mugabe | ukwatch.net

Zimbabwe election: US and UK move to impose sanctions

tim — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:52:22 +0000

Robert Mugabe was inaugurated for a sixth term as President of Zimbabwe on Sunday, following an election campaign characterised by government backed violence and intimidation.

Mugabe, standing for the ruling ZANU-PF, claimed to have received more than 85 percent of the vote. But his only opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), had withdrawn from the campaign because of the level of violence and intimidation. International observers condemned the elections. “The current atmosphere prevailing in the country did not give rise to the conduct of free, fair and credible elections,” said Marwick Khumalo head of the Pan-African Parliament monitoring team.

Observers from Zimbabwe’s neighbours in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) concurred. “The elections,” the SADC observers concluded, “did not represent the will of the people of Zimbabwe.”

The elections were “worse than those we witnessed in Angola in 1992, after decades of war, and are not credible,” one SADC observer said.

Zimbabwean observers called off their plans to monitor the polls because it was too dangerous.

A government-sponsored campaign of beatings, kidnappings and murders has left 104 people dead and 3,500 injured. Doctors who have been treating the wounded say that this is just the tip of the iceberg. “What we are seeing is probably 10 percent of what has actually happened,” a doctor who wished to remain anonymous told reporters. He said that the violence was the “worst the country has witnessed.”

The injuries he had treated were more serious than those experienced during the liberation war of the 1970s. “This is much, much more severe,” the doctor said, “We are not seeing simple fractures, we are seeing bones smashed into 20 pieces. People being forced to walk on burning coals, having scalding water poured over them and their wounds poisoned.”

Marwick Kumhalo said that monitors had evidence of violence and intimidation all over the country in the run up to the election. The turnout, he said, was low.

In Mashonaland the number of votes announced by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) exceeds the number of registered voters. The ZEC claimed that the turn out was comparable to that in the first round of the elections in March. But some polling stations in Bulawayo reported that they did not receive a single voter.

In Harare, the capital, few voters were seen. Many registered voters said that they did not intend to vote. There were a large number of spoilt ballot papers. Some had obscene language directed at Mugabe.

Turnout was very low in major urban areas. Voters in those areas can expect retribution. Reprisals have already been reported in the working class suburb of Chitungwiza outside Harare.

In the wake of the election the repression is continuing. Anyone who does not have the red ink stained finger that shows they voted is immediately at risk.

The ZEC has handed the details of polling patterns in each electoral ward to the government. Security forces and government-backed militias will be able to target voters in wards that did not endorse Mugabe.

Leaked minutes from the Joint Operations Command (JOC), which has been coordinating the coercion, indicate that the regime has decided to wipe out the opposition MDC.

The UK based Independent has seen sworn affidavits from reserve bank officials who transported money to regional organisers to finance the campaign of violence against the opposition.

There are reports that re-education camps at which opposition voters have been tortured are being re-supplied for a second phase of the campaign. An opposition activist told reporters that local businesses in Chinhoyi in Mashonaland West are being forced to make contributions to fund the repression.

“These camps are now regrouping. They’re going to unleash another terror campaign,” he said.

Mugabe went almost directly from his inauguration to the African Union (AU) summit in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt. The response of other African leaders to his presence was muted. They are reluctant to criticise a fellow African leader in public. Many of them have records of repression as bad, or worse than Mugabe’s.

Other African leaders, such as the summit’s host Muhammad Hosni Mubarak, are notoriously corrupt. Mubarak is accused of rigging the 2005 election. These were the first multi-party elections to take place since he came to power in 1981. He has maintained a state of emergency rule for the last 25 years.

Mubarak and his fellow African leaders have no more desire to allow democratic rights to their people than Mugabe. All the African rulers at the Sharm el Sheikh summit have for the most part enriched a tiny elite at the expense of the majority of the population.

But these regimes value their relationship with the United States and are coming under intense pressure to isolate and condemn Mugabe.

Egyptian prisons, for example, have proved invaluable in providing a secret base for the torture of US detainees in the so-called war on terror. The Italian authorities are currently investigating the “extraordinary rendition” of Abu Omar, an Egyptian cleric living as a refugee in Italy. He was seized by the CIA from the street in Milan in 2003. He was then taken to the US airbase at Brescia and flown to Ramstein in Germany from where he was taken to an Egyptian prison and tortured.

Even the Sudanese government, which is regularly condemned in the US press, has proved useful in intelligence matters to the US government. Muammar al-Gaddafi of Libya was recruited to the US “war on terror” in 2004.

The African states may well acquiesce to US demands on Mugabe, if they want to maintain their favoured status as allies in the war on terror.

Zimbabwe has become something of test case for US power in Africa, which has suffered a serious setback following the military debacle in Iraq and the emergence of China as a major player on the continent.

“I would suggest that one not take from the soft words in an open plenary as a reflection of the deep concern of leaders here of the situation in Zimbabwe,” said US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Jendayi Fraser. “I would expect them to have very, very strong words for him.”

Her remarks were as much an instruction to the African leaders as a comment for journalists. The US, Britain and the European Union have made it clear that they will not recognise Mugabe as president of Zimbabwe.

Visiting Beijing, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called for China to support an arms embargo against Zimbabwe. But Chinese Foreign Secretary Yang Jiechi insisted that the only way forward was for the government of Zimbabwe to enter into talks with the opposition.

It seems that a call for a negotiated settlement and a power-sharing government like that established in Kenya following the disputed election earlier this year may emerge from the AU summit. On the second day of the summit the South African paper Business Day reported that President Thabo Mbeki was close to brokering a deal between Mugabe and Tsvangirai.

Even if Thabo Mbeki succeeds in establishing a government of national unity, that is unlikely to be the end of the matter. The US and UK seem to have already rejected this option.

An article in the Financial Times on 25 June posed a somewhat different scenario. The article’s authors reflected on the recent pronouncements by a series of African leaders and former leaders denouncing Mugabe.

Rising commodity prices and economic liberalisation has ensured that growth rates across much of Africa remain at 5 percent, the article said. But food prices and transport costs are rising fast, it warned. Under these circumstances, Mugabe’s intransigence may have unforeseen effects.

“Not only has Robert Mugabe put southern Africa in jeopardy. Like ripples on a pond, which can drown a man already up to his nose in water, his actions can strain an uneasy peace in Kenya, affect food shipments to refugees in east Africa and add to the trials of Britain’s beleaguered government.”

The article was written by former Africa editor of the Financial Times Michael Holman and Dr Gregg Mills, director of the Brenthurst Foundation, a think tank founded by the Oppenheimer family to further the economic development of Africa. These two old Africa hands proceeded to imagine a scenario in which attacks on whites might lead the UK to attempt an evacuation of its nationals and a convoy to the South African border might be attacked.

Zimbabwe’s second city of Bulawayo, the article suggests, might become a centre of resistance and railway connections might be severed. Mbeki might offer Mugabe sanctuary in South Africa, but President of the ANC Jacob Zuma and the South African trade unions might respond by organising “countrywide protests.”

In the midst of all that, Holman and Mills imagine, “Somali-based terrorists bomb a tourist hotel” while in Kenya further ethnic riots disrupt the power-sharing government and hamper relief to refuges in central Africa.

This could be the plot of a political thriller rather than an article in a sober financial journal. But the fact that it appears in the Financial Times and is the work of two senior commentators on Africa gives it a certain weight.

Such is the fragility of the world situation following the credit crunch and the still expanding speculative bubble in commodity prices that Mugabe’s attempt to hang on to power threatens to destabilise not only southern Africa, but the entire continent. In recognising that threat, Holman and Mills evince a desire to seize the moment and precipitate a crisis that they envisage to be already on the horizon.

How far the US and UK intelligence agencies would be behind the disastrous scenarios that Holman and Mills draft out, we may never know. But it is revealing that such influential commentators assume only a bloody outcome is possible in Zimbabwe.

The article is an indication of the extent to which the attitude of the US and UK towards Zimbabwe has shifted. At present it is accepted that the US and UK cannot intervene openly in Zimbabwe. As the Economist recently said, “other methods, with Africans to the fore, must be tried first.” But the scenario drafted out by Mills and Holman would provide a pretext for American and British intervention.

An editorial in the Financial Times expressed the western powers’ dissatisfaction with Mbeki’s attempts to establish a government of national unity in Zimbabwe.

“Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s president, who has sought to resolve the crisis with a Kenyan-style national unity government, should accept he has failed. There is no way any western nation will send international aid to a regime that has Mr. Mugabe or ZANU-PF at the helm. An MDC government that included a small ZANU-PF contingent would be an acceptable price for ending the violence, but is unlikely to happen.”

The Financial Times called for tighter sanctions and demanded that “Western financial institutions should be debarred from operating in Harare.”

US and UK policy is moving rapidly in this direction. President George Bush announced that he had instructed Condoleezza Rice and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to “develop sanctions against this illegitimate Government of Zimbabwe and those who support it.”

The giant mining company Anglo-American has come under intense pressure to abandon its planned investment in a Zimbabwe platinum mine. Barclays bank is coming under pressure to cease business in Zimbabwe after more than a century. The UK-based supermarket chain Tesco has announced that it has stopped sourcing goods from Zimbabwe.

These economic measures and the proposed sanctions will inevitably have more impact on the population of Zimbabwe than on the ruling elite, who have long since established their own secret channels for funding. Tesco, Barclays and Anglo-American are major employers in what is left of the formal economy in Zimbabwe.

Sanctions will mean that it will become even more difficult for hospitals to source medicines and for ordinary people unconnected with the regime to buy fuel. As the West tightens the screws on the Zimbabwean economy, more people will flock across the country’s borders to escape poverty and malnutrition.

The experience of the recent election has demonstrated that Morgan Tsvangirai’s opposition offers no alternative to Mugabe or to Western domination. From the outset, Tsvangirai’s party has been a pliant tool of the West and the international financial institutions.

Tsvangirai’s pusillanimous performance in the second round of the presidential elections seems to have convinced any potential backers in the West that he is useless for their purposes. He announced his withdrawal from the election last week with a letter to the Guardian in which he appealed for international military intervention. Within days he had denied that he ever sent that article to the paper. On its part the Guardian, while loath to discredit Tsvangirai, had to point out that they had received the article from the usual sources.

The “usual sources” turned out to be a “media consultant” who had provided 400 pieces under Tsvangirai’s byline for the Guardian, the Melbourne Age and the Washington Post. Inadvertently, Tsvangirai had admitted far more than he intended about the nature of his campaign and the extent to which it is run by big business interests and is far removed from the interests of the people who are being beaten and killed in Zimbabwe.

Mugabe, Britain and the Abuses of Anti-Colonialism

eddie — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 15:28:33 +0000

Over forty years ago, as Africa commenced the long and arduous process of decolonization, one of its foremost liberationist thinkers issued a prophetic warning. Frantz Fanon, himself a freedom fighter, wrote that the national leader in the postcolonial era should not ‘fall back into the past and become drunk on the remembrance of the epoch leading up to independence.’ His powerful descriptions of a once effective leader who gradually secedes from reality and betrays the people who entrust him with their future has resonances for the tragic situation in which Zimbabwe finds itself today. Having reduced a once significant anti-colonialism to a self-serving dogma, Robert Mugabe is the kind of fallen leader Fanon cautioned Africa against. Hesitant African leaders who are being called upon to intervene might want to reread his classic essay, ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’ from that classic liberationist text, The Wretched of the Earth,

As Zimbabwe spirals into further political chaos, Mugabe and his party’s addiction to power will further indulge an equally self-serving Western appetite for spectacles of Third World despotism. If Mugabe finds it convenient to invoke the demon of colonial oppression (which many Zimbabweans, barely thirty years out of colonial rule, remember all too well), he also enables British politicians to spout pieties condemning violence while their own nation is currently implicated in two dubious and bloody wars. Were the BBC and Channel 4 to show as many close-ups of injured and dead Iraqis as they do of Mugabe’s maimed victims, criticism of violence against innocents might be somewhat more evenly distributed than it currently is. The British government turns accusatory fingers in Zimbabwe’s direction while Mugabe shouts back anti-colonial slogans. It is a perfect symbiosis, a mutually convenient embrace of denunciation, with each party laying claim to the higher moral ground. The only innocents, however, are ordinary Zimbabweans.

Both Mugabe and Britain are guilty of avoiding historical truths in favour of a skewed story which legitimates their own position. Britain’s persistent refusal to acknowledge its own colonial legacies is contradictory. It reneged on its commitments to the land reform programme claiming, in Claire Short’s words, that there were no ‘links to former colonial interests’ while nevertheless concerning itself with the fate of the white farmers who represent these interests. Alongside an extremely selective use of human rights discourse, such contradictions mean that Mugabe’s denunciations have some truth to them even if their main purpose is to detract from the ruling elite’s own depravities. While Africa is ostensibly central to Britain’s international development agenda, the emphasis has always been on the paternalism of aid rather than acknowledging and making reparations for the economic devastation wrought by colonialism. Rarely do condemnations of land seizure, violence and intimidation extend back to the time Matabeleland came under British rule. This too was accompanied by the seizure of vast swathes of fertile land by a handful of British farmers while large numbers of Ndebele and Shona people were killed or forced into labour. Brutal modern regimes in that part of the globe didn’t begin with Mugabe.

Mugabe, meanwhile, should also reacquaint himself with the original aims of anti-colonialism and the people’s expectations of the liberation struggle in Zimbabwe. Having resisted the anti-poor agendas of international monetary institutions and initiated necessary land reforms, the Zimbabwean leader has also refused all responsibility for those many failures of his rule not reducible solely to the colonial past. A once dynamic band of freedom fighters have degenerated into a party who brandish their liberationist laurels while they subjugate, starve and brutalize an entire population in the name of anti-colonialism. The sanctions imposed by the West have, as they usually do in such cases, strengthened Mugabe’s brutish hold on power and further harmed the vulnerable. Real anti-colonialists like Fanon and Gandhi both insisted that that freedom was not about replacing the white tyrant with the brown or black one. Mugabe is the exemplary cautionary tale here, a freedom fighter who has essentially recolonized his people. Indeed, the very techniques of suppression and intimidation which the Zimbabwean leader whereas Mugabe has essentially recolonized his people. Indeed, the very techniques of suppression and intimidation deployed by the Zimbabwean leader, a knight of the British Empire until yesterday were taught to him by the colonial masters he professes to despise. Censorship, brutal suppression of resistance and the dismissal of any form of criticism as seditious were all part of the colonial arsenal. Quick to claim credit for spreading parliamentary democracy, Britain is less forthcoming about acknowledging the legacy of authoritarian rule also left behind by its empire.

Frantz Fanon died young, but one can imagine what he might have to say to his fellow former liberationist. Mr Mugabe, it is time for you to return the power which the Zimbabwean people once vested in you but which they now legitimately wish to reclaim. Liberate them from the tyranny of the rule you have exercised for too long and without a continuing mandate. Your actions weaken all of us who hold the accomplishments of liberation dear and only strengthen the hypocrisies of former colonial powers. The great tradition of African anti-colonialism to which you constantly refer has never been about blaming the colonizer alone; it has always taken account of the culpability and responsibilities of African leaders and elites.

As for those in Britain, it is time for the ‘proper analysis’ some commentators have called for, one which would include honest reflections on the imperial legacy rather than ‘shutting up’ because of colonial guilt. It is the only way to deprive Mugabe of his main moral weapon.This is not just about the kind of simple-minded ‘balance’ which the BBC generally advocates (though it has long since abandoned that value with regard to Zimbabwe), but also an informed sense of how history shapes the present. Failing this, Zimbabwe and the rest of us are destined to asphyxiate ourselves in what Fanon aptly termed ‘the tragic lie’ of the aftermath of colonialism.

This is an extended version of an article published in the Guardian which can be found
here

BBC: Imperial Tool

Ellie Keen — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 00:48:12 +0000

At a time of growing public disenchantment with the major media, millions now rely on alternate sources. Many online and print ones are credible. One of the world’s most relied on is not – the BBC. It’s an imperial tool, as corrupted as its dominant counterparts, been around longer than all of them, now in it for profit, and it’s vital that people know who BBC represents and what it delivers.

It was close but not quite the world’s first broadcaster. Other European nations claim the distinction along with KDKA Pittsburgh as the oldest US one. BBC’s web site states: “The British Broadcasting Company Ltd (its original name) was formed in October 1922….and began broadcasting on November 14….By 1925 the BBC could be heard throughout most of the UK. (Its) biggest influence….was its general manager, John Reith (who) envisioned an independent British broadcaster able to educate, inform and entertain the whole nation, free from political interference and commercial pressure.”

That’s what BBC says. Here’s a different view from Media Lens. It’s an independent “UK-based media-watch project….offer(ing) authoritative criticism” reflecting “reality” that’s free from the corrupting influence of media corporations and the governments they support.

Its creators and editors (Davids Cromwell and Edwards) ask: “Can the BBC tell the truth….when its senior managers are appointed by the government” and will be fired if they step out of line and become too critical. It notes that nothing “fundamentally changed since BBC founder Lord Reith wrote the establishment: ‘They know they can trust us not to be really impartial.’ “ He didn’t disappoint, nor have his successors like current Director-General and Chairman of the Executive Board Mark Thompson along with Michael Lyons, Chairman, BBC Trust that replaced the Board of Governors on January 1, 2007 and oversees BBC operations.

On January 1, 1927, BBC was granted a Royal Charter, made a state-owned and funded corporation, still pretends to be quasi-autonomous, and changed its name to its present one – The British Broadcasting Corporation. Its first Charter ran for 10 years, succeeding ones were renewed for equal fixed length periods, BBC is in its ninth Charter period, and is perhaps more dominant, pervasive and corrupted than ever in an age of marketplace everything and space-age technology with which to operate.

It’s now the world’s largest broadcaster, has about 28,000 UK employees and a vast number of worldwide correspondents and support staff nearly everywhere or close enough to get there for breaking news. It’s government-funded from revenues UK residents pay monthly to operate their television receivers – currently around 22 US dollars, and it also has other growing income sources from its worldwide commercial operations supplementing its noncommercial ones at home.

Most important is how BBC functions, who it serves, and Media Lens’ editors explain it best and keep at it with regular updates. They argue that the entire mass media, including BBC, function as a “propaganda system for elite interests.” It’s especially true for topics mattering most – war and peace, “vast corporate criminality,” US-UK duplicity, and “threats to the very existence of human life.” They’re systematically “distorted, suppressed, marginalized or ignored” in a decades-long public trust betrayal by an organization claiming “honesty, integrity (is) what the BBC stands for (and it’s) free from political influence and commercial pressure.”

In fact, BBC abandoned those notions straight away, and a glaring example came during the 1926 General Strike. Its web site says it stood up against Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill who “urged the government to take over the BBC, but (general manager) Reith persuaded Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin that this would be against the national interest” it was sworn to serve.

Media Lens forthrightly corrects the record. Reith never embraced the public trust. He used BBC for propaganda, operated it as a strikebreaker, secretly wrote anti-union speeches for the Tories, and refused to give air time to worker representatives. It got BBC labeled the “British Falsehood Corporation,” and proved from inception it was a reliable business and government partner. It still is, of course, more than ever.

Consider BBC’s role during WW II when it became a de facto government agency, and throughout its existence job applicants have been vetted to be sure what side they’re on. Noted UK journalist John Pilger explains that independent-minded ones “were refused BBC posts (and still are) because they were not considered safe.”

Only “reliable” ones reported on the 1982 Falklands war, for example, that Margaret Thatcher staged to boost her low approval rating and improve her reelection chances. Leaked information later showed BBC executives ordered news coverage focused “primarily (on) government statements of policy” and to avoid impartiality considered “an unnecessary irritation.”

This has been BBC practice since inception – steadfastly pro-government and pro-business with UK residents getting no public service back for their automatic monthly billings to turn on their TVs – sort of like force-fed cable TV, whether or not they want it.

Back on BBC’s web site, it recounts its history by decades from the 1920s to the new millennium when post-9/11 controversies surfaced. BBC only cites one of them rather pathetically. This critique gives examples of its duplicity across the world.

Misreporting on Iraq – Deception over Truth

The controversy BBC mentioned was the so-called Hutton Inquiry into the death of Ministry of Defense weapons expert Dr. David Kelly. On July 18, 2003, reports were he committed suicide, but they were dubious at best. Here how BBC explained it: “a bitter row with Government” emerged after a “Today programme suggested that the Government ‘sexed up’ the case for war with Iraq in a dossier of evidence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (BBC governors) backed the report, rejecting (PM) Tony Blair’s (demands) for a retraction.”

“The row escalated over the following weeks when editorial flaws became evident.” Then came Kelly’s “suicide.” It made daily headlines because he was the source of the BBC report. “The Hutton Inquiry followed, and on January 28, 2004 chairman Gavyn Davies resigned when Lord Hutton’s findings were published. The following day the remaining governors accepted the resignation of Director-General Greg Dyke.”

True to form, BBC suppressed the truth, so here’s what we know. David Kelly, as an insider, accused authorities of faking a claim of Iraq WMDs that could be unleashed in 45 minutes with devastating effects. He then mysteriously turned up dead (three days after appearing before a televised government committee) to assure he’d tell no more tales with potentially smoking-gun evidence for proof. He apparently had plenty.

What BBC and the Blair government suppressed, a Kelly Investigation Group (KIG) examined and revealed. Consider these facts:

— Kelly’s death was pronounced suicide without an autopsy;

— Lord Hutton was aging and never before chaired a public inquiry, let alone one this sensitive making daily headlines;

— no formal inquest was ordered and was subsumed into the Hutton Inquiry;

— evidence showed Kelly’s body was moved twice;

— a supposed knife, bottle of water, glasses, and cap reported by later witnesses weren’t seen by the first ones who found Kelly;

— hemorrhaging from a left wrist arterial wound was ruled the cause of death, but there was little blood to substantiate it; other suspicious findings also suggested a thorough independent investigation was warranted.

In fact, evidence became clear that the real agenda was cover-up. Key witnesses weren’t called to testify. An anesthesiologist specialist read two KIG accounts (of known facts) about Kelly’s death and concluded that “the whole ‘suicide’ story (was) phony in the extreme….He was clearly murdered.” Another surgeon confirmed that Kelly couldn’t have died of hemorrhage as reported. It’s impossible to bleed to death from that kind of arterial severing.

Three other doctors also examined evidence, commented, and concluded that Kelly didn’t commit suicide. The doctors and KIG then wrote an 11 page letter to the Coroner, cited their concerns in detail, and got no response. In a follow-up phone call, the Coroner said that he saw the police report and felt everything was in order.

In the meantime, the Hutton report came out and was leaked a day early to defuse a possible murder angle. Concurrently, the Coroner refused to reopen the investigation, the Hutton Inquiry was bogus, it never proved suicide and, in fact, was commissioned to suppress Blair government lies, whitewash the whole affair, and end it with considerable BBC help.

In this instance, things didn’t play out as BBC planned, thanks to correspondent Andrew Gilligan. On May 29, 2003, he delivered what became known as his “6:07 AM dispatch” and said his source (David Kelly) alleged that the government “sexed up” the September dossier with the 45 minute WMD claim knowing it was false. He was immediately reigned in on subsequent accounts, but the damage was done, and Gilligan upped the stakes in a June 1 Mail on Sunday article.

In it, he quoted Kelly blaming Alastair Campbell (Blair government’s 1997 – 2003 Director of Communications and Strategy) for embellishing the dossier to provide cause for war against Iraq. The fat was now in the fire with Kelly through Gilligan accusing the Blair government of lying and BBC having to find an out and get back to business as usual.

It wouldn’t be simple with an exposed Campbell diary entry revealing he intended to go after Gilligan and apparently Kelly and do whatever it took to nail them. It all played out for days with Campbell demanding an apology and retraction, BBC wanting it to go away, Kelly’s July death, and other Blair allies defending the government with threats about reviewing BBC’s Charter until it ended predictably and disgracefully.

BBC cut a deal. Saying they resigned in late January 2004, it fired Gilligan along with Chairman Gavyn Davies and Director-General Greg Dyke. Even they weren’t immune to dismissal at a time of an “aberrant” report that later proved true. For BBC, it was back to business as usual under new management supporting two illegal wars showing no signs of ending or BBC reporting truthfully about them.

From the start, it championed Tony Blair’s “moral case for war,” was a complicit cheerleader for it with the rest of the media, and found no fault with Washington and London’s blaming Iraq’s regime for what it didn’t cause or could do nothing to prevent. Instead, round the clock propaganda ignored the facts and barely hinted at western responsibility for the most appalling crimes of war and against humanity that continue every day.

It’s the way BBC reports on everything. Fiction substitutes for fact, news is carefully filtered, wars of aggression are called liberating ones, yet consider what former BBC political editor Andrew Marr wrote in his 2004 book on British journalism: Those in the trade “are employed to be studiously neutral, expressing little emotion and certainly no opinion; millions of people would say that news is the conveying of fact, and nothing more.”

Even worse (and most humiliating) was his on-air 2003 post-Iraq invasion comment that he’d like to erase: “I don’t think anybody (can dispute) Tony Blair. He said that they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both these points he has been proved conclusively right. (Even) his critics (must) acknowledge that tonight he stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister as a result.”

So much for truth and accuracy and a free and impartial BBC. It continues to call a puppet prime minister legitimate; an occupied country liberated; a pillaged free market paradise “democracy;” with millions dead, displaced and immiserated unreported like it never happened.

Supporting Aggression in Afghanistan

BBC was no better on Afghanistan and considered the war largely over when Kabul fell on November 13, 2001. The bombing continues, but it was yesterday’s news, and only Taliban “crimes” matter. Unmentioned was how John Pilger portrayed the country in his newest book “Freedom Next Time.” He called it more like a “moonscape” than a functioning nation and likely more abused and long-suffering than any other.

Contrast that description with BBC’s reporting that Afghanistan is now free from “fear, uncertainty and chaos” because the US and UK “act(ed) benignly; (their) humanitarian military assault is beneficial (but those) meddlesome (Taliban) are trying (to) undermin(e) our good work.” Unreported is what really lay behind the 9/11 attack and the price Afghans and Iraqis keep paying for it.

BBC’s Disturbing Balkan Wars Reporting

BBC’s shame is endless, and consider how it reported on the 1990s Balkan wars that evoked popular support on the right and left. Slobadon Milosevic was unfairly vilified for the West’s destruction of Yugoslavia. Things culminated disgracefully with a 1999 seventy-eight day NATO assault on Serbia. Its pretext was protecting Kosovo’s Albanian population, but its real aim was quite different – removing a head of state obstacle to controlling Central Europe, then advancing east to confront a few others.

Milosevic was arrested in April 2001, abducted from his home, shipped off to The Hague, hung out to dry when he got there, then silenced to prevent what he knew from coming out that would explain the conflict’s real aim and who the real criminals were.

The war’s pretext was a ruse, Kosovo is a Serbian province but in 1999 was stripped away. Ever since, it’s been a US-NATO occupied colony, denied its sovereignty, and run by three successive puppet prime ministers with known ties to organized crime and drugs trafficking. It’s also home to one of America’s largest military bases, Camp Bondsteel, and it’s no exaggeration saying the territory is more military base than a functioning political entity.

Then on February 17, 2008, during a special parliamentary session, Kosovo unilaterally declared its independence. It violated international law but got something more important – complicit western backing (outweighing a one-third EU nation block opposition). It also got one-sided BBC support. Its reporting took great care to ignore an illegal act, leave unmentioned that Kosovo is part of Serbia, or explain the UN’s (1999) Security Council Resolution 1244. It recognizes the “sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia” and only permits Kosovo’s self-government as a Serbian province. No longer with plenty of BBC help making it possible.

Targeting Hugo Chavez and Assailing His Democratic Credentials

BBC misreports everywhere at one time or other, depending on breaking world events and the way power elitists view them. Consider Venezuela and how BBC reported on Chavez’s most dramatic two days in office and events preceding them. Its April 12, 2002 account disdained the truth and headlined “Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez (was) forced to resign by the country’s military. (His) three years in power (ended) after a three-day general strike….in which 11 people died….more than 80 others (were) injured,” and BBC suggested Chavez loyalists killed them. It reported “snipers opened fire on a crowd of more than 150,000 (and it) triggered a rebellion by the country’s military.”

During anti-Chavez demonstrations, “Mr. Chavez appeared on the state-run television denouncing the protest, (then BBC falsely reported corporate TV channels it called independent ones) were taken off the air by order of the government. (High-ranking) military officers rebell(ed) against Mr. Chavez. (He) finally quit after overnight talks with a delegation of generals at the Miraflores presidential palace.”

“BBC’s Adam Easton, in Caracas at the time, says there are noisy celebrations on the streets, (and former army general) Guaicaipuro Lameda said Mr. Chavez’s administration had been condemned because it began arming citizens’ committees (and) these armed groups….fired at opposition protesters.”

In another report, BBC was jubilant in quoting Venezuela’s corporate press. They welcomed Chavez’s ouster and called him an “autocrat,” “incompetent” and a “coward.” They accused him of “order(ing) his sharpshooters to open fire on innocent people (and) betray(ing his) country.”

BBC went along without a hint of dissent or a word of the truth, but where was BBC when a popular uprising and military support restored Chavez to office two days later? It quietly announced a “chastened….Chavez return(ed) to office after the collapse of the interim government….and pledged to make necessary changes.” In spite of vilifying him in the coup’s run-up, cheerleading it when it happened and calling it a resignation, BBC put on a brave face. It had to be painful saying: “The UK welcomed Mr. Chavez’s return to power, saying that any change of government should be achieved by democratic means.”

It’s hard imagining Caracas correspondents Greg Morsbach and James Ingham see it that way. Morsbach called the country a “left-wing haven” on the occasion of 100,000 people taking part in the 2006 World Social Forum in the capital. He said the city is “used to staging big events (opposing) ‘neo-liberal’ economic policies,” then couldn’t resist taking aim at Chavez. “Five hundred metres away from the (downtown) Hilton,” Morsbach noted, “homeless people scavenge in dustbins for what little food they can find.” He then quoted a man named Carlos “who spent the last three years sleeping rough on the streets” and felt Bolivarianism did nothing for him.

It’s done plenty for Venezuelans but Morsbach won’t report it. Under Chavez, social advances have been remarkable and consider two among many. According to Venezuela’s National Statistics Institute (INE), the country’s poverty rate (before Chavez) in 1997 was 60.94%. It dropped sharply under Bolarvarianism to a low of 45.38% in 2001, rose to 62.09% after the crippling 2002-03 oil management lockout, and then plummeted to a low of around 27% at year end 2007. In addition, unemployment dropped from 15% in 1997 to INE’s reported 6.2% in December 2007.

Morsbach also omitted how Chavez is tackling homelessness. He’s reducing it with programs like communal housing, drug treatment and providing modest stipends for the needy. His goal – “for there (not) to be a single child in the streets….not a single beggar in the street.” It’s working through Mission Negra Hipolita that guides the homeless to shelters and rehab centers. They provide medical and psychological care and pay homeless in them a modest amount in return for community service. No mention either compares Venezuela under Chavez to America under George Bush (and likely Britain under anyone) where no homeless programs exist, the problem is increasing, nothing is being done about it, and the topic is taboo in the media.

Instead in a BBC profile, Chavez is called “increasingly autocratic, revolutionary (and) combative.” He’s a man who’s “alienated and alarmed the country’s traditional political elite, as well as several foreign governments,” (and he) court(s) controversy (by) making high-profile visits to Cuba and Iraq” and more. He “allegedly flirt(s) with leftist rebels in Colombia and mak(es) a huge territorial claim on Guyana.”

The account then implies Chavez is to blame for “relations with Washington reach(ing) a new low (because he) accused (the Bush administration) of fighting terror with terror” post-9/11, and in a September 2006 UN General Assembly speech called the president “the devil.”

Chavez’s December 2007 constitutional reform referendum was also covered. It was defeated, the profile suggested controversial elements in it, but omitted explaining its objective – to deepen and broaden Venezuelan democracy, more greatly empower the people, provide them more social services, and make government more accountable to its citizens. Instead, BBC highlighted White House spokeswoman Dana Perino saying: Venezuelans “spoke their minds, and they voted against the reforms that Hugo Chavez had recommended and I think that bodes well for the country’s future and freedom and liberty.”

In another piece, Inghram took aim at the country’s “whirlwind of nationalisations, and threats to private companies (are) changing Venezuela’s economic climate and threaten to widen a tense social divide.” It’s part of Chavez’s “campaign to turn Venezuela into a socialist state” with suggestive innuendoes about what that implies, omitting its achievements, and reporting nothing about how business in the country is booming or that Chavez’s approach is pragmatic.

Instead, Inghram cites his critics saying “his plan is all about power” (and) bring(ing) no benefit to the nation” in lieu of letting business run it as their private fiefdom. It’s how they’ve always done it, Venezuelans were deeply impoverished as a result, and BBC loves taking aim at a leader who wants to change things for the better and is succeeding.

It refers to his “stepp(ing) up his radical revolution since being re-elected in December 2006.” Venezuela is “very divided” and its president “far too powerful (and) can rule by decree” – with no explanation of Venezuela’s Enabling Law, his limited authority under it, its expiration after 18 months, and that Venezuela’s (pre-Bolivarian) 1961 constitution gave comparable powers to four of the country’s past presidents.

BBC further assailed Chavez’s refusal to review one of RCTV’s operating licenses and accused him of limiting free expression. Unreported was the broadcaster’s tainted record, its lack of ethics or professional standards, and its lawless behavior. Specifically omitted was its leading role in instigating and supporting the aborted April 2002 coup and its subsequent complicity in the 2002-03 oil-management lockout and multi-billion dollar sabotage against state oil company PDVSA.

Despite it, RCTV got a minor slap on the wrist, lost only its VHF license, and it still operates freely on Venezuelan cable and satellite. Yet, if an American broadcaster was as lawless, it would be banned from operating, and its management (under US law) could be prosecuted for sedition or treason for instigating and aiding a coup d’etat against a sitting president. BBC ignored RCTV’s offense, assailed Hugo Chavez unjustifiably, and reported in its usual deferential to power way.

It falsely stated RCTV’s license wasn’t renewed because “it supported opposition candidates (and said) hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in Caracas….some to celebrate, others to protest.” Unexplained was that pro-government supporters way outnumbered opponents, it’s the same every time, and they gather spontaneously for every public Chavez address. Also ignored is that opposition demonstrations are usually small and staged-for-media events so BBC and anti-Chavistas in the press can call them huge and a sign Chavez’s support is waning. As BBC put it this time: The situation “highlight(s), once again, how deeply divided Venezuela is” under its “controversial” president – who’s popular support is so considerable BBC won’t report it.

BBC’s War Against Mugabe

On April 4, The New York Times correspondent Michael Wines wrote what BBC often reports: “New Signs of Mugabe Crackdown in Zimbabwe.” It highlighted “police raids….against the main opposition party, foreign journalists (and) rais(ed) the specter of a broad crackdown (to keep) the country’s imperiled leaders in power.”

Below is what BBC reported the same day in one of its continuing inflammatory accounts in the wake of Zimbabwe’s March 29 presidential and parliamentary elections. It pitted the country’s African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) President Robert Mugage against two opponents – the misnamed Movement for Democratic Change’s (MDC) Morgan Tsvangirai (a western recruited stooge) and independent candidate Simba Makoni.

In its role as an unabashed Tsvangirai cheerleader, BBC headlined: “Mugabe’s ZANU-PF prepares for battle” after its parliamentary defeat – MDC winning 99 seats; ZANU-PF 97 (including an uncontested one); a breakaway MDC faction 10 seats and an independent, one, in Zimbabwe’s 210 constituencies with only 206 seats being contested; ZANU didn’t contest one seat, and three MDC candidates died in the run-up to the poll.

Results for the 60 (largely ceremonial) Senate seats were announced April 5 with ZANU-PF winning 30 and the combined opposition gaining the same number. In addition, ZANU-PF announced 16 parliamentary seats are being contested and ordered recounts for them that could change the electoral balance. Mugabe is also challenging the presidential tally, asked the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) to delay releasing it and wants it retabulated because of what he calls “errors and miscalculations.”

MDC officials called the move illegal, BBC seems eager to agree, and then went on the attack the way it always does against independent black republics. It can’t tolerate them, but it’s especially hostile to Zimbabwe. It’s the former Rhodesia that British-born South African businessman, politician and De Beers chief Cecil Rhodes founded shortly after Britain invaded in 1893 and conquered Matabeleland. UK soldiers and volunteers were given 6000 (stolen) acres of land and within a year controlled the area’s 10,000 most fertile square miles through a white supremacist land grab. They went further as well, confiscated cattle, and coerced the native Ndebele people into forced labor. Brits also exploited the Shonas, they rebelled, and a year later were crushed at the cost of 8000 African lives.

Decades of exploitation followed, a 1961 constitution was drafted to keep whites in power, Rhodesia declared its independence in 1965, but Britain intervened to protect white privilege. UN sanctions and guerrilla war followed, Southern Rhodesia declared itself a republic in 1970, then became the independent nation of Zimbabwe (the former Southern Rhodesia, then just Rhodesia in 1964) in April 1980 after 1979 elections created independent Zimbabwe Rhodesia.

Robert Mugabe was elected president, won overwhelmingly, remained the country’s leader for 28 years, and at age 84 ran again for another term on March 29. He’s called outspoken, controversial, and polarizing but for millions in Zimbabwe (and in Africa) he’s a hero of his nation’s liberation struggle against white supremacist rule.

America, Britain and other colonial powers, however, don’t view him that way, and therein lies today’s conflict. A racist UK can’t tolerate an independent black republic and uses its state-owned BBC to vilify Mugabe and target him for regime change in a pattern all too familiar.

In a close March 29 election, vote-rigging is suspected, results days later weren’t announced, and BBC accused ZANU-PF of knowing and concealing them as well as governing dictatorially. With no official totals, it stated “Mugabe….failed to pass the 50% barrier needed to avoid a second-round run-off.” It’s now been announced, by law must be held within 21 days of March 29 (by or before April 19), but AP reports “diplomats in Harare (the capital) and at the UN said Mugabe (wants) a 90 day delay to give security forces time to clamp down.”

BBC expects trouble, appears trying to incite it, and denounces Mugabe loyalists as hard-line, militant and known for their violence. In battle mode, correspondent Grant Ferret from Johannesburg (BBC’s banned from Zimbabwe because of its anti-Mugabe reporting) states: “Intimidation is….likely to be part of the second round. Offices used by the opposition were ransacked on Thursday night (April 3) (and) two foreign nationals (were) detained (for) violating the country’s media laws.” An NGO worker “promoting democracy” was also detained.

Correspondent Ian Pannell joins the assault. He stresses a crumbling economy, out-of-control inflation, people unable to cope and talking everywhere about “a struggle to make ends meet.” They “spend hours queuing at the bank or waiting in line at a bakery where lines stretch around the corners. Many shops have as many empty shelves as full ones,” Zimbabweans are suffering, and “80% of the workforce” has no regular job. People survive anyway they can, there’s “a thriving black market,” overseas remittances help, but “fields (are) without crops, shops without goods, petrol stations….low or empty, women at the side of the road begging for food, traders desperate for customers and hard currency.”

There’s no denying Zimbabwe is under duress, but BBC won’t explain why. It never reported that ever since Mugabe’s ZANU-PF ended white supremacist rule, he’s been vilified for being independent, redistributing white-owned farms, mostly (but not entirely) staying out of the IMF’s clutches, and waging a valiant struggle to prevent a return to an exploited past.

Doing it hasn’t been easy, however. It’s meant getting little or no outside aid, bending the rules, restraining civil liberties, banning hostile journalism like BBC’s, but up to now (most often) holding reasonably free and fair elections and winning every time. Despite Zimbabwe’s problems, Mugabe’s popular support has been strong, especially from the country’s war veterans who didn’t fight for freedom to hand it back to new colonial masters.

But it looks like that’s where Zimbabwe is heading. The March 29 election showed weakness. The opposition made it close and forced a runoff (unless a retabulated count shows otherwise). It controls the parliament (barring a retallied change) and has strong western support that smells blood. Behind the scenes, regime change is planned and this time may succeed. An 84 year old Mugabe’s time may be passing – if not now, soon.

Zimbabwe’s economy has collapsed, drought problems have been severe, food and fuel shortages are acute, 83% of the population lives on less than $2 a day, half the people are malnourished, more than 10% of children die before age five, and the country’s HIV/AIDS rate is the fourth highest in the world. In addition, average life expectancy plunged to 37.3 years, inflation is out of control, conditions are disastrous, and it was mostly engineered by 2002 western-imposed sanctions.

Fifteen EU member states and Australia support them plus America after passage of the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of 2001 (ZIDERA). Its effect has been devastating on an already weakened economy. It cut off the country’s access to foreign capital and credit, denied its efforts to reschedule debt, froze financial and other assets of ZANU-PF officials and companies linked to them, and effectively brought the economy to its knees.

ZIDERA states that economic and other sanctions will be enforced until the US president certifies that the “rule of law has been restored in Zimbabwe, including respect for ownership and title to property….and an end to lawlessness.” Unmentioned is the Act’s real purpose – restoring white supremacist rule, exploiting the black majority and doing to Zimbabwe what’s happening throughout Africa and in nearly all other developing states.

If Mugabe goes, the IMF can swoop in with a promised $2 billion (renewable) aid package for a new MDC government with the usual strings attached – sweeping structural adjustments, privatizing everything, ending social services, mandating mass layoffs, crushing small local businesses, escalating poverty, and returning the country to its colonial past under new millennium management under a black stooge of a president to make it all look legitimate.

BBC has a role in this, and it’s been at it for decades. It’s waged a multi-year anti-Mugabe jihad and seems now to be going for broke. For days, broadcasts practically scream regime change. Reports are inflammatory, visibly one-sided, with correspondents saying (MDC’s) Tsvangirai won, election results are being withheld, no runoff is necessary, and when it’s held Mugabe will use violence to retain power.

On April 5, BBC quoted Tsvangirai accusing Mugabe of “preparing to go to war against the country’s people (and) deploying troops and armed militias to intimidate voters ahead of a possible runoff….thousands of army recruits are being recruited, militants are being rehabilitated and some few claiming to be war veterans are already on the warpath.”

Tsvangirai wants the courts to force officials to release the results, Zimbabwe’s High Court is hearing MDC’s petition, but earlier it was claimed “armed police prevented MDC lawyers” from petitioning the Court to get them. BBC quoted one of them saying “police had threatened to shoot them,” then quoted Tsvangirai again saying Zimbabwe’s central bank was printing money for bribes and government-financed violence and intimidation campaigns.

BBC also suggests that international intervention is needed “to prevent violence if a second round is held (because) violence and intimidation (have) been characteristic of past (Zimbabwe) elections.” It quotes another MDC spokesman saying ZANU-PF will “use a runoff to exact revenge….it’s a strategy for retribution.”

Its correspondent Peter Biles reports “the ruling party remains divided….many (want) a change of leadership, and believe under Mr. Mugabe, Zimbabwe has no future.” BBC hammers at this daily in a full-court press to force out Mugabe either willingly or with outside intervention, and now is the time.

A broadcaster is supposed to be neutral, fair and balanced and BBC states “Honesty and integrity (is) what (it) stands for.” BBC is dedicated to “educate (and) inform, free from political interference and commercial pressure.”

The US-based Society of Professional Journalists states in its Preamble that it’s the “duty of the journalist (to seek) truth and provid(e) a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues. (They must) strive to serve the public with thoroughness and honesty. Professional integrity is the cornerstone of a journalist’s credibility….Seek truth and report it….honestly, fairly, courageously.”

In serving power against the public interest for 86 years, BBC fails on all counts.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Global Research News Hour on RepublicBroadcasting.org Mondays from 11AM – 1PM US Central time for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests.

London's OutRage! Leader Blocks Pakistani Strongman's Limo

Ellie Keen — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 23:47:03 +0000

Britain’s best-known gay activist, Peter Tatchell, confronted Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf this past weekend when the dictator arrived in London on the last leg of his European tour, blocking the general’s car with his body repeatedly to protest "the suppression of democracy and human rights" by the military strongman.

Tatchell, who this year marks the 40th anniversary of his start as an activist, undertook the protest against Musharraf even though he is still suffering the physical after-effects of the severe beating he received last year in Moscow when a crowd of fascist thugs, egged on by the police, violently broke up an attempted Gay Pride demonstration in front of Moscow’s City Hall that Tatchell had gone to Russia to support (see this reporter’s May 31-Jun. 5, 2007 article, "The Agony of Moscow Pride").

"I’ve still got cognition and physical cordination problems, loss of vision, and memory holes" as a result of the Moscow beating, Tatchell, head of the militant UK queer rights group OutRage!, told Gay City News by telephone from London. He added, "First my doctors told me I’d be alright in a month, then they said three months, and now they’re telling me these problems may never go away."

The ambush of Musharraf happened outside London’s Hilton Hotel Park Lane on January 25, as the Pakistani president’s motorcade drew close to the hotel, where he was scheduled to speak.

"To avert police attention, I stood inconspicuously at a bus stop reading a newspaper, waiting for Musharraf’s motorcade to arrive," said Tatchell. "When the police motorcycle escorts drew level, I ran out into Park Lane and straight in front of the president’s car. It screeched to a halt. I unfurled a placard protesting against Musharraf’s massacre of civilians in occupied Baluchistan. The placard read: ‘Stop Pakistan Massacre of Baluch people.’"

Tatchell got his message across to the Pakistani dictator.

"Musharraf could clearly see the placard, and he did not look pleased," he said. "His driver tried to back up and drive around me, but I ran in front of the limousine again, forcing it to halt once more. I could see Musharraf shouting something at his driver. Perhaps he feared that I was an assassin or a suicide bomber."

Then, said Tatchell, "The limo reversed again and tried to swerve past me. I blocked it for the third time. Musharraf and his colleagues looked very agitated. Eventually, police motorcycle escorts ran over and dragged me away from the bonnet of Musharraf’s vehicle."

Pulled across the road by police, Tatchell was pinned against a railing. He was soon released by police, allowing him to join the main anti-Musharraf demonstration outside the Hilton, organized by lawyers protesting the arrest of their colleagues and of Supreme Court judges in Pakistan.

This is not the first time Tatchell has personally confronted a dictator. He became a national hero in Britain when, on October 30, 1999, he and three other OutRage! activists ambushed Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe’s car in a London street and attempted to perform a citizen’s arrest of him on charges of crimes in violation of United Nations human rights conventions. Tatchell opened the car door, seized Mugabe, and then summoned police. Mugabe was not taken into custody; instead all four OutRage! activists were arrested and Tatchell was charged with assault.

Mugabe is a ruthless tyrant who has used violence and imprisonment against political opponents. He is also a notorious anti-gay demagogue — he has said that gays and lesbians "are worse than pigs and dogs" — who criminalized homosexuality and authorized his political gangs to engage in street lynchings of gay Zimbabweans.

Tatchell tried again twice to perform a citizen’s arrest on Mugabe — first in Belgium in 2001, when he was beaten unconscious by the dictator’s bodyguards, causing him serious permanent damage to one eye; and then again in Paris in 2003, when Tatchell was arrested by the French police.

As The Independent, a British daily, noted in a recent profile of Tatchell, he "was once perhaps the most execrated man in British politics. He was — to restrict ourselves to quotations from just one newspaper, the Daily Mail — ‘loony,’ ‘scabrous,’ ‘repellent,’ ‘repulsive,’ ‘sour,’ ‘humourless,’ ‘obnoxious,’ and a ‘homosexual terrorist.’"

These epithets came after Tatchell led protests that disrupted church services led by the homophobic archbishop of Canterbury and threatened to out both Church of England bishops and conservative homosexual members of Parliament who voted against gay rights legislation.

But since his attempts to arrest Mugabe, "Tatchell has variously been called ‘a national hero’ (the Sunday Times), ‘a civil rights campaigner we can all applaud’ (Sunday Telegraph), and ‘Heroic… an example to us all’ (Daily Mail)," The Independent noted.

As Tatchell marked his fourth decade of militant human rights activism with the Musharraf protest, Gay City News asked prominent British gays to assess his contribution.

"Sometimes infuriating, often imbued with a great theatrically, Peter’s work has helped keep moving forward the cause of gay emancipation enormously," according to Joe Galliano, editor of Gay Times, the glossy monthly magazine that is the largest British gay publication. Galliano added, "Peter is one of the very few campaigners to make the intellectual leap that gay rights can only properly come through better respect of human rights for all."

Brian Whitaker, author of "Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East" and a senior editor at The Guardian, a British daily that regularly publishes Tatchell’s commentaries on gay and human rights, told Gay City News, "Peter is a sort of one-man Great British Institution, even though he came from Australia — if he didn’t exist he’d have to be invented."

Whitaker went on to say, "I don’t always agree with him and sometimes he goes a bit over the top, but he’s courageous and absolutely sincere in what he does and many people admire him for that. One thing troubles me a bit — he’s such an effective campaigner that other gay people tend to let him get on with it and don’t become involved in activism themselves. They can send ten quid to OutRage!, then carry on partying with a clear conscience."

The son of a lathe worker, Tatchell began his political activity when, as a Melbourne, Australia high school student in 1967, he organized a campaign on behalf of the indigenous Aboriginal population, who faced severe discrimination at the time. Although his fellow students recognized that he was gay, he proved popular with them. Tatchell was elected student body president, or "head boy."

The next year, Tatchell joined the movement against Australia’s involvement as a US ally in Viet Nam, and led campaigns urging other young men to refuse to be drafted. In August 1971 he emigrated to Britain to escape conscription. Five days after arriving in London, he attended a meeting of the recently organized Gay Liberation Front, and within a month he began organizing its campaigns.

In 1987, he was a founder of the UK AIDS Vigil pressure group and two years later started the London chapter of the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power, or ACT UP. In May 1990, he attended the founding meeting of OutRage!, formed in response to police inaction after the queer-bashing murder of actor Michael Boothe. Gay journalists and writers Simon Watney, Keith Alcorn, and Chris Woods initiated the group to wage a provocative campaign of direct action and civil disobedience for gay rights. Tatchell in time became OutRage!‘s leader.

"Peter Tatchell has been a huge and towering figure in British gay politics for the last quarter of a century," Neil McKenna, an openly gay journalist and historian, told Gay City News from London.

McKenna, who authored the groundbreaking, critically acclaimed 2005 revisionist biography, "The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde," which detailed the gay playwright’s little-known work as a pioneer activist for homosexual emancipation, said, "Peter has worked selflessly to bring about change, making many memorable protests. He has lived on the poverty line for three decades and has to rely on a network of support to feed himself and clothe himself. He is unique, extraordinary, principled, dedicated, and should be classified as a living national treasure, warts and all.

"My first encounter with him was when I was a cub reporter attending a Church of England General Synod which was debating the rights and wrongs of homosexuality," McKenna recalled. "Peter stood up in the public gallery circling the Synod and proceeded to denounce them. I wrote at the time that he stood up ‘like an Old Testament prophet’ and that image has stayed with me over the years. Peter Tatchell says things and does things which lots of people don’t always want to hear."

Tatchell has also been a pioneer in catalyzing international solidarity for oppressed LGBT people outside the West. In 1973, Tatchell was arrested in East Germany when he went there to help local activists stage what he says was the first public gay protest in a Communist country. In the 1980s, he traveled to Thailand to support the first wave of gay and AIDS activists in that country, and to El Salvador to highlight the violent attacks on that country’s gays and lesbians amidst a bloody civil war, during which the US gave aid to the right-wing patrons of the authoritarian regime’s death squads. He’s traveled to Malawi to protest the semi-slave labor of children on British-owned tea estates; to New Guinea to protest the Indonesian massacre of indigenous peoples in West Papua; to Latvia for banned 2006 Gay Pride observances that were violently attacked by religious extremists (see this reporter’s Jul. 27-Aug. 1, 2006 article "The Siege of Riga," a link to which appears in the web version of this article); and to Memphis to confront boxer Mike Tyson after the pugilist gay-baited heavyweight boxing champion Lennox Lewis.

"I am often asked a question on who is my hero, whom I want to be like and I can answer for sure that Peter Tatchell is my hero, he is my ideal in fighting for LGBT rights in the world," said Nicolai Alexeyev, the courageous young Russian lawyer who has been the principal organizer of Moscow Pride. And Alexeyev went on to say, "When I just started my activist work in Russia in 2005, it was Peter who was an inspiration to me. I tried to build our work here in Russia on the principles of his work in the UK. I think he is one of the most outstanding human rights and LGBT activits in the contemporary world, who is courageous and smart at the same time. I am extremely thankful to destiny that I got acquainted with Peter. He is a person of very high standing who is totally devoted to human rights and equality for everyone."

One of Tatchell’s most attention-getting protests came at the wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles, where he held up a sign that read, "Charles Can Marry Twice, Gays Can’t Marry Once!"

Tatchell’s flair for attracting media attention to his causes, which draws charges he’s a publicity hound, includes writing a constant stream of articles for both the mainstream and gay press.

In 2002 he launched the Peter Tatchell Human Rights Fund to support his campaigning work around the world.

"Peter is a world leader when it comes to LGBT human rights activism," UK Gay News editor Andy Harley told Gay City News, adding that "last year when he was seriously assaulted during Moscow Gay Pride, the first group who condemned the attack, and expressed support and good wishes for a speedy recovery, were exiled Ahwazi Arabs, a persecuted ethnic minority in Iran. They described Peter Tatchell as ‘an icon in human rights.’ This speaks volumes, coming from a Muslim group that has been supported by Peter."

French black civil rights leader, scholar, and author Louis-Georges Tin, who is also the founder of the International Day Against Homophobia (IDAHO) — celebrated in over 50 countries last year — told Gay City News from Paris, "Peter Tatchell invented a new mode for gay activism, flamboyant and pragmatic at the same time, offensive and full of humor. As the apostle of this new genre of protests, he has sacrificed nearly everything — his private life, his material comfort, his physical security — to defend human rights in England and the entire world. When will he be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize he deserves?"

Ex-pat British author Christopher Hitchens, a Vanity Fair columnist, told this reporter, "Peter Tatchell has made an exemplary effort, in his life and in his writing, to give expression to a consistent and international ethic of human rights and human dignity."

And Sir Elton John recently said of Tatchell, "He’s incredibly brave… doing good work in a world where most people are too timid. He keeps sticking at it."

Peter, we salute you!

Of Motes and Beams

Ellie Keen — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 23:41:11 +0000

ACCORDING to Gordon Brown, “The taking of hostages is completely unjustified, wholly unacceptable and we are making it clear they will not change our policy in any way.”

Has he told this to the rulers of Israel who still hold nearly 10,000 Palestinians in captivity, having seized them from their homeland in a bid to terrorise Palestinians against fighting for their national rights?

Is Mr Brown aware also of his own hypocrisy in supporting the indefinite detention of what he calls terror suspects in Britain while expecting Iraqi resistance forces to allow a free hand to foreigners who are not even subject to the truncated legal jurisdiction of the collaborationist Iraqi government.

The people on whose behalf the Prime Minister is appealing are not members of the British occupation army.

They are the beneficiaries of highly lucrative contracts offered to private companies to do work that the US and British governments have privatised.

In short, they are mercenaries, but they are mercenaries with a free hand, courtesy of a law imposed by decree by Paul Bremer, who ruled post-invasion Iraq as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Mr Bremer told those Iraqis who were elected under the occupation to be the fig-leaf “government” that they had no right to arrest or charge the foreign mercenaries in their country.

This is why there have been countless examples of mercenaries, aka private contractors, opening fire on Iraqi civilians and even police officers and being allowed to leave the country without so much as being questioned.

For most Iraqis, who continue to suffer mass murder, shortages of food, water and fuel, unemployment, poverty and lack of popular sovereignty, the plight of a small number of foreign mercenaries is not a major issue.

They and their families will doubtless be experiencing anguish, but anguish is not in short supply in Iraq because of the imperialist invasion.

Archbishop of York John Sentamu opposed the Iraq invasion as a breach of international law and fasted in York Minster for a week for international peace.

But he didn’t cut up his dog collar on TV and vow never to wear it again until Tony Blair or his partners in crime George W Bush and Gordon Brown left office.

In fact, on Mr Blair’s belated resignation, Archbishop Sentamu praised the war criminal’s commitment to maintaining the union between law and morality and religion.

Robert Mugabe’s erratic, divisive and too often brutal rule in Zimbabwe merits criticism, especially from the country’s working people whose hopes, which were stirred by their mass struggle for independence from Britain, have not been met.

But, in terms of death and destruction, it doesn’t amount to a minuscule proportion of that dealt out to the Iraqi people by the US and British invaders and by those whose malign interference in Iraq was facilitated by the invasion.

And yet, at one international diplomatic gathering after another, Western leaders, the latest Angela Merkel, berate South Africa for not taking action against Zimbabwe, while they condone wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and zionist colonisation in Palestine.

Perhaps Archbishop Sentamu should reacquaint himself and his Christian brothers Bush, Blair and Brown with the biblical references to motes and beams.