Why Zimbabwe Is Neither Egypt Nor Tunisia

Zimbabweans reading the Sunday Mail which reported on the peaceful national run-off elections in June 2008 which were won by President Robert Mugabe. Mugabe then headed to Egypt for the African Union Summit. a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.

Why Zimbabwe is neither Egypt nor Tunisia .

Saturday, 05 March 2011 21:29
AFRICAN FOCUS
By Tafataona Mahoso
Zimbabwe Sunday Mail

On April 21 1979 the people of Zimbabwe voted at Ian Smith’s gun-point for Bishop Abel Tendekayi Muzorewa to become the first and last prime minister of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia.

But on January 27 1980, when the then Zanu-PF leader, Robert Gabriel Mugabe, returned to Zimbabwe and attended a rally of supporters of his wing of the liberation movement, Muzorewa was forced to retreat indoors and watch the massive Second Chimurenga uprising show its popular strength at Zimbabwe Grounds in Highfield.

The truly popular elections of March 1980, just two months after the massive Zanu rally at Zimbabwe Grounds, cut Muzorewa’s party’s support in Parliament to only three seats!

In March 2008 the people of Zimbabwe voted under the duress and shock of illegal sanctions and produced a mixed result which produced the current inclusive Government with President Robert Mugabe as

President, Head of State and Government and Commander-in-Chief of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces deputised by Vice Presidents Joice Mujuru and the late Joseph Msika; and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai as Prime Minister on February 13 2009.

But on March 2 2011 Tsvangirai, like Muzorewa in 1980, was also forced to retreat to his Strathaven home and watch the massive Third Chimurenga uprising through the windows and on television.

The massive turnout at the anti-sanctions rally on March 2 2011 suggests that Tsvangirai’s showing in the March 2008 elections was a fluke caused by confusion over sanctions; just as the January 27 1980 Zimbabwe Grounds rally also suggested that Muzorewa’s showing in the April 1979 Rhodesian election was also a fluke caused by confusion over the war and the exclusion of the Patriotic Front from the same election.

Mr Tsvangirai’s retreat to Strathaven is the answer on the ground to his speculative wish during his visit to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in early February 2011.

There Mr Tsvangirai did not only get excited watching events in Cote d’Ivoire, Tunisia and Egypt on his hotel room TV screen. He came home and tried to stage what he thought was an inevitable sequel or domino uprising at Town House, Harare.

While in Davos, the Prime Minister was asked by Amy Kellog of FoxNews.com of the USA:

“What do you think of events in Egypt and Tunisia, and how do they relate to Zimbabwe? . . . Could that happen in Zimbabwe and is President Mugabe nervous?”

Tsvangirai’s answer was disjointed but it contained the following elements, among others.

“One (issue) is the general resentment of autocratic regimes, the manner in which these governments have stayed in power forever and ever. I think people resent that, naturally . . . So (an uprising is) like a spring. The more pressure you put on a spring, the more it will bounce . . . (Removing a government this way) was the whole purpose of our struggle for the last 10 years.”

The reader may wonder why I call the huge gathering which launched Zimbabwe’s national anti-sanctions campaign a “Third Chimurenga uprising”.

How can it be an uprising? Who were the Zimbabweans rising against? In what way can the anti-sanctions launch be compared and contrasted with what people have been trying to do in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Jordan, Yemen and Libya?

The answer is imperialism, made up of the imposition of neo-liberal corporatist polices expressed in our region as structural adjustment programmes; made up of the unilateral Nato-driven security programme called “the war on terror” in the Middle East and masquerading as Africom in the rest of Africa; made up of the global financial crisis and Western efforts to prescribe responses to the crisis for other regions of the world; made up of the myth of “change” and “democracy’ which tries to substitute mere words for real work, production and livelihoods; and made up of strenuous efforts to impose and maintain the Western media template on the rest of the world. That is imperialism in practice.

Fortunately or unfortunately the last imposition, that of a media template, is a double sword; it cuts those it is imposed upon and those who have fashioned, imposed and enforced it.

That is why the uprisings in North Africa and in Zimbabwe could not happen according to the imperialist “change” project and could not be predicted.

The result is that it is not just Morgan Tsvangirai who missed the real uprising when it happened. The result is that the imperialist powers themselves are taken by surprise.

Zimbabwe did not only dump and condemn foreign-sponsored economic structural adjustment in April 2001; by that date Zimbabwe had replaced adherence to Esap with adherence to the Third Chimurenga in the form of the African land reclamation and agrarian reform programmes. Land which according to Esap was supposed to go to foreign corporations went to peasants, millions of peasants.

Instead of being incorporated into the Bush-Blair “war on terror” programme, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Angola were busy rescuing the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) from a Western-sponsored genocidal invasion at the time of the Bush declaration.

When the Bush-Blair “war on terror” was repackaged for Africa as Africom, again Zimbabwe and its Sadc allies led the way in condemning it and rejecting it.

And because Zimbabwe was already under illegal Western sanctions it did not suffer the worst effects of the so-called global financial tsunami the way the North African economies of Tunisia, Libya and Egypt have.

And, finally, what happened on March 2 2011 was a national indigenous Zimbabwean uprising against illegal Anglo-Saxon sanctions and against the same corporate cannibalism or corporatism which the MDC formations have been trying to sell to Zimbabweans since 1999.

It is therefore significant that the Western-sponsored NewsDay on March 3 2011 chose to trivialise the national indigenous anti-sanctions rally on March 2 2011 in terms of individual leaders: “Tsvangirai snubs Mugabe”, while The Herald of the same day, and on the front page as well, chose to say: “The people have spoken”. Making the massive anti-sanctions rally Mugabe’s concern trivialises it.

So, the people of North Africa must be seen as rising up against their governments which had accepted neo-liberal structural adjustment programmes which had integrated them into the EU economy; governments which had accepted the Bush-Blair re-definition of the imperialist war on revolt as a global war on terror; governments which thought they were being strengthened when the US and Nato armed them to the teeth to put down revolts in the Arab world (including that of Hamas in Gaza) in the name of fighting terrorism; governments which had accepted Euro-American corporatism (fascism) as development; governments which collaborated with the US and Nato in the destruction and pillaging of Iraq and the destabilisation of Iran. That is imperialism in practice.

The best way to demonstrate that Tsvangirai’s expectation of an uprising in support of the imperialist project of regime change was wrong is to give readers a picture of the society which the West sponsored and sustained in the oil-rich Arab world, the society against which the so-called “protesters” have now risen.

According to Said Aburish’s article called “The Wounds of Oil”, in Index on Censorship number 4 of 1997:

“The massive discrepancy between conditions of rulers and the ruled has produced a hybrid culture.

“Beyond the royal families (and other elites) there exists a small class of beneficiaries . . . Merchants, bureaucrats and army and security officers, the possessors of what might be called a ‘petro-personality’ fashioned by rulers and oil companies, they constitute a minority group of loyalists whose privileged position is dependent on their creators.

“Mostly Western-educated and visible, this group endows the oil-producing countries with superficial legitimacy which is accepted by the Western world.

“In reality they are nothing but cultural half-breeds who speak Arabic and English badly and fit into neither Arab nor Western social moulds.”

This is the same foreign-inspired and foreign-sustained social and moral decadence which the liberation movement in government in Zimbabwe has been fighting against. This is the moral and material corruption and decadence which the anti-sanctions campaign seeks to overcome by linking the struggle against illegal and racist sanctions to the struggle for indigenisation and African economic empowerment.

Zimbabweans have also been aware that the Euro-American media template is destructive and harmful to human rights and to the ideals of Article 19 of the UN Charter, although that template, in fact, misrepresents itself as the protector of freedom of information and freedom of expression.

After September 11 2001 and after George W. Bush’s declaration of an endless war on revolt which he called “the war on terror”, John Perkins decided to publish his manuscript which became Confessions of an Economic Hitman.

One of the things that frightened him was the fact that the Western media blinded the majority populations in the Western countries themselves to the consequences of Western policies such as that of “war on terror”.

He wrote:

“Things are not as they appear. NBC is owned by General Electric, ABC by Disney, CBS by Viacom, and CNN is part of the huge AOL Time Warner conglomerate. Most of our newspapers, magazines and publishing houses are owned — and manipulated — by gigantic international corporations.

“Our (Western) media is part of corporatocracy (that is, new fascism). The officers and directors who control nearly all our communications outlets know their places; they are taught throughout life that one of their most important jobs is to perpetuate, strengthen, and expand the system they have inherited. They are very efficient at doing so, and when opposed, they can be ruthless.”

This characterisation includes directors of BBC, CNN, Sky News, Euro News and Fox TV.

This ruthlessness explains the surprise expressed by the European and North American governments at events in the Arab world. It also explains Tsvangirai’s misplaced analogies and parallels. In fact, the article by Aburish already cited also included this observation:

“No Western leader has ever spoken of human rights abuses in the oil-producing countries. The Western media settles for superficial examination of conditions within these (Arab) states and essentially follow its governments’ official line.”

So one difference (which Mr Tsvangirai and his Western sponsors did not appreciate) between the uprisings against imperialism and its collaborators in North Africa, on one hand, and the Chimurenga uprisings in Zimbabwe is the relationship between leaders and the people.

In Southern Africa and in Zimbabwe in particular, the masses of the people have produced a genuine, organic, leadership which cannot put down those uprisings which are by the people and for the people’s interest. This is because the leaders are part and parcel of the people who bring them to the fore.

That is how the African land reclamation movement succeeded. The majority of beneficiaries, the security forces and the civilian leaders were all products of one continuing Chimurenga uprising.

This difference explains why NewsDay on January 13 2011 had to use a white man sitting in Brussels to claim that NGOs wanted illegal sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe to remain. It also explains why the National Association of Non-Governmental Organisations (Nango) was not among the civil society organisations who denounced sanctions at the launch of the national anti-sanctions campaign on March 2 2011 in Harare. Nango is currently dominated by foreign-funded organisations whose duty is to separate leaders from the people by playing intermediary. This is because the role of the NGO in the South — like that of the missionary, the anthropologist and the foreign journalist — is to become intermediaries between leaders and their people, to interpret leaders to their people and people to their leaders, and to interpret both the people and their leaders to the outside world. When that is allowed to go on, eventually the leaders and the people fail to find or hear each other.

There is too much noise. The conflict between Zimbabwean society and foreign-sponsored media and NGOs arises mainly because the latter hate the pungwe structure where the leader sits and suffers with the people and there is no room for the chema emissaries and their interpreters to interpret leaders to their own people and people to their own leaders.

Finally, the uprising which marked a big milestone in Zimbabwe on March 2 2011 was different from those in North Africa so far because it was a home-coming process both physically and philosophically. It was a bringing together of forces once artificially polarised via media and NGO lies.

It will invite and attract even those who once ran away because of the sanctions. They will come to join the reconstruction even if Europe and the US are stupid enough to keep the sanctions on.
In North Africa, on the contrary, the uprisings are still scattering people and they still exhibit disjointed and scattered visions. In contrast, the thrust of the movement which coalesced in Harare on March 2 2011 is sharp, clear and massive. Tsvangirai and the MDC formations are on their way to the same fate which Bishop Abel Muzorewa and his UANC faced after January 27 1980. The March 1980 elections reduced

Muzorewa’s alleged majority in Parliament (obtained at gun-point in April 1979) to just three seats. But it was the massive rally of January 27 1980 which hinted at Muzorewa’s final isolation, just as the massive launch of the anti-sanctions campaign which Tsvangirai boycotted also points to his final isolation.-The Sunday Mail