By Pupurai Murefu

THE United States Institute for Peace (USIP) is a highly conservative and warlike International non-governmental organisation (INGO) which in 2003 produced a report on Zimbabwe titled, ‘Zimbabwe Political Change’.
The report is an account of how NGOs in Zimbabwe were transformed to focus on regime change.
Part of the report reads, “In the late 1990s civic coalitions began to emerge, build consensus and gain collective strength around the need for non-violent political change …. This newer focus of NGOs on governance, advocacy and political change departed significantly from the earlier civic orientation.
“This change is at the heart of concerns by government and some social critics that NGOs are involved in politics, and are too closely aligned with, and compromised by, Western donor interests.”
The report was basically an account of USIP’s activities in Zimbabwe.
In this respect, the message was that USIP had reorganised NGOs to work in coalitions and to focus on removing President Mugabe from power.
USIP also appears to be taking credit for: (a) the formation of the NCA in 1997 (b) the emergence of opposition politics in the form of the MDC and (c) the no vote in the 2000 constitutional referendum which was, ‘the first major defeat for ZANU PF government’.
The report also exposes USIP’s deep involvement in the formation of Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition (CZC) in 2001 which at formation constituted 300 NGOs and 15 coalitions.
The formation of CZC was partly prompted by the need to have an overarching organisation that would control the behaviour of NGOs, including public pronouncements from that sector.
The need for a superior organisation to rein in NGOs became apparent when, in 1999, Nick Ndebele who was heading ZIMRIGHTS, wrote a letter to President Mugabe praising him for sending troops to the DRC and for taking land from the whiteman to give to landless black people.
This seriously embarrassed USIP and other regime changers.
Michael Barker describes USIP in uncomplimentary terms and quotes Richard Hatch and Sara Diamond (1990), in a book which describes USIP as a “stomping ground for professional war makers” with a Board of Directors of “who’s who of right wing ideologues from the academia and the Pentagon.”
Barker also describes USIP as the Republican counterpart of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
Chester Crocker, an acclaimed proponent of the regime change agenda in Zimbabwe, is a Board Member of USIP and was its chairman between 1992 and 2004.
Crocker is also a founder patron of the Zimbabwe Democracy Trust (ZDT) yet another of the most dangerous organisations through which very senior Western leaders have ganged up to destabilise Zimbabwe.
The list of ZDT patrons comprises some of the most senior Western politicians ever put together to work on a foreign project including former Tory Foreign Secretaries, Michael Rifkind, Douglas Hurd, Geoffrey Howe and Lord Renwick Clifton, a former British Ambassador to South Africa.
A good number of them also own mining and other business interests in Zimbabwe and South Africa.
As a regime change strategy, Crocker has advocated making the economy of Zimbabwe ‘scream’.
The logic for this is that when the economy ‘screams’, the nationals of the country targeted for regime change will seek to remove their leader from power in order to return the economy to productivity again.
It is a tactic that the Americans successfully used against Salvador Allende’s Chile and many other countries.
It is also the same strategy that failed in Fidel Castro’s Cuba.
Apart from being an extreme and warlike conservative, Chester Crocker is married to a Rhodesian woman whose kith and kin, obviously, lost farms to the Fast Track Land Reform Programme.
It is no wonder, therefore, that the senior conservative American has made the removal of ZANU PF from power his preoccupation.
USIP’s record in Southern Africa has always been tainted.
During apartheid, Chester Crocker and his colleagues at USIP viewed the apartheid government as an ally against communism.
In this respect, USIP strongly argued for a policy it called ‘Constructive Engagement’ which opposed isolation and punishment of the racist white government in South Africa.
In fact, USIP did not only support the apartheid government morally, its members also openly supported the racists on the diplomatic and intelligence fronts.
In the 80s and 90s, USIP also supported RENAMO and encouraged South Africa to continue giving military and financial support to the bandit movement in Mozambique.
USIP are masters of ‘double speak’.
This is a form of language that the West has perfected to hide their real intentions.
When they describe themselves as an ‘institute for peace’, for example, one gets the impression that they promote peace when in fact their actions tell a completely different story.
They are in reality, a highly organised group of white racists who have an incurable hatred for black people.
They view the world and all the natural resources in it as created for the white race.
What makes them particularly dangerous is the fact that they are highly educated.
As such, their operations are sophisticated and, therefore, difficult to read.
The so-called ‘Peace Studies’ fall in this category of programmes.
They are part of ‘low intensity democracy’.
Next week we want to show how the mandatory ‘Peace Studies programme’ at universities across the country are not about peace, but a form of war that thrives on the false notion that black people cannot understand ‘double speak’ and, as such, they will accept as legitimate, anything presented in the language of scholarship from the West.