U.S. and Britain are Fueling Violence in Zimbabwe

"In the 2000 parliamentary elections MDC won 57 seats compared to Zanu PF's 62. In the recent 2005 elections the MDC has dropped to 41 and Zanu PF increased to 78." (Zimbabwe 2005 Parliamentary Elections).

Zimbabwe's leading opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), is an opportunistic alliance of white farmers, trade unionists and urban commercial interests. Its track record reveals that it is more concerned with having good relations with the international community than with presenting the Zimbabwean electorate with a convincing alternative.

"All in all there were only about 30 police and there were more than 1,000 - we were too many for them. They could not control what was happening."

"We picked up their [police] discarded sticks and used them to beat their left-behind colleagues"

"Cde Mohadi said last weekend's planned gathering was not a prayer meeting, as the opposition had claimed under the so-called Save Zimbabwe Campaign coordinated by the MDC's purported Democratic Resistance Committees (DRC) and other anti-Government civic organisations.

'It was not a prayer meeting because there are flyers which said it was an MDC defiance campaign and they were coercing people to attend the rally,' said Cde Mohadi.

"As police, we could not just stand by and see the country go on fire. So we deployed and managed to quell the disturbances. The leaders of the opposition (Morgan) Tsvangirai and (Arthur) Mutambara were actually commanding (hooligans) using children as shields.

"The flyers read: 'Save Zimbabwe Rally. MDC Defiance Campaign. MDC joins other democratic forces under the auspices of the Save Zimbabwe Campaign for the rally to be held on 11 March 2007 at Zimbabwe Grounds in Highfield, starting at 10am. 'It is defiance or death'.'

"Spokesperson of the Save Zimbabwe Campaign, Jacob Mafume, told reporters at a press conference yesterday that they would continue to defy the law.

'We are not going to stop,' he said."

"Despite their pious claims, Britain and the others are not angry because Mugabe is a corrupt dictator. They sponsor corrupt dictators when it suits them. They are not angry because ordinary Zimbabweans are suffering under Mugabe. They don't care about ordinary Zimbabweans. They were quite happy to herd them into reserves when it suited them.

No, what they care about is the expropriation of white farmers. They express indignation at Mugabe's cronies acquiring the land. That is a bad thing, of course. I myself come from an area where government or government-affiliated bigwigs are buying up all the prime sea-front locations because they can afford them. But in the case of Zimbabwe only 0.3% of people settled on land have acquired it through undue influence or corruption. So 99.7% of Zimbabweans got their land fair and square."

"ZANU-PF was a leading force in the armed struggle of the Black majority to wrest political control from the White minority Rhodesian settler regime. While the Black majority achieved a kind of formal political independence, de facto independence has always been limited by the reality that the White minority remains economically dominant. The land seizures were a way of carrying forward the revolution to its logical conclusion in the absence of Harare having the wherewithal to buy out the White settlers and absentee British landowners. While the confiscation of land was, on the one hand, a denial of the previous owners' rights to make a profit, it was, on the other, a reclamation of a right to land that had been stolen by colonial plunder -- a war of right against right (with the soft Left in the West, sadly, though predictably, aligning itself in the war with the landowners.) Zimbabwe is not, however, a one-party state, and nor is it a country in which those with money power are prohibited from buying mass media or funding opposition political parties to oppose the government. For this, Zimbabwe too, along with Venezuela, can be criticized for failing to be repressive enough, and yet it is revolutionary and national liberation movements that fail to repress their enemies with sufficient zeal and that allow ample opportunity for their enemies to marshal a counter-strike, that are often the most vigorously reviled by the soft Left (and perhaps because part of the counterstrike is PR campaigns mounted in the West to discredit the regime in question - campaigns the soft Left has always shown a particular vulnerability to.) Whatever repressive measures ZANU-PF takes toward its opposition must be understood in the context of the history of the struggle for national liberation and of the alliance of the main opposition party, the MDC, with Britain and the White settlers."

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