African leaders tell U.S. & Britain
'End sanctions on Zimbabwe!'
By Heather Cottin
The leaders of the 14 countries of the
Southern African Development Community, meeting in Dar es
Salaam, Tanzania, have condemned sanctions against Zimbabwe.
President Benjamin Mkapa of Tanzania, current chair of the
SADC, said, "Those sanctions should now be lifted."
In 2000, just when southern Africa was suffering from a
serious drought, the U.S. and the European Union instituted
economic sanctions on Zimbabwe. It was already reeling from the
AIDS crisis, which affects 25 percent of its population.
Sanctions are war without guns and bloodshed that targets
"children, the elderly and the chronically ill," wrote former
U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark. He was commenting on
sanctions on Iraq, but the same is true in Africa.
In the mid-1990s, former members of the revolutionary armies
that had won Zimbabwe's independence in 1979 spearheaded a
resistance movement to win back the land, which remained
largely in the hands of the white ruling class and
multinational corporations.
The British-brokered Lancaster House Accords ending the
guerrilla war had prevented the African people from
expropriating white-owned land for 10 years after independence,
keeping the white farmers rich and the Black Zimbabweans
poor.
Some 4,500 whites owned 95 percent of Zimbabwe's most
fertile soil while millions of African farmers were landless.
When President Robert Mugabe supported the redistribution of
land, the imperialist countries launched a destabilization
campaign as vicious as those which have targeted Yugoslavia,
Iraq and Cuba.
One British conservative characterized the Mugabe government
as a "racist and fascistic regime." Britain is the former
colonial power in Zimbabwe, which used to be called Rhodesia
after the British magnate Cecil Rhodes.
President Mugabe's support of the landless veterans' demand
for land provoked the imperialist countries, especially the
U.S. and Britain, to launch a propaganda campaign against him
at the same time that they instituted the killer sanctions.
Britain and the U.S. then began pressuring the leaders of
Mozambique, Namibia and South Africa "to prevail on Mr. Mugabe
to ... end the wave of farm invasions and violence." (The Times
of London, April 22, 2000) After a recent meeting with George
W. Bush, South African President Thabo Mbeki said he and the
U.S. president were "of one mind about the urgent need to
address the political and economic challenges of Zimba bwe." In
a July 10 article in the British newspaper The Guardian, this
was slanted as "Bush backs Mbeki on Zimbabwe."
But Mbeki did not come out against the land redistribution
program in Zimba bwe. The Black people in southern Africa
strongly oppose the still-existing and iniquitous property
relations that continue to impov erish them while enriching
white farmers and transnational agribusinesses.
They also know that the imperialists are always defaming
their leaders. In fact, for decades, even after he had received
the Nobel Peace Prize for his struggle against apartheid,
Nelson Mandela was on a U.S. government list of international
"terrorists."The U.S. government only recently agreed to remove
the 85-year-old Mandela and two other former leaders of the
African National Congress from the list. (Charlene Smith, "The
Independent Online," Aug. 10)
Mugabe received a "rapturous welcome" from the populace at
the SADC summit in Dar es Salaam, according to BBC News, and
enthusiastic support from South African President Mbeki. This
shook up the imperialists.
In a defiant speech, which was the conference highlight,
Tanzanian President Mkapa upheld the inalienable right of the
Zimbabwean people to recover their land. He said, "I find it
insulting that there are powers and people who believe food
shortages in the region can only be averted when Africans
become servants on white people's-owned land, rather than when
they work on their own land."
Reprinted from the Sept. 11, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
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