Talking to the people: not to power

THERE are those among the readership of this writer’s works who have become so prurient in coming to the defence of the US Empire in particular and Western domination in general  that all manner of slander and threats have become common missiles by which this writer is meant to be felled.

In all this there is the untrue assumption that writings such as mine are directed at power. To many of these readers the writings are a direct attack at the imperial empire and they presuppose that the whole idea of such political commentary is to bring the empire down.
Realistically speaking there is no point doing an opinion piece for the attention of a power centre such as the US Empire.

Firstly, they are more than aware of all the things we write and they know very well that they run a sabre-rattling foreign policy. They know pretty well that they are imperialists and they do not need reminders to that effect.
Secondly power is the wrong audience for any writer and attempting to address it is an absolute waste of time, resources and energy.

When one writes about the role of the West in the political climate of Zimbabwe the idea is not to scare away the United States or the West by the power of eloquence, research or grammatical fluency. That does not work.

The idea is to talk to the people and it is the people that can stop power in its trait. It is the people who can rise against the empire and it is only the people who can speak a language that power can neither ignore nor resist.

There is a general misunderstanding that writers such as myself are anti-West and are simplistic in approach so much that they portray the wrong picture that the United States acts everywhere as an evil empire.

Well the United States might not be, or perhaps are not the evil empire and neither is China the emerging holy empire. Both assertions are obviously an oversimplification of facts.

Currently the United States happens to be more powerful than the Indo-China emerging power and they expectedly are more violent. We cannot speculate the amount of violence China is going to use fifty years from now but we can compare the United States to the former empires – to Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium and so on and so forth.

When the British were running the world they presided over despicable atrocities that one will never find in any history lesson in the schools in England. Before the First World War, Britain was the dominant world power and they were only weakened by the war.
After the war the British were seriously worried about how they were going to continue to run Asia, especially now that they no longer had the military capacity to actually occupy the region. This is the same worry they have today over how they can continue to run Zimbabwe and every other former African colony especially that colonial capacity long collapsed in the 1950s.

With Asia, the suggestion was that the solution was to turn to air power and this kind of warfare was just coming in then, just at the end of the First World War. Britain figured that attacking civilians by air power would be a good way to reduce the costs of “crushing the barbarians”.

Winston Churchill, who was then the colonial secretary, received a request from the Royal Air Force office in Cairo asking for permission to use poison gas “against recalcitrant Arabs.”

They were actually talking about Kurds and Afghans and by racist standards of the time and even of now, everyone you want to kill is an Arab or an Islamic fundamentalist. This request was coming at a time when poisoned gas was the equivalent of nuclear weapons today, it was the worst atrocity one could imagine then, and it was the ultimate punishment one could possibly think of.

Despite protests from the British Empire’s Indian office Churchill was convinced that the use of poisoned gas was a brilliant idea. In fact he was outraged by the protests coming from the Indian office and he had this to say;

“I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas....I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes.....It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses; gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected....We cannot in any circumstance acquiesce in the non-utilization of any weapons which are available to procure a speedy termination of the disorder which prevails on the frontier. It will save British lives. We will use every means that science permits us.”

That was the way you dealt with Kurds and Afghans then if you were British. Today when Zimbabweans cause “disorder which prevails on the frontier” by taking away land from whites of British origin there is a way you deal with that if you are British.
It is no longer possible to use “poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes” but it is very possible to wipe them out through ruinous sanctions.

The only reason there are no details of what happened to the Kurds and the Afghans is that the 1992 (British) Open Government Policy (a policy to declassify government operations) had among its first acts the mandatory role to remove all documents having to do with the use of poisoned gas and air power in colonial Asia.

In short the British were not going to admit to atrocities, the same way they will not admit that the sanctions they mobilized against Zimbabweans are the cause of the suffering the country is facing today.

The British succeeded in undermining every effort that was made to bar the use of air power against civilians and also to block many disarmament treaties of that time. Great British statesmen were exceedingly pleased with this kind of achievement that Lloyd George, the highly honoured statesman, had this to say to the British government in 1932: “We insisted on reserving the right to bomb niggers.” This is the history of that “great democracy” – Great Britain.

This is the history of the Great Britain that today grandstands as humanitarians in their preached word on the crisis in Zimbabwe. The intervention that Britain wants the world to understand as “humanitarian intervention” is an intervention on a crisis directly caused by the isolation of Zimbabwe by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and every other Western country in their individual capacities – an isolation directly sponsored by British politicians, particularly former Premier Tony Blair, who counted himself very lucky to have the black face provided to his ruinous campaign by Zimbabwe’s opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai.

From any number of angles the intervention that the West seeks in Zimbabwe cannot be called humanitarian. It is like the politics of the bombing of Kosovo. The rich story of how the United States played its chess piece, Bosnia in making them oppose the Vance-Owen peace plan, the same way Zimbabwe’s MDC are being told to oppose the Sadc facilitated position on the issue of an inclusive government, is what we are seeing again.

Washington had to impose the Dayton agreement in Yugoslavia in 1995 and they called it a humanitarian intervention although there were absolutely no humanitarian elements in the US’s otherwise political and military involvement. There are no humanitarian elements in Britain’s involvement in the Zimbabwe crisis. What we see is the chess piece, the opposition MDC, and its obnoxious behaviour designed to create and exacerbate the crisis in the country so that Britain can ask the likes of Kofi Annan, the former UN Secretary General, to provide a face for “humanitarian intervention”. A pretext cannot be humanitarian.

If the West decides to lift sanctions on Zimbabwe today, this writer does not see how that can be viewed as humanitarian intervention. Readers can make their judgment on this.

The West gloated about the greatness of the achievement of returning refugees to their homes after the deadly Kosovo bombings but they totally overlooked the fact the refugees were driven out after the bombing by NATO. Whatever one may think about the issue of how the refugees were returned to their homes this was hardly a humanitarian effort.

Similarly, whatever one may think about bringing food and welfare assistance to suffering Zimbabweans, the gesture as spearheaded by the West can hardly be viewed as a humanitarian effort. It is a political effort designed to achieve a political goal of an illicit regime change programme.

It is not a question of whether the intervention is good or bad, one can think of it either way, but there is no humanitarian element.

The Australians civilized and Christianized the Aboriginal people by nearly eliminating them from the face of the earth. The Americans killed about 200 000 Filipinos over a hundred years ago because they sought to civilize them and to Christianize them. The border between Mexico and the United States is where it is today because the US massacred Mexicans and took half their country to their own side.

There used to be lots of people who lived in California and somehow they are not around anymore. It was not because they faced a Black Death plague or anything like that. History knows what happened to these people. The French War Minister of the colonial times declared that his country was committed to “exterminating the indigenous population” of Algeria and the Belgians did all sorts of unspeakable things in the Congo.

With all these former great powers having done all these bad things it is unfair to call the US the evil empire and that is why we do not do so. They are just as bad as every other empire, may be a little worse but not the evil empire as some readers would want to allege we believe.      

The system of great powers is not and cannot be humanitarian. It is an exploitative and repressive system that has been responsible for both of the World Wars, for the era of slavery, for the ignominy of colonialism and for imperialism in its current crude form.

This writer seeks to speak not to the great powers but to the people of Zimbabwe. It is the people that can speak to these powers and their voice cannot be ignored.

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

Reason Wafawarova is a political writer and can be contacted on wafawarova@yahoo.co.uk or reason@rwafawarova.com or visit www.rwafawarova.com