Appreciating the battle we face

20 Jul, 2014 - 06:07 0 Views

The Sunday Mail

The May/June 1999 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine carried a pertinent article titled “Sanctions of Mass Destruction” authored by John Mueller and Karl Mueller.
Around this time, Western Europe and America had realised that in President Mugabe they had got more than they had bargained for.
His intervention — as Commander-in-Chief of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces — in the DRC about a year earlier made it clear he was prepared to confront the West, even militarily.

Further, land hunger was about to explode spectacularly, with Government highly unimpressed by Claire Short’s totally arrogant letter renouncing tenure reforms some three years prior and no headway being made in political negotiations since then.

The IMF was around that time already preparing to jettison Zimbabwe. The stage was well and truly set for the frosty relations and economic warfare that we have lived with from the turn of the millennium.

The EU was to — in contravention of the Cotonou Partnership Agreement — impose sanctions on Zimbabwe in early 2002 in the futile hope of influencing that year’s Presidential elections against President Mugabe.

The US was to follow suit with its own highly destructive embargo a year later. In 1999, Mueller and Mueller were to pen their piece on “Sanctions of Mass Destruction”.

This was in reference not to Zimbabwe but to Iraq. But the lessons contained therein are crucial for all oppressed peoples wherever they are found on this planet.

Mueller and Mueller wrote: “No one knows with any precision how many Iraqi civilians have died as a result, but various agencies of the United Nations, which oversees the sanctions, have estimated that they have contributed to hundreds of thousands of deaths.

“By 1998 Iraqi infant mortality had reportedly risen from the pre-Gulf War rate of 3,7 percent to 12 percent. Inadequate food and medical supplies, as well as breakdowns in sewage and sanitation systems and in the electrical power systems needed to run them, reportedly cause an increase of 40 000 deaths annually of children under the age of five and of 50 000 deaths annually of older Iraqis.”

The authors said America maintained the “targeted” sanctions despite the widespread suffering they were causing because their ultimate objective was regime change.

In an interview with CBS News around that same time, then US secretary of state Madeleine Albright was asked if the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children were worth regime change.

She replied: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.”
More people died in Iraq — mostly children — as a result of US sanctions than those killed by all weapons of mass destruction, including the two atomic bombs Washington dropped on Japan, during World War II and in wars after that. Now we learn that the US is tightening sanctions on Zimbabwe, regardless of what Ambassador Bruce Wharton may say to the contrary.

These sanctions will have a direct impact on a health sector already hit hard by sanctions and other negatives, some of them admittedly and ashamedly of internal origin. Having seen what happened in Iraq with the deaths of all those hundreds and thousands of innocents, and the subsequent invasion of that greatly weakened country, do Zimbabweans fully appreciate the import of what the US is doing here?

Those who say the sanctions are there to “help them get rid of Mugabe” must recall the words of Madeleine Albright. Washington does not impose sanctions for our good, it is done to pursue their own foreign policy objectives and the price of the deaths of non-Americans is a small one to pay in their reckoning.

And those who swallow the line that America is our friend because it still extends “aid” should start realising that without sanctions and related interference we should be heading towards self-sufficiency instead of ingratiatingly accepting handouts from those who would rather see us dead.

There is much work that needs to be done to circumvent and bust sanctions, but it all starts with a full appreciation of the battle that is on our hands.

 

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