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DOING THE MASTER’S BIDDING . . . Osama bin Laden was trained and funded by the US to fight Russia in Afghanistan in the 1980s

Tichaona Zindoga Senior Political Writer
When last week Government announced the Suppression of Foreign and International Terrorism Act, which blacklists and freezes funds and assets of individuals and organisations associated with international terror, there was a small irony that couldn’t be helped. For those that missed the story, the gazetting of the Act by Home Affairs Minister Kembo Mohadi was in compliance with a Security Council Resolution requiring all UN members to apply financial sanctions on individuals and entities associated with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and the Taliban.

Zimbabwe is a responsible international citizen. It will, through the Bank Use Promotion and Suppression of Money Laundering Unit, ensure compliance with the law and fight the bad guys that the world has come to know as Al Qaeda and Taliban.

Terrorists are very bad people that we see on TV screens senselessly bombing people and properties, especially persons and properties associated with the United States of America.

In the background lurk some bad guys with long beards who wear dresses and head-cloths who are Muslim fundamentalists. Therein lies the irony — in fact, two small ironies.

The first relates to the very institutions of Taliban and Al Qaeda which history has shown to have been hatched and used by the US for various purposes, chief of which is fomenting terror in different times since the Cold War.

The Taliban were created by the US in the 1970s as a means to entrench Islamist regimes and defeat progressive secular forces.
Veteran journalist Robert Dreyfuss, as cited in one journal, writes: “By the end of the 1950s, rather than allying itself with the secular forces of progress in the Middle East and the Arab world, the United States found itself in league with Saudi Arabia’s Islamist legions.

“Choosing Saudi Arabia over Nasser’s Egypt was probably the single biggest mistake the United States has ever made in the Middle East.
“A second big mistake . . . occurred in the 1970s, when, at the height of the Cold War and the struggle for control of the Middle East, the United States either supported or acquiesced in the rapid growth of Islamic right in countries from Egypt to Afghanistan.

“In Egypt, Anwar Sadat brought the Muslim Brotherhood back to Egypt. In Syria, the United States, Israel, and Jordan supported the Muslim Brotherhood in a civil war against Syria.

“And . . . Israel quietly backed Ahmed Yassin and the Muslim Brotherhood in the West Bank and Gaza, leading to the establishment of Hamas. Still another major mistake was the fantasy that Islam would penetrate the USSR and unravel the Soviet Union in Asia.

“It led to America’s support for the jihadists in Afghanistan. But . . . America’s alliance with the Afghan Islamists long pre-dated the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and had its roots in CIA activity in Afghanistan in the 1960s and in the early and mid-1970s.

“The Afghan jihad spawned civil war in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, gave rise to the Taliban, and got Osama bin Laden started on building Al Qaeda.”

Garikai Chengu, like many other scholars, has also pointed out the complicity of the US in terror and its duplicity in purporting to condemn the same.

He has also demonstrated how the US has found differing usefulness of its creations.
Writes Chengu in an article titled, “America: The World’s Number One Sponsor Of Terrorism”: “Just as there are good dictators and bad dictators in Washington’s eyes, there are also good terrorists and bad terrorists: good Al Qaeda in Iraq, bad. Al Qaeda in Syria, good.

“Al Qaeda in Mali, bad. Al Qaeda in Libya, good, now bad.”
He also explains that America’s policy of openly backing Islamic terrorist groups stems largely from the Cold War era when America saw the world in binary terms.

“(O)n one side the Soviet Union and Third World nationalism, which America regarded as a Soviet tool; on the other side Western nations and militant political Islam, which America considered an ally in the struggle against the Soviet Union.

“The director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan, General William Odom, recently remarked that ‘by any measure the US has long used terrorism. In ‘78-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism — in every version they produced, the lawyers said the US would be in violation.’”

There is a body of evidence to the effect that Osama bin Laden was trained, armed and funded by the CIA. Given the above, it thus becomes quite curious how the world kowtows to the constructs called Taliban and Al Qaeda which the US seeks to project as everyone’s enemies.

These constructs generally serve to create a permanent state of crisis and fear in the US, a precondition for perpetual wars waged to serve the military-industrial complex.

More pressing worries
Zimbabwe is no friend of Al Qaeda and Taliban — will conceivably never be. However, it has more immediate and pressing worries than Al Qaeda and Taliban.

Ironically — the second irony — the same worries stem from the US itself which has shown to be a present and continuous danger to Zimbabwe because of its unprovoked hostility towards this peaceful country and its peaceful leaders who are nowhere near Osama bin Laden, whoever he is.
It is now common knowledge that the US imposed sanctions on this country in 2001, which it uses to freeze Zimbabwe’s moneys that it gets from bona fide businesses from selling its agricultural produce to diamonds.

In exceptional cheek, the US recently froze funds of the Zimbabwean embassy in Washington. Private individuals have also had their moneys needlessly frozen because the US targets some local banks.

The US is ruthless in making sure it punishes Zimbabwe.
It does so via what it calls the Office for Foreign Assets Control, which is the equivalent of what Zimbabwe created in the new Bank Use Promotion and Suppression of Money Laundering Unit to fight a predominantly American war, if there is one.

Why has Zimbabwe not created its own laws and units to fight local groups and political parties that are sponsored by Western governments, including the US, for political ends that are hostile to Zimbabwe’s self-determination and nationalist politics?

It is common cause that the main opposition parties and their cousins in the civil society get sponsorship from the US, UK, Sweden, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and so on.

An article on Race and History puts it succinctly that “The US Government Sponsors Terrorism in Zimbabwe”.
It says: “The US solicits other countries to join in applying sanctions to a country along with systematically attacking the targeted government in order to scare away potential and established investors.

“The US generously funds a multitude of newly-created fake social organisations and media, including websites that claim to be promoting democracy and freedom.

“These organisations are meant to entice others to revolt against the government.
“Their activities are designed to construct hardships on the ordinary people in order to force them to revolt.”

Western think-tanks and institutions such as National Endowment for Democracy, National Democracy Institute, International Republican Institute, Westminster Foundation and so on have been fingered as working to topple Zimbabwe’s revolutionary Government.

Just ahead of elections last year, this paper carried an expose chronicling how the opposition MDC-T’s Election Resource Centre was resourced to the tune of US$5 043 044 by the UNDP, Canadian Embassy, Norwegian Embassy, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Netherlands, the Royal Danish Embassy, the Electoral Reform International (ERI), Open Society Initiative of Southern Africa (OSISA), Freedom House, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and other donors who have nefarious electoral interests in Zimbabwe.

It is a familiar tale.
Right now, as the opposition is imploding, it is being freely stated that Western countries through their embassies here, have taken sides and are pouring monies into one faction while starving the other.
Where are Minister Mohadi and the Justice Minister in this?

The Justice Ministry is supposed to administer the Political Parties (Finance) Act.
This law stipulates that: “No political party, member of a political party or candidate shall accept any foreign donation, whether directly from the donor or indirectly through a third person.”

Do the Minister of Home Affairs and other authorities not feel the irony of entangling Zimbabwe in matters such as Al Qaeda and Taliban while ignoring clear and present danger of foreign funding of our politics?
Or the Bank Use Promotion and Suppression of Money Laundering Unit may also come in handy here as well, as it should?