[UAH] VERY SAD THAT MDC HAS STARTED TO USE THE SHIITES AS A ROLE MODEL.
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MP Eddie Cross
This writing is very troubling, and we as Africans, need to read it closely to understand the danger we have in minds as of you as an MP in Zimbabwe. Why? For you are a white man but an MP in The Zimbabwean government, and an MDC official. The rebels fighting Assad are Sunnis, when you claim that Sunnis are a majority in Syria you are actually stating that Tutsis are a majority in Rwanda which is untrue. But in all records we have seen privately and publicly, Sunnis have established themselves as massive killers and very terrible brutal terrorists, it is bothering all critical thinkers why Western Countries like United States decide for some reason to deal with The Sunnis that are clearly killers. And if you want to know the history of the Sunnis and how murderous they are, read a piece from The Independent of London, of 16th June 2013, written by Robert Fisk under a heading “Iran to send 4,000 troops to aid President Assad forces in Syria “ a piece I have already posted in these forums where you whites are yelling for we post issues that have no effect with Africa. We are apparently trying to educate Africans on reasoning’s as for example you have used to illustrate the fight against Assad as a fight of a majority. In that writing, Robert a very respected journalist in UK states and I directly quote” For the first time, all of America’s ‘friends’ in the region are Sunni Muslims and all of its enemies are Shiites. Breaking all President Barack Obama’s rules of disengagement, the US is now fully engaged on the side of armed groups which include the most extreme Sunni Islamist movements in the Middle East. “ End quote. And on top of that, I have posted as well a piece with a Utube where the leader of these Sunni extremists killed a Syrian soldier, cut out his heart and ate it on camera. And these are the people you are defining as a majority fighting Assad? MP Edie Cross are the rebels fighting in Syria the role model for MDC really? Are you as an MDC member of parliament claiming today that the Sunni’s are a good example you are following? And just asking !!!!!!!
I am posting the entire writing of Fisk here below so that our readers understand what people you are relating your party MDC to, sir.
EM
On the 49th
Iran to send 4,000 troops to aid President Assad forces in Syria
World Exclusive: US urges UK and France to join in supplying arms to Syrian rebels as MPs fear that UK will be drawn into growing conflict
Sunday 16 June 2013
Washington’s decision to arm Syria’s Sunni Muslim rebels has plunged America into the great Sunni-Shia conflict of the Islamic Middle East, entering a struggle that now dwarfs the Arab revolutions which overthrew dictatorships across the region.
For the first time, all of America’s ‘friends’ in the region are Sunni Muslims and all of its enemies are Shiites. Breaking all President Barack Obama’s rules of disengagement, the US is now fully engaged on the side of armed groups which include the most extreme Sunni Islamist movements in the Middle East.
The Independent on Sunday has learned that a military decision has been taken in Iran – even before last week’s presidential election – to send a first contingent of 4,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guards to Syria to support President Bashar al-Assad’s forces against the largely Sunni rebellion that has cost almost 100,000 lives in just over two years. Iran is now fully committed to preserving Assad’s regime, according to pro-Iranian sources which have been deeply involved in the Islamic Republic’s security, even to the extent of proposing to open up a new ‘Syrian’ front on the Golan Heights against Israel.
In years to come, historians will ask how America – after its defeat in Iraq and its humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan scheduled for 2014 – could have so blithely aligned itself with one side in a titanic Islamic struggle stretching back to the seventh century death of the Prophet Mohamed. The profound effects of this great schism, between Sunnis who believe that the father of Mohamed’s wife was the new caliph of the Muslim world and Shias who regard his son in law Ali as his rightful successor – a seventh century battle swamped in blood around the present-day Iraqi cities of Najaf and Kerbala – continue across the region to this day. A 17th century Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbott, compared this Muslim conflict to that between “Papists and Protestants”.
America’s alliance now includes the wealthiest states of the Arab Gulf, the vast Sunni territories between Egypt and Morocco, as well as Turkey and the fragile British-created monarchy in Jordan. King Abdullah of Jordan – flooded, like so many neighbouring nations, by hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees – may also now find himself at the fulcrum of the Syrian battle. Up to 3,000 American ‘advisers’ are now believed to be in Jordan, and the creation of a southern Syria ‘no-fly zone’ – opposed by Syrian-controlled anti-aircraft batteries – will turn a crisis into a ‘hot’ war. So much for America’s ‘friends’.
Its enemies include the Lebanese Hizballah, the Alawite Shiite regime in Damascus and, of course, Iran. And Iraq, a largely Shiite nation which America ‘liberated’ from Saddam Hussein’s Sunni minority in the hope of balancing the Shiite power of Iran, has – against all US predictions – itself now largely fallen under Tehran’s influence and power. Iraqi Shiites as well as Hizballah members, have both fought alongside Assad’s forces.
Washington’s excuse for its new Middle East adventure – that it must arm Assad’s enemies because the Damascus regime has used sarin gas against them – convinces no-one in the Middle East. Final proof of the use of gas by either side in Syria remains almost as nebulous as President George W. Bush’s claim that Saddam’s Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
For the real reason why America has thrown its military power behind Syria’s Sunni rebels is because those same rebels are now losing their war against Assad. The Damascus regime’s victory this month in the central Syrian town of Qusayr, at the cost of Hizballah lives as well as those of government forces, has thrown the Syrian revolution into turmoil, threatening to humiliate American and EU demands for Assad to abandon power. Arab dictators are supposed to be deposed – unless they are the friendly kings or emirs of the Gulf – not to be sustained. Yet Russia has given its total support to Assad, three times vetoing UN Security Council resolutions that might have allowed the West to intervene directly in the civil war.
In the Middle East, there is cynical disbelief at the American contention that it can distribute arms – almost certainly including anti-aircraft missiles – only to secular Sunni rebel forces in Syria represented by the so-called Free Syria Army. The more powerful al-Nusrah Front, allied to al-Qaeda, dominates the battlefield on the rebel side and has been blamed for atrocities including the execution of Syrian government prisoners of war and the murder of a 14-year old boy for blasphemy. They will be able to take new American weapons from their Free Syria Army comrades with little effort.
From now on, therefore, every suicide bombing in Damascus - every war crime committed by the rebels - will be regarded in the region as Washington’s responsibility. The very Sunni-Wahabi Islamists who killed thousands of Americans on 11th September, 2011 – who are America’s greatest enemies as well as Russia’s – are going to be proxy allies of the Obama administration. This terrible irony can only be exacerbated by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s adament refusal to tolerate any form of Sunni extremism. His experience in Chechenya, his anti-Muslim rhetoric – he has made obscene remarks about Muslim extremists in a press conference in Russian – and his belief that Russia’s old ally in Syria is facing the same threat as Moscow fought in Chechenya, plays a far greater part in his policy towards Bashar al-Assad than the continued existence of Russia’s naval port at the Syrian Mediterranean city of Tartous.
For the Russians, of course, the ‘Middle East’ is not in the ‘east’ at all, but to the south of Moscow; and statistics are all-important. The Chechen capital of Grozny is scarcely 500 miles from the Syrian frontier. Fifteen per cent of Russians are Muslim. Six of the Soviet Union’s communist republics had a Muslim majority, 90 per cent of whom were Sunni. And Sunnis around the world make up perhaps 85 per cent of all Muslims. For a Russia intent on repositioning itself across a land mass that includes most of the former Soviet Union, Sunni Islamists of the kind now fighting the Assad regime are its principal antagonists.
Iranian sources say they liaise constantly with Moscow, and that while Hizballah’s overall withdrawal from Syria is likely to be completed soon – with the maintenance of the militia’s ‘intelligence’ teams inside Syria – Iran’s support for Damascus will grow rather than wither. They point out that the Taliban recently sent a formal delegation for talks in Tehran and that America will need Iran’s help in withdrawing from Afghanistan. The US, the Iranians say, will not be able to take its armour and equipment out of the country during its continuing war against the Taliban without Iran’s active assistance. One of the sources claimed – not without some mirth -- that the French were forced to leave 50 tanks behind when they left because they did not have Tehran’s help.
It is a sign of the changing historical template in the Middle East that within the framework of old Cold War rivalries between Washington and Moscow, Israel’s security has taken second place to the conflict in Syria. Indeed, Israel’s policies in the region have been knocked askew by the Arab revolutions, leaving its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, hopelessly adrift amid the historic changes.
Only once over the past two years has Israel fully condemned atrocities committed by the Assad regime, and while it has given medical help to wounded rebels on the Israeli-Syrian border, it fears an Islamist caliphate in Damascus far more than a continuation of Assad’s rule. One former Israel intelligence commander recently described Assad as “Israel’s man in Damascus”. Only days before President Mubarak was overthrown, both Netanyahu and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia called Washington to ask Obama to save the Egyptian dictator. In vain.
If the Arab world has itself been overwhelmed by the two years of revolutions, none will have suffered from the Syrian war in the long term more than the Palestinians. The land they wish to call their future state has been so populated with Jewish Israeli colonists that it can no longer be either secure or ‘viable’. ‘Peace’ envoy Tony Blair’s attempts to create such a state have been laughable. A future ‘Palestine’ would be a Sunni nation. But today, Washington scarcely mentions the Palestinians.
Another of the region’s supreme ironies is that Hamas, supposedly the ‘super-terrorists’ of Gaza, have abandoned Damascus and now support the Gulf Arabs’ desire to crush Assad. Syrian government forces claim that Hamas has even trained Syrian rebels in the manufacture and use of home-made rockets.
In Arab eyes, Israel’s 2006 war against the Shia Hizballah was an attempt to strike at the heart of Iran. The West’s support for Syrian rebels is a strategic attempt to crush Iran. But Iran is going to take the offensive. Even for the Middle East, these are high stakes. Against this fearful background, the Palestinian tragedy continues.
Thé Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni and Dr. Kiiza Besigye Uganda is in anarchy"
Kuungana Mulindwa Mawasiliano Kikundi
"Pamoja na Yoweri Museveni na Dk. Kiiza Besigye Uganda ni katika machafuko"
From: zimsite@yahoogroups.com [mailto:zimsite@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of EG Cross
Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2013 3:08 PM
To: EG Cross
Subject: [zimsite] Democracy in Africa
Democracy in Africa
One of the small political parties in Zimbabwe (we have 28 right now and more coming) said this past week that “you cannot remove a dictatorship by democratic means, only by revolution.” When he used the word “revolution” I assume he was actually referring to the use of violence in some form to unseat an entrenched autocracy.
Those African States that were governed by a settler class (South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Angola) all had to fight to gain their rights. In Syria right now the majority are attempting to remove a minority ethnic dictatorship by the use of arms. Libya went through a similar process. Only in those countries where an external force (the colonial State) exercised its power to determine the nature of the transition did some sort of independent democratic State emerge. In some cases (Egypt) the regime collapsed and change became possible simply by street action – another form of violence. The situation in Turkey is another example of this sort of effort.
What makes the situation in Zimbabwe so distinctive is that the effort to remove the Mugabe dictatorship has concentrated almost exclusively on the use of democratic means. There were good reasons for that choice: it is difficult to imagine that any of our neighbors would have given the forces of change here secure external bases and support. The fact that the cold war no longer sets one group of States against another in such regional or country based conflict is yet another reason. Sourcing arms would be another difficulty although they are abundant enough to fuel conflict anywhere in the world.
But beyond those arguments, it was a choice that the leadership of the MDC made at its inception and in which it was supported by its membership – largely drawn from the working class and rural peasants.
Our assumption at the outset was that everyone would recognise what a revolutionary stance this was and that support would be forthcoming from local business, intellectuals, regional States and the global powers. It was not to be. We found ourselves the subject of regional and even continental ostracism fueled by the active and determined efforts of the South African Government. Aid from the international Community was sporadic and even parsimonious, technical assistance yes – funding no. The largest contribution we got in the early days was a $50 000 grant from the Westminster Foundation in London. That was bitterly attacked by the regime and thereafter no further assistance was available.
We found ourselves isolated in the region, the AU and even in the UN. As for business, they could see no purpose in funding the MDC – what could we offer them; they feared retribution from the State (fully justified) and could not see us ever unseating what looked like an entrenched, powerful and ruthless oligarchy.
Despite these difficulties (a German politician told me once that politics was all about money) the MDC made rapid and surprising progress: we won the March 2000 referendum, nearly beat a frightened Zanu PF in the June Parliamentary elections (they retained their majority by three seats) and then went on to beat them soundly in the 2002 Presidential ballot. Only regional intervention and protection allowed them to “fix” the result and allowed Mugabe back into State House.
Then in 2007 we were reluctantly accepted as a player who could not be ignored and we were brought into play – the international community followed suit with great cynicism, the African community with some respect for these plucky “small boys”. We were forced into negotiations and eventually a government of national unity even though it was a totally unequal and unjust arrangement.
Through it all, we stuck to our principles and worked towards a democratic solution. Strangely this struggle gained us little recognition or attention. One old time journalist, a veteran of many conflicts once said to me “come on Eddie, let’s see some violence, some blood on the streets: give us a story”. You can see the effect of that – just watch your news every night on any channel. It’s not the peace keepers who get the exposure and attention. Today the USA gave $300 million to the struggle in Syria – for humanitarian aid, that’s great, but when they have to fight an election will they get the support they need to win?
Now we have had yet another SADC summit – very encouraging, but no sooner had we got back than Zanu PF were once again up to their old tricks. In all probability we will be forced into another election on an uneven playing field. In the middle of the most serious crisis in the past 14 years, the summit and the struggle for democracy in Zimbabwe did not justify a single minute of news time on any of the major networks, or even the networks of southern Africa. Just hours of riots in Turkey and smashed buildings and ruined lives in the Middle East.
If as I suspect, we end up with an election on the 31st July, without media reform, without security sector realignment, with a manipulated voters roll and millions denied the right to vote, we will still win by a wide margin because the people are totally fed up with the status quo. Perhaps we will then merit a 60 second news clip on the BBC, but for the rest we are just another small country taking a halting step towards the future.
What they all will miss is that this is a story of courage and principle, a story of David and Goliath, a victory for the ordinary men and women in the world who just want to make a better life for themselves and their children. But above all it will be a victory for the democrats.
Eddie Cross
Harare, 18th June 2013
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