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George W Bush

Joram Nyathi Spectrum
In an address to the House Foreign Relations Committee in 1971, current US Vice President John Kerry railed against the atrocities and injustice associated with the Vietnamese war. He said back then that American soldiers were being killed fighting “for the biggest nothing in history”. American soldiers, said Kerry, were engaged in a racist war, using weapons they would shudder to use against Europeans, fighting a people whose only crime was to resist “colonial influence” on their country, and posed no threat whatsoever to America.

Kerry was then a 27-year-old soldier just returned from the Vietnamese battlefront with his comrades.

During that tour, he said of his comrades: “They told stories that, at times, they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam, in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.”

He lamented that meanwhile back home and elsewhere America enjoyed the “criminal hypocrisy” of a fighter for and defender of democracy. Kerry hoped in his speech that in 30 years America would have “turned” and become a better country.

A coincidence. It was exactly 30 years later in 2001 that America would “turn” its unprovoked wrath on Zimbabwe for its resolve, through land reform in 2000, to rid the country of “any colonial influence whatsoever” on its economy, by raining its ruinous sanctions on us under the “criminal hypocrisy” of democracy and human rights. Zimbabwe, like Vietnam then, was accused under Zidera of constituting a threat to the foreign policy of the United States. President George W. Bush gave us Zidera as a Christmas present on December 21 2001.

Efforts by Democratic Senator James Inhofe to have the iniquitous law, described by Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, as designed to “maintain white-skin privilege . . . under the hypocritical guise of providing a transition to democracy”, repealed, stalled in 2010 and 2011. Instead, the US government has this year added two strategic fertiliser manufacturing firms, Chemplex Corporation and Zimbabwe Fertiliser Company, to its arsenal to destroy Zimbabwe’s economy in exchange for its opium of democracy.

That is part of what Kerry, now a key member of an American government led by a black man, called the “criminal hypocrisy” of America in 1971. The addition of the two companies critical to Zimbabwe’s agricultural sector, is supposed to demonstrate America’s love for the people of Zimbabwe in this year of drought and food scarcity.

Incidentally, while researching this article I hit upon a staggering statistic I had never heard of, which was partly used to buttress the sanctions propaganda. It was alleged the land reform had deprived “400 000 white farmers of their properties and livelihoods”. Really? In 2000? Another one told of how Tendai Biti tamed Zimbabwe’s roaring inflation over night by introducing the multicurrency system.

That’s how far Zimbabweans can be very helpful instruments, inadvertently or otherwise, in distorting or exaggerating reality to undermine their own nation.

I for one consider Zimbabwe to be a very vulnerable little country. If anything, it needs protection more than it poses a threat to any nation, least of all a superpower such as the United States of America. The only thing Zimbabwe commands in a big way on the global arena since 2000 is a just cause and a bold voice. The country has every reason to be sensitive about security matters.

But our literati don’t think so.

The Zimbabwe Independent last Friday carried an article titled “Mujuru and the militarisation of the State”. Read the blurb: “This is the fourth instalment in a series of articles which constitute an introduction to a book to be published this month under the title ‘Zimbabwe: The Challenges of Democratisation and Economic Recovery’, edited by Dr Mandaza.”

The article roughly sketches the road to Zimbabwe’s independence and the who-is-who of that treacherous, heavily-mined odyssey. The late national hero General Solomon Mujuru got everyone in the current national security establishment in their pecking order right from the liberation war, a hierarchy which has been maintained to this day minus the late Vitalis Zvinavashe. No need for any quotations.

The core of the article lays bare the anatomy of Zimbabwe’s security architecture for all to know who in this country has frustrated or deferred the enjoyment of the now fully-fermented opium of all alienated African intellectuals: America’s pursuit of its foreign policy interests marketed with criminal hypocrisy as a desire for democracy and human rights. That opium, if you are African, works well on an empty stomach, save for little morsels doled out to the glory of American love and unstinting philanthropy. (Wait for one Thomas Jr.)

Those in the security pecking order are President Mugabe himself, Constantine Chiwenga, Perrance Shiri, Happyton Bonyongwe, Augustine Chihuri and Paradzai Zimondi; men of steely ideological firmness who have made a military coup impossible in Zimbabwe. These are the men who pose a threat to America’s foreign policy because they will not be swayed!

The article laments that these men have not been retired despite the expiry of their terms, presumably to be replaced by malleable NGO leaders who would be pliant and amenable to foreign manipulation!

But why this glare? For whose benefit? But then, who am I to ask, Mandaza is a literatus. There must be profound logic.

Dangerously armed as America is, would we expect its intellectuals to tell the world even a tenth of what its top security men plot and execute at The Pentagon? If I recall well, unless things have changed, until recently it was a serious offence, if not a crime, in America to publish the names of its serving heads of the CIA and FBI. America’s biggest Middle East ally, Israel’s Mossad at some went to the end of the earth in search of Mordechai Vanunu, a nuclear technician, for disclosing snippets of what was going on at its Dimona Negev Nuclear Research Centre.

But we are more than a democracy; we keep no security secrets, small as we are! We must help America spread its opium of democracy. We live in era of accountability and complete state disclosure for small nations.

America rewards us for this diligence with tokens of appreciation. After all Africans sell too cheap. Anyone can purchase our soul.

Like blessing us with the services of Ambassador Peter Harry Thomas (Jr).

Mr Thomas Jr last week told local journalists in Bulawayo that America was the biggest supporter of “ordinary Zimbabweans” and that its sanctions were targeted and didn’t hurt ordinary people. Zidera, he helpfully told his bemused interlocutors, targeted 98 officials and 68 entities.

NewsDay of April 23 quotes him saying: “It is not true that US sanctions affect ordinary people the most. We are the biggest donor in this country, we give more scholarships to support people.” He disclosed all this for the benefit of doubting Thomases. “People can argue about politics, but no one,” he said, “can argue with figures.”

The figure to buy our silence about the effect of sanctions and to demonstrate America’s unfailing love for ordinary Zimbabweans who are never affected by its sanctions came to a staggering grand total of $2,6 billion. Yes, you got it: $2,6 billion. In 36 years of love!

For perspective, the US gives Israel $3 billion annually in military aid and it’s rising. After a military coup and for wiping out the Moslem Brotherhood, Egypt gets $1,3 billion per year in military aid and it’s rising.

These are tiny figures compared to commercial deals involving the deadliest weaponry conceivable to you and I.

But we must kneel down to the American god for giving Zimbabwe $1,6 billion in 36 years and imposing sanctions on our nation for resisting “any colonial influence” on our economy and natural resources.

And educated sons and daughters of the soil assist America in undermining that resistance because they are not affected by the sanctions.

I said Africans we come cheap for the labour we do for America. To the 68 entities, presumably employing only undesirable Zanu-PF activists, we can now add Chemplex Corporation and Zimbabwe Fertiliser Company.

In exchange for the loss of these two strategic entities, Thomas Jr told reporters the US had donated $20 million more “to help those affected by drought”.

Gentlemen, even if Tsvangirai says puppies don’t open their eyes on the same day, how does it happen that our opium drugged intellectuals can’t grasp America’s “criminal hypocrisy” more than 45 years since John Kerry made this a public secret in Washington, DC in April 1971?

Contrary to Kerry’s prayer that the US should turn out to be a better country, the war on terror has turned America into a veritable global monster, perhaps worse than it was during the Vietnam war.