Augusto Pinochet.
The list included intellectuals, professors, progressive union leaders, students and patriotic members of the armed forces who were committed to upholding the democratic constitution and protecting the country’s national independence and sovereignty.
In Chile, as in Indonesia eight years before, the shooting list was detailed and thorough enough to enable Gen Pinochet’s death squads to move around after the coup and pluck out those people who had been identified.
Those on the shooting list who were members of the armed forces were murdered before the coup d’etat in order to pave way for the illegal regime change and leave the targeted President without adequate defence. After the coup d’etat, more than 13 500 civilians were rounded up and detained immediately.
Before these acts of national mass torture were over, 3 200 persons were "disappeared", which means that they were murdered in such a way that their bodies have never been accounted for. It is believed that they were cut up and dropped in the ocean. More than 80 000 were imprisoned, and 200 000 had to flee the country for fear of persecution. Pan Africanists will remember also that the murder of the first Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and his close advisors and followers in 1961 was carried out according to a CIA shooting list.
Let us now turn to the example of Indonesia. The story begins eight years before the fascist coup d’etat in Chile.
The people of Indonesia were punished through the provocation of two holocausts (1965-66 and 1975-81) for their role in Afro-Asian solidarity and in the Non-Aligned Movement. Zimbabwe has a lot to learn from this imperialist treatment of Indonesia.
In order not to confuse rhetoric with actual practice, the first question Zimbabweans must ask about themselves is: Why did the US and Europe intervene in Indonesia the way they did and why are they similarly interfering in the internal affairs of Zimbabwe and in bilateral relations between Zimbabwe and Britain?
In Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corporations, Barnet and Muller provide part of the answer:
"Capital and ideological purity were preserved together. The readier the Pentagon and CIA were to bring down or raise up a government, the better the investment climate for US corporations. US military power was used to establish the ground rules within which American businesses could operate.
The US government acted as a consultant for rightist coups in Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Greece and Indonesia . . ."
In the 1960s, Indonesia was viewed in Europe and America as the richest core of the South-East-Asia region, containing 85 percent of the world’s natural rubber, more than 45 percent of the word’s tin, 65 percent of the world’s copra and 23 percent of the world’s chromium ore.
In other words, Indonesia was central in terms of rich raw materials and minerals and in terms of ideological leadership in Afro-Asian solidarity against imperialism.
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