US Ambassador ruffles the rooster’s feathers!

Yesterday, The Horrid (state controlled The Herald) reported that Christopher Dell, the United States Ambassador to Zimbabwe, risked being expelled from Zimbabwe or being put under “open surveillance” for his “meddling”:

Precedent shows that host countries reserve the right to expel a diplomat whose behaviour they feel is unbecoming or undiplomatic and Zimbabwe could take that route in the case of Mr Dell.

The Horrid goes on to explain why Mr Dell might be expelled:

Mr Dell raised the ire of the Government following a speech he gave at the United Methodist Church-run Africa University in Mutare last week when he claimed that the economic challenges facing the country were a result of “corrupt rule” and not sanctions.

The state-controlled Sunday Mail took a similar line in its comment page the day before:

By encouraging people to place the blame of the country’s economic collapse squarely on the shoulders of the government and ignore the Western sanctions factor, Dell was calling for the people on Zimbabwe to rebel.

There it is: if Zimbabwean people come to believe that the devastating poverty and hardship they’re enduring is the fault of the government, and not western imperialists, then we might just get a little angry with zanu-pf and we might even rebel.

Zanu-pf has spent years trying to peg responsibility for our poverty on anything other than itself – they even labelled their March election campaign the ‘anti-Blair campaign’ – and then along comes Mr Christopher Dell to sort out the ‘big imperialists vs vulnerable mugabe’ myth very effectively (one South African paper described the speech as “arguably the best-researched of any diplomat in the past few years”).

The United States and European governments have only imposed targeted visa and travel sanctions on 86 government and party officials, he said.

And:

The argument that these narrowly targeted sanctions have hurt the larger economy could only be true if the economy as a whole were entirely in the hands of the 86 government and party officials on the list and they controlled all of it

And:

There are no blanket sanctions against doing business in Zimbabwe and the effect of sanctions is confined to the senior people they are meant to hurt.

He then added insult to injury by pointing out that one of the so-called imperialists apparently bent on destroying Zimbabwe’s economy just happened to be its fourth-largest trading partner (read more in The Guardian, UK).

Ouch!

But this sort of knee-jerk reaction to the truth from the regime is fairly typical and will surprise very few Zimbabweans. We’ve watched newspaper after newspaper be targeted by the zanu machine and closed down for telling the truth; laws passed to specifically stop the truth from spreading; journalists tortured for telling the truth; the foreign press barred from our country in case they report the truth etc. It must be agonisingly frustrating for those same truth-fearing bullies to be confronted by the barefaced truth – in their own backyard! – and be unable to let loose the police or the thugs.

It must also be just a little worrying to know that this truth from Christopher Dell isn’t a new truth, but is in fact something all Zimbabweans are very aware of. After all, it is us who are on the receiving end of ‘food for votes’ threats, and it is us who have to produce zanu cards when we want to buy mealie meal. We know what the truth is already, but when Christopher Dell ‘told it like it is’ to a Zimbabwean audience, in Zimbabwe, he gave us a buzz. Because the truth, although well known in our land, is seldom heard spoken out loud. He affirmed our experience loudly and in so doing stood beside us in a way the zanu government could never ever do.

So the threat of public anger must feel real and close and I suppose that that is when panic might set in.

How else can you explain the next bizarre tasteless twist in the tale? Round 1: Mr Dell gets the moral highground for speaking the truth; Round 2: the zanu government try to smear him as an immoral individual.

A columnist (possibly mugabe’s spokesperson George Charamba) writing in The Sunday Mail actually described Christopher Dell as a ‘pervert’. He wrote:

He (Mr Dell) is in the habit of wo(a)ndering in strange, unseemly places one never associates with characters of the beau monde that ambassadors are supposed to inhabit. We all know what happens by the margins of the Botanical Garden as night falls.

So many of our youthful citizens have been deflowered there, lured by the greenback from generous and flaunting foreigners not given (to) enjoying sex the conventional way.

This allusion of sexual impropriety harks back to last month when Christopher Dell was walking his dog in the Botanical Gardens and entered a so-called ‘restricted security area’ (so restricted that it has no fences around it!) near one of robert mugabe’s three residences in Harare. The zanu-pf government’s typically hyperbolic response to one man and his dog was that this was a,

calculated disregard of the rules governing relations between states… clearly intended to provoke an unwarranted diplomatic incident.

The US response was that Mr Dell had “inadvertently wandered into a poorly marked military area located in the midst of the park”.

In the end it was the Zimbabwean government who sent apologies:

Dell had accepted apologies from two senior Zimbabwean foreign affairs officials over his brief detention, including an explanation that the guards who had held him did not know how to deal with issues involving diplomats, the statement said.

Now, however, that incident has been resurrected and dressed up as one man and his dog in search of “unconventional” sex. In a restricted military area? In a country where 25% of the adult population are HIV positive? An area where mugabe’s trigger-happy loons roam freely? Somehow I just don’t think so!

Well, what can a small pro-democracy blogger say to all that? I have three thoughts: the first is that I’d rather go for a walk in the botanical gardens with Mr Dell and his dog than share the sewer that is George Charamba’s mind – if anything shreaks ‘perverted’, it has to be his poison-pen response. My second thought must be shared by most people, and that is that by launching such a venemous personal attack on Christopher Dell, zanu-pf have clearly revealed that he struck a nerve. The truth hurts, and all that!

My final thought is how funny the whole thing is. Think about it: Christopher Dell delivers a sixteen page carefully researched paper that strips the zanu government to the bone, and the most devastating thing the government can squeak in response is “you pervert”. My knees are trembling – with laughter!

UPDATE: ZimPundit describes Mugabe as taking the “low road” with “cheapshot” comments. The latest in the saga from Reuters:

The Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) said it had asked Mugabe for his reaction to the comments.

“The president said the ambassador must go to hell. The president said: ‘I cannot even spell the word Dell with a “D” but an “H” and that is where Dell should go’,” a ZBC correspondent said during a news bulletin.

Zimbabwe, Mugabe, USA, Christopher Dell, Propaganda

This entry was posted by Hope on Monday, November 7th, 2005 at 9:23 pm. You can follow any comments on this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.