The Sunday News
Harare Bureau
ZANU-PF has joined a union of political parties from Africa, Asia and Latin America to stave off Western hegemony and interference with independent states’ domestic affairs. Last month, the Council of African Political Parties, the Asian Political Parties, Political Parties of Latin America and the Caribbean met in Indonesia on the sidelines of the International Conference of Political Parties and resolved to fight neo-colonialism, with one strategy involving tackling supremacism at the United Nations General Assembly.
The meeting also adopted the Jakarta Joint Statement, which underscores their commitment to the UN Charter and the Bandung Statement on Peace and Co-operation.
Other talking points were peace, principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity, food security, climate change and poverty.
Zanu-PF Secretary for Administration Dr Ignatius Chombo told our Harare Bureau, “The deliberations were robust, and one major outcome was that we will unite as a trilateral front in pursuance of one goal: fighting Western domination of the global political spectrum. Every September, when the United Nations General Assembly meets, we will act as a pressure group to influence deliberations and direct our Heads of States to issues they should raise there.”
He also said: “The meeting was not amused by the West’s behaviour, especially its stance against political parties that it is not amenable to. We, therefore, updated each other, shared tactics and adopted alliances to counter threats from the West. We (as Zanu-PF) have now asserted ourselves in the body of Council of African Political Parties. Over the years, our membership has been sort of dormant, so we have activated it and being part of the conference in Indonesia was one of the major steps towards that.”
The Indonesia meetings were part of efforts to reawaken principles of the historic Bandung Conference of 1955 that led to greater Afro-Asian economic and political co-operation, and the Non-Aligned Movement’s formation. Twenty-nine countries participated in the 1955 conference organised by Indonesia, Burma, Pakistan, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and India.
NAM was incepted on similar principles in 1961, taking the middle ground between the Eastern and Western blocs during the Cold War. In 1979, Cuba’s then President, Cde Fidel Castro, said NAM aimed to ensure “the national independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and security of non-aligned countries” in their “struggle against imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism, and all forms of foreign aggression, occupation, domination, interference or hegemony as well as against great power and bloc politics”.
Zimbabwe, a NAM member, has been a target of Western economic sanctions and isolationist policies following its redress of historical land imbalances. Former colonial power Britain and the United States have been actively working through the opposition to topple President Mugabe’s Zanu-PF Government under a broad plan to destabilise the country.
Last week, the Secretary-General of South Africa’s African National Congress, Cde Gwede Mantashe, said a similar strategy was being used on President Jacob Zuma and the ruling party.
“It did not start as MDC. It started (with) the formation of a trade union movement, and then got NGOs that came together and all graduated into MDC whose intention to simply remove Zanu-PF from power almost succeeded,” Mr Mantashe told journalists in Johannesburg. The Zimbabwean narrative was prevalent in South Africa, where “all of a sudden democratic institutions needed to be protected from us” by people who were not part of forming these institutions, said Cde Mantashe.
