Manufacturing Democracy

Truisms characterising Western meddling in the political affairs of weaker nations are numerous, and they include democracy enhancement, democracy promotion, democratisation, or as we are made to believe by pronouncements from Western authorities these days, the need for credible elections in Zimbabwe.

These are all noble causes against which there can be no dispute. However an objective study of the trend of international relations reveals a dramatic demonstration of anti-democratic tendencies by the West, especially whenever democratic demands happen to stand in the way of economic interests – like when the people of Venezuela kept voting Hugo Chavez into power regardless of his well-articulated stance against Western imperialism.

In situations like this the West often finds it politically prudent to manufacture a democracy that suits their selfish imperial interests. That is done through the sponsoring of pliant puppet politicians like Venezuela’s Henrique Capriles, or Zimbabwe’s Morgan Tsvangirai. Manufactured democracy requires the manipulation of the genuine will of the people by various strategies, top of which include the slandering of popular independent candidates, strangulation of the populations of weaker nations through the ruin of economic sanctions, or manufacturing people’s consent through massive financial injections into the public relations campaigns for puppet political parties – and the media plays a major role in doing this.

Refutations in relation to criticism that the West’s undeclared intentions are evil are quite dramatic and even convincing, so much as to confuse and divide opinion even among the victims of Western hegemony within the affected weaker nations. In fact there is a real worrying reverence for Western rhetoric among the people of countries targeted for imperial meddling by Western elites. One can take a look at how George W Bush’s “messianic mission” to “democratise” countries like Iraq was hailed even by a sizeable number of Iraqis themselves.

There is no dispute about a worrying number of Zimbabweans who have hysterically cheered the economic strangulation of the country in the name of their love for democracy – and the irony of victims of the West’s sabre-rattling foreign policy praise-singing the works of their tormentors is not without precedence. The Contras of Nicaragua literally thrived on the biting effects of US imposed economic sanctions on their own country, and there are just too many other examples to mention, including the overly hailed treacherous group of so-called Cuban exiles resident in Miami, and always portraying their motherland as a massive prison.

When Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron decided to invade Libya through Operation Odyssey in 2011, there was significant endorsement of this act of aggression among Libyan citizens, and when NATO took over the aggression to complete the destruction of Gaddafi’s Libya, there was a significant reverence for the empty rhetoric around which the attacks were premised – and this by a significant number of people across the world, as well as by many Libyans.

Of course such endorsement gave NATO the perfect pretext for the ruinous bombardment of Libyan cities in an attack that caused the death of about 50 000 people, mostly civilians, and among them children, including Gaddafi’s grandchildren. UNSC Resolution 1973 completely legitimised this murderous venture at law.

A prosperous and debt free country was reduced to rabble under the pretext of democratisation, and in no time the self-sufficient people of Libya were rendered desperate and their territory desolate.

In Zimbabwe we had a significant number of mostly our urban population celebrating and hailing thrillingly when the Western bloc illegally imposed ruinous economic sanctions on the country following the land reclamation program in the year 2000. It was painful to swallow the reality that our own people in the leadership of the then opposition MDC were helping in the drafting of the draconian US sanctions law – ZDERA. While the ruin and pain inflicted by the sanctions regime was obvious; those from the opposition saw in these murderous sanctions the pathway to democracy; or is it to mere political power. In fact a manufactured democracy where people are intimidated into voting for a party endorsed by powerful Western powers is what is at stake in the politics of Zimbabwe today.

These same insidious characters dutifully compiled names of fellow Zimbabweans and forwarded them to Western authorities so that these people could be individually targeted and persecuted for their unforgivable sin of belonging to a political party called Zanu-PF, or even for being suspected of sympathising with the party’s pro-people policies. Alongside the more than 200 people on the illegal sanctions lists were scores of corporations at the centre of Zimbabwe’s economy – all sanctioned and isolated for their perceived support for Zanu-PF policies. A few of these corporations still remain sanctioned to date.

This writer is aware of what a lawyer friend and former university mate who is closely associated with the MDC once did to a young man whose daring independent conduct he deemed stubborn, or more appropriately a threat to his interests. At the time the good lawyer friend held a high ranking position with the Western-funded Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition; that was before he moved to Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s office where he currently is a principal director reportedly responsible for mobilising illicit donor funding through the conduit NGO IDAZIM.

Well, the independent minded young man had audaciously questioned some happenings at CZC, particularly on matters he viewed as inconsistent with ethical, moral and democratic values. The good lawyer-friend of this writer reportedly pointed a trembling finger in earth-shaking rage and roared, “Do you know that I have got power to add you on the sanctions list?” He added, “So you think we do not know that you are a CIO operative send here to destabilise us?”

Now we are told that some of our own people who revere so ardently the sanctions regime illegally imposed on the country by the West are totally outraged that the EU has partially lifted some of these sanctions, allowing in the process a visit to London by Minister Patrick Chinamasa, a senior Zanu-PF official – a visit at the invitation of the British government.

It is hard to believe that these Zimbabweans are reported to be organising a protest march against Chinamasa – a clear sign that these politically deluded exiles have not seen enough of the ruin of sanctions. The fact that the EU has lifted its illegal sanctions on all but 10 of the over 200 people it had sanctioned almost eliminates the myth of a political crisis in Zimbabwe, and it appears the move is quite unpopular with asylum seekers who are desperate to convince British immigration officials that Zimbabwe is a land of tremendous political calamities.

In reality this is a protest march for protection visas, and a crisis is badly needed to facilitate the processing of such visas. Only ZANU-PF and President Mugabe can be used to manufacture this crisis, and without these sanctions the endorsement of the crisis is in tatters.

On one hand we have desperate Zimbabweans manufacturing a crisis for selfish individual interests, and on the other we have a British government manufacturing frivolous pretextsfor the international isolation of Zimbabwe- all in the noble name of democracy.

We saw in 2006 how the Bush administration financially bankrolled Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah for his reverence for the Western rhetoric on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He was a pliant stooge who went on to loose in an election that was internationally recognised to be free and fair; and the US and Israel instantly turned to severe punishment of the Palestinian population for their democratic error of voting the wrong way. Other Western outposts like the EU politely toddled along in support.

Israel hit back at the Palestinian people by cutting off water supplies and bombing down power plants, plunging the entire community into total darkness.

This brutality was characteristically camouflaged with the pretext that Hamas was the aggressor shelling Israel with unidentified missiles – the usual pretext that most of the time collapses even under the most superficial scrutiny.

Nato’s murderous exploits in Libya were sanitised by many high sounding pretexts that were impressive enough to confuse even the whole world. The insane aerial attacks on Libyan cities were heroically elevated to levels of a noble rescue operation – packagedby the Western media as “protection of the civilian population.”

The pretext was plainly laughable, but upon it an entire country was collapsed to near absolute ruin. Just how does one protect civilians by freely spraying high precision aerial bombs endlessly all over the cities occupied by the same civilians?

When Israel started bombing Palestine in 2007, the goal was clearly to impose suffering on the population in order to induce them to shift their support to Abbas – Washington’s favourite. Abbas has been illegally occupying the office of President of the Palestinian people since 2005, and elections that were due in July 2010 have been postponed on several occasions, with the latest position being that they could be held in October 2013. All this is an effort to thwart another legislative victory by Hamas, the popular rival to Abbas’ Fatah.

The script to manufacture democracy is always the same. It was used to strangulate the Nicaraguan population when the US wanted Nicaraguans to disengage from the Sandinistas in the eighties, and it is the same script used to destroy the relationship between the Castro power and the Cuban population.

It is the same script that leaves President Robert Mugabe and nine other people on the EU sanctions list – precisely to isolate the Zimbabwean leader not only from the rest of the world, but potentially from his own colleagues and followers, and more strategically from the generality of Zimbabweans.

The West has demonstrated some of the most dramatic hatred and contempt for democracy ever seen in the history of mankind. This tradition is precisely why Johnnie Carsons had the audacity to warn Kenyans of “consequences” in the event that they vote Uhuru Kenyatta into power – the man who went on to win the election despite being the openly unflavoured candidate of the West.

When one looks at the invasion of Iraq, the sanctioning of Zimbabwe, the NATO invasion of Libya, and the occasional bombardment of Palestinians by Israel, international law becomes hardly intelligible.

It becomes worse when one looks at the ICC ignoring Gaddafi’s call for international intervention when his country was under siege, and proceeding to indict the victim of this aggression at a time he was crying out for help from international law.It even becomes ridiculous when one is reminded that the ICC has since its inception indicted 30 people, and that all of them are from the African continent – despite the fact that not even one African country has been involved in an inter-state war in that period, let alone an invasion of another state.It is the Iraq and Libya invaders sponsoring the indictment of Africans at the ICC.

We need international law that allows people to exercise genuine democracy – not a democracy that is manufactured according to the whims and interests of powerful nations. This idea of the West trying to manipulate the opinion of voters in sovereign nations must be discredited and abandoned.

Africa we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!!