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A frustrated Canadian General, Romeo Dallaire, had this to say after his horrendous Rwanda experience: “We have no right to prioritise humanity.” He led the 1994 UN Peace-keeping Mission to Rwanda, and his arrival preceded a series of sad events leading to the infamous 100-day genocide that claimed 800 000 lives.
The frustration on the part of General Dallaire came through his experience as a deserted leader of the peace-keepers.
Neither the UN nor any of the Western actors and other global powerhouses heeded the desperate calls by Dallaire as he haplessly watched the genocide rage unabated, and as he tried to protect the survivors and to stem the tide of death and utter destruction.

The perception that the world must prioritise humanity is contrary to the doctrine that drives geo-political affairs. World powers prioritise not humanity, but factors that are to do with geo-political importance.

The harmonised elections held yesterday were not of importance to the West for the humanitarian cause of Zimbabweans, but more for the geo-political strategic importance of the country’s wealthy bastion of natural resources. Indeed, the most impressive pretext for any intervention camouflaged in the democracy rhetoric is humanitarianism.

Morgan Tsvangirai feels abandoned by his Western backers because they all seem to be saying the apparent lack of political violence in the run-up to this election suffices to produce a credible election.

He has a whole lot of other factors he says are leading to an unfair contest in this election. One great consolation about losing an election in a democracy is that the loser can always entertain the thought that something is unfair about the outcome. Tsvangirai is extensively exercising this democratic privilege, and what is unfair is to begrudge him for deciding to console himself.

Please allow him the therapy because losing a presidential election is no easy feat.
The man has come to the conclusion that his Western backers now consider “stability as more important than democracy.” The assessment is quite correct in as far as stability is related to access to Zimbabwe’s natural resources, not necessarily to any humanitarian consideration.

Tsvangirai himself has never prioritised humanitarianism or democracy itself in his master-puppet relationship with his Western allies, and he must be aware that the people he once asked to economically strangulate Zimbabwe have no humanitarian motivations in the dealings they carry out.

The Zimbabwean politician has always been in it for the strategic importance of Western funding to his power obsession selfish cause, and this is an acknowledged factor by many independent commentators, including those from Morgan Tsvangirai’s own ranks.

No humanitarian priority has ever been a factor in the political career of Tsvangirai; and in all fairness in the political career of just about every other politician, Tsvangirai’s Zanu-PF rivals included.

The only reason for anyone to prevent the Rwanda-style genocide that took place 19 years ago was that human beings were being brutalised and murdered, and in global political affairs that does not suffice in warranting intervention by capable global players, including the United Nations.

Dallaire’s pleas for help naturally fell on deaf ears – ears that can only listen where there is something more important than the plight of mere human beings.

In global political affairs there are deep seated flaws that govern our priorities. Moral convictions fall short of being adequate to determine our priorities, and this flaw is almost becoming part of humanity itself.

The fact that 19 years ago the whole world determined that preventing a genocide was outside the national interest of all countries is a telling indicator of how misdirected the global arbiter of morality has become, as it also shows how flawed the system of international relations has become.

Apart from the incompatibilities inherent in the values enshrined in Western style liberal democracy when imposed on other cultures, the other major weakness of liberal democracy is that it is propounded by players who cannot act except when their actions result in tangible financial or political gain. This explains the motivation behind the so-called democratisation of the oil reach Middle East. It is all about the oil, and never about the purported democracy drive.

Democracy is no more capable of driving financial gain and profiteering than authoritarian or dictatorial political arrangements, and this is precisely why Western democracies have no problems establishing unbridled and unbreakable alliances with Egyptian military authorities, or authoritarian monarchies in Saudi Arabia, Qatar or Bahrain. The uniting factor here is not democracy or political arrangement. It is profit and financial gain. More precisely and simply it is oil.

The reaction of the US and the EU over the Rwandan genocide was not a mistake by the so-called democratic nations. Rather it was a manifestation of exactly how liberal democracy has been systemised. It is part of the capitalist expansion strategy.

Liberal democracy carried no moral compass when the US unilaterally and aggressively invaded Iraq in 2003, when Western Allied Forces wantonly killed innocent civilians in Afghanistan after the 2001 invasion, when NATO provoked a murderous and unnecessary aerial war that claimed an estimated 50 000 lives in Libya, and it has no moral compass as the US and Israel continue to arm murderous insurgents in Syria today. There is never a prioritisation of humanity in global political affairs, but only that of financial and political gain.

In international relations there is no topic more in vogue today than discussing the compatibility of liberal democracy with the cultures of the countries to which it is being exported.

If the developing world is inexorably headed towards a democratic future measured on the Western scale, then we need to seriously consider the capacity of liberal-style democracy to address the moral failures of our day.

Liberal democracy in its basic form seeks to establish itself as the philosophical undercurrent of the understanding behind democratic ideals. Essentially liberalism focuses on formulating a governance system that serves as a means to protect individual liberty. In a liberal democracy protecting the rights of individual is the most important concern. We never think like this in Africa. We are a collective society and to us the rights of all supersede those of individuals.

In collective cultures like the African one, societal or collective rights take precedence over individual liberties, and this is why collective land rights for Zimbabwean people naturally supersedes property rights protecting the individual privileges of a few land owners privileged by colonial history. That was the underlying thinking behind our land reform program in 2000.

South Africa is fast following in the footsteps of Zimbabwe if the political fortunes of Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters continue to balloon the way they are going. That country’s land is destined into the hands of indigenous South Africans and there is simply no possibility of anything stopping that tide.

Elections in Africa often produce mechanical democratic political organisations where elections facilitate the existence of free and open press and other such freedoms without instituting values leading to collective freedom like that which comes through economic empowerment of the local people.

Nationalism is often condemned as unreservedly as communism is for alleged homophobic and racial inclinations – with many critics arguing that nationalism by its very nature excludes foreigners and non-citizens. That may be the case, but there is no evidence liberal democracy fares any better.

Liberal democracies are much more proficient at securing the rights of their own citizens, and this is precisely why the United States has what has come to be known as the “Hague Invasion Act,” — an Act drafted to protect US citizens from prosecution over international crimes, especially war crimes.

The lives of millions of people killed by American troops in search of American interests through draconian wars across the world are of less importance than the freedom of their killers; and that thinking makes up the psyche of the US Senate.

Overt racial or religious discrimination is less likely to take place in Western democracies, but discrimination based on nationality is a wholly acceptable and legally sanctioned phenomenon. Examples of such discrimination are many and they are actually institutionalised in the governance, corporate and social structures.

Like almost everywhere else in this world the accident of one’s birth place can grant or deny any individual a whole host of rights in the West, and this is why immigrants to Western democracies are always reminded of the importance of showing their gratitude by accepting the views and values of their host countries, even embracing as their own the enemies of their adopted countries, even if the enemy may happen to be the people of their birth countries.

For running this column this writer has not only been vilified and slandered, but also discriminated against at a work place where employment was terminated purely on the basis that this column fell short of impressing the political opinions of the employing authority. That was in May 2007.

Liberal democracy has confines by which all progressive people are supposed to abide, and failure to meet the requirements of these confines can have disastrous consequences — sometimes more draconian than any tyranny could ever met. Muammar Gaddafi faced a very brutal death at the hands of sponsored advocates for liberal democracy, and so did Samora Machel of Mozambique and Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso. Imperialism has lethal fangs and it is a ruthless monster.

It is the hope of this writer that the Zimbabwean election will produce real democracy as in bringing to the lives of Zimbabweans optimum benefits from the richness of the country.

It is one thing to talk about the will of the people, and totally a different thing to talk about the realisation of democracy in a country. For an election to produce democracy it must by necessity be an election whose outcome is an informed will of the people, never a manipulated will.

We have seen a lot of effort in trying to influence and manipulate public opinion in Zimbabwe, and there is an outside possibility that we may have a people’s will that is only an expression of how manipulated the populace has been. This is what Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky call “manufactured consent” in their best-selling book by the same title.

Our consent as Zimbabwean must be manufactured by our telling needs, and not by the power of opinion makers with vested interests.
Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome! It is homeland or death.

Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in SYDNEY, Australia.