Just published:
STRANGE LIBERATORS
Militarism, Mayhem, and the Pursuit of Profit
by Gregory Elich
with an introduction by Michael Parenti and an afterword by Mickey Z.
"Using a wealth of historic evidence and revelatory analysis, deep
research and eye-witness investigation, Gregory Elich treats what
lawyers call the `hard cases': Yugoslavia, Croatia, Zimbabwe, North
Korea, and certain untouched questions about Iraq, issues that have
been most thoroughly misrepresented in the corporate media and even
by political commentators and activists who claim to be on the left.
Elich wastes no time with genuflections to the dominant ideology.
Instead he sticks to the awful facts and glaring truths that compose
the underlying reality of the U.S. global empire. He ties in his
deeply informed case studies to the wider issues of U.S. imperial
policy, the broader questions of war and peace, and the general
crisis that faces the entire world and the planet's ecology itself.
Thereby he performs a most valuable service to persons all across the
political spectrum."
Michael Parenti, author of The Culture Struggle, The Assassination of
Julius Caesar and To Kill a Nation
"Gregory Elich is the model investigative journalist of the anti-
imperialist left; tenacious, thorough, penetrating, meticulous and
above all, uncompromising. On Yugoslavia, North Korea, Zimbabwe, and
Iraq, no one digs deeper, and no one uncovers more, than Elich."
Stephen Gowans, political commentator, What's Left
"Gregory Elich offers a clear and vital analysis of the goals of
private interests and their secret collusion with the Bush
administration to cover up a broad range of dangers, from war to
global warming. Scholars, researchers and the lay public interested
in US foreign policy will find
this book both vital and illuminating."
Lenora Foerstel,vice president of Women for Mutual Security, and
author of Confronting the Margaret Mead Legacy
"Gregory Elich has dedicated himself to skillfully unearthing and
disseminating the information that typically goes unsaid. He provides
us with the well-researched fundamentals we cannot and should not
expect to get from our newspapers or televisions. Put another way,
Elich teaches us to identify the `gates' that restrict our freedom of
thought."
Mickey Z, author of The Seven Deadly Spins and 50 American
Revolutions You're Not Supposed to Know
"For years, Gregory Elich has made his mark as a journalist-historian
who pairs a special literary flair with a talent for uncovering real
time, tightly held intelligence secrets. In this profoundly ominous
time of modern history, there are precious few contemporary writers
who brook no
compromise with the truth. This volume stands tall, and the author is
a special breed."
Louis Wolf, publisher of Covert Action Quarterly
"Informed Americans know about their government's interventions into
Vietnam, Cuba, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. They know about the
violations of international law, the injustices, the lies, and the
harm caused by these actions. But the case of Yugoslavia tends to
draw a blank. Even worse, it tends to elicit support for this
`humanitarian' intervention. Correcting this gross misunderstanding
and distortion of history is one reason among many for reading this
book."
William Blum, author of Killing Hope and Rogue State
---
About the Author:
Gregory Elich is on the board of directors of the Jasenovac Research
Institute and on the advisory board of the Korea Truth Commission.
His articles have appeared in newspapers and periodicals across the
world, including the U.S., Canada, South Korea, Great Britain,
France, Zimbabwe, Yugoslavia, Russia, Denmark and Australia.
Price: $25.95
424 pages, soft cover
Llumina Press
---
"Just to have a book that links a defense of Yugoslavia and Zimbabwe
is remarkable. Strange Liberators begins with Dr. King's April 4,
1967 speech, that called the U.S. invaders of Vietnam 'Strange
Liberators.'"
Strange Liberators goes from global sweatshops to Iraq to Korea to
Yugoslavia to Zimbabwe before a concluding chapter on global warming.
In every case, Elich exposes the lies spread by the bourgeoisie,
which are so often echoed by those in the progressive movement.
As well as everything else, it's a compelling argument against those
who insist we have to vote for the "lesser evil." Elich shows how
evil President Clinton was in planning nuclear war against People's
Korea in 1993 and 1994. As well as the 78 days of terror bombing
against socialist Yugoslavia.
Just for the chapter about the Lora concentration camp in Split,
Croatia, it's worth buying the book.
"Using a wealth of historic evidence and revelatory analysis, deep
research and eye-witness investigation, Gregory Elich treats what
lawyers call the 'hard cases.'...Issues that have been most
thoroughly misrepresented in the corporate media and even by
political commentators and activists who claim to be on the left.
Elich wastes no time with genuflections to the dominant ideology.
Instead, he sticks to the awful facts and glaring truths that compose
the underlying reality of the U.S. global empire.He ties in his
deeply informed case studies to the wider issues of U.S. imperial
policy, the broader questions of war and peace, and the general
crisis that faces the entire world and the planet's ecology itself.
Thereby he performs a most valuable service to persons all across the
political spectrum."—Michael Parenti, author of The Culture Struggle
and To Kill a Nation.
Soft cover, 401pp. Extensive Notes
---
http://www.workers.org/2006/us/elich-0720/
BOOK REVIEW
Countering imperialist propaganda: North Korea, Zimbabwe, Yugoslavia
Published Jul 17, 2006 7:43 PM
“Strange Liberators: Militarism, Mayhem and the Pursuit of Profit,”
by Gregory Elich,
Llumina Press, 2006, 402 pages. Available through LeftBooks.com.
By John Catalinotto
Radical political scientist and historian Michael Parenti writes in
his introduction to Greg Elich’s new book, Strange Liberators: “The
difference between what U.S. citizens think their rulers are doing in
the world and what these rulers actually are doing is one of the
great propaganda achievements of history.”
With his ambitious attempt to combat that propaganda, Elich confronts
the lies of the U.S. government and its servile media as he takes on
what he calls the “hard cases.” North Korea’s nuclear program, the
imperialist assault on Yugoslavia and the machinations against
Zimbabwe are his major topics. Even for people who have been
following these conflicts closely, Elich has found material that
sheds new light on the events.
Though he first finished the book in 2003, he spent the next two and
a half years searching for a publisher, during which time he
continually updated his material to keep up with new developments,
especially regarding the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea and
Zimbabwe. The book is up-to-date, well researched and a treasure of
political arguments.
His work regarding the DPRK is especially on target now, following
that country’s tests of rockets and a new wave of threats against
North Korea from the U.S. and Japan, the two colonial powers on the
Korean peninsula in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Korea’s nuclear program
Elich reviews about 15 years of U.S. relations with North Korea
regarding that country’s nuclear power program and its alleged
construction of nuclear weapons. While Washington portrayed the
Pyongyang leaders as intransigent and irrational, it was the U.S.
that refused to make an honest deal.
Elich quotes Selig Harrison, Director of the Asia Program at the
Center for International Policy, to show that the Bush
administration’s “very rigid position” showed it was “not prepared to
trade anything” and “risks a war. The point is, the administration’s
objective is really regime change in Pyongyang.”
Harrison referred to Victor Cha of Georgetown University, whom he
called a “kind of ideologue of the Bush administration” regarding
Korean affairs. Cha’s book on North Korea “lays it all out: the
purpose of negotiations with North Korea, he says, is not to settle
anything.”
“You have these multilateral negotiations in Beijing simply to show
the other parties in the region—China, South Korea, Russia and Japan—
that it is not possible to make any deals with North Korea. He [Cha]
says the purpose of the negotiations is to mobilize a ‘coalition for
punishment.’”
This analysis fits with the latest news, where U.S. pundits speculate
what policy will help Washington line up China and Russia to support
sanctions against North Korea in the United Nations Security Council.
No one in the Bush administration has yet raised as a serious
possibility negotiating a real end to the 1950-53 Korean War and
normalizing relations with the DPRK.
Elich shows how during 2004 and 2005 it was only on the insistence of
the South Korean government that the U.S. had to keep putting up a
good front during the six-part talk, and that even then the U.S.
bargaining position was intransigent—the U.S. negotiators constantly
raised the bar with extra demands on the DPRK for concessions.
And the Democrats
This summer two prominent members of the Clinton administration,
Assistant Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and Defense Secretary
William Perry, have been writing position papers advocating a
preemptive military strike against North Korea’s rocket launch pads.
Anyone reading Elich’s book could follow the aggressive history of
the Clinton administration and especially these two officials. Elich
shows how in 1994 the U.S. came within hours of launching an all-out
war against North Korea.
In writings following that period, Perry and Carter revealed that the
Clinton administration “spent much of the first half of 1994
preparing for war on the Korean peninsula.” The main target was the
Yongbyon nuclear site, but targets included all of the DPRK’s
military installations. “In the event of a North Korea attack,” they
wrote [that is, a response to the U.S. attack—JC], “U.S. forces,
working side by side with the South Korean army and using bases in
Japan, would quickly destroy the North Korean army and the North
Korean regime.” Since the battle would be waged “in Seoul’s suburbs,”
they expected heavy casualties among all the armed forces, and
“millions of refugees” crowding the highways. They don’t discuss the
many civilians who would die.
According to Elich—and he provides sources—Clinton officials were
meeting to launch the war when Jimmy Carter pulled the rug out from
under them. The former president had visited the DPRK, succeeded in
getting an agreement from the Pyongyang government and then held a
news conference announcing the agreement. Only by going public did he
force the Clinton officials to pull back on their war plans.
Frustrated in Asia, the Clinton administration then opened a 78-day
bombing campaign against Yugoslavia on March 24, 1999.
Aggression against Yugoslavia—and lies
The U.S. rulers were even more successful in selling the war on
Yugoslavia, in the sense that even some progressive media outlets
repeated the lies demonizing President Slobodan Milosevic, the
Yugoslav army and even the Serb population.
Milosevic had waged a heroic and quite successful self-defense in his
trial before NATO’s court in The Hague until his suspicious death in
March. On July 10, this so-called tribunal opened another important
case on the so-called “Kosovo War,” this one against Serbian
President Milan Milutinovic and five other Yugoslav leaders for the
same charges about Kosovo that Milosevic’s defense had completely
discredited.
Elich again provides good research to back up his explanation of the
“Kosovo War,” the machinations used to overthrow the Milosevic
government in the summer of 2000, and other aspects of the war waged
by the U.S. and its NATO allies to destroy the multinational, pro-
socialist state of Yugoslavia from 1990-2000.
One point that Elich reveals involves the details of the U.S. threats
against Yugoslavia at the end of May 1999. This was an important
moment, one that led the Belgrade government to allow NATO to occupy
Serbia’s Kosovo province.
The world knew that Yugoslavia faced an imminent invasion. It knew
also that the Russian government had removed all support for the
embattled Yugoslavs. What was kept hidden at the time were the
specific threats the European Union’s “mediator,” Martti Ahtisaari,
literally laid on the table before Yugoslavia’s coalition government.
When Milosevic asked “what will happen if I don’t sign” the
ultimatum, “Ahtisaari made a gesture on the table,” wrote Serb
negotiator Ljubisa Ristic, and then moved aside the flower
centerpiece. Then Ahtisaari said, “Belgrade will be like this table.
We will immediately begin carpetbombing Belgrade. There will be half
a million dead within a week.” The Yugoslav leaders accepted the terms.
Zimbabwe and the land question
As with the war on Yugoslavia, the U.S. has also disguised its
maneuvers in Africa as “humanitarian interventions.” In Somalia the
U.S. forces were supposed to be feeding people in a “failed state.”
Now the propagandists are making a case that the civil war in Sudan
needs the wise heads of imperialist generals to “rescue Black Africans.”
Another major target of U.S. and British maneuverings is Zimbabwe.
This southern African country with 12 million inhabitants, formerly
called Southern Rhodesia after the wealthy British colonialist and
then led by outright apartheid-style racist settlers, won its
independence in 1980 following a long liberation war.
A leader of that independence struggle, Robert Mugabe, has been the
head of the Zimbabwean government since. As Elich points out, a key
element of the struggle for liberation of the African people is the
struggle for land in this agricultural country. British and U.S.
attitudes toward Mugabe soured when the African leader began to
resist privatization and imperialist globalization in the form of
“structural adjustment programs.”
Then conflict between Britain and the Mugabe government sharpened
when the government in Harare started to seize the land from the
wealthy European farmers and distributed it to Africans who had
participated in the struggle for liberation. To the Tony Blair
government, its allies in Washington and the imperialist press,
taking this land from “productive farmers” was a heinous crime. The
imperialists slander the Mugabe government, calling it autocratic and
inefficient.
Elich, with a quick review of colonial history of the region, shows
how the British Empire waged a bloody colonial war against the local
peoples to seize the land in the first place and distribute it to
settlers, then how the colonial governments drove Africans off the
land and prevented them from owning it by law. If the settlers’ farms
are productive, it is also because the colonial regimes built up the
country’s infrastructure in such a way as to support the regions
owned by European-origin farmers.
In 2002, the 4,500 white commercial farm owners still held 70 percent
of Zimbabwe’s arable land. Six million African peasants did
subsistence farming in the “communal areas.”
Since the sanctions the U.S. and the EU have imposed against Zimbabwe
have condemned many of its HIV-positive citizens to death, it is hard
even for the imperialist media to claim a “humanitarian intervention”
is needed. Instead, the intervention is alleged to be pro-democracy.
The tool for this intervention was the Movement for Democratic Change
(MDC), founded in September 1999 and benefiting from a massive
infusion of funds from Western sources, writes Elich. The MDC
supported the structural adjustment programs that Mugabe’s ZANU-PF
party had begun to resist.
By 2002 the British High Commissioner to Zimbabwe, Brian Donnelly,
who had been ambassador to Yugoslavia for two years, was considered
instrumental in formulating a plan to get rid of Mugabe. This time
the plot failed.
The MDC was weakened in 2005 when its leader, Morgan Tsvangirai,
provoked a split in his own party by demanding a boycott of the
election. The split led to a landslide victory for ZANU-PF, Mugabe’s
party. His next announced step was to prepare for regime change not
by electoral processes but through what amounts to a coup.
In each of these hard cases and some other topics Elich takes up, he
shows the goal of U.S. foreign policy is never democracy or human
rights, but “to create a world that exists only to serve the wealthy,
where resources are freely exploited and the mass of humanity labors
for shrinking wages and inadequate or nonexistent benefits.”
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
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STRANGE LIBERATORS
Militarism, Mayhem, and the Pursuit of Profit
by Gregory Elich
with an introduction by Michael Parenti and an afterword by Mickey Z.
"Using a wealth of historic evidence and revelatory analysis, deep
research and eye-witness investigation, Gregory Elich treats what
lawyers call the `hard cases': Yugoslavia, Croatia, Zimbabwe, North
Korea, and certain untouched questions about Iraq, issues that have
been most thoroughly misrepresented in the corporate media and even
by political commentators and activists who claim to be on the left.
Elich wastes no time with genuflections to the dominant ideology.
Instead he sticks to the awful facts and glaring truths that compose
the underlying reality of the U.S. global empire. He ties in his
deeply informed case studies to the wider issues of U.S. imperial
policy, the broader questions of war and peace, and the general
crisis that faces the entire world and the planet's ecology itself.
Thereby he performs a most valuable service to persons all across the
political spectrum."
Michael Parenti, author of The Culture Struggle, The Assassination of
Julius Caesar and To Kill a Nation
"Gregory Elich is the model investigative journalist of the anti-
imperialist left; tenacious, thorough, penetrating, meticulous and
above all, uncompromising. On Yugoslavia, North Korea, Zimbabwe, and
Iraq, no one digs deeper, and no one uncovers more, than Elich."
Stephen Gowans, political commentator, What's Left
"Gregory Elich offers a clear and vital analysis of the goals of
private interests and their secret collusion with the Bush
administration to cover up a broad range of dangers, from war to
global warming. Scholars, researchers and the lay public interested
in US foreign policy will find
this book both vital and illuminating."
Lenora Foerstel,vice president of Women for Mutual Security, and
author of Confronting the Margaret Mead Legacy
"Gregory Elich has dedicated himself to skillfully unearthing and
disseminating the information that typically goes unsaid. He provides
us with the well-researched fundamentals we cannot and should not
expect to get from our newspapers or televisions. Put another way,
Elich teaches us to identify the `gates' that restrict our freedom of
thought."
Mickey Z, author of The Seven Deadly Spins and 50 American
Revolutions You're Not Supposed to Know
"For years, Gregory Elich has made his mark as a journalist-historian
who pairs a special literary flair with a talent for uncovering real
time, tightly held intelligence secrets. In this profoundly ominous
time of modern history, there are precious few contemporary writers
who brook no
compromise with the truth. This volume stands tall, and the author is
a special breed."
Louis Wolf, publisher of Covert Action Quarterly
"Informed Americans know about their government's interventions into
Vietnam, Cuba, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. They know about the
violations of international law, the injustices, the lies, and the
harm caused by these actions. But the case of Yugoslavia tends to
draw a blank. Even worse, it tends to elicit support for this
`humanitarian' intervention. Correcting this gross misunderstanding
and distortion of history is one reason among many for reading this
book."
William Blum, author of Killing Hope and Rogue State
---
About the Author:
Gregory Elich is on the board of directors of the Jasenovac Research
Institute and on the advisory board of the Korea Truth Commission.
His articles have appeared in newspapers and periodicals across the
world, including the U.S., Canada, South Korea, Great Britain,
France, Zimbabwe, Yugoslavia, Russia, Denmark and Australia.
Price: $25.95
424 pages, soft cover
Llumina Press
---
"Just to have a book that links a defense of Yugoslavia and Zimbabwe
is remarkable. Strange Liberators begins with Dr. King's April 4,
1967 speech, that called the U.S. invaders of Vietnam 'Strange
Liberators.'"
Strange Liberators goes from global sweatshops to Iraq to Korea to
Yugoslavia to Zimbabwe before a concluding chapter on global warming.
In every case, Elich exposes the lies spread by the bourgeoisie,
which are so often echoed by those in the progressive movement.
As well as everything else, it's a compelling argument against those
who insist we have to vote for the "lesser evil." Elich shows how
evil President Clinton was in planning nuclear war against People's
Korea in 1993 and 1994. As well as the 78 days of terror bombing
against socialist Yugoslavia.
Just for the chapter about the Lora concentration camp in Split,
Croatia, it's worth buying the book.
"Using a wealth of historic evidence and revelatory analysis, deep
research and eye-witness investigation, Gregory Elich treats what
lawyers call the 'hard cases.'...Issues that have been most
thoroughly misrepresented in the corporate media and even by
political commentators and activists who claim to be on the left.
Elich wastes no time with genuflections to the dominant ideology.
Instead, he sticks to the awful facts and glaring truths that compose
the underlying reality of the U.S. global empire.He ties in his
deeply informed case studies to the wider issues of U.S. imperial
policy, the broader questions of war and peace, and the general
crisis that faces the entire world and the planet's ecology itself.
Thereby he performs a most valuable service to persons all across the
political spectrum."—Michael Parenti, author of The Culture Struggle
and To Kill a Nation.
Soft cover, 401pp. Extensive Notes
---
http://www.workers.org/2006/us/elich-0720/
BOOK REVIEW
Countering imperialist propaganda: North Korea, Zimbabwe, Yugoslavia
Published Jul 17, 2006 7:43 PM
“Strange Liberators: Militarism, Mayhem and the Pursuit of Profit,”
by Gregory Elich,
Llumina Press, 2006, 402 pages. Available through LeftBooks.com.
By John Catalinotto
Radical political scientist and historian Michael Parenti writes in
his introduction to Greg Elich’s new book, Strange Liberators: “The
difference between what U.S. citizens think their rulers are doing in
the world and what these rulers actually are doing is one of the
great propaganda achievements of history.”
With his ambitious attempt to combat that propaganda, Elich confronts
the lies of the U.S. government and its servile media as he takes on
what he calls the “hard cases.” North Korea’s nuclear program, the
imperialist assault on Yugoslavia and the machinations against
Zimbabwe are his major topics. Even for people who have been
following these conflicts closely, Elich has found material that
sheds new light on the events.
Though he first finished the book in 2003, he spent the next two and
a half years searching for a publisher, during which time he
continually updated his material to keep up with new developments,
especially regarding the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea and
Zimbabwe. The book is up-to-date, well researched and a treasure of
political arguments.
His work regarding the DPRK is especially on target now, following
that country’s tests of rockets and a new wave of threats against
North Korea from the U.S. and Japan, the two colonial powers on the
Korean peninsula in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Korea’s nuclear program
Elich reviews about 15 years of U.S. relations with North Korea
regarding that country’s nuclear power program and its alleged
construction of nuclear weapons. While Washington portrayed the
Pyongyang leaders as intransigent and irrational, it was the U.S.
that refused to make an honest deal.
Elich quotes Selig Harrison, Director of the Asia Program at the
Center for International Policy, to show that the Bush
administration’s “very rigid position” showed it was “not prepared to
trade anything” and “risks a war. The point is, the administration’s
objective is really regime change in Pyongyang.”
Harrison referred to Victor Cha of Georgetown University, whom he
called a “kind of ideologue of the Bush administration” regarding
Korean affairs. Cha’s book on North Korea “lays it all out: the
purpose of negotiations with North Korea, he says, is not to settle
anything.”
“You have these multilateral negotiations in Beijing simply to show
the other parties in the region—China, South Korea, Russia and Japan—
that it is not possible to make any deals with North Korea. He [Cha]
says the purpose of the negotiations is to mobilize a ‘coalition for
punishment.’”
This analysis fits with the latest news, where U.S. pundits speculate
what policy will help Washington line up China and Russia to support
sanctions against North Korea in the United Nations Security Council.
No one in the Bush administration has yet raised as a serious
possibility negotiating a real end to the 1950-53 Korean War and
normalizing relations with the DPRK.
Elich shows how during 2004 and 2005 it was only on the insistence of
the South Korean government that the U.S. had to keep putting up a
good front during the six-part talk, and that even then the U.S.
bargaining position was intransigent—the U.S. negotiators constantly
raised the bar with extra demands on the DPRK for concessions.
And the Democrats
This summer two prominent members of the Clinton administration,
Assistant Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and Defense Secretary
William Perry, have been writing position papers advocating a
preemptive military strike against North Korea’s rocket launch pads.
Anyone reading Elich’s book could follow the aggressive history of
the Clinton administration and especially these two officials. Elich
shows how in 1994 the U.S. came within hours of launching an all-out
war against North Korea.
In writings following that period, Perry and Carter revealed that the
Clinton administration “spent much of the first half of 1994
preparing for war on the Korean peninsula.” The main target was the
Yongbyon nuclear site, but targets included all of the DPRK’s
military installations. “In the event of a North Korea attack,” they
wrote [that is, a response to the U.S. attack—JC], “U.S. forces,
working side by side with the South Korean army and using bases in
Japan, would quickly destroy the North Korean army and the North
Korean regime.” Since the battle would be waged “in Seoul’s suburbs,”
they expected heavy casualties among all the armed forces, and
“millions of refugees” crowding the highways. They don’t discuss the
many civilians who would die.
According to Elich—and he provides sources—Clinton officials were
meeting to launch the war when Jimmy Carter pulled the rug out from
under them. The former president had visited the DPRK, succeeded in
getting an agreement from the Pyongyang government and then held a
news conference announcing the agreement. Only by going public did he
force the Clinton officials to pull back on their war plans.
Frustrated in Asia, the Clinton administration then opened a 78-day
bombing campaign against Yugoslavia on March 24, 1999.
Aggression against Yugoslavia—and lies
The U.S. rulers were even more successful in selling the war on
Yugoslavia, in the sense that even some progressive media outlets
repeated the lies demonizing President Slobodan Milosevic, the
Yugoslav army and even the Serb population.
Milosevic had waged a heroic and quite successful self-defense in his
trial before NATO’s court in The Hague until his suspicious death in
March. On July 10, this so-called tribunal opened another important
case on the so-called “Kosovo War,” this one against Serbian
President Milan Milutinovic and five other Yugoslav leaders for the
same charges about Kosovo that Milosevic’s defense had completely
discredited.
Elich again provides good research to back up his explanation of the
“Kosovo War,” the machinations used to overthrow the Milosevic
government in the summer of 2000, and other aspects of the war waged
by the U.S. and its NATO allies to destroy the multinational, pro-
socialist state of Yugoslavia from 1990-2000.
One point that Elich reveals involves the details of the U.S. threats
against Yugoslavia at the end of May 1999. This was an important
moment, one that led the Belgrade government to allow NATO to occupy
Serbia’s Kosovo province.
The world knew that Yugoslavia faced an imminent invasion. It knew
also that the Russian government had removed all support for the
embattled Yugoslavs. What was kept hidden at the time were the
specific threats the European Union’s “mediator,” Martti Ahtisaari,
literally laid on the table before Yugoslavia’s coalition government.
When Milosevic asked “what will happen if I don’t sign” the
ultimatum, “Ahtisaari made a gesture on the table,” wrote Serb
negotiator Ljubisa Ristic, and then moved aside the flower
centerpiece. Then Ahtisaari said, “Belgrade will be like this table.
We will immediately begin carpetbombing Belgrade. There will be half
a million dead within a week.” The Yugoslav leaders accepted the terms.
Zimbabwe and the land question
As with the war on Yugoslavia, the U.S. has also disguised its
maneuvers in Africa as “humanitarian interventions.” In Somalia the
U.S. forces were supposed to be feeding people in a “failed state.”
Now the propagandists are making a case that the civil war in Sudan
needs the wise heads of imperialist generals to “rescue Black Africans.”
Another major target of U.S. and British maneuverings is Zimbabwe.
This southern African country with 12 million inhabitants, formerly
called Southern Rhodesia after the wealthy British colonialist and
then led by outright apartheid-style racist settlers, won its
independence in 1980 following a long liberation war.
A leader of that independence struggle, Robert Mugabe, has been the
head of the Zimbabwean government since. As Elich points out, a key
element of the struggle for liberation of the African people is the
struggle for land in this agricultural country. British and U.S.
attitudes toward Mugabe soured when the African leader began to
resist privatization and imperialist globalization in the form of
“structural adjustment programs.”
Then conflict between Britain and the Mugabe government sharpened
when the government in Harare started to seize the land from the
wealthy European farmers and distributed it to Africans who had
participated in the struggle for liberation. To the Tony Blair
government, its allies in Washington and the imperialist press,
taking this land from “productive farmers” was a heinous crime. The
imperialists slander the Mugabe government, calling it autocratic and
inefficient.
Elich, with a quick review of colonial history of the region, shows
how the British Empire waged a bloody colonial war against the local
peoples to seize the land in the first place and distribute it to
settlers, then how the colonial governments drove Africans off the
land and prevented them from owning it by law. If the settlers’ farms
are productive, it is also because the colonial regimes built up the
country’s infrastructure in such a way as to support the regions
owned by European-origin farmers.
In 2002, the 4,500 white commercial farm owners still held 70 percent
of Zimbabwe’s arable land. Six million African peasants did
subsistence farming in the “communal areas.”
Since the sanctions the U.S. and the EU have imposed against Zimbabwe
have condemned many of its HIV-positive citizens to death, it is hard
even for the imperialist media to claim a “humanitarian intervention”
is needed. Instead, the intervention is alleged to be pro-democracy.
The tool for this intervention was the Movement for Democratic Change
(MDC), founded in September 1999 and benefiting from a massive
infusion of funds from Western sources, writes Elich. The MDC
supported the structural adjustment programs that Mugabe’s ZANU-PF
party had begun to resist.
By 2002 the British High Commissioner to Zimbabwe, Brian Donnelly,
who had been ambassador to Yugoslavia for two years, was considered
instrumental in formulating a plan to get rid of Mugabe. This time
the plot failed.
The MDC was weakened in 2005 when its leader, Morgan Tsvangirai,
provoked a split in his own party by demanding a boycott of the
election. The split led to a landslide victory for ZANU-PF, Mugabe’s
party. His next announced step was to prepare for regime change not
by electoral processes but through what amounts to a coup.
In each of these hard cases and some other topics Elich takes up, he
shows the goal of U.S. foreign policy is never democracy or human
rights, but “to create a world that exists only to serve the wealthy,
where resources are freely exploited and the mass of humanity labors
for shrinking wages and inadequate or nonexistent benefits.”
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