By Reason Wafawarova

AFTER the late President Samuel Doe of Liberia “brazenly stole” the 1985 election, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who is now the president of that country; had this to say: “At the time, an American official told me bluntly, ‘Our strategic interests are more important than democracy’.”

This flagitious Washington tradition is what seems to elude the overly zealous civic activists that herald the White House as the headquarters of democracy.

A lot of the youths in Africa today are addicted to this hoopla about the glorious exultations offered at the altar of American democracy — so crazed about this fantastic system that produced the vaingloriously idolised Barrack Obama, a man whose half black component has been elevated to double blackness and to the super testimony of African achievement.

While criticising Barrack Obama is to some like shooting an angel in the heart, the reality of the matter is that Barrack Obama is no result of democracy, but a creation of American strategic interests — an employee of George Soros and others from his camp of corporate owners.

The United States has no tradition of being motivated by democratic values and we will have to look at history in brief to understand this point better.

The scene in Africa in the seventies and the eighties was quite awful.The catastrophe included apartheid South Africa’s military aggression in Southern Africa.

A study by the UN Economic Commission for Africa estimated that “South Africa’s military aggression and destabilisation of its neighbours cost the region US$10 billion in 1988 and over US$60 billion and 1,5 million lives in the first nine years of this decade”.

The United States undertook “quiet diplomacy” — something they furiously accuse independent South Africa of doing in Pretoria’s perceived failure to carry out Washington’s bidding on Zanu-PF and Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.

The US never undertook quiet diplomacy when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, not when Morris Bishop declared people-centred policies in Grenada.

For apartheid South Africa, the US recognised the concerns of a primitively racist regime and the domestic and foreign business interests it fostered.

The US Congress imposed sanctions on South Africa in 1986 over Ronald Reagan’s veto, but the impact of those sanctions was sharply limited.

As noted by Noam Chomsky in the book “Deterring Democracy”; the American Committee on Africa reported that only 25 percent of US-South Africa trade was affected, and that iron, steel, and (until late 1989) half finished uranium continued to be imported from South Africa.

When one compares these sanctions to the mass killing embargo placed on Nicaragua by Ronald Reagan on May 1, 1985, or to the 50-year-old deadly sanctions regime on Cuba, or more recently to the ruinous and murderous illegal sanctions imposed by the EU, the US and other Western allies on Zimbabwe — the contrast shouts a lot of obscenities.

After the sanctions were put in place US exports to South Africa increased from US$1,28 billion in 1987 to US$1,71 billion in 1989, according to the US Commerce Department.

This was considered a vast improvement compared to the US reaction to the UN-imposed sanctions on Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), a reaction which impelled the US Congress to pass the Byrd Amendment authorising the importation of Rhodesian chrome from 1971 to 1977.

Stephen Shalom observed: “Many nations had covertly been violating the sanctions, but the US became one of three UN members — the others were (fascist) Portugal and South Africa — to officially violate the (Rhodesia) sanctions.”

Despite the rants and rhetoric from surviving Rhodesians, Ian Smith was no economic genius with the ability to bust sanctions and “grow the economy regardless”. Smith was merely a beneficiary of the acts of a bunch of racist law- breakers who were blatantly violating international law to prop up one of their own.

Even Britain had a soft spot for Smith.They too continued to import Rhodesia’s chrome.

Under the current illegally-imposed sanctions regime on Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe has no covert backers helping him to keep his head above the waters, and this is why the last decade has been phenomenally ruinous for the Zimbabwean economy in general and for the agricultural sector in particular. The only realistic way to fight back is for Zanu-PF and Mugabe to hit directly at specific economic interests of Western countries in Zimbabwe, and this writer can safely predict that 2011 will bring in a lot of such counter-attacks.

The sole reason the illegal sanctions are in place is to stall the popular land reclamation programme that ousted white commercial farmers who used to occupy 75 percent of the arable land in Zimbabwe prior to 2000.
Britain and the US still dream of a day when this process will be reversed so that the “victims of Mugabe’s land grab” can return to “their” stolen land. The two countries seem to seriously believe that a Morgan Tsvangirai government can be made to carry out this reversal, and white advisors from within the MDC-T freely confuse their illusion for advice — and it would appear Washington is taking it all very seriously, especially when Roy Bennett speaks. Maybe another crude shocker on the West’s global economic hegemony will sober some of the imperialistic dreamers.

The truth of the matter is that reversal of the land reclamation exercise is simply unenforceable — absolutely unachievable from however many angles one may want to try. Not even the determinations and verdicts reached by foreign courts over land reclaimed from ex-colonialists will make any difference. Not a single white farmer will ever be allowed to track back to colonial occupation of stolen land.

In fact, so impossible is this task that even President Robert Mugabe himself cannot enforce such a reversal —there is just no way anymore. The land is with the people and no politicking can take it back to captivity. Zimbabwe’s arable land is now a liberated zone.

During the Cold War, the disasters of Africa were commonly attributed to “socialism”, a term then used freely to apply to anything Washington did not like.

But there was an exception, described well by Noam Chomsky when he quoted Howard Witt of the conservative Chicago Tribune saying, “an island of freewheeling capitalism in a sea of one-party socialist states”.

He was referring to Liberia, which like the Philippines, could attribute its happy state to American leadership. Witt said Liberia was “America’s only toehold on the African continent” — in this case for a century and a half.

Liberia today takes special significance in the US’ self-anointed mission to democratise Africa, and similar significance was assumed by Liberia during the Cold War era, particularly after President Samuel Doe, “a brutish, nearly illiterate army sergeant . . . seized power in 1980 after disembowelling the previous president in bed”, as described by Witt.

Doe proceeded to elevate his fellow tribesmen, who made up only 4 percent of the population, and he went on to persecute and savagely oppress the rest of the population. The US looked the other way with a grin and a wink.

Clearly, the Reagan Administration was more than impressed — and it happily determined to turn Liberia, like Jamaica, into a showcase of capitalism and democracy.

In the first six years of Doe’s regime, Washington poured massive military and economic aid into “the backward country”, arrogantly ignoring mounting evidence that Doe and his ministers were stealing much of the money.

Then was the election that was stolen by Samuel Doe in 1985 — all with Washington’s approval. This was a replica of the Noriega story where the US had created and endorsed a similar election in Panama a year earlier.

It is this election that was protested by the then dissident, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, as earlier quoted in the opening remarks of this piece.

Witt noted that the results of US aid were quite evident. He wrote: “The soldiers of President Samuel Doe’s army wear uniforms of American GIs as they go about their business murdering Liberian civilians on the streets of the capital, Monrovia.”

The city was named after President James Monroe of the United States and Witt added, “the bodies of many of the civilian victims are dumped in the morgue at the American-built John F. Kennedy Hospital”, where “combat-hardened doctors” said “they had never witnessed such brutality”.

Monrovia became a death trap and those who were not struck by starvation, cholera or typhoid tried to escape the army or the rebel forces under Charles Taylor, a former Doe aide — or later, those under the command of a breakaway unit led by Prince Johnson.

The results of US aid became even more apparent when reporters entered Monrovia with the African peacekeeping forces after Doe was tortured and murdered by Johnson’s rebel soldiers.

What they discovered was “a bloody legacy” of “10 years in power” by the US favourite African leader then.
UPI reporter Mark Huband wrote about “piles of bleached bones and skulls, many smashed, half-clothed, decomposed heaps of flesh . . . littered with millions of maggots, contorted bodies . . . huddled beneath church pews” and “piled up in a dark corner beside the altar, bodies rotting into their mattresses”.

He also wrote about “a large meeting hall for women and children (where) clothes clung to the skeletons of female and underaged victims”.

Of course, it is not everyone who suffered in this US-created “island of freewheeling capitalism”.

The oligarchy of freed American slaves and their descendants oppressed and exploited the indigenous population for a century and a half, much the same way Israelis persecute and torment the people of Palestine each passing day.

The irony of victims of oppression and brutality turning out to be absolute monsters themselves is a tragedy that has never been explained.

Of course, the US will always look the other way. So Doe did quite well for himself until his turn to be discarded came.

Chomsky then noted that US corporations Firestone and B. F. Goodrich merely benefited without facing any unpleasant fate, proving that freewheeling capitalism does have its own virtues.

To cap it all, the US built a massive Voice of America transmitter in Liberia, like the one they recently built in Botswana, perhaps to respectively broadcast the good news of Doe’s wondrous achievements, and for Botswana to beam across the Zimbabwean border rigorous lectures on American democracy and freedoms.

This short history of Africa provides for Zimbabweans very incisive lessons, not least the idea that any sane citizen must not have anything to do with such a patronising monster feeding on the blood of innocent nationals from other countries. MDC-T must be disowned by every right-thinking citizen for fronting the will of Westerners in Zimbabwe.

The choice is a deadly one as Zimbabweans have seen over the last 10 years of mass killing illegal sanctions.
Zimbabwe should have absolutely nothing to do with this vampire democracy spread by the US in places like Iraq and Afghanistan — a democracy built on the shedding of innocent civilian blood.

Zimbabwe is not ready for a democracy founded on the deaths of so many of its people buried today as victims of the ruinous Western sanctions, including those who faced death in hospitals hit hard by the sanctions regime in the last 10 years.

Zimbabweans are not about to reward those who worked hand in glove with the US in suffering our people to the graves.

This is why MDC-T is a concern to many Zimbabweans. It is a party following Doe’s lead in marching according to Washington’s instructions.

Of course, the US strategic interests in the mineral wealth of Zimbabwe are way more important than matters of democracy.

The rhetoric about MDC-T bringing “change” to Zimbabwe is infuriating as it is unconvincing.
But the West’s strategic interests will have to suffer what Zimbabwe suffered through illegal sanctions in the last 10 years and 2011 is the year.

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

Article in January 2011