An informed perspective - forwarding.

 

Soffie 

 

 

 Culled from Mwananchi, submitted by Edward Mulindwa: 

 

 

Settler church and its clans of Judas



AFRICAN FOCUS By Tafataona P. Mahoso



A number of analysts have seen a big difference between the neoliberal church document called the Zimba-bwe We Want and the latest Pastoral Letter: Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops’ Conference on the Zimbabwe Crisis.



The supposed differences are true as long as one accepts that "the crisis" both groups face is outside the church itself; as long as one accepts that the crisis is situated in some external location called "governance". But the crisis the two church groups face has to do with two basic realities which they must hide.



First, they are both "shepherds" who cannot feed their flocks because they are themselves fed by outside "donors".



Second, they must champion "change" without themselves changing as products of a settler church transforming the settler church itself into an African institution.



These propositions sound outrageous until we broaden the context. Professor Claude Mararike and myself spent some time in Venezuela in November 2005 and December 2006. 



While we were there we got a closer look at four Latin American revolutions similar to the Third Chimurenga here: one in Venezuela itself, which is currently tackling the problems of ownership of petroleum, land and brick and cement factories; another in Ecuador, tackling similar challenges; a third in Bolivia, tackling similar challenges; and a fourth in El Salvador. 



On our second visit to Venezuela in December 2006, we were election observers and the revolutionary parties led by President Hugo Chavez won free and fair elections by a landslide. All the more than 500 observers from all continents blessed the elections as totally free and fair.



But who were the fiercest opponents of the Chavez revolution and its election manifesto in Venezuela? The Catholic bishops, especially those in the capital, together with businessmen representing foreign interests. Who were the fiercest opponents of the Bolivian revolution led by President Evo Morales? 



The Catholic bishops and big land owners supported by US corporations. Who were the fiercest opponents of the Ecuadorian revolution? The Catholic bishops sponsored by US oil cartels. Who were the longest standing opponents of the Farabundo Marti Liberation Front which also recently won elections in El Savador? Well, landlords and Catholic bishops.



In all those countries as in Zimbabwe, the Catholic bishops did not represent all bishops or most Christians. That is why President Chavez won the elections with a landslide despite the bishops’ minority opposition.



But what is the problem with shepherds who cannot feed but have to be fed by sponsors? The biggest problem is that they will not see the real crisis. They will depend on equally sponsored media to certify their views precisely because the sources of sponsorship would be similar in their ideological requirements and perspectives.



What we see in Zimbabwe, Venezuela, El Salvador, Ecuador and Bolivia is the class position of a minority of senior Catholic bishops who consistently oppose indigenous revolutions. The media owned by the churches or by similar class interests also divert attention from the real crisis or the causes of the real crisis, as Marc Raboy and others once observed: "The tendency is, therefore, for (these) media to seek out crisis where it does not exist, and to obscure the actual forces of change that threaten (class) media privilege along with entrenched social privilege in general. Paradoxically, this means that the media will tend to pay even more attention to a fabricated crisis than to one that can stake a material claim to reality . . . a serious limitation to contemporary mainstream (white) media is their reluctance to recognise and legitimate an actually existing crisis whose logical outcome would empower those who do not currently form part of the dominant social elite."



It is no coincidence that senior Catholic bishops in Zimbabwe, Venezuela and Bolivia all want to define "crisis" there in terms of "governance" problems caused by Cde Robert Mugabe, Hugo Chavez, and Evo Morales, respectively. A global crisis of ownership is distorted to appear in terms of its very symptoms. A crisis of lack of ownership and lack of sovereign control is misrepresented as a crisis of management and consumption. A few years ago Old Mutual cancelled more than 250 000 insurance policies built up by working Zimbabweans over their working lives. The assets were transferred to the London Stock Exchange or put in skyscrapers. The bishops said nothing. Today the country is a victim of corporate crime which the bishops do not want to see.



In a paper called The Question of Compensation: A Third World Perspective, Norman Girvan outlines what the heart of the real crisis is. Zimbabwe is part of a world in which that same crisis is being treated differently but it does exist. Said Girvan: "The question of compensation for expropriated property takes us, in many respects, to the heart of the relationship between the developed capitalist countries and the Third World. On no other subject is the gulf between the two — in interests, in perspectives and positions — potentially so great, nor so pregnant with passionate and violent conflict."



In 1978 economist Roger Riddel put the effects of this land theft precisely, saying: "The total surface area of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) covers 94,4 million acres. Under the Land Tenure Act (of 1969) 45 million acres have been set aside for Africans and Europeans respectively. At the end of 1976 there were . . . 680 000 African farmers . . . nearly three times the maximum number that can be safely carried . . . and 6 682 European farmers, so that on average every European had access to one hundred times as much land as every African . . . the European areas contain almost twice as much of the land most suited for crop production."



Moreover, of the best agricultural land under white settler control in 1976, more than three million acres were not being used at all. They were being held as collateral for speculative purposes for the white settlers. As the number of white farmers fell from 6 682 to 4 000 in 1992, more and more prime agricultural land went unused or underutilised.



John Sprack in the International Defence and Aid Fund booklet Rhodesia: the Sixth Province of South Africa then demonstrated how the racist land tenures of South Africa and Rhodesia were central to the crime of apartheid: "The foundation of white supremacy in both Rhodesia and South Africa lies in the area of land policy, and in the labour policy which complements this. 



"The two are interrelated and their development has followed a similar pattern in both countries. South Africa experience, because it both pre-dated similar processes in Rhodesia and provided several variations of a native policy . . . furnished the main guidelines in the shaping of Rhodesia policy on land and labour . . . In both countries the (racist) allocation of land served a dual exploitative purpose. The white settlers’ first requirement was land for cultivation (and mineral speculation), their second labour to enable them to do this . . . The white demand for both land and labour was served by a policy of expropriation of land from the African peasantry." 



The United Nations Human Rights Commission was supposed to compile lists of organisations, institutions and individuals to be prosecuted for the crime of apartheid. As Professor Kader Asmal pointed out in his legal paper on Namibia in September 1984, the prosecutions were supposed to lead to judgments for reparations and other forms of compensation to be paid to victims of apartheid throughout Southern Africa. Where member states of the UN or representatives of the victims could not agree on the reparations, the International Court of Justice was supposed to arbitrate.



What do these facts about the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid mean? They show that the intervention by Britain and the US on the side of the white settlers at the Lancaster talks in 1979 violated the Convention. They show that the granting of the Nobel Prize to former apartheid president F. W. de Klerk, former president Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu served to undermine the 1973 Convention by equating Cde Mandela and Bishop Tutu with one of the key criminal suspects under the Convention. De Klerk was not only state president of the apartheid state. Before becoming state president, he served that state as Minister of Home Affairs in charge of the internal security machinery of apartheid. 



These facts show that South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission also served to undermine the 1973 Convention again by equating the violence of the victims of apartheid with the barbarism of the perpetrators of apartheid. This is the historical context of the debates on land distribution and judicial reform in Zimbabwe, South Africa and Namibia.



The white powers who oppose and attack Zimbabwe’s Third Chimurenga know of these wide ramifications for them and for their kith and kin in the Sadc region.



Even the proposal by white liberals and radicals in South Africa to launch a development and reconciliation fund because "we need to acknowledge we have benefited from apartheid" also avoids the central aims of the 1973 Convention. 



The acknowledgement that even white opponents of apartheid benefited from the system is quite noble; but the proposed fund is likely to be another token and act of "charity" and public relations in contrast to the concept of reparations and compensation understood in the 1973 Convention and the Pan-African Reparations Movement.



The problem Zimbabwe faces with the settler church is that church leaders must pretend to be drivers of the most radical process of change when, in fact, they are reactionaries.



During years of the African liberation struggle and the struggle against apartheid, there was a vocal minority among leaders of the settler church who made enough noise to convince some of us that the settler church was part of the liberation movement.



The liberal minority among leaders of the settler church saw its mission as one of moderating, putting brakes, on the radicalism of the African liberation movement. So they went along in some ways with the programme of the African liberation movement because they believed they could stop or stall its radicalism at the right stage.



 

 



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