Spiked Online
April 3, 2008
ZIMBABWE AND THE NEW COWARDLY COLONIALISM
Western intervention against Robert Mugabe’s ‘evil regime’ put Zimbabwe
into
an economic straitjacket and disempowered its people.
by Brendan O'Neill
‘We’ve beaten Mugabe’, said a frontpage headline in the London Evening
Standard yesterday. Only there were no quote marks around the words ‘We’ve
beaten Mugabe’, which made it difficult to tell if the paper was re****ting
the thoughts of Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC)
upon its electoral victory over Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF Party, or its own
back-slapping relish at the thought that its journalism may have played a
part in toppling Mugabe. Indeed, ‘We’ve beaten Mugabe’ could be the slogan
of political and media operators in Britain and elsewhere in the West, who
like to fantasise that Mugabe is ‘Africa’s Hitler’, that his Zimbabwe was
‘more evil than, for example, China and Saudi Arabia’, and that it is up
to
the West to ‘put pressure on Zimbabwe to change’ (1).
The media re****ts about Zimbabwe’s elections present them as a clash
between
the ‘evil’ Mugabe and the ‘heroic’ Tsvangirai, an electoral battle for
Zimbabwe’s soul. Mugabe is depicted as having brought Zimbabwe to its
knees,
causing widespread poverty and enforcing terror and repression, and
Tsvangirai is discussed as the harbinger of a dignified ‘revolution’
against
Mugabeism (2). This is a fantasy. It ignores the key role played by
Western
governments and financial institutions in using sanctions, tough diplomacy
and the proxy interventionists of the South Africa government and the
African Union to isolate and harry Zimbabwe over the past decade. Such
self-serving external meddling has contributed to Zimbabwe’s economic
crisis - and it has dangerously distorted the political dynamics inside
Zimbabwe and elsewhere in the south of Africa.
Full article at:
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/4942/
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