Sister Jabou,
This is typical Mugabe stuff designed to make-believe that opposing 
Mugabe equals support for the resurrection of Cecil Rhodes. Very 
offensive to all peace loving patriotic Zimbabweans and Africans.

Malanding

 
[log in to unmask] wrote:
> Election standoff in Zimbabwe: The
> threat of imperialist intervention
>
>
>
> By Ann Talbot
>
> 5 April 2008
>
>
>
> “Zimbabwe Waits
> to Exhale” ran the headline in this week’s Time magazine.
>
>
>
> The eyes of the world’s media are fixed on President Robert Mugabe and the
> only subject under discussion is “Will he or won’t he go?” In the meantime, a
> quiet and little remarked process is going on behind the scenes. There is a
> creeping process of regime change under way that will affect not just Zimbabwe,
> but the entire region and marks a new phase in the recolonialisation of Southern
>  Africa.
>
>
>
> The British and US governments are engineering the transition to a new
> regime that will be more open to transnational investment, will allow the
> resources of Zimbabwe
> to be more freely plundered and make a well-educated English-speaking working
> class available for exploitation.
>
>
>
> Despite the economic and military shocks that Britain
> and America
> have suffered in recent years, they have not reversed the wave of neocolonial
> adventurism that they began with the invasion of Iraq.
> The setbacks they have suffered in Iraq
> and the economic crisis they face have only made them more determined to
> salvage their position of dominance by military means.
>
>
>
> Under Labour, the UK
> economy has become almost entirely dependent on finance capital, and the most
> dangerous and speculative areas of finance capital at that. In conditions of
> mounting recession, the UK
> is relying on its military capacity as never before. Brown, like Blair before
> him, has tied himself to the coattails of the US,
> and the same partnership that invaded Iraq
> and Afghanistan
> is menacing Iran
> and has set its sights on Zimbabwe.
> Britain gave up
> its hold on Zimbabwe
> very reluctantly and sees an opportunity to reestablish itself there.
>
>
>
> Archbishop Desmond Tutu has already called for British troops to go into Zimbabwe
> and insisted that it would not be an aggressive force. “It is merely ensuring
> that human rights are maintained,” he claimed. A peacekeeping force was needed,
> Tutu said, because “The situation is very volatile. Many, many people are
> angry. I doubt that they are jus t going to sit back and fold their arms. They
> are going to take to the streets and I am fearful.... We have seen what
> happened in Kenya.”
>
>
>
> Tutu is using his prestige as a Nobel laureate and anti-Apartheid campaigner
> to make an extraordinary move seem right and necessary. Speaking later the same
> day at a memorial service for anti-Apartheid activist Ivan Toms, he called on
> Mugabe to stand down.
>
>
>
> “I mean when your time is over, your time is over,” he said. Mugabe had
> played a pivotal role in the armed struggle, so, “We hope he will be able to
> step down gracefully, with dignity.”
>
>
>
> In writing Mugabe’s obituary before he has left the presidential palace,
> Tutu is speaking for a layer of African nationalist opinion that senses that
> the “wind of change” is now blowing the other way and that they need to
> accommodate themselves to a more aggressive attitude on the part o f the major
> powers. Whether Mugabe retires from the political scene gracefully or stands
> and fights, the present crisis is an indication of a shift in world politics
> that has brought to an end the period when nationalist regimes could present
> themselves as liberators of the African masses.
>
>
>
> There are indications that Mugabe might attempt a military clampdown on the
> opposition. Foreign reporters have been arrested in recent days, the election
> headquarters of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) has been raided, and
> army roadblocks encircle the capital, Harare.
> Deputy Information Minister Bright Matonga told reporters, “President Mugabe is
> going to fight to the last, and he’s not giving up, he’s not going anywhere, he
> hasn’t lost the election.”
>
>
>
> But Mugabe cannot halt the underlying processes that have undermined his position
> by military means alone. The crisis brought on by the election was the product
> of a p rotracted economic change that has now produced a sudden political
> shift. The government-appointed Zimbabwe Electoral Commission has been forced
> to admit that the ruling party ZANU-PF has lost control of parliament and has
> still not released the result of the presidential elections, strongly
> suggesting that Mugabe has lost.
>
>
>
> Mugabe’s last hope of retaining power is to claim that neither candidate for
> the presidency won a majority and that there must be a runoff between him and
> MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai. During a further election campaign, he could hope
> to use intimidation and ballot rigging to win a majority. But Mugabe could once
> command mass political support because of his role in the war against the white
> racist regime that ruled what was then Rhodesia.
> To admit that he can no longer secure more than 50 percent of the vote is to
> admit defeat. A victory in the second round would merely postpone the day of
> reckoning. He has been fatally wounded by the election, and his opponents
> inside and outside ZANU-PF are aware of this fact. It would only be a matter of
> time before he was challenged again.
>
>
>
> His hold on power has been unravelling for almost a decade. As long ago as
> 1999, when the MDC first emerged out of the Zimbabwe Trade Union Congress, the World
> Socialist Web Site noted that trade union and business leaders, who had
> been happy to work with Mugabe since he came to power in 1980, were becoming
> increasingly restive.
>
>
>
> “As Zimbabwe
> slides towards economic collapse, the trade unions have stepped in to form a
> new political party,” we wrote. “But this is a party that will look after the
> interests of big business, the rich farmers and inward investors, not the
> working class.”
>
>
>
> That same year, the WSWS desc ribed the way in which the International
> Monetary Fund was tightening the screws on Zimbabwe:
>
>
>
> “Zimbabwe is
> in the hands of the moneylenders who are laying claim to everything in sight.
> These standby credits will ensure a huge transfer of wealth from one of the
> world’s poorest nations to the international bankers and transnational
> corporations.”
>
>
>
> Since then, Mugabe has tried every method in his power to escape from the
> grip of the international bankers and corporations, without success. He refused
> to implement IMF measures, stopped repaying his loans for a time, and seized
> the land of white farmers and redistributed it to his supporters. He demolished
> working class shantytown districts, leaving thousands homeless in “Operation
> Murambatsvina,” and suppressed all opposition with the utmost ruthlessness.
>
>
>
> In his latest bid to maintain an autarkic economy that did not depend on
> international finance or Western companies he has turned to China, which has
> become one of the major backers of his regime. China’s
> need for platinum and chromium to feed its booming economy gave Mugabe the
> chance to survive a little longer. Mugabe’s “Look East” policy saw trade
> between the two countries increase to US$100 million. China
> is one of the biggest investors in Zimbabwe.
> But in recent months, Beijing has,
> if not cut Mugabe adrift, at least adopted a lower profile.
>
>
>
> David Dorwood of the Africa Studies Institute of La Trobe University,
> Melbourne, told Australian Broadcasting Company News that Beijing had concluded
> that it was only a matter of time before Mugabe went: “They want to secure
> their resources with the new administration and therefore are sort of taking
> less of an active role in propping up the ZANU-PF and Robert Mugabe.”
>
>
>
> China’s
> interest in Zimbabwe
> would “persist irrespective of the government,” Dorwood said. Beijing
> would welcome a Tsvangirai administration because “Zimbabwe
> has become really quite dysfunctional. The Chinese need to have reliable
> infrastructure.”
>
>
>
> Mugabe supporters have seen China
> as fundamentally different from Western governments and companies. They have
> held China up
> as the liberator of Africa because of its
> long-established connections with Mugabe that go back to the Cold War. But
> Chinese companies must work in the same economic environment as every other
> company in the world, and Zimbabwe’s
> platinum and chromium come higher in their scale of priorities than any thought
> of preserving Mugabe’s hold on the presidency.
>
>
>
> The tiny space for manoeuvre that China
> allowed Mugabe is therefore closing. In the countryside, even his most fervent
> supporters admit that it is time for him to go. The generals and heads of the
> security services may be prepared to back him a little while longer, at least
> until they can negotiate a suitable deal, but the rank and file of the army are
> as alienated from his regime as the rest of the Zimbabwean population.
>
>
>
> Britain has
> let it be known that an unprecedented £1 billion IMF-backed aid package is
> awaiting the arrival of Tsvangirai in the presidential palace. It was being
> discussed at the NATO summit in Bucharest
> this week. If the opposition has to fight a run-off election, it will use this
> promised aid package as an incentive to voters.
>
>
>
> The UK
> government’s Department for International Development has been running what
> they call “turn-around models” for Zimbabwe,
> and if a Tsvangirai government comes to power, Britain
> will insist that its economic strategy is followed. The aim will be to bring Zimbabwe’s
> 100,000 percent inflation rate down within a ye ar. Such a programme would be
> far more damaging than even the most severe of previous Structural Adjustment
> Programmes imposed on African countries by the IMF. The aid would be dependent
> on the working class and rural poor bearing the cost of the fight against inflation.
>
>
>
> In 2002, Eddie Cross of the MDC wrote to the WSWS in an attempt to elicit
> our support for his party’s economic policies. We rejected his overtures and
> wrote:
>
>
>
> “You say that the IMF and World Bank would help Zimbabwe
> get debt relief, but what attacks would you have to impose in order to get it?
> As you well know you would have to privatise every state asset in Zimbabwe.
> Your Economic Stabilisation and Recovery Programme states that within its first
> 100 days an MDC government would begin the process of privatising all
> parastatals, which you would aim to have completed within two years. In every
> country where these measures have been applied they have meant mass
> unemployment, escalating poverty, the destruction of whole industries and
> infrastructural collapse.”
>
>
>
> The US has
> long been a supporter of the MDC and opposition elements within ZANU-PF. A year
> ago, the WSWS pointed to US Ambassador Christopher Dell’s remark that Zimbabwe
> had “reached a tipping point” and to the report of the US State Department that
> it was funding “pro-democracy elements” in Zimbabwe.
> Dell clearly favoured regime change then. The role of the MDC in this situation
> will be to control the working class and rural poor whose needs they cannot
> possibly meet. With US and British backing, it may prove to be an even more
> oppressive regime than the present one.
>
>
>
> Tutu wants British troops deployed in Zimbabwe
> because he fears that the population has been driven to such a point of
> desperation that there will be a popular uprising that the MDC will not be able
> to contain. That such a scenario could even be contemplated, let alone
> seriously discussed in the media, more than a quarter of century after the
> colonial Rhodesian regime was overthrown is a measure of the failure of the
> nationalist movement.
>
>
>
> Mugabe is a determined and capable nationalist leader, but he has proved
> incapable of breaking free from the grip of imperialism. His entire perspective
> has proved to be bankrupt. Zimbabwe
> has remained in a position of semi-colonial dependence from 1980 onwards.
>
>
>
> The crisis that Mugabe faces in Zimbabwe
> is only the most acute expression of what is happening to regimes throughout
> the continent. A long-established political formation is unravelling before our
> eyes. Kenya was
> pitched into crisis following its recent election. In Sou th Africa,
> Jacob Zuma is challenging President Thabo Mbeki. In each case, the form of the
> political crisis and its intensity is different, and yet all express the same
> phenomenon. The African nationalist movement has lost its social base and all
> semblance of political legitimacy.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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