By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

APART from the ongoing series on ‘Security Sector Reform and the Regime Change Agenda in Zimbabwe’, The Patriot has also published the following features to-date: ‘ICC war against Africa’, June 26 2015; ‘Peace Studies at university: A horrible version of the ICC’, July 3 2015; Africa University Peace graduates: Assets or liabilities?’ July 10 2015; ‘Unmasking Pamela Machakanja’, July 24 2015; and ‘Why is Peace Studies compulsory at NUST?’, August 7 2015.
If one researches current discussions on Peace and Conflict Resolution Studies or Peace, Governance and Human Rights Studies in Western universities, it is possible to be struck and even confused by the fact that many white conservative institutions and individuals in those countries also oppose and denounce Western versions of these programmes as anti-Western, unpatriotic and pandering to the interests of anti-Western revolutionaries in the South and the East at the expense of Western influence.
The fact that programmes similar to the ones criticised by The Patriot here for seeking to reverse the gains of the Second Chimurenga; for supporting illegal regime change; and for opposing indigenisation and African land reclamation — are also being attacked by white conservatives in the West has been used by the promoters of these programmes here to argue that these academic programmes are really independent, objective, legitimate, suitable for our universities and relevant to the needs of the people.
This confusion arises from the fact that Peace and Conflict Resolution, Peace, Governance and Human Rights programmes in the South and the East historically represent white liberal interventionism in contrast to white conservative interventionism.
Peace and Conflict Resolution studies in the South play the role once filled by white liberal projects during the liberation struggle whose purpose was to stop nationalist movements from becoming revolutionary movements.
That is why, even today, Iran’s agreement to foreswear a nuclear arms programme in exchange for the lifting of sanctions is strangely and vociferously debated between the Obama administration and its mainly Republican opponents.
The white right-wing thinks a war to destroy Iran is possible.
Therefore any compromise is bad for the empire in the long term.
The liberals in turn succeeded in selling an agreement which is unfair to Iran by pointing to the more extreme options advocated by the conservatives.
There has always been fierce competition and debate between white conservative forces and white liberal ones as to which strategies can secure and prolong capitalist-imperialist interests best.
The white liberal approach usually succeeds because it is bought by most of the Western-educated elites in the targeted countries or movements.
In this respect, The Patriot was correct to classify the ‘Peace and Security’ or ‘Peace and Conflict Resolution Programmes’ sponsored by Western states and corporate interests here as representing a Western ‘soft-power’ approach to regime change.
Altogether, these programmes benefit imperialism in the 21st century in the following ways:
l Creating an intellectual and ideological climate in Africa which is receptive, at an elite level, to Western liberal intervention through sponsorship and patronage.
l That is why there is a nexus linking African academics, local Western-sponsored non-governmental organisations (NGOs), foreign NGOs, the United Nations (UN) system and Western agencies receiving funds from Western governments.
l Making the UN system an accomplice in Western intervention through Peace and Conflict Resolution efforts which do not deal with the fundamental and perennial causes or causers of aggression, war and illegal regime change. The UN has since the 1990s been turned into a housemaid and janitor trying to clean up after the disasters inflicted on Third World peoples by the Pentagon, NATO and Western capital.
l Once the UN accepts funds and projects in Peace and Conflict Resolution without making the aggressors accept responsibility for starting the wars in the first place, the programmes succeed in deflecting calls for UN reform. After all, the UN is seen by elites from the universities in the South and the East to be directly involved in Peace and Conflict Resolution efforts both at the war front and through university programmes.
Once the UN becomes a conduit for donor funds from Western powers, it ceases to be treated as a candidate for radical reform.
Focus on humanitarian relief, focus on Peace and Conflict Resolution programmes, becomes a permanent form of tinkering with symptoms of otherwise fundamental problems caused by the very same Western powers sponsoring the programmes.
The cumulative effects of structural adjustment programmes (SAPS), effects of the war on terror, effects of the US-UK invasion of Iraq, the US-NATO bombing of Libya, the Western sponsorship of insurgencies against Syria and Yemen are simply obscured as the UN, Western governments and the media focus on giving token relief to so-called boat people in the Mediterranean Sea and migrants forcing their way into Europe.
Refugees from US and NATO wars are simply re-labelled as migrants seeking a better life in Europe.
In reality they are victims of Western-instigated genocide and terror.
For each major Western war against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, Peace and Conflict Resolution activists have been able to pick and co-opt a handful of women to use as specimen demonstrating the worst kinds of gender violence or sexual violence by backward religious and indigenous ‘traditions’.
The chosen women are ferried to London, Paris, New York and Washington and taken on public speaking itineraries in the very same countries who sponsored or caused the wars in which the sexual crimes were committed. This is tinkering at its worst.
Instead of studying and stopping militarism and its wars of imperialist aggression, instead of fighting what Naomi Klein called ‘Disaster Capitalism’, our universities are paid to try to clean up after the imperialist aggression — by focusing on post-war conflict resolution, post-war reconciliation or post-war healing without naming the primary instigators of the conflict.
There was neither Al Quaeda nor ISL in Iraq or Syria before the West invaded Iraq or before the West sponsored illegal regime change in Syria. Now Al Quada, ISL and worse terrorists proliferate everywhere in North Africa and the Middle-East, riding on the back of Western invasion forces.
Because of the elite discourse cultivated through Peace and Conflict Resolution courses, the same Western powers, NGOs and media who championed those acts of aggression will draw the world’s attention mainly to a small proportion of the victims going to Europe as examples of how their Peace and Conflict Resolution concepts operate in practice.
The permanent damage inflicted on Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria will be left out of the picture.
The victims who stay put in those war-damaged countries will not be highlighted except as recipients of expert intervention by graduates from the academic programmes.
A clear example of the Western imperialist nexus involving governments, the UN system, NGOs and co-opted universities was the spectacle of US President Barack Obama as guest of honour at the UN Global Entrepreneurship summit in Nairobi, Kenya, in June 2015.
Obama lectured African leaders and African businessmen on how to build ‘prosperous’ societies and prosperous businesses right there in Kenya which is daily surrounded by the barbarous legacy of US-UK and NATO aggression in Libya, Iraq, Yemen and to some extent Somalia.
How could Obama represent prosperity and entrepreneurship in Nairobi given the glaring consequences of his administration’s recent decisions in Libya which is now under the governance of seven terror factions plus ISL? What sort of global entrepreneurship or Peace and Conflict Resolution do US polices represent in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen and Afghanistan?
What sort of peace do US sanctions against Zimbabwe’s land revolution represent?
The upheavals which we see today in North Africa, Nigeria, Mali, Somalia, Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, Syria and Lebanon are the cumulative results of SAP policies, of the so-called ‘War or Terror’, and of the selective and hypocritical application of the notion of the ‘Right to Protect unarmed demonstrators’ against their governments, when in fact the so-called unarmed demonstrators are being armed by the very same invaders claiming the right to protect civilians!