Aug18 Written by:Web Admin
8/18/2008 4:58 AM
Africa still among 'Cold War' catches
August 18, 2008
By Chenjerai Chitsaru
Africa Path, Aug 15, 2008 -- IT IS not entirely inconceivable that, in African capitals from Pretoria to Tunis, diplomats have been consulting feverishly on what position to take on the ongoing bloody David-and-Goliath conflict between Georgia and Russia.
Since the former is backed by the West, there could be an unmistakeable Cold War element in whatever decision the countries take.
If there was a United Nations Security Council vote on who to condemn for the as-yet-undeclared war, you can guess which side South Africa and Tunisia would take.
You can also guess which side Zimbabwe would support. In the Security Council vote on sanctions on Robert Mugabe’s regime, over the murder of scores of unarmed opposition supporters since 29 March, Russia and China scuttled any affirmative action by the 15 members.
So, Ambassador Chidyausiku might find himself scratching the Russian bear’s back, just as it scratched his country’s pangolin over the sanctions.
You can imagine the foreign minister, Simbarashe Mumbengegwi, telling a press conference in Harare, in outraged, ringing tones: “The republic of Georgia, being a puppet of the West, provoked the peace-loving republic of Russia and must thus be condemned in the strongest language.”
The cold war ended more than 20 years ago, but is about to be revived, with all its needless carnage of human life because - to take a cynical view - countries want to test the efficacy of their new weapons of mass destruction, or the preparedness of their new lean, mean fighting machines for a full-scale war against…somebody. .
Russia is so big – more than 140 million people, compared with little Georgia’s under five million - to say the latter could be swatted like a fly would not be an insult to the Georgians.
One reason Moscow decided on the attack could be related to Georgia’s intention to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and the European Union.
It is, probably legitimate for Russia to have retaliated for Georgia’s attack on secessionist South Ossetia on its border with the small former Soviet republic. Yet there must be a good reason for the failure of negotiations, before guns were fired.
When you consider that Vladimir Putin himself, the militant, war-mongering former KGB boss now the prime minister of Russia, decided to personally check on the military progress, you might not avoid linking this to his own apparent intention to frighten the West into letting Russia deal with the former Soviet republics as it wishes.
There are some analysts, in fact, who believe the pro-Mugabe vote at the UN was probably more anti-West than anti-MDC, although there are others who maintain there is little difference between the two.
This puts the new phase of the cold war into better perspective. What both China and Russia seem to be aiming for is for the West to allow them unbridled domination of certain countries, in exchange for their
own “neutrality” or ”hands-off” policy in areas “controlled” or “owned” by the West.
The strategies on either side are not as rigid or as predictable as they were before the end of communism, but the lust for world domination by either side remains as robust as it ever was.
In going to the Beijing Olympic Games, but being blunt in his criticism of China’s human rights record, President George W. Bush seemed to display a pragmatic approach designed to appeal to the Chinese leadership. Bush, the lame-duck Republican president, knows you can’t risk trade opportunities over nebulous short-term political benefits..
Still, this does not detract from Beijing’s anti-democratic attack on the media in general, with so many restrictions on their coverage and movements during the Olympic Games in Beijing.
The murder of an American by a Chinese who later committed suicide might, by now, have been explained away as the insane act of one mentally disturbed person, but there are those who are bound to wonder...
What Africa’s major concern ought to be is its continuing victimisation as a “prize catch” in this new phase of the cold war, Sudan, for instance, has definitely benefited from the patronage of China which has huge oil interests in that vast country.
But the African Union’s efforts to end the killing of innocents in the Darfur region have been frustrated by the government of the dictator Omar Al Bashir.
If China took a neutral stance in that conflict, there could be a dramatic decrease in the killings.
That, of course, might parallel a guarantee of non-Chinese and non-Russian opposition to a fresh UN Security Council resolution on sanctions against the Mugabe regime.
The old cold war stakes were mostly political. Apartheid South Africa and Mobutu Sese Seko’s dictatorship in Zaire, for instance, were backed by the West for the same reason – they were perceived as anti-communist bastions, although both were hardly squeamish about killing their own citizens for vocal opposition to the regimes, most of it untainted by ideological preference...
Russia has so much going for it – vast natural resources, including oil and gas. A recent report suggested the country has so much idle but fertile land it has allowed British farmers to come in and exploit this precious resource – on a commercial basis.
It could yet be the world’s ultimate breadbasket.
But there was never any unanimity among the Soviet people that the world’s first one-party dictatorship should be dismantled. There are still some who feel it should be revived, although how to subdue the former republics is an imponderable...
Both China and Russia have made spectacular economic strides since abandoning their strict dogma of the people’s ownership of the means of production.
Russia has certainly shed many of the traces of the Marxism-Leninism that dominated the economy until Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin came on the scene. But China’s displaying of portraits of Mao Zedong during the Beijing Olympics must have been the cause for some disquiet among those who thought the republic had turned over a new leaf.
This is the China which sends billions of dollars worth of arms to an African country facing its worst economic crisis since independence. Moreover, the country is not facing a military challenge from any quarter...
Its only formidable opposition is from an indigenous civilian political party of former trade unionists, intellectuals and student leaders. The party has galvanised ordinary people against the Chinese-backed group of geriatric rulers who have to take massive doses of performance-enhancing drugs before they even attempt to walk the few metres to their official cars.
Both the Chinese and the Russians can only back the Mugabe regime for economic and not political reasons. Their desire is to replace Zimbabwe’s traditional trade and economic partners, most of them in the West.
What that must entail is a surrender to the ideological dogma that both countries were believed to have abandoned entirely after their economic about-face which has now transformed them into economic giants...
But their readiness to resort to violence must disturb all in Zanu PF who believe the economic benefits of this alliance is worth the risk of surrendering some of their sovereignty to foreigners.
The Chinese have steadily raised their economic profile in Zimbabwe. In a number of instances, they have treated the workers as if they were no more than chattel or serfs.
In Zambia, there were fights between Chinese and Zambians at workplaces in one case, with serious casualties. In South Africa, where the Chinese have made similar economic inroads, reports suggest all has not been smooth sailing. Their methods continue to be crude and uncaring, the prime motivation being profit, at whatever cost.
The Russians are not entirely different, except perhaps in that they are handicapped by a racism that has been detected by many Africans visiting and working with Russians in their own country.
The Westerners remain the hated former colonisers. In every country which won independence from them, a struggle had to be waged, which ended in victory for the indigenous people.
Another round of liberation wars against the Chinese and the Russians may not necessarily end that way. The cold war was vicious; Africa does not deserve that kind of blood-letting now, 50 years after the dawn of independence.
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