Africa facing new Cold War?

Zimbabwe: Isn't Africa Facing a New Cold War With Tsvangirai As Savimbi?
The Monitor (Kampala)
OPINION
23 July 2008
Posted to the web 23 July 2008


The Human Rights Watch insists the ICC should quiz the UPDF among those suspected of committing war crimes.

Thanks to the dwindling primary natural resources, oil and gas, the west is hounding Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe and the Sudan's al-Bashir, and heaping blame on Russia and China for protecting them; thus setting the stage for a new Cold War in to be in fought Africa, with Morgan Tsvangirai as Jonas Savimbi, reincarnated.


The last Cold War saw the savage murders or violent overthrows by the British, Americans, Belgians, French and Portuguese of nationalist African leaders including Patrice Lumumba, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, Luis Cabral, Eduardo Mondlane, Samora Marcel, Milton Obote, Hamed Sekou Toure, Gamel Abdel Nasser and Ahmed Ben Bella who were dubbed terrorists or Russian and Chinese sympathisers.

The lucky ones - Jomo Kenyatta, Robert Mugabe and Nelson Mandela were given long prison sentences from which they were never expected to come out, alive. Today, Mandela's statute stands as a monument of British cynicism, in Parliament square, London.

The human, social and economic wounds inflicted on Africa by the last Cold War are still very raw. Mozambique, Angola and Namibia are littered with millions of land mines and other unexploded military ordinances, which will kill people for centuries to come.

Algeria, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic (Zaire), Ivory Cost, Chad, Central African Republic, Nigeria, Sudan and Uganda are fighting self-destruct wars, while Somalia ceased to be a state in 1992, thanks to western weapons.

Overall, the last Cold War left Africa on the life-support machine of western food aid administered by the World Food Programme, while their leaders pay lips services to cure the patient.

Last week, Africa Progress Panel (APP), headed by the former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, issued a report, "Africa Progress Panel responds to the G8 Summit in Hokkaido" which said:"G8 countries have done little to show how they will fund the shortfall of US$ 40 billion in programmable aid and debt relief identified by the Africa Progress Panel last month...The G8 has yet to present clear timetables outlining future aid provision or to provide increased transparency required to improve the quality of aid".

Instead of using the recent G8 meeting to fulfil their commitments made at Gleneagles, the west, led by Britain, concentrated on using Zimbabwe to split and weaken the African Union (AU). The July 11 UN resolution accused Mugabe of "killing 100 opposition supporters and displacing 2,000", and called for punitive sanctions including imposing an arms embargo, a clear signal for attacks on Zimbabwe.

Naturally, the resolution was supported by Belgium, France, Italy, UK and the USA - the same countries that met at the 1884 Berlin conference and shared Africa as a carcass before launching a genocidal Cold War on the continent soon after independence.

Thankfully, China and Russia, which were not at the Berlin Conference, rejected the resolution, saying it would "open the way for interference by the Security Council in internal affairs of Members Sates, which is a gross violation of the UN Charter."

To disorganise the AU further, the international Criminal court (ICC), is planning to arrest Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir, for "leading a campaign of murder, rape and mass deportation in Darfur".

The plan is advancing despite the AU statement, which "reiterated the AU's concern with the misuse of indictments against African leaders".

Incidentally, the conflict in Darfur stated 18 years after the one in northern Uganda which killed over 300,000 civilians, caused the abduction of 20, 000 children and drove 2 million into concentration camps. Yet, the ICC never investigated the role of the Ugandan troops, leave alone issuing an arrest warrant for President Yoweri Museveni.

But the west is less interest in human rights in Africa than justifing a new Cold War. The BBC reported on 13th July it "has found the first evidence that China is currently helping Sudan's government militarily in Darfur".

Yet, China's real crime is its dominating investments in Africa which now exceeds British, USA, European Union, World Bank and IMF aid budgets, combined. And Russia is an enemy because it is sitting on huge gas and oil reserves, and opposing not only the expansion of North Atlantic treaty Organisation (NATO) to its borders, but also the US plans to build Missile Defence facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic. Given the devastation of the last Cold War, won't a new one be a double crime against humanity exceeding not only the massacres by the Germans of 6 million Jews, but also the genocide committed by Belgians in Congo in the last centaury, and the slave trade?


Aren't African leaders facing a simple choice: tell the west not to touch Al-Bashir and Mugabe, or wait to be picked one by one? But isn't Mr Morgan Tsvangirai looking increasingly like Field Marshal Mobuto and Jonas Savimbi, the two western agents who helped to confine Africa on its death-bed?