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DEPENDING on the medium you follow, in some countries they have been called revolutions, while others call them anti-government protests, unrest or demonstrations.
It’s a mammoth task to piece together the puzzle.
The question that begs is why it looks like the Persian Gulf and Arab Africa have been caught unaware.
Are there some early warning signs that were ignored?
Are they also as spontaneous as being insinuated and are they being led by nationals of the affected countries?
If the Libyan government is being accused of using “mercenaries” against its people, can the same be said about these unrests?
A likely possibility when we reflect on the anti-global unrest in the West in the past decade.
Why is the narrative one-sided, and why is the official voice from the African Union and the Arab League missing?
Where is the Non-Aligned Movement’s voice?
What lessons can be drawn from the current media coverage, where leading questions to interviewees are asked?
Why would a respected media house ask why protests in Algeria seem to have failed, if there are no underhand dealings?
Looking for answers, I turned to some international magazines I bought recently.
The December 2010 – January 2011 issue of the Africa Report’s flash points are Zimbabwe, Angola/DR Congo border; eastern DRC; Niger Delta; Senegal/Casamance; Sahel; South Sudan and Somalia. Nothing about Arab Africa.
The World in 2011, a publication of The Economist magazine gives a slight hint, but nothing close to the current goings-on.
In a piece, “Welcome to a Zero-sum World” it states, “The era of good feelings associated with the heyday of globalisation has gone forever”.
On the same page it also announces: “the 57 members of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference hold a heads-of state summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt”, new home to deposed Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.
Have the visionaries and futurists in all those multi-million dollar think tanks been sleeping on duty?
Are current events also being analysed in their proper historical contexts, for the uprisings that started in Tunisia last December are not without precedent?
The current US administration’s statements also provide useful clues. More about that later.
“Glasnost”, “perestroika”, Mikhail Gorbachev and the Cold War could be in the dustbins of history, anachronistic, until events in North Africa and the Persian Gulf reincarnate them.
And, until Gorbachev came alive this week castigating the Russian leadership!
The terms also feel like dinosaurs, especially when you hear experts speaking from London and Washington-based think tanks talk about home-grown uprisings, and much more in the Western democracy plc consumer basket.
As the uprisings in Arab-speaking Africa and the Persian Gulf continue unabated, you realise that the monster unleashed by the West is refusing to be tamed, and it is in actual fact showing who its makers are, and the hidden agendas.
It is also a threat on its very creators!
This is what happens when US foreign policy reaches saturation point; when foreign policy is used as a conduit to win support when a re-election is around the corner.
For, President Barack Obama no longer has the luxury of doing a two-year campaign for his second term like he did last time, since he is in the White House to run the country, and his re-election depends on deliverables.
So much is at stake, even if it means dumping old allies in the oil rich region, and changing tactics about protecting permanent interests.
Emerging economies like China make the task more daunting.
He will not be the first US president to use disastrous and deadly foreign policy agendas to canvass for support.
US administrations need war and chaos in other parts of the world to spruce their images back home.
George W. Bush did that with his illegal invasion of Iraq under the guise of “war on terror”.
Gorbachev!
The uprisings also look like they are spontaneous reactions to unwanted systems until Ronald Reagan, the United States’ 40th president and his desire to destroy communism makes this writer realise that everything happens for a reason.
Among the top 10 things Reagan is accredited of is the defeat of communism.
The World Almanac states Reagan’s hatred of communism: “In 1983 Reagan sent a task force to invade Grenada after two Marxist coups there.
“Reagan’s opposition to international terrorism led to the US bombing of Libyan military installations in 1986.
“He strongly supported El Salvador, the Nicaraguan contras, and other anti-communist governments and forces throughout the world. He also held four summit meetings with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
“At the 1987 meeting in Washington, DC, a historical treaty eliminating short and medium-range missiles from Europe was signed.”
After that, the die was cast. Last April Obama, Russian President Dimitry Medvedev signed a nuclear war treaty.
But politics is a dirty game.
US foreign policy is now a shattered glass mirror as key Middle East allies rise up against their leaderships that have been protecting its interests in the past three decades.
The US is accused of paying lip service to human rights when its interests are oil.
Notwithstanding all that President Obama has said in the past few weeks regarding the unrests, we revisit his first two days in office.
It is reported that within 48 hours, Obama “established personal contact with a series of Middle East leaders”.
But, it is in inaugural speech where the clues are.
Obama said in part: “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history: but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist . . . “
Then, it was argued that he meant Iran, Syria, North Korea, and even Zimbabwe.
Little did people realise that this was all-inclusive, allies and non-allies alike.
A 1993 global assessment had seen this shift: “As the currency of international power is shifting away from military dimensions that dominated the Cold War calculus and toward economic capabilities, on many fronts evidence is mounting that deference for US leadership is faltering, even among its closest allies.”
What method could the US use to ditch allies? Through mapping of Internet usage, with social networks and blogs topping the list!
That way, it is easy to claim that these are people-driven protests when those masterminding them worked for Internet search engines like Google, as was the case in Egypt.
The precedent – the fall of the Berlin Wall was partly attributed to ICTs, with the US ordering an orderly transitions to power and participatory democracy? Didn’t the US and Western Europe shed crocodile tears as communism “collapsed”?
Are we seeing a Reagan plan in Eastern Europe, taken to the Middle East by George W Bush after his invasion of Iraq, being put to completion by Barack Obama? What system is Obama fighting? Islamism?
Why did the protests also erupt after Tony Blair’s grilling by the Chilcot Commission, and with the Western media giving full backing? What is Blair’s report on the peace process in the Middle East?
But dear reader, the state of the Arab world changed a decade ago after the September 11 bombings of the New York World Trade Centre. This is not an attempt to apportion blame. But we read between the lines.
Exactly a decade later, is this revenge being meted out on a people that sired the elusive master-mind of the “war on terror”, Osama bin Laden, who has been conspicuous by his silence about the protests?
After Tunisia and Egypt, there was all round applause on the impact of social networks. They have also been dubbed the Internet revolutions or uprisings.
Washington in particular celebrated the monumental achievements of technological advances whose policy framework were spearheaded by Vice President Al Gore through the National Information Infrastructure, and institutionalised by the Clinton administration.
Globally, we have wholly embraced the Internet, with very few questions asked. If we were told to keep mum about the origins of HIV, the virus that causes Aids, it is the same with the Internet and other ICTs.
Why was it created and whose interests is it saving? Who decides the beat?
Why is it that while they can eavesdrop on every facet of our lives, we are unable to do the same with them? We can only see and read what they selectively choose for us, including WikiLeaks, while we give away everything, in the name of freedom of expression.
This includes reacting to messages sent to our e-mail addresses or posted on our Facebook walls. This is why the US administration wants people in affected countries to have unfettered access to the Internet and to freely express themselves.
According to Ed Krol, one of the doyens of the Internet, in 1986, the Internet had only “a few thousand users.”
Now it has billions, with Facebook accounting for the largest market share among social networks, where people do and say anything, including deposing duly elected governments.
In the early ’90s when the writer literally lived on the Internet, studying the medium, I discovered that anything was possible. It is virgin land for information.
The double standards by the US and Britain are also not surprising. When the “uprisings” occurred in Iran last week, Hilary Clinton was reported as expressing her “firm support for the thousands of opposition supporters who protested in Tehran.
Clinton said Iranians deserved to have “the same rights that they saw being played out in Egypt . . . What we see happening in Iran today is a testament to the courage of the Iranian people, and an indictment of the hypocrisy of the Iranian regime – a regime which over the last three weeks has constantly hailed what went on in Egypt,” she said.
But as perforations are being mad about an Internet popular revolt, we see an administration failing to contain what it thought was the easiest way to punish the Moslem world on the war on terror.
Analysts are challenging Western governments for their double standards. For decades, they bankrolled the very people they are now too happy to see deposed. Who are they fooling?
While Egypt was ablaze, MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai was itching that Cecil John Rhodes’ dream – the Cape to Cairo fantasy somersaults into a Cairo to Cape via Zimbabwe. He feels that a popular revolt against a sitting Government where he is Prime Minister must take place.
Doing so with the slightest idea that those that are behind the North African protests will be pillaging and plundering Africa’s natural resour- ces.
Tsvangirai told Fox News recently that the struggles waged by Tunisians and Egyptians were similar to those Zimbabweans were facing. “To me when people take their rights and start demanding more rights, there is nothing wrong with that including in Zimbabwe. “That was the whole purpose of our struggle for the last 10 years.
Now that Moroccans have been trying to do an “Egypt”, what does the PM Tsvangirai say since he got an award from them?
But the million-dollar question is, after the Arab world what will be social networks and satellite TV’s next port of call?
Africa’s liberation movements or Western governments!
Remember the movie, “The Siege” starring Denzel Washington?
Analysts have argued that as long as President Mugabe is in power, the Persian Gulf – like “winds of change” will move to southern African, with the sole aim of dislodging and discrediting the region’s liberation movements.
I once again revisit Reagan’s global vision of a unipolar world. On September 12, 1983 then Prime Minister Robert Mugabe made his first three-day official visit to Washington.
Note that it took three years for the Reagan administration to invite him. Surprisingly, one of the items discussed was the Middle East.
Reagan remarked: “The United States and Zimbabwe have much in common. We both came to independence through a revolutionary process; we are both multi-racial societies; and our constitutions offer protection to all our citizens . . .
“We look to Zimbabwe for leadership in southern Africa. Blessed with natural resources, a hard-working, multi-racial population and a spirit of national reconciliation, Zimbabwe can provide a firm foundation of economic viability and political stability and serve as an inspiration in its part of the world.”
In response, PM Mugabe said, ” . . . We got pledges from your government, from your predecessors, that upon attainment of our independence, the United States will not be found wanting in extending to Zimbabwe that amount of aid the United States was capable of extending to it . . .
“Our posture regarding international situations of conflict has been identical. We both are opposed to interference in the domestic affairs of a country by another . . . “
Shattered dreams, as Americans are now in the forefront of demonising the Zimbabwean leader and want him removed from power unconstitutionally.
We also ask whether the Mandela aura has disappeared? It should be noted that Tsvangirai made his utterances around the time president Nelson Mandela had been hospitalised.
That Arab Africa could not realise that as well is food for thought.
That Mandela, the man and symbol of non-violence and negotiation was taken into hospital in Cape Town while Cairo was ablaze is an indictment on Africa including young people who have appropriated the Mandela name to advance interests alien to the SA leader’s principles.
That Africa could be found wanting at a time when they should have rallied behind Mandela is also cause for concern, for we know that the owners of the very tools that are exporting uprisings were in vantage positions with their Mandela plans – ready to do a “breaking news”, and doing it shamelessly, and as usual we would be left to regurgitate their stories.
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