allAfrica.com: Zimbabwe: McGee, We Wear Sanctions As Badge of Honour (Page 1 of 2)

THE news in South Africa over the past week was that the US State Department had decided to remove ANC leaders, among them Nelson Mandela on whom the Westerners dote so much, from a Terrorist Watch blacklist.

ANC members, past and present, who wish to travel to the US have to get waivers from the State Department and to this day, even President Mbeki -- is allowed to travel only to the United Nations headquarters in New York but not to Washington DC or any other parts of the so-called Free World.

Matters came to a head when former South African Ambassador to the US, Barbara Masekela, was terror-flagged when she attempted to visit a dying cousin in the US, by the time she was cleared, her cousin had already died.

On May 8, the US House of Representatives adopted a bill aimed at taking Mandela and other ANC leaders off the terror blacklist.

The House agreed to give the State Department and Homeland Security Department powers to overlook the ANC's anti-apartheid activities when determining whether to allow members and former members into the US.

Please note, "anti-apartheid activities."

A similar bill is moving through the US Senate with supporters hoping to get it passed before Mandela's 90th birthday on July 18.

ANC leaders were naturally elated with many of them lauding the US for a "progressive decision." It, however, appears not many saw the irony in Uncle Sam's actions.

Here is a country and leadership claiming to be paragons of liberty and democracy but which had no qualms placing the leaders and members of a liberation organisation that was fighting the evil system of apartheid in occupied South Africa on travel and other forms of sanctions. Instead of recognising that the likes of Oliver Tambo, Mandela and Walter Sisulu were fighting a just war against settler oppression, they were instead labelled terrorists as the US government maintained open relations with the racist regime in Pretoria.

Ironically, Washington put the ANC leadership under sanctions while it refused to impose sanctions against the racist regime that was oppressing the black majority in South Africa, preferring what they called "constructive engagement."

This approach, constructive engagement, was the brainchild of the then US assistant secretary of state for African Affairs in the Reagan administration, Chester Crocker who argued that instead of imposing economic sanctions on, and divestment from Pretoria, the West had to "use incentives to encourage South Africa to gradually move away from apartheid."

"Constructive engagement" latter became Washington's official policy towards apartheid Pretoria.

It is important to note that this duplicity was born of the same Crocker who, in a foreign policy testimony to the US Senate in 2001, proposed imposing sanctions on Zimbabwe for, according to him, "to separate the Zimbabwean people from Zanu-PF we are going to have to make their economy scream, and I hope you senators have the stomach for what you have to do."

These words, which were borrowed from utterances made by the then secretary of state Henry Kissinger who said the US had to make the Chilean economy scream to topple the leftwing government of Salvador Allende in 1973, culminated in the drafting of the US sanctions law, the so-called Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act that was signed into law by George W. Bush on December 21 that year.

The ZDERA not only provides for the cutting of Zimbabwe's lines of credit from all multilateral lending institutions but also funding for the MDC and other quasi-opposition groupings in Zimbabwe in pursuit of the regime change agenda.

But what is the point here.

The point here is that Washington, which wants to pass itself as a progressive democracy that supports "democratrisation" throughout the world was opposed to democratisation in South Africa, and instead covertly supported the apartheid State to delay black majority rule.

The same way it supported the racist Smith regime in the then Rhodesia by by-passing UN sanctions to continue trading with Smith and helping him, again, through apartheid South Africa.

A bit of history may help the historically naïve, particularly one James D. McGee who is proving to be every bit the House Negro I predicted many moons ago, to appreciate the destructive role Washington played during Zimbabwe's liberation struggle and how those actions served to delay the dawn of independence at a cost of over 50 000 innocent lives, the same way Washington's illegal sanctions today seek to torpedo Zimbabwe's quest for economic independence.

When Rhodesian prime minister, Ian Douglas Smith made, his Unilateral Declaration of Independence on November 11 1965, the progressive world was naturally outraged and the UN Security Council promptly responded by slapping the Smith regime with a raft of sanctions beginning that year till the brief restoration of British rule in December 1979.

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