Posted on 08/15/2007 5:46:23 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
South African President Thabo Mbeki’s attempt to blame Britain for Zimbabwe’s problems may convince fellow leaders at the Southern African Development Community’s summit in Lusaka. But it is unlikely to bring a peaceful resolution of the country’s crisis any closer - and is certain to deepen misgivings about perceived anti-Western tendencies in South Africa’s international outlook.
The SADC asked Mr Mbeki to mediate between Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party and the Opposition Movement for Democratic Change after a brutal crackdown on Government critics, including the beating of MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai, caused international repulsion earlier this year.
But regional analysts say that despite claims to the contrary, Mr Mbeki has made little substantive progress in bridging the gulf between the two sides. According to leaks to South African media, Mr Mbeki’s report backs Mr Mugabe’s claims that British-orchestrated sanctions are the principal cause of Zimbabwe’s woes, including hyperinflation and accelerating economic meltdown, and that the Government is effectively the target of a “regime change” plot hatched in London with U.S. backing.
“Worrisome factor”
Characterising the situation as a “bilateral dispute with Britain”, the Mbeki report states: “The most worrisome thing is that the U.K. continues to deny its role as the principal protagonist in the Zimbabwean issue ...”
The U.S. until now has accepted South Africa’s contention that “quiet diplomacy” is the way forward with Zimbabwe. Mr Mbeki’s failure to deliver is being set alongside a series of other foreign policy positions adopted by the African National Congress-led Government that run contrary to wider U.S. and Western interests.
According to The New Republic magazine’s James Kirchick, these include recent, friendly contacts between South Africa’s Intelligence Minister and Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader; South Africa’s public support for Iran’s nuclear programme; its defence of Sudan and Myanmar against proposed U.N. sanctions; and its siding with Russia and China on these and other issues.
Mr Mbeki and colleagues were the willing heirs to an “anti-imperialist intellectual tradition heroically opposed to the Western democracies”, Mr Kirchick said in the Los Angeles Times.
Even as long as the Boers and other whites have been in South Africa, they better be prepared to flee on short notice.
Africa will continue to fester and fail, as long as it has the two types of "leaders" discussed in this article.
Congressman Billybob
There’s only one possible explanation for Mbeki’s support of Mugabe...and it’s because Mbeki is watching and learning.*Britain* is to blame for Zimbabwe’s collapse? For six or seven years Mugabe has been expropriating fertile farmland from experienced farmers and giving it to his political cronies and the country’s implosion started about the same time....
Most people in Zimb would kill to be a British colony again.
Yes, well there are certain questions as to in whom that "heroism" actually resides. The principal beneficiaries of it appear to be the Western-trained perpetuators of the myth - the Amins, the Bokassas, the Mugabes - who tend to end their days feted by a breathless European elite and stone-deaf to the agony their misguided ideology-driven polices caused. The heroism on the part of the people appears to be less widely spread unless heroism consiste of oppression, starvation, torture, and execution. Thus the neo-Marxian "enlightenment."
One tends to be less patient with the Western enablers of the murderous gang - the academy, the international media, and a host of hopelessly overmatched "intellectuals" who prefer to cling desperately to a beautiful theory rather than to face the bloody and counterindicative results of its application. Colonialism - "imperialism" if you prefer - being the sole source and origin of repression in Africa and there being misery so obvious that even the savants at The New Republic cannot deny it, there must hence be a colonial origin, a conspiracy, a plot. Britain will serve because there simply isn't a lie big enough to ascribe it to the United States - yet. They're working on one.
And so we see the disaster of an "intellectual tradition" that has proven more deadly than anything in Africa short of the tsetse fly and the Anopheles mosquito. We see a Mbeki willing to perpetuate the lie because it brought him into power. We see countless enablers in the Western academy and media who are too intellectually dishonest to consider that the anti-Colonialist mythos may have been a cure worse than the disease, and that's saying a lot. It was not, after all, Britain who threw the white farmers off the land, it was the anti-Colonialists with their racism and their easy assurance that theory dictated that the farmers be easily replaceable. They were not. It was not Britain who sent roving gangs of thugs to terrorize the countryside, both black and white, that did not support the ruling party. It was not Britain who systematically ruined a working economy with idiotic socialist nostrums. It is not Britain who now starves Zimbabwe, it is Mugabe and his African and Western enablers.
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