By Reason Wafawarova in SYDNEY, Australia:

Wed Mar 26, 2008 2:38 am

IF one were to rely on what is said by Zimbabwean opposition politicians at political rallies, Press conferences and to Western media, there is every reason to forgive that person if they concluded that President Mugabe and his Zanu-PF party are the enemies of the people of Zimbabwe.

One also gets the impression that the opposition, particularly the MDC, is just an unfortunate bunch of well meaning and blameless advocates for democracy at the mercy of a ruthless dictatorship. The MDC is hardly ever presented as that obnoxious party of intolerant goons that believe more in violent street marches than reason.

This is before one is challenged to answer a list of questions that Morgan Tsvangirai, Simba Makoni and their Western backers would never want anyone to ask. The world, and by this reference is made to the oppressed masses of this planet outside the framework of imperialist economies and territorial space — this part of the world is supposed to believe that a man who left career, family and friends to sacrifice twenty years in the fight for the liberation of his own people and country can suddenly just turn out to be an enemy of the same people for whom he suffered so much.

When one is told that eleven of those years were spent in the ruthless and torturous jails manned by an unrepented and outrageously racist gang of British colonialists the question all the more begs for a logical and rational answer. All that suffering and sacrifice just to become a monster towards one’s own people? Surely this does not make even a fool’s sense.

After these twenty years of outstanding contribution to the national liberation struggle this man — Robert Gabriel Mugabe — was a co-leader of his people alongside the late Vice President Joshua Nkomo at the Lancaster House conference where a transition from colonialism to independent majority rule was negotiated and agreed between Britain, the former coloniser and members of the Patriotic Front — a coalition of the two major liberation movements — Zanu-PF and PF-Zapu.

Multi-party elections were then held in March 1980 and Zanu-PF, led by Cde Robert Mugabe won those elections against Western sponsored rightwing forces as well as the other wing of the national liberation movement, PF-Zapu, then led by the late Cde Joshua Nkomo. After assuming office as the first Prime Minister of independent Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe embarked on two major policy frameworks.

He adopted a reconciliatory path with those former colonisers who chose to remain part of the newly born country and this reconciliation policy meant that those heartless butchers of Nyadzonia and Chimoio in Mozambique — the murderers who massacred thousands of defenceless refugees comprising innocent children and women with tremendous brutality and reckless abandon — would go scot-free and also keep their economic privileges gained through the ruinous effect of colonialism and racialism. How can a man muster the courage of overlooking such an atrociously gruesome piece of history affecting his own people?

Any man with such a big heart as to allow progression a chance over vindictiveness cannot logically turn out into the monster being created out of President Mugabe by the Western rulers through their lackeys in the Western media and their surrogates in the opposition MDC and to a lesser extent through the renegade Simba Makoni.

The other policy framework embarked on by Cde Mugabe was the people oriented domestic policy mainly cantered on a mass education programme, the creation of growth points in rural areas, an expansion of the health delivery system and the establishment of economic co-operatives in rural areas.

It is just unimaginable that a people who chose to abuse Cde Mugabe’s hand of reconciliation for further imperialistic self-aggrandisement can now label a man who, in the first decade of his rule, channelled 75 percent of the fiscus towards social projects meant to directly benefit his people an enemy of those same people.

Zimbabwe has a literacy rate of 93 percent, well comparable to any developed country across the globe and the irony of this outstanding achievement is that some of the highly talented Zimbabweans who are beneficiaries to Cde Mugabe’s social policies on education — are among the allies of President Mugabe’s imperialist enemies today. Doubtless, many of these people would be illiterate villagers under Ian Smith today if the colonial regime had been allowed its thousand-year-rule dream. It is a sad sight to see some of these people arraying themselves as willing agents of the imperialist agenda by shamelessly portraying President Mugabe as an enemy of the Zimbabwean people.

Is President Mugabe an enemy of the Zimbabwean people or an enemy of the imperialist ruling elite, who in their desperation to guise the evil intentions of their sanctions war — have financially acquired the hearts of weaker souls among Zimbabweans, souls whose voices of treachery are currently more important than the atomic bomb for the imperialists?

Whatever these insidious Zimbabweans say will find way to the front pages of newspapers even if whatever they say would go totally unnoticed if it were said by anyone else from any other part of this planet. The treachery of these people makes good propaganda for the imperialist ruling elite and for this many such Zimbabweans have easily accessed places of high authority in Western capitals.

If there is a part of President Mugabe’s revolutionary life that he has to regret it is the post Cold War era. In 1990, President Mugabe’s Government officials — led by the late Bernard Chidzero, the then Finance Minister, were duped and baited into accepting the IMF’s Economic Structural Adjustment Programme. Although President Mugabe was sceptical about this programme he however conceded to the advocacies of his officials and that way ESAP was allowed to happen.

It was nothing complicated at all. It was the same old stupid story sold earlier on to Ghana, Venezuela, the neighbouring Zambia, Nicaragua, Haiti and many other countries in the developing world. It was a straightforward scam where the respective governments were told to prepare their people for a belt-tightening process that preceded the "liberalisation of the economy" and a new neo-liberal economic regime based on the rule of "market forces".

The belt-tightening process meant that the civil service had to be downsized, something Morgan Tsvangirai and Simba Makoni are promising to do if elected in this election. There are of course no contingent measures for those to be retrenched, as there were none when many were retrenched in the early nineties. The IMF also ordered that essential services like power supplies, public transport, education and communication be privatised with new job evaluations sidelining thousands of workers.

The stupid and ludicrous story line was obviously not a clever scam but all were fooled and lured by the promises of aid, loans and an influx of Foreign Direct Investment.

By 1995, the Government of Zimbabwe had realised what many other governments had realised in the late seventies and throughout the eighties — that there was not much coming in by way of the promised aid, neither was there anything worthy telling people about by way of the promised loans. The Foreign Direct Investment that was trickling in was just milking the country of its resources with no dividends coming the people’s way.

The filter down effect of this imperialist scam benefited a few businesspeople and a middle class that manned the management affairs of the multinationals behind the FDI capital that financed these classy business ventures. These are the people that keep crying for a return to the rule of imperialist capitalism and they cannot wait for the return of white privilege.

The Government subsequently announced an official abandonment of ESAP in 1995 but the damage had already been done. The life expectancy of Zimbabwe had fallen from 62 years to 46 years during ESAP but not even one media mouthpiece in the West told the world that Mugabe was an enemy of his own people. Neither did we hear anything about bad or unsound policies.

When people suffer because the sitting government allows the imperialist regime a free reign over their resources no one is labelled an enemy of the people. It is when a sitting government asserts its authority to defend the interests of the wretched masses of this world that such a government becomes an enemy of imperialists.

Imperialists are obviously ashamed of their own existence and will never run a foreign policy that says such and such a government has "refused us imperial reign over their resources and therefore they are officially declared an enemy of the mighty imperialist gang." That will never happen. It is like marching into Iraq with a banner that reads, "Blood for Oil!" or going into Iran with a banner that says "In Defence of our surrogate State of Israel!" Such a move would render imperialism totally unviable on home soil where the public is to be kept under permanent deception in order to avoid a public opinion backlash.

The imperialists will use the suffering of a people against their leadership if they have a problem with that leadership. If the suffering is non-existent it has to be created. In the past the easier option was military aggression where the imperialist elites would just order their armies to go and massacre the people until the people turn against their own leadership.

This has increasingly become difficult since the resolute victory of the Vietnamese people over the unthinking bully, the United States and its surrogate allies that accompanied them to that meaningless war of the seventies.

The latest trick has been to subject people to ruinous sanctions and keep piling the blame for their suffering on the leadership of their country. Is it not ironic that we saw the suffering Zimbabweans under ESAP being told by the West to tighten their belts until kingdom come and yet the same people are now subjected to worse suffering under sanctions mobilised and organised by Britain and her lap-dog politicians in the Zimbabwean opposition. In this kind of suffering the people are now being told to loosen and take off their belts and use them to fight their own leadership. How about an uprising against those who have imposed the sanctions and against the IMF? Would the West be comfortable with such an idea?

We are supposed to live in a naïve world where a Mugabe government allowing the ruinous effect of IMF policies on its people is praised as progressive and another Mugabe government is being ruthlessly punished through sanctions for abandoning IMF’s ESAP as well as engaging on a people oriented agrarian reform programme.

The trick is to guise the ruinous effect of sanctions as an effect emanating from unsound or bad policies. What is unsound about abandoning a programme from the IMF, especially if such a programme has been forced down the throats of resource rich underdeveloped countries? What is unsound about redistributing land to its rightful owners after repossessing it from colonial dispossessors? What is unsound about allowing 51 percent control over the means of production in one’s own country? What is unsound about coming to the rescue of a neighbouring country that is about to suffer a US-sponsored military executed regime change?

These are questions the Zimbabwean British-sponsored opposition will never want asked. The Western ruling elite will not allow their lackeys in the media to air these questions to the Western public.

Anyway, this Mugabe who is supposedly an enemy of his own people only became an enemy of the people after his government drafted a constitution that would have allowed compulsory acquisition of white occupied land in 1999. Imperialism fought back by taking over the MDC and civic society through sheer money power. The takeover resulted in the campaign for a "NO" vote and the draft constitutional bid was thus thwarted.

Realising that imperialism was up for a big fight President Mugabe had to summon all his Marxist experience accumulated over many years of fighting for national liberation. In typical Marxist style, he allowed the revolutionary veterans of the liberation struggle to put on the revolutionary armour one more time and to lead the masses towards the repossession of their heritage. The land occupation marches began and they were unstoppable. Imperialism was at a loss. Britain was irked to the core and Tony Blair was so livid with this show of bravery by African natives. The US’s self imposed authority over the affairs of this world was facing the most embarrassing moment and something had to be done.

Morgan Tsvangirai was ordered to embark on all manner of missions, from threatening violent removal of the sitting government, organising futile and abortive mass actions to openly calling for sanctions from everyone and the idea was to isolate Zimbabwe until the "return of the rule of (imperialist) law." For his trouble Morgan Tsvangirai got himself isolation from Africa, particularly from Sadc and of course he found himself brushing with the real law of Zimbabwe on a few occasions — needless to say, always coming second best.

The British established a permanent desk on Zimbabwe at the BBC and a slanderous media smear campaign against the Government was launched. They also mobilised the EU, the Commonwealth and the US to sanction Zimbabwe and such sanctions were immediately put in place. The sanctions range from travel bans, sporting bans to full-fledged economic sanctions and a blockade on the loans and balance of payments.

The US established a permanent desk on Zimbabwe in the CIA and the Department of State and they even deployed one Christopher Dell, a self proclaimed architect of insurrections, as ambassador to Harare. Of course he was dealt a blow of his life by the revolution of Zimbabwe and he left the country cursing and even resorting to divine talk by telling his surrogates in the opposition to "keep the faith".

Now that the isolation has created so much suffering, the idea is to turn that suffering into arsenal against President Mugabe.

The sanctions-induced suffering, aided by unruly and illicit corrupt officials in the private and public sector; is now being wrongly and maliciously attributed to the shortcomings of the person of President Mugabe. That way Mugabe is meant to be portrayed as the enemy of the people. This is what happened to Chile’s Allende, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, to Grenada’s Maurice Bishop and even to the US-created Saddam Hussein of Iraq and the former CIA agent, Manuel Noriega of Panama.

All these people were ruthlessly sanctioned and then blamed for the suffering that came with the sanctions. Thomas Jefferson called it "political gravitation" and the idea is to make a people suffer until they begin to accept their oppressor and source of suffering as the only liberator. Jefferson said when this point is reached the targeted country would be "ripe for the picking." Is Zimbabwe ripe for such picking? We will see on the 29th of March of course.

Now who are the enemies of the people? Is it those who call for sanctions and then go ahead to dangle rescue packages in exchange for votes or is it those who stand by the people in empowering the masses at the expense of imperialist vultures?

Who is the enemy of the people? Is it the long suffering Mugabe who has given so much documented sacrifice and commitment for his country or Morgan Tsvangirai, a man who ignored the call to fight for his own country during the armed struggle only to turn up as a willing agent for imperialism in the fight against the gains of the very independence brought about by the war that Tsvangirai despised and ignored in his youthful days?

Who are the enemies of the people? Is it the war veterans seeking to defend the nationalism, freedom, sovereignty and independence for which they sacrificed lives and limbs or the Western sponsored associations and civic organisations coming to the Zimbabwean people in the name of good governance and human rights?

Who is the enemy of the people? Is it President Mugabe, who has embarked on a ten-phase agricultural mechanisation programme or Simba Makoni who scoffs at the idea and promises those sitting on repossessed land a "gnashing of teeth?"

Who are the enemies of the people? Is it those who want to make sure that the country takes itself out of the current suffering through a successful agricultural tenure and through indigenous economic policies or those who are surrendering and eying the economic packages that come with a restoration of the old imperial set up of the pre-2000 era?

Who is the enemy of the people? Is it this writer who writes in defence of a people’s revolution or any of those other writers pre-occupying themselves with writing perfidious and slanderous pieces solely based on their sense of imagination and their irrational hatred for President Mugabe?

The people of Zimbabwe are clear of where they are coming from and where they are going, even in the wake of all this suffering. The election on the 29th of March is just but an opportunity for the masses of Zimbabwe to show the world who exactly is the enemy of the people. They showed the world who this enemy was in 2000, in 2002 and in 2005 – each time the enemy refusing the tag and crying aloud that Zanu-PF and Cde Mugabe were electoral thieves.

It seems this time they have not bothered to wait to do their crying after the announcement of the election result.

Morgan Tsvangirai has already unwittingly conceded defeat by announcing that he is busy preparing for a fight after the election instead of psyching up his team for governance — something anyone with a hope to win the elections would be doing. May be Tsvangirai does not want a repeat of the 2002 embarrassment when some people within the MDC fought for diplomatic postings that were supposed to come through a government that never was.

It is this writer’s wish to make an appeal for tranquillity and peace during and after the election because no amount of threats or rebellion will ever get anyone to rule Zimbabwe. This is a very special country with a special people — a country whose history will show anyone that external meddling is but a futile exercise. Not even the mighty United States can establish their will on Zimbabwe and that position will not change. The US and her Western allies can do absolutely nothing about it.

The only Zimbabwe that can be ungovernable is one presided over by imperialist stooges and that message has already been sent out loud and clear and the people are ready. After the people have spoken on 29 March, the voice of the majority has to be respected and Morgan Tsvangirai is behaving in an extremely dangerous manner by trying to pre-empt the will of the people in his bizarre claims for a victory ahead of an election.

Tsvangirai seems to think that he is so invincible that the only way he can lose an election is through some rigging process — that despite the fact that he has lost the vote in his own MDC on more than one occasion. He lost the vote on the Senate issue in 2005 and he lost it on the Matibenga issue in 2007. One wonders what makes Morgan Tsvangirai think that he has to win the national vote when he struggles to be supported within his own party.

The people know their enemy and they will speak out on Saturday.

Homeland or death! We will overcome.