Khama's European Union Shooting List

[XXPANTHAXX]

By Tafataona Mahoso
Zimbabwe Herald

This is the first of a two-part article by Tafataona P. Mahoso
highlighting the evils of the Western-sponsored regime change agenda.

WHAT happened to Zimbabwean lecturer and journalist Caesar Zvayi at the
hands of the Botswana government is a profound warning to Sadc and
Africa about the evils of the Western-sponsored regime change project.

The Botswana President is keeping a shooting list of so-called "cronies
of Robert Mugabe" which he has received from the European Union but
which has been compiled by opposition parties, sponsored journalist
associations and non-governmental organisations for pay.

For Pan-Africanists to appreciate the threat which the EU and its
Botswana collaborators pose to African freedom, let us look at an
extract from journalist Naomi Klein’s recent book, The Shock Doctrine:
The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

The extract concerns an Egyptian man who was put on a CIA shooting list
while visiting Pakistan. He was, therefore, kidnapped from Pakistan and
taken to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where it was found, too late, that he
should never have been on the CIA list, except for the fact that the CIA
was offering good prize money to those who compiled the shooting lists.
Here is the extract:

"Do you have any theories about why the government and the Pakistani
intelligence folks would sell you out and turn you over to the (North)
Americans?"

"Come on, man," he replied, "you know what happened. In Pakistan you can
buy people for US$10. So what about US$5 000?"

"So they sold you?" the tribunal member asked, as if the thought had
never occurred to him.

"Yes."

But Klein does not stop with just that exchange. She then goes to other
research which shows that the Egyptian victim of US kidnapping was
released, too late, when it became clear that he had been put on the
shooting list by cynical and over-zealous Pakistanis who wanted the US$5
000 prize badly.

"According to the Pentagon’s own figures, 86 percent of the prisoners at
Guantanamo were handed over by Afghan and Pakistani fighters or agents
after bounties were announced. As of December 2006, the Pentagon had
released 360 prisoners. The Associated Press was able to track down 245
of them; 205 had been cleared of all charges when they returned to their
home countries.

According to the Chronicle issue of August 13 and Herald of August 15,
2008, the new President of Botswana has ordered the forced expulsion of
four Zimbabweans so far for the crime of being labelled supporters of
Zimbabwean President Mugabe and being on a white man’s (EU) shooting
list.

Those who have studied the histories of apartheid and imperialist
"regime change" will not fail to realise that the Botswana leader is now
involved in a white man’s crime dating back from the beginning of the
Cold War in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

The compilation of a shooting list on a country is one of the key stages
in the development of the white imperialists’ regime change and
destabilisation plan. It was used in the US-sponsored fascist
destruction of democracy in Chile in 1973; it was used in the
destruction of the progressive mixed economies of Argentina and Brazil
and the imposition of neo-liberalism in those countries in 1976 and 1965
respectively.

It was a critical tool in the enforcement of apartheid in South Africa,
with the authors of the book Automating Apartheid accusing the US
government and US computer companies of computerising the police,
intelligence and military systems of South Africa whose responsibilities
included the generation of similar shooting lists of freedom fighters to
be eliminated.

Before we look at some of the historical cases, it helps to examine the
issues at stake.

Just as the US found that 86 percent of its kidnapped prisoners at
Guantanamo Bay were kidnapped after the announcement of prize monies of
up to US$5 000, Sadc will also find that the shooting lists of banned
Zimbabweans are also being paid for by British, US and EU spies and NGOs
serving the regime change project in our region. Even some journalists
have also been involved in selling one another to the highest bidder.

But our main concern here is to warn Sadc that some of its members and
certain churches, NGOs and associations are engaged in an evil project
which has an ugly past of which they may not be fully aware.

Since the document which became the so-called Zimbabwe Democracy and
Economic Recovery Act (ZIDERA) was written in 2000, Zimbabweans have
been told by MDC-T and its sponsors that the sanctions against Zimbabwe
were only "targeted travel bans". The truth is that targeting
individuals has always been part and parcel of regime change programmes
which also include economic sanctions and financials warfare. Targeting
individuals by compiling shooting lists is not in any way inconsistent
with economic warfare or with an economic blockade.

Unfortunately, journalists in Zimbabwe have routinely failed to unbundle
the concept of targeted sanctions in terms of recent history and
practice. What exactly is involved?

First, the compilation of shooting lists was perfected during that part
of the Cold War known as the McCarthy era in the US.

Its logic has been revived by George W Bush under the binary doctrine of
"You are either with us, the good guys, or you are with them, the
terrorists."

So, in each targeted state, the CIA and its collaborators always compile
lists of the bad guys on the other side. That list is used for various
purposes, some of which we shall demonstrate through real historical
cases.

In Chile, the binary processes began with the massive selection on
youths who were to be trained to become "the good guys. Using the Ford
Foundation and other organisations, the US government selected students
from Chile and channelled them to the University of Chicago where they
were trained in the neoliberal economic ideology of Milton Friedman and
John Williamson.

Chile’s foreign minister in the 1990s was to describe the channelling of
Chilean students to the University of Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s as
"a striking example of an organised transfer of ideology from the United
States to a country within its direct sphere of influence".

But the successful election and inauguration of Salvador Allende and his
Popular Unity Government against the US-sponsored opposition in Chile
convinced the CIA that it could not win Chile for neoliberal imperialism
through the battle for ideas. The people of Chile would have to be
forced, through fascism and mass torture, to realise what was "good for
the".

The CIA, therefore, started to plan for a coup d’état which eventually
overthrew the popular Allende government on September 11, 1973. This was
planned carefully between the CIA and rightwing generals in the
military. As part of the plan for the coup, a shooting list was compiled
by the CIA and given to the rightwing generals led by General Augusto
Pinochet.

The list included intellectuals, professors, progressive union leaders,
students and patriotic members of the armed forces who were committed to
upholding the democratic constitution and protecting the country’s
national independence and sovereignty.

In Chile, as in Indonesia eight years before, the shooting list was
detailed and thorough enough to enable Gen Pinochet’s death squads to
move around after the coup and pluck out those people who had been
identified.

Those on the shooting list who were members of the armed forces were
murdered before the coup d’etat in order to pave way for the illegal
regime change and leave the targeted President without adequate defence.
After the coup d’etat, more than 13 500 civilians were rounded up and
detained immediately.

Before these acts of national mass torture were over, 3 200 persons were
"disappeared", which means that they were murdered in such a way that
their bodies have never been accounted for. It is believed that they
were cut up and dropped in the ocean. More than 80 000 were imprisoned,
and 200 000 had to flee the country for fear of persecution. Pan
Africanists will remember also that the murder of the first Congolese
Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and his close advisors and followers in
1961 was carried out according to a CIA shooting list.

Let us now turn to the example of Indonesia. The story begins eight
years before the fascist coup d’etat in Chile.

The people of Indonesia were punished through the provocation of two
holocausts (1965-66 and 1975-81) for their role in Afro-Asian solidarity
and in the Non-Aligned Movement. Zimbabwe has a lot to learn from this
imperialist treatment of Indonesia.

In order not to confuse rhetoric with actual practice, the first
question Zimbabweans must ask about themselves is: Why did the US and
Europe intervene in Indonesia the way they did and why are they
similarly interfering in the internal affairs of Zimbabwe and in
bilateral relations between Zimbabwe and Britain?

In Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corporations, Barnet and
Muller provide part of the answer:

"Capital and ideological purity were preserved together. The readier the
Pentagon and CIA were to bring down or raise up a government, the better
the investment climate for US corporations. US military power was used
to establish the ground rules within which American businesses could
operate.

The US government acted as a consultant for rightist coups in Bolivia,
Brazil, Chile, Greece and Indonesia . . ."

In the 1960s, Indonesia was viewed in Europe and America as the richest
core of the South-East-Asia region, containing 85 percent of the world’s
natural rubber, more than 45 percent of the word’s tin, 65 percent of
the world’s copra and 23 percent of the world’s chromium ore.

In other words, Indonesia was central in terms of rich raw materials and
minerals and in terms of ideological leadership in Afro-Asian solidarity
against imperialism.