Continuation of Bush-Obama Legacy

Republic of Zimbabwe Attorney General Mr. Johannes Tomana will convene a panel on the legal significance of the WikiLeaks revelations.
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos

Continuation of Bush-Obama legacy

Saturday, 15 January 2011 19:25
AFRICAN FOCUS
By Tafataona Mahoso
Zimbabwe Herald

The British Terrorism Act of 2000 defines a terrorist act as “the use or threat of action designed to influence the government or to intimidate the public or a section of the public” and “the use or threat of action made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause”.

On December 22 2010, the US government, through its Department of the Treasury, announced a new escalation of its financial, economic and ideological war upon the people of Zimbabwe by issuing a new decree against the Office of the Attorney-General of Zimbabwe in the form of Executive Order 1369:

“As a result of today’s designation, US persons (individuals, institutions and companies) are prohibited from engaging in (business or any other) transactions with (Zimbabwe’s Attorney-General) Tomana, and any assets he holds under US jurisdiction are frozen. (Attorney-General) Johannes Tomana's targeting of selected political opponents (according to the US government’s view) threatens the rule of law in Zimbabwe, harms the integrity of the Government of National Unity and counters the will of the Zimbabwean people, who have expressed their desire to build a democratic political system.”

This is an escalation of the US Government’s war against Zimbabwe which was started in 2001 by former US president George W. Bush.

The enemies of Zimbabwe consider this nation’s struggle to complete its sovereignty and secure its national assets to constitute a state of emergency for them.

US President Barack Obama’s renewal of George W. Bush’s illegal sanctions against Zimbabwe on March 2 2010 was entitled “Continuation of the (US) National Emergency With Respect to Zimbabwe.”

After citing the US’s International Emergency Economic Powers Act and three Presidential Emergency Powers decrees going back to March 2003, Obama concluded his Presidential decree on Zimbabwe thus: “Therefore in accordance with Section 202 (d) of the National Emergency Act, I am continuing for one year the national emergency with respect to the actions and policies of certain members of the Government of Zimbabwe and other persons . . .”

Britain, the European Union, Australia and most of the other Anglo-Saxon states have followed US leadership and done the same against little Zimbabwe.

They did not send a committee to Tamandayi or Muzarabani to ventilate the issue and find out if Zimbabweans think their reclamation of white-stolen land and minerals should constitute a national emergency for the US and Europe.

They did not ventilate the issues at all. In fact they created laws barring from entry into those states any Zimbabwean who could ventilate this issue. It had to be decided as an emergency and by decree.

Attorney-General Tomana is both barred and silenced. He cannot travel freely to these white countries and he cannot represent the people and State of Zimbabwe in those global apartheid forums in which the Anglo-Saxon powers pronounce decrees against the interests of the people of Zimbabwe!

This is because what imperialism teaches its enemies through media and NGOs is the opposite of what it teaches its own children through hard-nosed practice.

Imperialist practice in real time and real life teaches that: “Ventilation is for those who are fainting or faint-hearted; transparency is for those who are empty inside and have no interests or secrets of value.”

Yet the real rule of law which Zimbabwe’s Chief Justice Godfrey Chidyausiku articulated at the opening of Zimbabwe’s judicial year on January 10 2011 includes the following clear provisions:

“The powers of the Attorney-General under Subsection (4) (of Section 76 of the Constitution of Zimbabwe) may be exercised by him in person or through other persons acting in accordance with his general or specific instructions . . .

The powers of the Attorney-General under Subsection (4) (b) and (c) (of Section 76 of the Constitution of Zimbabwe) shall be rested in him to the exclusion of any other person or authority . . .”

(That means powers) “to take over and continue criminal proceedings that have been instituted by any other persons or authority before any court, not being a court established by a disciplinary law, and to prosecute or defend an appeal from any determination in proceedings taken over by him and . . . to discontinue at any stage before judgment is delivered any criminal proceedings he has instituted under paragraph (a) or taken over under paragraph (b) or any appeal prosecuted or defended by him from any determination in such proceedings.”

Moreover, “In the exercise of his powers . . . the Attorney-General shall not be subject to the direction or control of any person or authority (not even the President of the imperial government of the Anglo-Saxon axis!).

“The provisions (quoted) shall apply in relation to any case stated or (any) question of law reserved for the purposes of any criminal proceedings to any other court as they apply in relation to any determination in criminal proceedings.”

Since the US’s terroristic aggression against Zimbabwe’s political, legal, economic and security systems is being carried out at the invitation of the various MDC formations and foreign-sponsored NGOs set up to support them, it is important to ask whether or not all the parties in the current inclusive Government do agree that the independence of the Attorney-General is part and parcel of the independence of the judiciary which the Chief Justice asserted so emphatically on January 10 2011.

The same three parties signed the 2007 Draft Constitution of Zimbabwe called the “Kariba Draft” and this is what that co-signed draft says:

“In the exercise of his or her powers regarding criminal prosecutions, the Attorney-General is not subject to the direction or control of anyone else (including Obama), and he or she must be guided by the public interest, the interest of the administration of justice and the need to prevent abuse of the legal process.”

Readers will have seen the NewsDay story called “Law Society of Zimbabwe hails Chief Justice” on January 13 2010 for asserting the independence of the judiciary.

The LSZ is being cynical. Some of its leaders have been implicated in inviting gross interference with the AG’s Office.

“On May 20 2010, The Herald published a puzzling story called “Parly summons A-G over Zambian debt”.

In itself, even the title is puzzling. The Attorney-General’s Office is part of the judicial system whose “independence” almost everybody was shouting about at that very same time in mid to late May 2010.

Why, then, would a Parliamentary Portfolio Committee just “summon” such a high-ranking official in that judicial system, let alone announce it in the Press before the official had even been invited?

The Herald story suggests that the committee complained about the Attorney-General’s non-attendance on or before May 19, for the story to be published on May 20 2010. The LSZ did not raise a finger.

Lo and behold, the Clerk of Parliament, Cde Austin Zvoma, wrote to the Attorney-General on May 21 2010, two days after the complaint to The Herald about his failure to respond to Parliament’s demands. Was the Attorney-General expected to reply through The Herald? The LSZ did not raise a finger.

“On the very same day that Parliament wrote the Attorney-General, May 21 2010, the GMB’s deputy general manager, finance and administration, wrote to the Attorney-General to assure him that the attorney for the Food Reserve Agency of Zambia, the debtor, had assured the GMB that he was going to appeal to the Attorney-General of Zambia to help clear the way for the GMB to be paid.

This raised two questions: Whether the GMB official who appeared before the committee told it the same information and why the committee would still insist on summoning the Attorney-General; and why the committee did not want to deal with Zambian legislators while the Attorney-General, if he found it necessary, could not be left to negotiate with his Zambian counterpart in confidence?

What benefit would the people of Zimbabwe, represented by Parliament, obtain from embarrassing both our Attorney-General and the Zambian government through the Press and before talking to either of them?

Indeed the same story found its way into The Financial Gazette of May 27 2010, where it was expanded and elaborated.

“The plot became a bit clearer when one discovered that on the very same day of the confusing and confused attempt to attack the Office of the Attorney-General though The Herald, the Law Society of Zimbabwe also “summoned” the very same Attorney-General to appear before its disciplinary committee to answer questions about how he became one of the millions of Zimbabwe’s landless people who benefited from the African land reclamation and land tenure revolution!

“If readers of this column go back to the instalment for August 6 2006, they will find that the Law Society was recycling in 2010 stale allegations which it raised against Cde Tomana on December 16 2004, when Cde Tomana was just a legal practitioner at Muzangaza, Mandaza and Tomana. The August 6 2006 instalment included the following passage which is relevant even now:

“The current leaders of the Law Society of Zimbabwe have been harassing legal practitioners with whom they disagree ideologically, especially those who have participated in or who accept and celebrate the achievements of the Second and Third Chimurenga . . .

Using Rhodesian law firms, leaders of the LSZ have been mounting efforts to deregister mostly African lawyers who have benefited from the African land reclamation revolution, accusing them of theft of property and ethnic cleansing.

So, the LSZ’s celebration of judicial independence is not consistent if we consider its relationship with the AG.

Significance of Anglo-Saxon Terror Targeting the Office of the Attorney-General

Barack Obama’s decree does target Attorney-General Johannes Tomana but is not about the person or the individual called Johannes Tomana.

The terror decree is aimed at Tomana’s commitment to the requirements of the job and Office of the Attorney-General.

In other words, the attack is intended to create and maintain the perception long established through Anglo-Saxon and MDC-T propaganda that illegal sanctions are targeted against a few individuals while, in fact, hitting the economic system, the security system and the constitutional order in ways that precipitate real terror and suffering for the very same people who are being deceived into believing that it is only the person of Tomana at risk.

The most significant thing about the terror announcement by the US Treasury Department against Zimbabwe’s Attorney-General is its timing:

Execution of the terror is specifically delegated to a financial and economic agency; it has been delegated to a financial and economic agency at the very same time that the AG’s office is being called upon to consolidate legally the gains of he Third Chimurenga, that is the indigenisation and empowerment programmes of the liberation movement. The public importance of the Attorney-General’s office in that consolidation can be illustrated by referring to a few recent actions and developments:

Zimbabwe convinced Sadc to suspend the so-called Sadc Tribunal on account of its illegal and vindictive pronouncements against the constitutionality of Zimbabwe’s land redistribution and agrarian revolution. The AG’s office led the way in that successful fight.

The same AG’s office succeeded in obtaining from the Constitutional Court judgment SC 31 of 2010 on November 26 2010 which brought to an end some of the most retrogressive and unjust acts of litigation against the African land reclamation movement and the resulting land redistribution programme, thereby rectifying 100 years of African impoverishment, dispossession and mass hunger for land.

The same AG’s office successfully defended the public property of the people of Zimbabwe in South Africa which the former Rhodesian settlers and their European supporters were threatening to attach as compensation for the white-stolen land which the African majority had just reclaimed in Zimbabwe after 100 years of dispossession.

The same AG’s office had successfully guided Zimbabwe’s delegations to meetings of the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS) and the International Diamond Council; and that advice resulted in Zimbabwe’s achievement of certification against continuing opposition and manipulation of the KPCS by the US, Canada, Australia and other white racist forces seeking to have Zimbabwe’s diamonds banned from the international market.

The same AG’s office was about to advise the Government of Zimbabwe how to use the nation’s enormous mineral resources and other assets, how to use the nation's newly enacted indigenisation and empowerment legislation, against companies from those very same powers who continued to place this country under illegal sanctions while benefiting from our investment and trade market.

In addition, the AG's office had just announced its intention to advice the Government of Zimbabwe on ways to respond to possible breaches of the constitution committed by some members of the current inclusive Government and revealed in secret US State Department cables recently made available by WikiLeaks.

In this context, it is obvious that the decree against Cde Tomana is a blatant act of aggression and intimidation intended to stop the Government of Zimbabwe from responding democratically and constitutionally to the needs and demands of the African majority as expressed, for instance, at the Annual National People’s Conference of Zanu-PF in Mutare in December 2010.

The best way to demonstrate that the latest decree against Cde Tomana represents an escalation of Anglo-Saxon terror is to carry out an objective test using a bipartisan Bill which the US itself turned into law in response to the general national security emergency caused by the September 11 2001 terrorist bombings of New York City and the Pentagon.

The objective test can be conducted by simply establishing how important the office of the Attorney-General is in upholding the US constitutional order as demonstrated through references to actions which the attorney-general of the United States of America was mandated and expected to execute by both the US House of Representatives and the US Senate on behalf of the people in the face of external threats.

The 131-page US Patriot Act was the main instrument and the attorney-general of the United States is an integral feature of that 131-page Act. To enable readers to appreciate the cynicism of the Obama administration and the seriousness of that administration’s attempts to interfere with the office of the Attorney-General of Zimbabwe in the name of democracy and the rule of law, it will be necessary to show by using just one example of a piece of US law, how seriously the North Americans themselves treat their office of the attorney-general.

The general emergency unleashed by events on September 11 2001 precipitated a commercial, financial, economic, military and general security crisis which required the mobilisation of the entire people and the creation of a new cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security together with hundreds of other agencies. The key instrument for such reorganisation and mobilisation was the US Patriot Act.

The office of the attorney-general of the US is referred to substantially in that Act at least 85 times in 128 substantive pages of text covering 915 sections. There is no room now to illustrate exactly how that office of the attorney-general is employed and empowered in the 85 references.

That has to wait for the next instalment.