admin
IF there is one issue that miffed former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and wreaked havoc with his blood pressure then Zimbabwe and its President Cde Mugabe ranked top of that list. Never mind his disastrous foreign policy faux pas in Iraq where he went along with his American counterpart George Bush on an illegal mission to topple the late Saddam Hussein on false allegations of possession of weapons of mass destruction, Zimbabwe remained a festering sore that refused to go away.
Blair’s undoing was his ill-advised move to renege on the United Kingdom government’s obligation to fund the land reform programme and literally pull the middle finger at the administration in Harare at a delicate time of simmering tensions over land. The Tories had been reasonable and the Zimbabwean Government patient — for two decades even — but Blair’s stubborn streak and his government’s intransigence towards the land issue precipitated a breakdown in bilateral relations unprecedented in the history of the two nations.
The scorched earth policy adopted by the Labour Government under Blair and their sponsorship of the Movement for Democratic Change to unseat President Mugabe among other skullduggery and shenanigans, contributed to the prolonged instability in Zimbabwe. For that, Zimbabwe will remain a blot on the former British Prime Minister’s legacy.
This week, startling revelations were made by former South African President Thabo Mbeki who told the Qatari-based Al-Jazeera news network that Blair leaned on him to back a plot for a military invasion of Zimbabwe to topple Cde Mugabe from power. Speaking to Talk to Aljazeera at the weekend, Mr Mbeki said the British wanted to replace the President with MDC-T leader Mr Morgan Tsvangirai.
“There is a retired chief of the British Armed Forces who said he had to withstand pressure from then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Tony Blair who was saying to the chief of the British Armed Forces ‘you must work out a military plan so that we can physically remove Robert Mugabe’.
“We knew that because we had come under the same pressure that we needed to cooperate in some scheme. It was a regime change scheme, even to the point of using military force and we were saying no,” he said. Mr Mbeki was the facilitator in inter-party talks that led to the formation of the inclusive Government made up of Zanu-PF and the MDC formations in 2008.
He always maintained the stance that Zimbabweans should be left to resolve their internal issues without foreign interference. On Wednesday, Mr Blair mounted a spirited denial of accusations that he plotted a military invasion of Zimbabwe. Speaking through his spokesman in London, he told the AFP news agency: “Tony Blair has long believed that Zimbabwe would be much better off without Robert Mugabe and always argued for a tougher stance against him, but he never asked anyone to plan or take part in any such military intervention”.
But Mr Mbeki’s spokesman Mukoni Ratshitanga told AFP the statesman stood by his words.
We have no reason to doubt Mr Mbeki’s words and believe he has no reason to accuse the former leader of the British Government of something he did not do. We are also persuaded to believe that indeed there were military plans to topple the Zimbabwean Government given certain events at the time.
For instance, the Telegraph newspaper of UK reported on 29 August 2002 that the Special Air Service, the elite British commandos, had reconnoitered the border between South Africa and Zimbabwe in preparation for a possible evacuation of British citizens. Quoting defence officials, the paper said the purpose of their mission was to identify a number of co-ordination points inside Zimbabwe where the Britons, mainly white farmers, could be collected before a mass convoy into South Africa.
The Ministry of Defence’s Permanent Joint Headquarters at Northwood, Middlesex, had also drawn up plans for an RAF evacuation of other British citizens by plane from Harare airport.
The contingency plans to move the estimated 20 000 British citizens inside Zimbabwe include the use of RAF transport aircraft and members of the Parachute Regiment, who will be on exercise in South Africa from the end of September until December 2002. This was at the height of land occupations by war veterans and tension was high in the country.
Any British military presence within Zimbabwe’s vicinity would have spawned a bloody conflict between Zimbabwean forces and their British counterparts. Debate in the two British Houses of Parliament — the Commons and Lords — at the time was on whether it was feasible for British troops to invade Zimbabwe.
Mr Blair was to later make his infamous statement in the Commons to the effect that the British Government was working closely with the MDC-T to effect regime change in Zimbabwe. He also said they were liaising with some Southern African states to put pressure on the Government of Zimbabwe, quipping: “I will not rest until that regime is changed”.
Given this background and Mr Blair’s naked detest for and dogged determination to remove the Zimbabwean Government and its President from power, it becomes plausible that he indeed mooted a military invasion of the country.
Online Reporter