Beware Of NGO Trojan Horse Aid: Zimbabweans And Their Old Theme Priests

30 June 2009

By Reason Wafawarova

IF there is one lesson that the tour by Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai to Western capitals provided, it is the fact that many, if not all, of the Western leaders visited by the Zimbabwean delegation are of the opinion that Zimbabwe is ripe for the picking.

It is the same old theory advanced by John Quincy Adams — the theory he called "the laws of political gravitation" where he advocated a wait-and-see approach to pre-independence Cuba, arguing that Cuba would "fall into our hands like a ripe fruit".

The trip to the United States, in particular, was interesting. President Barack Obama avoided being drawn into commenting on his January anti-grain expansion of the sanctions regime against Zimbabwe.

He chose to cushion that brutal gesture with an announcement that his government would fund Western non-governmental organisations stationed in Zimbabwe to the tune of US$73 million.

This announcement was also meant to give comfort to the Prime Minister that his mission was not exactly fruitless.

Surely, the Zimbabwean delegation had no planned intentions to be the fundraising team for Western NGOs resident in Zimbabwe, and plainly the Zimbabwean Prime Minister did not view himself as an envoy for these NGOs.

President Obama confidently said that the money was meant for "the people of Zimbabwe" and he made it clear that the Government, in which Morgan Tsvangirai is Prime Minister, is not part of US plans in reaching out to the people of Zimbabwe.

The Prime Minister had made it clear in an earlier trip to Holland that he was not on a "begging ball", interpreted to mean he was not out to beg for aid, but to seek "re-engagement with the international community".

Here was the President of the United States re-engaging Zimbabwe by telling its Prime Minister that the US would endeavour to reach out to Zimbabweans by explicitly by-passing the very Government advocating for this re-engagement, including its Prime Minister.

By virtue of being the natural leader of the pack that forms Western elites, the US was setting up the traditional rudimentary law for the rest of the West — that it is considered totally illegitimate to help someone that the United States seeks to isolate.

The reasoning is quite simple: everything the US does is right, by definition.

And anyone who interferes or acts contrary to what the US does is, by definition, wrong.

By this well accepted assumption, the fate of the Prime Minister’s trip was well sealed as soon as President Obama wrapped his "No" to Zimbabwe’s Government in a shiny announcement of aid to unnamed Western NGOs — of course, the aid coming in the name of "the people of Zimbabwe". There was no way the rest of the Western countries visited after the US were going to offer anything substantially different to what President Obama had offered, essentially a sweet nothing wrapped in diplomatic announcements of Western NGO funding for projects in Zimbabwe.

It is surprising how old themes persist.

When the government of Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, the US responded by an immediate engagement in terrible hostilities.

The CIA was actively involved in subversive acts as early as late 1959 and by March 1960, the Eisenhower government had produced a secret document where they said their objective was to replace the Castro government with one "more devoted to the true interests of the Cuban people and more acceptable to the US".

We are told today by the Americans and the rest of the West that just like the Zanu-PF led Government before it, the current inclusive Government of Zimbabwe falls short of meeting "the true interests of the Zimbabwean people".

The same explicit message is being sent to the world about the Iranian government: that it is failing to meet the "true interests of the Iranian people".

The Eisenhower administration’s document continued to say the replacement of Castro’s government had to be done "in such a manner as to avoid any appearance of U.S intervention".

This has always been the leitmotif of US and Western policy on countries whose governments embark on people-oriented social projects like Zimbabwe’s agrarian reforms.

In 1954, Guatemala embarked on a similar agrarian reform programme and the US State Department released a statement saying: "Guatemala has become an increasing threat to the stability of Honduras and El Salvador.

"Its agrarian reform is a powerful propaganda weapon; its broad social programme of aiding the workers and peasants in a victorious struggle against the upper class and large foreign enterprises has a strong appeal to the populations of Central American neighbours where similar conditions prevail."

The biggest sin the inclusive Government of Zimbabwe has committed is to embrace and include those cadres that spearheaded the land reform programme, particularly President Robert Gabriel Mugabe, whom they loath.

The bit about "the true interests of the Zimbabwean people" or that of Cuban people or Iranians can be laughed away as deserving no comment, but essentially it is the pretext upon which the West finds its way in advancing their interests and foreign policy goals in those countries that offer resistance to Western hegemony.

The second part of this policy that talks about "a government more acceptable to the US" and the avoidance of an "appearance of US intervention" is most telling.

Zimbabwe and Africa are hereby called upon to pretend that they do not know what is going on. It is impossible for African leaders and Zimbabwean politicians to openly approve the aggressive and imperial US-led Western intervention in Zimbabwe.

So a silent consensus has to be born.

We all have to pretend that no US or Western intervention exists and the inclusive Government — in particular — must pretend to believe it.

This is how imperial affairs are carried out. With ZDERA in place, the European Union and Western embargo intact, sabotage in full force and with limited support for Zimbabwe, the US and the West in general assume that African governments and Zimbabwe’s inclusive Government will be too intimidated to refuse to comply with Western benchmarks.

The supposition behind the sanctions and strangulation of Zimbabwe has always been that the economic situation would worsen as it did in the past 10 years, and with that there would naturally be protests, which in turn would elicit repression.

The idea was always that the activities of repressive apparatus would grow ever more rigorous, due to the growing effects of the policy of strangulation, and then we would see the natural cycle of more repression, more dissidence and perhaps catastrophic violence that would warrant Western invasion.

This cycle of events was the plan on Cuba, and the US hoped that the situation in Cuba would become so bad that US troops could invade without much opposition — or possibly with express approval of the population, unable to stand the situation any longer.

This was the same strategy for Zimbabwe, and indeed sections of the population applauded the failed attempts by Britain to seek United Nations Security Council approval for military intervention in Zimbabwe.

When a local population behaves like that, then the country is ripe for the picking — ready to give away the green shoots of the ruins of strangulation: the sanctions.

Zimbabwe did not exactly deteriorate into catastrophic violence warranting military invasion or "picking" by Western elites.

Rather, the people of Zimbabwe decided to find each other and the three major political parties came together to form an all-inclusive Government.

The Western elites publicly say they are sceptical of this arrangement when what they actually mean is that they are furious.

This is why the Prime Minister in essence did not get any money by way of developmental aid.

The West wanted to have another Panama in Zimbabwe.

You keep torturing people until they finally accept you like a liberation hero.

And one has to understand this, because the situation in Zimbabwe, as was in Panama; is so horrible that the only way to survive is under the domination of the colossus of the West.

The US knows well how to make the Zimbabwean people scream for Western help. With Iran and North Korea proving too hot to handle and with somewhat humiliating concessions (by US imperial standards) in Central America and Cuba, there is need for President Obama to produce a face-saving chauvinist hysteria by means of some cheap victories, and it is important that they be cheap and they do not come any cheaper than bullying ravaged little countries like Zimbabwe.

The West is dangling bits and driblets of so-called humanitarian aid so as to incite the population into hysterical hankering for more until as many as possible will come to believe that the West is not the tormentor but the liberator.

The victory, as already said, has to be cheap and President Mugabe has proven not to be such a cheap victory and attention shifted to Reserve Bank Governor Dr Gideon Gono and Attorney-General Mr Johannes Tomana, who also have proven to be too difficult to remove.

The other target, the ultimate prize, is the reversal of the land reforms, but that also is proving to be too hard to achieve with all parties in the inclusive Government agreed that the process is irreversible.

The West’s idea to give aid through their own NGOs is designed to achieve a tacit collaboration between the suffering and hungry people of Zimbabwe and Western elites with the hope that the West will have the last word. And the West does not want Zanu-PF to return.

Britain must be overly inspired that such collaboration with Zimbabwean people is achievable after the appalling behaviour of those 1 000 economic refugees resident in London — the lot that sought to impress the British Home Office by jeering and heckling the Prime Minister of their own country for daring to say home was now a place of "peace and stability".

The challenge facing the inclusive Government is meeting the demands of the only real donation that came the Government’s way through the PM’s tour of Western capitals — that pack of abstract benchmarks like "rule of law", "freedom of political prisoners", "restoration of property rights", "Press freedom", "respect for human rights" and "respect for the will of Zimbabwean people".

No one in the inclusive Government can define any of these phrases to the consensus of everyone and, of course, the Prime Minister announced the coming of "Press freedom" by the "first or second week of July" when the "free Press" from the West is expected to be accredited to work in the country.

Whether this is the definition of free Press or not, the truth of the matter is that Western benchmarks are not only vague and difficult to measure, but are also exceedingly patronising and bullish, especially when directed to a country that fought so hard to achieve these basic democratic rights — denied by the very people who today demand such rights.

Prime Minister Tsvangirai: do not tire in your efforts to seek re-engagement, but please be advised that the country will not be reconstructed by aid. We need to go out there with well-defined packages to attract and stimulate investment in the country, and not with well articulated misery to elicit pity and sympathy from other nations.

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

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