Interview with Stephen Gowans on Zimbabwe

Well the delayed results from the presidential elections show Morgan Tsvangirai had won 47.9 per cent of the first-round vote, with Mr Mugabe on 43.2 per cent so it would appear that more people in Zimbabwe prefer the MDC to Zanu-PF as well.

A second Scramble for Africa is well underway. All the major economic powers in the world are only after the natural resources which Africa has in abundance, particularly uranium, and they care not one jot for human life. That includes the U.S/UK, EU, China, India, Japan, Russia, Australia, Canada and whoever else climbs on board. That is why we see 5 million people dead in the DRC and not much media coverage, lest it prove bad for business.

I believe that Southern Africa is being systematically destabilised, with Zimbabwe at the heart of the operation. The IMF brought the Zimbabwean economy to its knees, starting in 1991. See what happened when similar SAPS were forced on Rwanda, Yugoslavia....It takes about 10 years for the economic devastation to truly kick in.

Mr Mugabe played the West's game all along until the economy was foundering and he saw land redistribution as a way of holding on to power; THAT is when Western countries decided he was a tyrant. He was their preferred leader whilst the USSR supported the liberation struggle in South Africa and he murdered more than 20,000 Ndebele people, who were close to the ANC struggle in South Africa. Once the USSR disintegrated, Western capital orchestrated a regime change in South Africa that is creating an ever-widening gap between the rich elite and the majority who are being squeezed down into desperate poverty through privatisation, cutting of subsidies and other genocidal economic policies favoured by the U.S.- controlled IFIs.

The U.S. has military plans for Africa: AFRICOM. See:  http://www.cfr.org/publication/13255/

To hell with all tyrants. The people will govern eventually, hopefully before the earth itself dies.

No, what the recent elections prove is the power of economic terrorism that sanctions can engender, to get people to vote the way they are supposed to vote.

The people wold not vote to have their economy privatised, or their land stolen, unless they were compelled to do so. And just to remind people of the rel nature of the MDC:

'Arthur Mutambara, the leader of one faction of Zimbabwe's main opposition party, the MDC, and one of the principals in the Save Zimbabwe Campaign that's at the centre of a storm of controversy over the Mugabe government's crackdown on opposition, boasted a year ago that he was "going to remove Robert Mugabe, I promise you, with every tool at my disposal." (1)

Educated at Oxford, the former management consultant with McKinsey & Co. was asked in early 2006 whether "his plans might include a Ukrainian-style mass mobilization of opponents of Mugabe's regime." (2)

"We're going to use every tool we can get to dislodge this regime," he replied. "We're not going to rule out or in anything the sky's the limit." (3)

Last year Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of an opposing MDC faction, and eight of his colleagues, were thrown out of Zambia after attending a meeting arranged by the US ambassador to Zimbabwe, Christopher Dell, with representatives of Freedom House, a US ruling class organization that promotes regime change in countries that aren't sufficiently committed to free markets, free trade and free enterprise. (4)

Funded by the billionaire speculator George Soros, USAID, the US State Department and the US Congress's National Endowment for Democracy (whose mission has been summed up as doing overtly what the CIA used to do covertly), Freedom House champions the rights of journalists, union leaders and democracy activists to organize openly to bring down governments whose economic policies are against the profit-making interests of US bankers, investors and corporations.

Headed by Wall St. investment banker Peter Ackerman, who produced a 2002 documentary, Bringing Down a Dictator, a follow-up to A Force More Powerful, which celebrates the ouster of Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, Freedom House features a rogues' gallery of US ruling class activists on its board of directors: Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Otto Reich, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Steve Forbes, among others.

The campaign to replace Mugabe with the neo-liberal standard bearers of the MDC is rotten with connections to the overthrow of Milosevic. Dell, the US ambassador, prides himself on being one of the architects of Milosevic's ouster. (5) He held a senior diplomatic post in Kosovo when Milosevic was driven out of office in a US-UK engineered uprising.'
etc
 http://www.counterpunch.org/gowans03232007.html

At the heart of the problem is a global economic system that is corrupt and detrimental to life itself in all its forms. In countries where there are elections, leaders are elected but the heads of economic bodies such as the World Bank and IMF are not elected. The people controlling those IFIs have power and influence over all our lives but we know little about how they operate or who they are, though there is more information in the public domain now I think than previously. The US appoints heads of the World Bank to bolster their economy and maintain their power in the world, though their days are numbered on the economic front, which is why they are ensuring they have military superiority for the foreseeable future.

The problem is that those who hold enormous economic power are happy for us to struggle for or against regimes in specific countries and activists in other countries to support those struggles and then there is finally a change in regime and everyone feels slightly powerful in being instrumental in that and there is a momentary illusion of progress but until the economic system is fundamentally changed nothing will really improve.

Movements such as MDC and many other grassroots movements become compromised because they need money to operate and there are always benefactors ready to buy influence today as well as future favours and there are always leaders like Mugabe willing to sacrifice ordinary people to stay in power for personal reasons as well as an ideal or a principle. When will a movement emerge that puts human life, health, wellbeing and happiness before ego or ideology and on an individual basis as well as collectively? I think all the national struggles are pointless. We can argue for and against personalities and parties but until people take power collectively on a global basis to bring about economic change we are just running on the spot.

It would be better for Mugabe to go and allow the MDC to take power if they won the election but no one need rejoice because we know that the choice is really between 2 superpowers - China supporting Mugabe or the US supporting the MDC, and neither China nor the U.S. have respect for ordinary people. Africa is being fought over by the 2 current superpowers and I think our priority has to be to ensure that there is as little loss of life as possible because this is going to be like the Cold War, which was anything but COLD in Africa, particularly the south. At the heart of any struggle must be the struggle to protect life, individually as well as collectively.

'Movements such as MDC and many other grassroots movements become compromised because they need money to operate and there are always benefactors ready to buy influence today as well as future favours and there are always leaders like Mugabe willing to sacrifice ordinary people to stay in power for personal reasons as well as an ideal or a principle. When will a movement emerge that puts human life, health, wellbeing and happiness before ego or ideology and on an individual basis as well as collectively? I think all the national struggles are pointless. We can argue for and against personalities and parties but until people take power collectively on a global basis to bring about economic change we are just running on the spot.

It would be better for Mugabe to go and allow the MDC'
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MDC is not a grassroots movement. Its a US/UK funded 5th column, designed to return power to the neololonials.

You need to stop lying.Mugabe is not sacrificing people. Thats what the MDC does. The MDC is behind the economic terrorism : it was there idea.

Its better if Mugabe stays,....if he goes, you can expect to see the economy privatised and Zimbabwe will for blacks be more like SA.

The grassroots social movements and unions in South Africa are very active in organising across borders in Southern Africa and that is the way forward for the region; not to retreat into xenophobia and nationalism but to open out to all people who are fighting for a just and equal life. Someone I know has recently returned from rural Zimbabwe and said people were like walking skeletons. There is mass starvation. Someone I know who was in Matabeleland in the early 80s saw with their own eyes the bullet-sprayed homes of Ndebele people. Doctors in Johanesburg have had to sew too many people back together who have been tortured by Zanu-PF troops in Zimbabwe for it all to be a BBC conspiracy. And too right all the leaders in Southern Africa are shitting themselves because one way or another they have all presided over increasing mass poverty and seem only too willing in their policies to let as many people die from hunger and illness so there are fewer left to tell the story. The time of chauvanistic, patrician or patriarchal rule is OVER OVER OVER as is colonialism in all forms - whether neo or ancient, from East or West.