THERE is a striking contrast between The Patriot’s visit to Protected Villages in Chiweshe and United States’ chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Rob Corker’s recent list of conditions which include, among others, ‘security sector reforms’ that he said Harare must adhere to in order to receive loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.
Last week this publication visited Chiweshe to unravel a story born out of the sacrifices of villagers and freedom fighters whom Corker want ousted from office because in America’s eyes they pose a threat to democracy.
This is the story of the liberation struggle, a story which gave birth to the current crop of the country’s security sector.
Both the opposition and the West have been frantically trying to wipe away heinous acts like the Protected Villages popularly known as ‘Keeps’ from our collective memory.
It was no coincidence that it was in the same week that our crew went to unravel one of the seemingly hidden secrets of colonial brutality that Corker wrote a letter to US Secretary of Treasury Jacob Lew telling him that Zimbabwe must not receive any funding from the Bretton Woods institutions unless it fires generals who formed the core of liberation war fighters.
“Current law requires the President to make a number of certifications, including the restoration of the rule of law in Zimbabwe; satisfactory election conditions in that country; equitable, legal and transparent land reform; and the subordination of the security force to civilian authority as the necessary conditions for a US vote in support of Zimbabwe’s arrears clearance at an international financial institution,” reads Corker’s letter in part.
In Chiweshe last week, our crew was re-awakened to the horrors of the liberation struggle that innocent villagers were subjected to.
The Keeps were designed to break the connection between freedom fighters and the villagers, a role the MDC-T is now tasked to play in independent Zimbabwe.
The West knows the current security sector in its current form cannot be used to reverse the gains of the liberation struggle.
Indeed, their fears are well founded.
On January 9 2002, just before the Presidential election that year, the then Commander of Zimbabwe’s Defence Forces (CDF), a veteran of the war of liberation, the late General Vitalis Zvinavashe, made the following pronouncement on behalf of Zimbabwe’s security command:
“We wish to make it very clear to all Zimbabwean citizens that the security organisations will only stand in support of those political leaders (who) will pursue Zimbabwean virtues, traditions and beliefs for the thousands of lives lost in pursuit of Zimbabwe’s hard-won independence. We will not accept, let alone support or salute, anyone with a different agenda that threatens the very existence of our sovereignty, our country and our people.”
Significantly, Europe’s Council of Ministers protested, claiming that the statement amounted to ‘a threat to overturn the democratic process if military commanders did not agree with the result of the presidential election’.
So did the United States (US) government.
But the quick of Zimbabwean politics had registered.
To this war-derived command, the West and its pawns were shedding tears, protesting against the strength of demobilised veterans of our liberation war who showed the potency in Zimbabwe’s politics by leading in the campaign for land restitution.
In the same vein, General Zvinavashe’s pronouncement was of course an assertive stance on protecting the peasantry in the countryside who are part of the 400 000 households that benefited from the Land Reform Programme and who have consistently given ZANU PF victory at the polls against Western interference.
This peasantry has a story to tell, such as the one in Chiweshe.
But the bigger story is brewing in the capital where the opposition hopes to spring a surprise attack on ZANU PF in the 2018 harmonised elections.
Writing in last week’s edition of The Saturday Herald, prominent columnist Nathaniel Manheru laid bare the current strategy by Uncle Sam who has clearly upped the tempo in his intrusive politics in the country.
“Politically, the strategy has not changed an iota. Of course Mavambo has been renamed People First, all to play Trojan Horse so the ZANU PF focus moves away from MDC-T which matters to Western calculations,” wrote Manheru.
“The splintered MDC-T is slowly being re-soldered by the Americans, with the strategy being to exaggerate intra-oppositional differences in the hope of engineering a surprise for ZANU PF.
“But unlike in 2008, the two shards out of ZANU PF, then playing out as Mavambo and then ZAPU, will have to happen now in order to re-unite before 2018. Mujuru’s PF is now in place, virtually. A ZAPU follow-up tear-away will soon pass, in the form of G-Wikileaks, not G40 as the group prefers to call itself.
“The idea is to have successive breakaways that would leave ZANU PF anaemic and softened for defeat.”
While ZANU PF has been infiltrated in the past, the same cannot be said of those villagers in Chiweshe and the Generals whose loyalty stems from the ethos of the liberation struggle.