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African clerics singing for Western supper
By Obert
Madondo
THE Archbishop
of York, Dr. John Sentamu, has joined former Roman Catholic Archbishop
Emeritus of Bulawayo, Pius Ncube, and retired Anglican Archbishop of
Cape Town, Desmond Tutu, in a growing pseudo faith-based anti-Mugabe
crusade.
The West, particularly Britain, is using the three to nourish its ineffectual punitive-isolationist policy against the fledgling Mugabe dictatorship.
Sentamu was quoted recently in the Observer calling on Britain to lead sanctions against Mugabe and his government. Speaking to BBC Television in London this week, Tutu urged the international community to take tougher measures to end the Zimbabwe crisis.
On the surface, the three men are Africans genuinely concerned with human rights in general and, in particular, the dictatorship in Zimbabwe. In reality, though, the West is using them to repeat and validate the same stale anti-Mugabe rhetoric. The West is desperate to resale an isolationist policy the international community is growing weary of every day.
Famous for calling Robert Mugabe a "caricature of an African dictator", Desmond Tutu insulted all Africans when he declared: "All of us Africans must hang our heads in shame for having allowed such a desperate situation to continue almost without anybody doing anything to try and stop it."
Obviously Tutu belittles the sacrifices Zimbabweans have so far invested in fighting the dictatorship. He dismisses the current efforts at dialogue between Zanu PF and the MDC being facilitated by South African President, Thabo Mbeki. Implicitly, he cries to the British and their Western allies to rescue Zimbabweans from Mugabe the way they “rescued” Iraqis from Saddam Hussein.
Dr. Sentamu was more direct in his desperate effort to auction Africans’ perceived stupidity and helplessness to his Western audience. He likened Mugabe to the Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin. The comparison reinforces the stereotypical images of powerlessness that accompanied the genocidal madness of Hollywood’s Last King of Scotland.
But Dr. Sentamu showed us he spoke mainly to and for a white Western audience when he called Mugabe the “worst kind of racist dictator”. Excuse me, but Mugabe’s killing machine in the last seven years harvested more than 200 blacks and about a dozen white lives. In the 1980s, Mugabe presided over the slaughter of 20 000 black Zimbabweans in Matabeleland and the Midlands. How exactly is his genocidal dictatorship racist?
The two men’s comments were timed to support BBC Two's Newsnight report on Zimbabwe which aired last week and exposed drastic food shortages, infant mortality, average life expectancies in the mid-30s and poor living conditions. The two men were recruited to validate this report and prepare for British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown’s reiteration of the ailing sanctions crusade. This past Thursday Brown told ITV News television: “We are prepared to consider further sanctions.”
To those more attuned to the prevailing Zimbabwe reality, the West’s sanctions regime is in the intensive care unit. A recent report by the respected Brussels-based think tank, the International Crisis Group (ICG), suggests that the sanctions are only symbolic.
Let’s take a closer look at the impact of the sanctions, and the anti-Mugabe crusade, vis-à-vis the dictator’s position in Zimbabwe, Africa and much of the world. Mugabe is regaining neither legitimacy nor his former glory, but his grip on power in Zimbabwe is not slackening either.
The opposition recently validated the doomed dialogue between Zanu PF and the MDC. The two parties reportedly struck a deal on constitutional reform in parliament that strengthens Mugabe’s grip on power while offering some guarantees, somehow cosmetic, for free and fair elections. The two leaders of the MDC factions, Morgan Tsvangirai and Arthur Mutambara, met with South African President, Thabo Mbeki, two weeks ago.
The sanctions have boomeranged and evolved into a lethal weapon in Mugabe’s domestic propaganda and diplomatic arsenal. In the Zimbabwe tragedy he authored, Mugabe stars as the unrepentant victim of neo-colonial ambitions. Through corruption, inept leadership bad economic policies, he engineered the country’s economic collapse. But he has convinced some politically gullible Zimbabweans that the sanctions are solely to blame.
On the international front, Mugabe is now Africa’s bargaining chip in the diplomatic game against Europe. Just to piss off the West, the 14-nation SADC recently re-affirmed their solidarity with him. The AU has vowed that Mugabe will attend the forthcoming European Union-African Union Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, on December 8 and 9.
Zambia's President Levy Mwanawasa vowed to boycott the summit if Mugabe was not invited and suggested that other African leaders would join him. Remember this is the same Mwanawasa the West once suggested was ready to confront Mugabe militarily.
Commonwealth Secretary General, Don McKinnon, recently showed how most of the West has grown weary of its own ineffective policy. He reportedly urged the EU to invite Zimbabwe to Portugal and argued that failure to do so could result in another postponement of the summit.
While warning that Zimbabwe was “closer than ever to complete collapse” the ICG, a Western think tank devoted to promoting Western perspectives, urged the international community to fully back the Thabo Mbeki’s mediation efforts. The think tank urged Western countries to lift their sanctions against Mugabe and his disciples in exchange for honest concessions with the opposition.
In sharp contrast to the reality on the ground and the learned assessment of the ICG, Sentamu and Tutu begged Gordon Brown to lead a coalition of countries in mounting stricter international sanctions against Zimbabwe. They are both either out of touch with reality or knowingly tow the Western line for personal glory.
Pius Ncube’s case is different. For one thing, he is Zimbabwean. He genuinely stood up to the tyrant at a time when the opposition was in shambles. Then the Western media, having lost faith in the opposition, exploited his gallant activism. Before his CIO-engineered demise, they presented him with the platform to express himself. As expected, Ncube demonised Mugabe but offered few answers. He called for street protests. Then he got carried away and told us he was praying for Mugabe’s death.
A position such as this, coming from a Zimbabwean churchman, finds easy currency in the Western media. Ncube’s pronouncements provided beautiful sound bites in the Western media. They rekindled many of the theories which had been proposed by self-appointed Western experts on Zimbabwe but which had always proved off the mark. When Ncube called for popular mass uprisings, he created the illusion in Zimbabwe of a Ukranian-style Orange Revolution or the Tulip Revolution, which saw the overthrow of President Askar Akayev in Kyrgyzstan in 2005.
In July, Ncube uttered the one view British politicians cherish but would never publicly express. He suggested that Britain would be justified in invading its former colony to rid it of Mugabe. Let’s take a bite into reality for a second. Over the last couple of years, Britain’s policy towards Africa has evolved toward interventionism. But, during his last trip to Africa recently, outgoing British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, confirmed the limitation of this approach in the case of Zimbabwe. He backed Thabo Mbeki’s mediation. He suggested that local pressure, and an African effort, would yield results.
Enter Blair’s protégé, Gordon Brown, and we have a contradictory position. Brown has vowed to retain intact the same punitive-isolationist position his predecessor disowned. He, however, knows that the Western position is as doomed as Thabo Mbeki’s quiet diplomacy but is too proud to yield to other possibilities.
Britain will be the last country to invade Zimbabwe. Colonialism aside, British interventionism is a tale of miscalculations and mass deaths of innocent civilians. Liberated Iraq is a broken country with few prospects and unending bloodshed.
Where was Britain when the genocide in Rwanda happened, when Gukurahundi swept across Matabeleland and the Midlands? What is the West doing about the ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan? Nothing!
Democracy and human rights activists all over the world are welcome to partner with Zimbabweans in the continuing search for Robert Mugabe’s ouster. But they cannot take the lead or prescribe solutions. Zimbabweans own exclusive rights to employ even unconstitutional means to overthrow Robert Mugabe.
Obert Madondo
is a Zimbabwean political commentator based in Canada
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