A British fighter jet bombed the Libyan city of Sirte on May 8, 2011. The imperialists bombed the North African state for seven straight months., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.
World insecurity made by those mandated to secure it
Thursday, 27 September 2012 00:00
Shepherd Moyo
Zimbabwe Herald
The year 2011 clearly displayed world insecurity not as predicated on terrorists and suicide bombers especially those portrayed as hailing from an antithetical and vindictive religious inclination, or supposed poor governance specifically that associated with a seemingly disunited and direction shy African continent whose peoples are perpetual slaves and victims of “civilisation”. World insecurity is manufactured and natured by a body set up to fight it. It is caused by self-interest exhibited by those mandated to secure the world in the United Nations Security Council.
These manipulate the United Nations Charter under chapter VII that authorises intervention only in response to a threat to international peace and security after exhaustion of all peaceful means or as a means of self-defence in response to an armed attack. The Nato war against Libya was a good example of manipulative proclivities by some members of the Security Council who deliberately circumvented mediation and peaceful negotiations to the Benghazi uprising through quick resort to Chapter VII that must only be used where all other possible means fail. Even the Responsibility To Protect (R2P) doctrine adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2005 was also misused as an excuse to attack Libya where the Nato coalition argued they had moral responsibility to protect Libyan civilians from Gaddafi, their own leader. Moreover, these civilians were armed rebels whose arsenal and military skills in only one month equaled or surpassed that of the Libyan defence forces built since 1969 by Gaddafi signified by their ability to “liberate” Benghazi.
Nato’s protection intervention had resulted in 20 000 bombing sorties targeting Libyan towns.
Assuming that each Nato bombing manoeuvre could kill at least one person, then not less than 20 000 people could have lost their lives to these bombings. Libya was aware of this looming danger because no sooner was the inevitability of these bombs reinforced by the approval of Security Council resolution 1973 on 17 March 2011 than it capitulated by announcing a ceasefire and a halt to all military action on 18 March 2011 fearing civilian deaths. Irrespective of this surrender gesture that dangled an opportunity for mediation and assurance of civilian safety, bombs rained on Libya anyway, with France taking the lead to enter Libyan air space on 19 March 2011, only a day after Libya’s hint on its intention to submit.
Nineteen more states including some Arab states namely Jordan, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates led by Britain, America and France joined in immediately indicating that the bone of contention was not about civilian safety but other ulterior motives which President Mugabe in his speech at the UN General Assembly last year saw as “bilateral hatred and quarrels allowed to creep into considerations of matters pertaining to threats to international peace and security”.
By hatred and quarrels President Mugabe was referring to strained links between two countries stemming from their relations to, as well as management and use of natural resources domiciled in one of them. In other words France, Britain and America pulled Nato and some Arab states into the Libyan war not because they wanted to rid the world of a clear and present threat to international security as permissible under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, but to alter Libya’s relations to its natural resources, specifically oil from being owner and therefore seller to being a recipient of ‘investments’, royalties, tax, jobs and aid.
After Gaddafi came to power in September 1969, he restructured the ownership of his country’s resources and altered the direction of profits. From that year, without both bilateral and multilateral “aid” he single handedly invented a unique direct democracy governance system which culminated in a Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya overseen by the General People’s Committees. Through these committees, at one time Libya’s per capita income, human development index, literacy rate and life expectancy rose to become one of the highest in Africa. Through this system Libya established equal rights for women and black people and created employment opportunities even for migrant workers. There was free education, free healthcare, and free access to fresh water. Unemployed university graduates were given a basic salary similar to what they would get if they were employed. All this happened because Libyans through Gaddafi owned and controlled their resources prejudicing American, French and British oil, construction and military ware corporates. It follows that stability in Libya translated to instability in countries whose economies were linked to its resource bank. The Nato bombing was therefore payback time for Gaddafi.
In individual African countries it is easy therefore to perceive all the chaos, “poor governance, dictatorship” and randomness associated with African politics as pivoted by an underlying corporatocracy structure that controls people’s conduct, their institutions and laws to make benefit unidirectional. Any attempt to alter this direction is synonymous to declaring war against the powerful yet mean beneficiaries. Zimbabwe survived more determined chicanery by the same Secovet and allies.
The onslaught on Zimbabwe was triggered by Britain’s stubborn reneging on its colonial responsibility and Lancaster House commitment to fund transfer of land ownership from colonial settlers to the people of Zimbabwe. This funding of land ownership right is not “aid”. It is restitution won in the battle field during the Second Chimurenga but partially lost on the table in Lancaster and had to be fought for again during the Third Chimurenga.
The then British Secretary of State for International development Clare Short confirmed this in her infamous November 5, 1997 letter to the then Zimbabwean Minister of Agriculture and Lands Kumbirai Kangai, a letter considered to have triggered a domino effect to the land question in Zimbabwe leading to economic sanctions.
In that infamous letter, she confirmed that profit from Zimbabwe’s natural resources had to remain unidirectional towards Britain. The Government of Zimbabwe disregarded Short’s demands to stop empowering her people by giving them land but instead legislated against buying it from settler thieves and or their descendants in 2000. There was an obvious standoff between her and Britain. From that moment there is nothing Britain has not done to discredit President Mugabe hoping that the people of Zimbabwe could vote him out of office.
Thus, Sir Robert Mugabe who the British themselves had knighted for excellency; Mugabe who received countless honorary degrees from European and American universities recognising his unprecedented rulership abilities; Mugabe whom they described as the sharpest and most intelligent African of all time; Mugabe who mesmerised them by an enigmatic “turn swords into ploughshare” reconciliation doctrine never matched anywhere in the world especially in Europe and America; the same Mugabe who shocked the world by employing his enemy’s secret service and military heads to take charge of his security forces after defeating them; the man who allowed his adversary to farm peacefully in Shurugwi district on a “borrowed head”; a magnanimous and democratic man who allowed an affirmative action for Rhodesians constituting no more than 2 percent of Zimbabwe’s population by giving them uncontested 20 seats to represent their interests in Parliament; the man who did not disband his enemy’s security forces but fused them with his own to create a formidable and unprecedented force, is now something else.
He is a unique “dictator” controlled by securocrats. He is an inimitable “voodoo” economist whose country according to them has an unemployment rate of 95 percent although his people are not “occupying Wall Street” or gathering at Tahrir square. He has been “so unwell” for more than 15 years but we see him perform his presidential duties excellently. Yes, in Africa, indigenes do not own the land which they inherited from their God and which conceals in its belly precious minerals only conglomerates can mine and they can pan. President Mugabe maintains that correcting this anomaly is the heart of all international security problems.
They missed success by the skin of a tooth on both fronts. For UN sanctions they won nine votes (France, Italy, Panama, Britain, Costa Rica, Belgium, Burkina Faso, United States of America and Croatia) against five for Zimbabwe (China, Russia, Libya, South Africa and Vietnam) in a 15 member Security Council where Indonesia abstained. The country was only saved from UN sanctions and arms embargo by the double veto of China and Russia. To note is the role played by an African country, Burkina Faso, in supporting African aggressors against an African brother. A UN Security Council resolution requires a minimum of nine votes to pass. What it means is had Russia and China simply abstained like they did on Libya, a sanctions resolution would have been passed against the country, thanks to one African vote.
Meanwhile, the Sadc Tribunal, also used as a tool to attempt a reversal of land reform in Zimbabwe, passed a dubious judgment effectively declaring land reform in Zimbabwe illegal.
The Sadc Tribunal ruling was a bad judgment and a clear and present danger to Zimbabwe. It had to be fought and defeated. However, it was just a symptom of an underlying threat which President Mugabe’s team in the inclusive Government fortunately identified and targeted directly. The team fought not the judgment, but the institution that delivered it. That institution, the Sadc Tribunal is now dead and Zimbabwe’s land reform is back to irreversibility. To enlightened Zimbabweans, a Mugabe loss in 2008 was shocking and not anticipated. It meant the end of an era, the end of self-rule and the beginning of voluntary servitude. Rhodesians who knew the game plan where starting to trickle into the country. Some even braved a visit to their old farms where they threatened the new farmers with a violent eviction as soon as Mr Tsvangirai was safe at State House. Everything was set. The results came albeit unprecedentedly late, but they came. They were shocking. They shook the whole world especially that represented by the West.
Although so shocking and yet so extraordinary, these results uniquely preserved the status-core. They did not produce a winner.
But Zimbabwe’s detractors took advantage of the cholera outbreak in 2008 and made frantic efforts to bring the country back to the Security Council, this time under the guise of dealing with a public health emergency. Like in the initial attempt where a fellow African country Burkina Faso voted against Zimbabwe, Raila Odinga of Kenya, who was MDC-T’s guest of honour at its congress in 2011, recommended then for a military intervention to stop cholera. Britain and its allies sought to invoke the doctrine of the responsibility to protect civilians, similar to Libya’s 1973 UN Security Council resolution. For Zimbabwe and indeed Libya the Responsibility
To Protect (R2P) mantra was a ploy to effect regime change. Nothing was not tried by Zimbabwe’s detractors to ensure the reversal of the land reform programme.
Shepherd Moyo writes from Harare. He can be contacted on dkshepherd@hotmail.com
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