Mugabe vote rigging allegations

By Stephen Gowans

It’s not the outcome of the upcoming March 29 elections that is foreordained, but the opposition’s, civil society’s, and Western media’s judgment of the election’s fairness that has been predetermined.

To see this, it’s instructive to note how the New York Times treated Mugabe’s chances of winning the election, before falling into line with the main opposition MDC party’s self-serving “Mugabe can’t win without rigging the vote” rhetoric.

On February 26, reporter Barry Bearak predicted Mugabe would “coast to victory” because the opposition had “failed to unite behind one presidential candidate.” The entry of Simba Makoni into the race, a former senior member of the ruling Zanu-PF party, would make the contest tighter, Bearak predicted, but acknowledged that “Mugabe…may still win handily.”

It was clear that Bearak didn’t think Mugabe would win because he had rigged the vote, but because the opposition was weak and fractured.

Three weeks ago, The Guardian (March 3, 2008) echoed Bearak’s assessment, declaring Zimbabwe’s opposition to be “weak and badly divided” and noted that MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai’s “credibility has been worn away by poor leadership.”

Only recently have both newspapers begun to treat Mugabe as an unpopular leader who has to resort to vote rigging to stay in power.

The same pattern characterized Western media assessments of the last presidential elections in Belarus. Belarus, too, is on Washington’s list of governments targeted for regime change.

Months before the vote, Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko’s popularity was openly acknowledged and his victory in the election confidently predicted.

However, in the final week leading up to the election, press reports suddenly reversed course, emphasizing the vote rigging allegations of the opposition. (See http://gowans.blogspot.com/2006_03_01_archive.html )

Significantly, Belarus’s opposition shares the same sources of funding, assistance and backing as Zimbabwe’s, and operates along the same lines and with the same goals.

The March 26 New York Times cited two leaders of US- and British-government funded NGOs, who averred confidently that the election would not be free and fair and that “the tabulated results are in the box and [Mugabe] has won.”

The newspaper did not acknowledge the NGO leaders’ connections to US- and British-government sources of funding – a significant omission, considering both governments have an interest in discrediting the Zimbabwean government.

At the same time, the newspaper’s reporters complained bitterly that Mugabe is buying votes by bestowing “tractors and plows on village chiefs whose gratitude is expected to be a reciprocal harvest of votes.”

The two allegations are contradictory. If Mugabe has rigged the elections, why does he need to buy votes?

As is true when imperialist states, the Western media, NGOs and peace and civil society scholars collaborate to bring down governments that refuse to do the West’s bidding, reality has been turned on its head.

While the case that says Mugabe has predetermined the outcome of the election has become the dominant view, through sheer repetition by a Western media that serves as a platform for a bought opposition and civil society, the evidence is paper thin.

The evidence that what is, in fact, predetermined, is the opposition and NGO judgment of the election, is far more compelling.

State, media, and NGOs collaborate in shaping public opinion on upcoming Zimbabwe elections

By Stephen Gowans

A New York Times story published three days before elections in Zimbabwe provides an interesting illustration of how the state and mass media cooperate with agents on the ground to shape public opinion.

The aim of the March 26, 2008 article, titled “Hope and Fear for Zimbabwe Vote,” is to discredit the elections that the current president, Robert Mugabe, seems likely to win, in order to justify continuing efforts to replace Mugabe and his policies of land reform and economic indigenization with the pro-foreign investment, pro-private property policies of the US- and EU-backed Movement for Democratic Change, Zimbabwe’s main opposition party.

Mugabe has provoked the ire of corporate executives, investment bankers, and those who have taken a leadership role in representing Western upper class interests by taking measures to invest Zimbabwe’s national liberation project with real content. His government expropriated the farms of white settlers and their descendants for distribution to the landless poor after former colonial power Britain reneged on promises to finance land redistribution.

Now the ZANU-PF government is proposing to place majority ownership of the country’s resources in the hands of indigenous Zimbabweans.

It’s all part of a program to achieve real national independence by turning Zimbabweans into owners of their own land and natural resources.

Zimbabwe has barred election monitors from the US and EU, but will allow observers from Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, South Africa and the Southern African Development Community to monitor the vote.

The barring of Western observers is pointed to as indirect evidence of vote rigging. After all, if Zimbabwe has nothing to hide, why won’t it admit observers from Europe and the US?

At the same time, it’s suggested that Zimbabwe is only allowing observers from friendly countries because they will bless the elections automatically.

By the same logic, one would expect that a negative evaluation is foreordained from observers representing unfriendly countries, especially those whose official policy is to replace the current government. Indeed, it is this fear that has led Harare to ban Western monitors.

With Western observers unable to monitor the elections directly, governments in North America and Europe are left with a public relations dilemma. How can they declare the vote fraudulent, if they haven’t observed it?

To get around this difficulty, the US, Britain and other Western countries have provided grants to Zimbabweans on the ground to monitor the vote. These Zimbabweans, part of civil society, declare themselves to be independent “non-governmental” observers, and prepare to render a foreordained verdict that the elections are rigged. Cooperating in the deception, the Western media amplifies their voices as “independent” experts on the ground.

The US Congress’s National Endowment for Democracy — an organization that does overtly what the CIA used to do covertly — has provided grants to the Zimbabwe Election Support Network “to train and organize 240 long-term elections observers throughout Zimbabwe.”

The NED is also connected to the Media Monitoring Project through the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition, which it funds, and the Media Institute of Southern Africa, which is funded by Britain’s NED equivalent, the Westminster Foundation.

The Media Monitoring Project calls itself independent, but is connected to the US and British governments, and to billionaire speculator George Soros’s Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa.

When the New York Times needed Zimbabweans on the ground to comment on the upcoming election, its reporters turned to representatives of these two NGOs.

Noel Kututwa, the chairman of the Zimbabwe Election Support Network, told the newspaper that his group would be using “sampling techniques to assess the accuracy of the results announced nationally.”

Yet, Mr. Kututwa also told the newspaper that, “We will not have a free and fair election.” If Kututwa has already decided the election will be unfair and coerced, why bother assessing its accuracy?

Andrew Moyse, a regular commentator on Studio 7, an anti-Mugabe radio station sponsored by the US government’s propaganda arm, Voice of America, is quoted in the same article.

“Even if Mugabe only gets one vote,” Mr. Moyse opines, “the tabulated results are in the box and he has won.”

Moyse, on top of acting as a US mouthpiece on Voice of America, heads up the Media Monitoring Project. While part of the NGO election observer team the US and EU are relying on on the ground, he’s already decided the vote is rigged.

Kutatwa and Moyse are the only experts the New York Times cited in its story on the upcoming elections.

Both represent NGOs funded by hostile governments whose official policy is to replace Robert Mugabe and his government’s land reform and economic indigenization policies.

Both present themselves as independent election monitors, though they can hardly be independent of their sources of foreign government and foundation funding.

Both have declared in advance of the election that the vote will not be free and fair and that the tabulated results are already in the box.

Their foreordained conclusions happen to be the same conclusions their sponsors in the US and Britain are looking for, to obtain the consent of a confused public to intervene vigorously in Zimbabwe’s affairs.

It’s a symbiotic collaboration of media, state, and NGOs on the ground.

The target is public opinion, and ultimately, the poor of the world, and their struggles to break free from centuries of oppression.

(References to follow)