The Three Puppeteers
Posted by By Akogun Akomolafe at 10 December, at 15 : 00 PM Print
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Puppets
“As Zimbabwe descends into anarchy and chaos, land is irrationally seized from productive farmers, we are told. President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe is portrayed as a dictator bent on driving his nation into starvation and economic disaster while benevolent U.S. and British leaders call for democracy and human rights. These are the images presented by Western news reports, intended to persuade the public to support an interventionist policy. As always when the West targets a foreign leader for removal, news reports ignore complexity and context, while the real motivations for intervention remain hidden. Concern for democracy and human rights is selective and it is always the nation that displays too much independence that evokes concern, even in cases of a functioning multiparty system and wide ranging media. On the other hand, no one calls for democracy and human rights in oppressive nations as long as the political environment is conducive to Western investment. Saudi Arabia, for example, holds no elections and imposes an abusive oppression on the lives of its women. The pattern is consistent. Any nation that embarks on a path diverging from Western corporate interests and places the needs of its people over the demands of Western capital finds itself the target of destabilization, sanctions and intervention. History and context are essential for understanding political events, and it is precisely these aspects that are lacking in Western news reports.” – Gregory Elich, ‘Zimbabwe under Siege,’ – http://www.swans.com/library/art8/elich004.html
“Behind the simple and humane façade, Carter has a strategy to reverse progressive regimes and undermine insurgent democrats. Carter and his “team” from his Center probe and locate weaknesses among insecure democrats, particularly those under threat by US-backed opponents and thus vulnerable to Carter’s appeals to be “pragmatic” and “realistic”–meaning his barely disguised arguments to accept fraudulent electoral results and gross US electoral intervention. Carter is a quiet master in mixing democratic rhetoric with manipulation of susceptible democrats who think he shares their democratic politics. The international mass media feature his self-promoted overseas trips to conflictual countries and above all his phony “human rights” record. The mass media provide Carter with the appearance of democratic credentials.” James Petras, “The Truth about Jimmy Carter.”
“To attempt to grasp the Zimbabwean predicament without falling for, or being naïvely suckered by, the well orchestrated and demonizing propaganda of the rapacious western interests — those predators who roam the globe to enrich themselves and their cronies and supply our guzzling economies with the goodies that fatten us and end up wasted in overflowing landfills — one must not ignore history, particularly that of colonialism and the subsequent but rarely fully implemented decolonization; the savagery of the former and the messy and painful process of the latter.” – Gilles d’Aymery , “The Anti-Mugabe Brigade.”
According to the BBC and the other Western corporate media, the tyrant of Harare, Robert Mugabe, decided to humiliate ‘so-called’ Elders comprising Former US President Jimmy Carter, former UN Boss Kofi Annan and Nelson Mandela’s wife, Gracia Mandela, who also happened to be the wife of Mozambican charismatic liberation war hero, Samora Marcel.
According to these reports the trio was trying to find solutions to the so-called humanitarian crises in authoritarian and despotic Zimbabwe. Unless I am missing something deep, I have to agree with the Zimbabwean authority’s refusal to allow them in. The so-called elders are either out rightly stupid or they are outright liars or both. They are surely motivated by ulterior motives that have nothing to do with seeking truth and justice and absolutely nothing to do with humanitarian concerns. Perhaps they are there to promote the ill-disguised Western policy of regime change.
African mores frowned on speaking ill of the dead, but some truth need to be told. Before her death I was asked what I thought of Lady Diana’s so-called humanitarian efforts. My reply was that she’s only earning her pay by promoting western views and ideas. Diana did nothing but lent her face to the charade of an altruistic and humanitarian West. She was the façade the West threw in our faces to mask her (West) unbridled greed and violence against the non-Western world. Diana knew where the bombs, the guns, the helicopters and the mines that were killing and maiming lives were made. Why didn’t she go to any of these factories and convince the manufacturers to turn their swords into plowshare? No, she didn’t. All that we saw were her pancacked face with a mechanical smile pasted on going around hospitals in her so-called humanitarian’s trips. She smiled and shook hands with victims of Western-sponsored aggressions and for this they say we should dance with joy. Many were Africans who shed copious tears at her death; yet the millions of victims of Western aggression will not stir them to tears! What a hypocritical world we live in!
I have always asked why US Presidents discover humanity only after they have left office. While in office American Presidents wield awesome powers which they have used to support tyrants, manufacture proxy wars in order to maintain Western Capital stranglehold on the world. No American leader supported any of African wars of independenceliberation. They, without exception, took sides with all the enemies of Africa. Today, we have Jimmy Carter being promoted as Apostle of Peace and in Southern Africa for that matter. And in Zimbabwe of all places!
For those who did not know it, Jimmy Carter’s Presidency (1977-1981) spanned the crucial period of Zimbabwean and Southern African liberation wars. Jimmy Carter pursued the same arrogant, imperial, anti-African and anti-human foreign policies of US and Western governments. It is a policy that it dedicated to the glorification and consolidation of international capital. In the Southern Africa region, American and West European finance helped to sustain the odious settler-regimes in Rhodesia, Namibia and South Africa. America and her allies abused their UN veto powers to protect the colonial regimes in Africa. The phony proxy wars the West claimed to have fought against communism ensured that Angolans, Congolese, Somalis and Mozambicans continue to live wretched lives until today. The argument then was that the stiff-necked Boers and Rhodesians were the bulwark against communism.
Jimmy Carter and his team rigidly sided with the oppressors and the killers of Africans. None of the liberation movements enjoy the support any US government, Jimmy carter’s included. The West allowed the Boers to acquire its (West’s) war-making technologies, so much so that the Boers built and tested nuclear bombs with the West looking the other way. Revelations in post-apartheid inquiries revealed that the Boers extensively used biological and chemical weapons against its enemies, again with the West looking unconcerned. In their book,’ Fighting for apartheid, a job for life,’ the authors revealed how Western nations allowed their nationals to obtain South African citizenship which obliged them to serve in the apartheid war machines that were killing Africans all over the place.
Today, Jimmy Carter, the wretched hypocrite with his phony smiles and phonier humanitarian credentials, is travelling around the world as Apostle of Peace. I won’t be surprised if in few years the Dubya, the BUSHman himself goes around the world as a UN envoy on Peace and Humanitarian affairs!
It is difficult for me to think of Kofi Annan without remembering Malcolm X phrase about the House Nigger. Everything about Kofi Annan typifies the concept of a House Nigger – always eager to please the Master. Everything about Mr. Annan stank of rank Uncle Tomism – Uncle Tom was the character in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ who is ever solicitous to white people. The House Nigger takes the welfare of the Master more seriously than the Master himself. Whenever the Master sneezes the House Nigger catches cold. Just everything about Kofi Annan is loathsome.
At least it is on record that Egyptian Boutros Boutros Ghali declined to surrender his principles to satisfy the West’s desires for control of the UN. Mr. Ghali refused to become a puppet on the string of Western manipulations, hence his failure to secure a second term as UN Secretary General. Not so, our Mr. Annan. The man will dance to any tune as long as he gets a bone thrown at him. Here was a man whose love of office made him refused to leave office even when Bush and co made his position untenable. Bush and co declared the UN irrelevant and went ahead to wage an unsanctioned war of aggression against a member of the UN; yet Mr. Annan lacked the elementary dignity to refused to occupy a sham office. And we ought not to forget the role our Mr. Annan played in the death of (estimate ranges from eight hundred to one million) Rwandans. Mr. Annan was at the head of impotent UN Peace-keeping Forces that refused to protect Africans at their hours of direst needs. Any man with an iota of self-respect would have buried his head in shame at that monumental failure and resign in disgrace. Not so, our Mr. Annan. He somehow wormed his ways into the pinnacle of the UN where he did his best to become the West’s YESMAN. And we shouldn’t forget the cloud of scandal that hung over his head at the UN.
The so-called ‘Elders’ do not look stupid to me and I bet that they have the resources at their disposal to arrive at the truth if they so desire. Before the cruel sanction the West imposed on it, Zimbabwe was able to feed, cloth, house and educate its citizens. Zimbabweans were adjudged the best educated Africans in pre-sanctions days. The country ranked among the cleanest with the most disciplined civil service. Zimbabwe was the cynosure of the region. Just like Pre-sanction Iraq was the most developed in the Middle East, so was Zimbabwe in the Southern Africa region, save for South Africa.
Years after the so-called smart sanctions the West imposed on its erstwhile client, Saddam Hussein, Iraq was reduced to a country on its knees with Iraqis reduced to scavenging for food like vermin, and with millions of Iraqi children dying from hunger and starvation and diseases. Our Mr. Annan was the head of an organization under whose purview millions of Iraqis were sentenced to untimely death. And it is the same man with absolutely no shame that today goes around the world purporting to be engaged in some humanitarian enterprise! Give me more than a break, please!
These three so-called elders must have some influence in the capitals where the punishing sanctions were imposed on Zimbabwe. Why don’t they go there to make and plead that the inhuman and illegal sanctions are killing and destroying innocent Zimbabweans and should be lifted? Why do they have to go the victims of these heinous crimes and pretend to be concerned? Mugabe might be part of the problem, but he is not the whole problem. He was able to feed his people and give them good health before sanctions were imposed. Carter, Annan and Mrs. Mandela cannot run away from this simple truth. They should tell us what crimes Zimbabwe committed apart from trying to right an historical injustice of land theft.
If the trio are genuinely interested in the plight of Zimbabweans, let Mr. Carter, Mr. Annan and Mrs. Mandela take their case to Washington, London and Brussels and persuade those vampires that imposed the illegal, undeserved and inhuman sanctions to lift them. Let them persuade the puppet masters in those capitals to desist from their evil path and get it into their skulls that Africa is tired of being manipulated. They should stop attempting to decide who our leaders and heroes should be.
The argument here is not whether or not President Robert Mugabe has outlived his usefulness to his people, the point is that the West, through it media, should stop throwing dust us into our faces. We have had enough of Westerners masking their selfish interests in humanitarian halo. And we Africans are matured enough to choose our heroes and, please, Mr. Annan is singularly and signally unqualified to be an African hero.
Nuff said!
Quotable quotes:
“Robert Mugabe is portrayed as the prince of darkness, but when whites expel black people from their lands, nobody gives a damn.” And when non-white people are dispossessed, “[t]hese are dark-skinned people being expelled by whites, rather than whites being expelled by black people. They are, as such, assuming their rightful place, as invisible obstacles to the rich world’s projects. Mugabe is a monster because he has usurped the natural order.” And so, “[t]he most evil man on earth, besides Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden, is Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe. That, at least, is the view of most of the western world’s press.” George Monbiot, “Our Racist Demonology;” The Guardian; August 13, 2002; http://www.monbiot.com/dsp_article.cfm?article_id=525
“[b]ad things should obviously not happen to white people. How else to explain the indignation? The knowledge of unspeakable horrors inflicted on black Africans is seldom allowed to interfere with our peace of mind, as if they were in the natural order of things. Over there it is hot, zebras live in the wild, and bad things happen to blacks. But when white families are dispossessed, it is another matter altogether.”
“‘[p]lease don’t write all the usual old clichés about swimming pools, servants and gin and tonics,’ Zimbabwean whites told the journalist Ian Jack in 1977. That is what he found, though, and that is what many of the whites moved there for. Few families arrived 100 years ago, as it is claimed; most were postwar arrivals looking for sunshine and a higher standard of living than they could possibly hope for at home. They say they have been ‘good’ for Zimbabwe, and indeed they have. If you own rich land and pay your workers a pittance, how could you not be productive?” Decca Aitkenhead, “Remnants of Empire: Pity the poor Zimbabwean farmer, deprived of his swimming pool, servants and gin and tonic;” – http://www.raceandhistory.com/Zimbabwe/23082001.htm
About the Author
Femi Akomolafe is a passionate Pan-Africanist. A columnist for the Accra-based Daily Dispatch newspaper and Correspondent for the New African magazine. Femi lives in both Europe and Africa, and writes regularly on Africa-related issues for various newspapers and magazines.
Femi was the producer of the FOCUS ON AFRICANS TV Interview programme for the MultiTV Station.
He is also the CEO of Alaye Dot Biz Limited Dot Biz, a Kasoa-based Multimedia organisation that specialises in Audio and Video Production. He loves to shoot and edit video documentaries.
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