Chigumbu Warikandwa
The US Embassy in Zimbabwe is going to great lengths in attempts to sanitize the diabolic illegal sanctions their country has set on defenceless Zimbabwe. Whose interest is the US serving by assaulting a sovereign country which seeks to fend for its people so they enjoy the best of what God and nature offers?
Has the US suddenly become an international prefect with a global status using an invisible constitution only known to them to assault its manufactured enemies?
International Law affords every nation the right to self determination, the right to associate with others unhindered and the right to choose what it wants with resources within its jurisdiction.
Zimbabwe does not hold any disputed land and neither does it have any boundary dispute with any of its four neighbours. But alas, a country that is tens of thousands of miles away across oceans chooses to engage into a territorial war with a sovereign state that has not provoked it.
While the US will jump to its own defence upon reading this, denying having a territorial dispute with Zimbabwe, the naked truth is the US wants to eat the Zimbabwean cake uninvited. Zimbabwe has become a thorn in the soft tissue of the US nerves.
All the talk about Human Rights and the rule of law is nothing but a convenient smoke screen useful to the US to harass and intimidate Zimbabwe so as to stop or reduce its inertia in the consciousness drive in Africanity. In the 1990s, the Zimbabwe National Army swiftly moved in to quell a rebellion in the then Zaire where the invisible hand of the Americans was apparent. That hand was meant to brew convenient trouble such that the rich resources of the expansive African state can continue to be pilfered inside the confusion. This move angered the Americans who had to slap the firm Zimbabwean government with sanctions three years later. These sanctions are ongoing.
The irony of these sanctions as they were described by their author as being targeted to a few individuals is that they are creeping further than this. This is a lie. The sanctions are wholesale and wide reaching. The sanctions are missing the said target by a wide margin. If anything, the sanctions are hurting persons that are never described in the 'client' list. Poor people are failing to access portable water, basic healthcare, education and sufficient food courtesy of these sanctions. Adolescent girls are failing to access sanitary ware. Meanwhile, the said targets are reading of the effects of the sanctions in newspapers. What callousness is this?
As if the pain created by the sanctions knows the laws of karma, employees of the US Embassy in Harare also reel under the same difficulty as faced by every Zimbabwean. They drive at snail's paces in potholed roads because machinery needed to service and maintain the roads cannot be imported courtesy of the sanctions.
Today the Harare City Council, the biggest local authority, which is run by the surrogate local authors of the sanctions directing operations from Harvest House, is crying for $100 million for water treatment chemicals. This is a case of a snake weeping from self bite wounds. The US government, through its local embassy runs various programs designed to fulfil its foreign policy (which it loves so much) but the progress of such programs is negated by the crippling sanctions.
Sanctions have reduced the speed of doing business in Zimbabwe both in the private and public sectors. A basic commodity such as fuel is trickling in the country at intermittent intervals, also affecting the operations of the US government and a host of other cooperating partners it works with in delivering outputs of its international engagement.
So, who is dangerous to American foreign policy here, the US itself or Zimbabwe?
America's behaviour towards Zimbabwe is equal to the proverbial mother who threw away the baby with the bath water. The sanctions have failed to achieve their intended design. The US is setting dogs on the herd boy to punish the farmer. Meanwhile, the farmer is home eating cake. The US is spending the whole wide hot day handling the dogs in the open country, risking the vagaries of the weather only to set dogs on the wrong person.
The sanctions have dismally failed and have become an embarrassment to the US as a member of the international community. To save its face, the US has to repeal this embarrassment in the dead of the night and wake up to progressive engagement with Zimbabwe.
