WikiLeaks a blessing in disguise: Jonathan Moyo

By Jonathan Moyo, MP

As the rivetting story of the so-called WikiLeaks continues to grip national attention, imagination and excitement under the spell of a thus far disappointingly frivolous and vexatious media coverage, the time has come to identify and analyse running threads, themes and patterns that define the national implications of all the 2 998 or so previously protected and inaccessible US diplomatic cables on Zimbabwe filed in Washington by American posts in Harare and elsewhere around the world between 1966 and February 2010 which are now in the public domain.

After spending an average of 18 hours a day between August 30 and last Friday sifting through the staggering record of the published cables on the Internet and enduring uniquely Zimbabwean broadband frustrations with browsing speed and all, and after discounting for another day all the cables on Zimbabwe covering the period between 1966 and 1997, this writer has found that the single most dominant thread, theme and pattern emerging out of the US diplomatic cables on our country between 1998 and 2010 more than any other issue is leadership renewal centred around a hodgepodge of familiar issues about President Mugabe’s succession.

In particular, US diplomatic communication on Zimbabwe in the decade between 1998 and 2008 shows that there was a formidable and rising “Mugabe must go” campaign across the political divide which started in 1998 whose wave spread like fire ahead of the 2008 harmonised presidential, parliamentary and local government elections.

But as a result of a combination of the GPA experience which brought MDC elements into Government and exposed them to President Mugabe’s iconic leadership and new developments within Zanu-PF sparked and impelled by the scary results of the first round of the presidential election on March 29 2008 and buoyed by the pursuit of indigenisation and economic empowerment under the banner of the Last Chimurenga which has attracted the overwhelming support of G40 elements between the ages of 18 and 35 who make up at least 70 percent of the electorate, the “Mugabe must go” mantra has given way to the “Mugabe must stay” refrain.

WIKILEAKS

This decisive shift, which is clearly captured in the US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks on August 30 although it has not yet been reported in the media, started taking root in the 2008 presidential election runoff which saw the regrouping of nationalist forces some of which had deserted President Mugabe before then and became full-blown with the formation of the GPA government in 2009 when a retinue of key MDC Cabinet ministers including the likes of Nelson Chamisa, Elton Mangoma, Gordon Moyo, Tendai Biti and Morgan Tsvangirai himself, among others, started telling US diplomats that President Mugabe is the only national leader in Zimbabwe today who can superintend over the country’s ongoing alleged political transition as the overriding solution to the so-called Zimbabwe crisis.

Otherwise the 1998 to 2008 “Mugabe must go” campaign led to the illegal formation of the MDC in 1999 by the British political establishment and sunk the deadly and divisive roots of factionalism within Zanu-PF by 2000 when the US government assumed the campaign’s leading and co-ordinating role on behalf of the British government which was cynically keen to avoid the unavoidable impression that it was fatally entrapped in an unwinnable bilateral conflict with Zimbabwe.

The factional consequences of the US-co-ordinated “Mugabe must go” crusade are reflected in one of only 39 cables on Zimbabwe classified as “secret” which details a meeting on January 15 2003 between then Ambassador Sullivan and the late national hero Eddison Zvobgo during which the US government undertook to look into ways of supporting the formation of “a party within a party” inside Zanu-PF whose consequence was to entrench factionalism that became full-blown in 2008 as the “bhora musango” sub-electoral culture became the commissariat order of the day, resulting in the launch of Simba Makoni’s ill-fated Mavambo challenge.

The US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show that, based on its view that “Mugabe is Zanu-PF and Zanu-PF is Mugabe”, the US has followed a three-pronged approach to its “Mugabe must go” campaign: (1) the first push was to isolate President Mugabe from Zanu-PF by promoting factionalism in the party and ensuring that it cascaded to the party’s grassroots as revealed by numerous cables stretching over a decade since 1998 and the key player in formulating and implementing this strategy was Ambassador Sullivan; (2) the second push was to isolate President Mugabe from Sadc leaders and the key players on this were Ambassador McGee and Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Fraser; and (3) the third push has been to isolate President Mugabe from the security sector and the key player in this is Ambassador Charles Ray.

A careful reading of the US cables released on August 30 shows that the US government believes that it has succeeded in isolating President Mugabe from Zanu-PF by promoting and supporting factionalism in the party and that it has also succeeded in isolating President Mugabe by canvassing Sadc ambassadors in Harare and using them to influence their leaders and governments under the pretext of supporting the GPA. The cables show that the outstanding work in progress is to isolate President Mugabe from the security sector.

In a December 21 2009 cable reporting on his meeting with then South African Ambassador Makhalima, who is said to have supported the American position on behalf of his government, Ambassador Ray confirms the US authorship and leadership of the security sector reform thrust and goes out of his way to caution that “there must be no US fingerprints on the campaign” which has found expression in the GPA negotiations as an alleged Sadc issue.

The three-pronged US strategy of isolating President Mugabe from Zanu-PF, Sadc leaders and the security sector is so pervasive in the leaked US diplomatic cables on Zimbabwe such that the fact that these cables are now in the public domain effectively puts paid to President Zuma’s Sadc-sanctioned mediation in Zimbabwe. The holding of elections in Zimbabwe without regime change games from any internal or external quarter has become inevitable, thanks to WikiLeaks.

Even so and in analytical terms for the sake of perspective, the widespread dominance of the question of leadership renewal as a persistent feature of the US diplomatic cables on Zimbabwe between 1998 and 2008 compares and ranks with a similar prevalence of American concerns about the geopolitical impact of Venezuela’s oil and gold reserves in Latin America under Hugo Chavez, the influence of Iran’s and North Korea’s nuclear programmes in their respective regions and the threats and opportunities of the so-called war on terror in the Middle East, North Africa and East Africa — especially Somalia — over the same period.

Because the compendium of some 251 287 US diplomatic cables released in their entirety on August 30 by Julian Assange’s whistle-blower website called WikiLeaks covers 274 countries, it is instructive and indeed necessary for Zimbabweans to respond to the leaked cables with comparative wisdom and maturity as has happened in Brazil, China, India, Iran, Russia and Venezuela, among others.

Of course our national ability to deal with the leaked cables properly is negated not only by the unfortunate fact that our country today is littered with illiterate and treacherous media morons who are ideologically bankrupt despite calling themselves independent but also because we have dangerous political misfits and rank criminals who find themselves in the leadership of supposedly mainstream political parties among whom some now have Cabinet seats in the moribund so-called inclusive Government.

This unfortunate WikiLeaks situation in Zimbabwe explains why many among us now cannot tell the verbatim difference between some opinionated newspaper propaganda and the actual accounts of the leaked US diplomatic cables themselves and this has engendered a kind of dysfunctional ignorance which has turned otherwise well-meaning people into helpless victims of illiterate media morons who would have us believe that an alleged or declared messenger in the WikiLeaks saga is the same as an informant or a reliable and secret source of information whose identification in the leaked US diplomatic cables is immediately and clearly followed with the plea, qualification and precaution to “strictly protect” the informant’s identity.

Another unfortunate WikiLeaks situation in Zimbabwe at the moment is that our media in general has conflated the leaked US diplomatic cables with Julian Assange’s whistle-blower website as if the two are one and the same thing called “WikiLeaks”. Now everybody is talking about WikiLeaks instead of talking about US diplomatic cables that are now in the public domain.

This is not only wrong but also unfortunate because WikiLeaks is a just a website which specialises in finding and leaking information in the possession of governments around the world but so far mainly in the Western countries. In the matter in question, Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks has released US diplomatic cables, yet, as sure as hell, Assange would love to leak the cables of the British, European, Australian, Russian, Chinese, French and even Zimbabwean governments but only if he can lay his leaking hands on them.

Yet another unfortunate WikiLeaks situation in Zimbabwe is that, unlike elsewhere around the world, including among our Sadc neighbours such as South Africa, the frenzy gripping us has overlooked the fact that the conversations that US diplomats had with a cross-section of Zimbabweans also involved, as they sure did, attempts by our own nationals, including through the so-called system, to understand what the hell Americans were really up to in our country.

As such, it would be naïve if not foolish for anyone to think or imagine that the so-called WikiLeaks were just about Americans running riot on everyone in our country, including nationalists who have a mind and national interests of their own. Anyone who believes or thinks that the Yankees were having a field day in Zimbabwe on their own is either naïve or foolish or both.

The fact of the matter is that there are two telling conclusions that are necessary to draw from the leaked 2 998 or so US diplomatic cables on Zimbabwe: One is that we, and this includes the Zimbabwean national security system, now all know what the Americans made of the various conversations that their diplomats had with Zimbabweans from across the political divide and the other is that unlike our knowledge about their take on the cables, the Americans don’t know what our take is or what our system has made or will now make of the same conversations because our cables or reports on those conversations remain secret and have not been and will not be exposed.

And so our system can now quietly and effectively follow up every detail about those conversations in a professional manner that can only enhance our national security and national interests. In other words, we now know which Zimbabwean spoke to the Americans, when and why they spoke to them, what was discussed and what Uncle Sam made of the discussion and we now can use the totality of this data as a baseline for more information in the interests of our national interest and national security.

What is even more interesting and more serious is that while we can tell from the so-called WikiLeaks on Zimbabwe what the US government thinks and has done or is doing about what is contained in the leaked US diplomatic cables about our country, the fact is that these cables do not reveal what our own system thought about the conversations which some of the Zimbabweans, especially in the nationalist movement and Zanu-PF, had with the Americans in order to understand them better for policy-making purposes. The shameless puppets from the two MDC formations who spoke to the Americans under the cover of darkness are now running scared as the net closes in on them.

Put bluntly, the leaked cables tell only one side of the story from the point of view of the Americans but does not tell the other side of the story from the point of view of the “system” in Zimbabwe and Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks has no chance in heaven of ever accessing the Zimbabwean cables or the Zimbabwean reports about the meetings or conversations with various US diplomats.

In other words, thanks to WikiLeaks we now know what the US government thought of our conversations with its diplomats in Harare but it does not know what the Zimbabwean government and Zanu-PF nationalists thought, made and might still make of the same conversations.

While the American jury has reached and announced its decision, the Zimbabwean jury is still out and Uncle Sam in Washington and Uncle Charles Ray in Harare better watch out because their backsides are totally, completely and irretrievably exposed with no redemption or recovery in sight. It’s the Americans and their allies and puppets, not Zimbabweans, who have been exposed and the game is over.

On a related and last point about the foregoing, much has been made about this writer’s meetings with US diplomats, most of which is better left alone because of its rather crazy self-indulgence. But for the avoidance of any doubt or confusion, this writer would like to unequivocally confirm that he indeed held the reported meetings when he was exiled from Zanu-PF between March 30 2005 and September 18 2007, none of which were private or clandestine, and he indeed uttered the things that are summarised by the various US diplomats mentioned in the nine or so cables covering those meetings whose cables were released by WikiLeaks on August 30 as part of the batch of 2 998 US diplomatic wires recorded on Zimbabwe.

There are at least three acceptable ways of engaging representatives of foreign countries: If you are part of the executive or a member of a political party you do so with necessary authority and participation of your system; if you are an independent Member of Parliament you do as you wish provided that you also make public the views you express privately and if you are an ordinary citizen such as academics and NGO activists you do as you wish. The bottom line is that society must make it possible and desirable for citizens to express in public what they think in private. Speech must not require courage because it’s what makes human beings different from animals and plants.

This writer is satisfied that, as reflected in the nine or so cables disclosed by WikiLeaks about his direct and intense conversations with US diplomats that took place between March 30 2005 and September 18 2007, he was able to establish that the US and the UK governments have no faith in Morgan Tsvangirai and his MDC-T and were readily willing to ditch him in favour of either Simba Makoni or Strive Masiyiwa or even Gideon Gono for that matter.

It was very important to know directly from US diplomats in Harare that their government and the British government and their European allies have no confidence whatsoever in Tsvangirai and his MDC’s capacity to govern Zimbabwe and that they see him and his party only as a convenient strategic nuisance to use for campaign purposes during elections and nothing more. In a meeting with US diplomats in Harare on April 17 2007, former US Ambassador Christopher Dell concluded that this writer had been “sent to gauge US government . . . commitment to Tsvangirai”.

This running theme about wavering American support for Tsvangirai and his MDC-T is confirmed by a February 4 2010 cable summarising conversations between Roy Bennett and US diplomats in which Bennett flatly declares that the MDC-T is only an election-based party for campaign purposes with no backbench depth or capacity to form and run a government that can deliver services to the people.

In addition to the fact that the American diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks between 2003 and 2008 show that the US and British governments along with their Rhodesian kith and kin represented by Roy Bennett have lost confidence in Tsvangirai’s poor leadership and given the MDC-T’s inability to govern in a manner that would deliver real services to the people, the same cables also show that Tsvangirai’s party is fundamentally violent and the US government knows it.

For example, a revealed top secret WikiLeaks cable not yet reported by our media shows that on May 19 2003 an MDC activist, Munyaradzi Sedweak Mupazviripo, confessed to the American embassy in Harare that he had made and thrown nine petrol bombs at perceived Zanu-PF targets on or about April 25 2003 and that this high crime was known to the then MDC head of security, Solomon Chikowero.

There are also hitherto unreported cables showing that the MDC-T has national structures for instigating and perpetrating violence, including submissions that Tendai Biti informed US Harare Embassy staff that he was aware of his party’s plans “to stone people and burn commuter minibuses” during an MDC-T mass action.

The new mantra in town confirmed by WikiLeaks, whose release is a huge blessing in disguise, is that “Mugabe must stay” as the only acceptable transitional national leader and this will be affirmed by the electorate at the next polls.

Jonathan Moyo is a member of the House of Assembly for Tsholotsho North.