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Understanding multiple fronts of regime change
Related to country: Zimbabwe

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Understanding multiple fronts of regime change

AFRICAN FOCUS By Tafataona P. Mahoso

FROM the point of view of the ordinary citizen of Zimbabwe, the population is experiencing semi-genocidal conditions similar to those experienced at the height of the war of liberation between 1975 and the end of 1979, but this time without civil war.

The semi-genocidal conditions include: the closure of a significant number of schools and colleges; the closure of a significant number of hospitals and clinics; food shortages and escalating prices of those foods which are available; hardening attitudes and denials of reality across political divides (despite everyone’s desire for unity and peace); and a general state of shock.

The last symptom, the general state of shock, has been defined by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, as follows: "A state of shock . . . is a moment when there is a gap between fast-moving events and the information that exists to explain them . . . [The predominance of] raw reality, unprocessed by story, narrative, or anything that could bridge the gap between reality and understanding . . . Without a story, we are . . . intensely vulnerable to those people who are ready to take advantage of the chaos for their own ends. As soon as we have a new narrative that offers a perspective on the shocking events, we become re-oriented and the world begins to make sense once again."

On November 20 2008, the Governor of the Reserve Bank, Dr Gideon Gono, held a Press conference at which he tried to explain to the public the shocking experiences which people have endured at the banks, in supermarkets and elsewhere, shocking experiences which are caused by hyperinflation which shows itself in the form of shortages of cash, escalating prices, dollarisation and the destruction of the national currency.

Dr Gono suggested that the shocking developments which people had experienced for a long time now are related to the illegal sanctions imposed on the country by the United Kingdom, the United States, the European Union and their allies related to regime change politics; and related to psychological war as well as corruption and greed.

As we have tried to demonstrate in previous installments, the imposition of illegal sanctions on Zimbabwe devastated society and the economy by increasing opportunities for illegal activity. Under illegal sanctions it becomes difficult to separate illegal activities that are motivated by regime change-related espionage and destabilisation from those caused by sheer greed, from those caused through incompetence and ignorance.

Illegal regime change as the overall objective of the British and their external allies and internal proxies remains confusing because it requires the use of any and all forms of destabilisation short of military invasion. As Ludo Martens pointed out, quoting the French specialist Colonel Trinquier: "Today war is a whole consisting of actions of all kinds, political, social, economic, psychological, armed . . . which aim to overthrow established power in a country"

This is the meaning of regime change. But underneath that umbrella of regime change, there are various fronts: psychological war or propaganda; information warfare; and financial warfare.

While the New Labour government of Britain has been the most open about the desire for a military invasion, the US State Department has been more open about financial warfare and psychological war.

The speech which former US Ambassador to Zimbabwe Christopher Dell gave at Africa University in Mutare on November 2 2005 was entitled "Plain Talk About the Zimbabwean Economy" and it served to launch the planning phase of the financial warfare, four years after the passage of the US sanctions law called the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act (Zidera). When the planning of the financial warfare was in place towards the end of 2007, Ambassador Dell gave another speech in Bulawayo in which he set a hyperinflation target of 1 800 000 percent by the end of 2007 which he said would bring down the economy and the Government of Zimbabwe.

The psychological war was revealed by former US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Walter Kansteiner to The Washington Times on August 20 2002 and reported in The Herald in Zimbabwe on August 22.

In that revelation, Walter Kansteiner named so-called independent journalists and independent media, "civil" society organisations and non-governmental organisations as well as selected governments in the Sadc region, as partners with the US State Department in the psychological and political war against Zimbabwe.

But the two fronts of the regime change onslaught which have not been explained are information and financial warfare.

In his paper called Financial Warfare Professor Michel Chossudovsky describes financial warfare as: "The worldwide scramble to appropriate wealth through financial manipulation. This manipulation of market forces by powerful actors constitutes a form of financial and economic warfare. No need to recolonise lost territory or send in invading armies. In the late 20th Century, the outright conquest of nations, meaning the control over productive assets, labour, natural resources and institutions can be carried out in an impersonal fashion from the corporate boardroom: commands are dispatched from a computer terminal, or a cellphone. The relevant data are instantly relayed to major financial markets — often resulting in immediate disruptions in the functioning of national economies."

But the vehicles and instruments used go beyond just finance and the financial sector. So do the concepts.

It is, therefore, important to note that the phenomena which the RBZ Governor described at his Press conference on November 20 2008 included both financial and information warfare. It was also clear that the explanations of these phenomena and events given by the regime change forces were aimed at psychological warfare, that is to turn the population affected by financial and information warfare against the RBZ and the entire social and political order behind the Governor.

It is, therefore, important to define information warfare before explaining how it operates with and sometimes as financial warfare. The US Information Warfare Site (IWS) defines information warfare as: "any action to deny, exploit, corrupt or destroy the enemy’s information and its functions; protecting ourselves against those actions; and exploiting our own military information functions . . . US information warriors would be able to disable important enemy command and control or civilian infrastructure systems with little, if any, loss of life".

The US IWS then gives many illustrations of actions which constitute information warfare. Two examples are quite telling: Stock or commodity exchanges, electric power grids and municipal air traffic control systems and . . . air traffic control or navigation systems could be manipulated or disrupted, with accompanying economic or societal disruption, physical destruction or loss of life.

Computer intruders might steal and disclose confidential, personal, medical or financial information, as a tool for blackmail, extortion, or to cause widespread social disruption or embarrassment.

Now, if we look at the daily needs and aspirations of the majority of the citizens of Zimbabwe and the policies of the Government of Zimbabwe in response to those needs and aspirations of the people, we can identify the following social objectives which the financial warfare, the information warfare and the psychological warfare together aim to defeat.

First, both the Government and the people want a stable currency, stable prices and affordable goods produced locally and imported from abroad.

Second, both the Government and the people want to be able to punish those who seek to defeat their objectives regarding the economy and the living conditions of the people. But under the conditions of economic liberalisation introduced at the time of the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme and worsened by the imposition of sanctions, it is difficult to maintain stability and to identify those who are engaged in acts of economic and financial destabilisation — let alone to punish them.

The Government and the people find, for instance, that a barrage of rates have been created, and are constantly thrown at them, and used to justify acts that fuel hyperinflation. For instance, when we use the following terms casually we are most likely describing the information war features of the overall economic war against ourselves:

l Old Mutual Implied Rate

l the transfer rate

l the RTGS rate

l the official Government rate

l the parallel market rate

l the inter-bank rate

l the Zimbabwe dollar cash price

l the foreign currency cash price

l the foreign currency transfer rate

l the bank cheque price

l the personal cheque price

l the parallel market price.

Most of these rates and prices have been used to defeat the official Government rate and the inter-bank rate.

If we now return to the US definition of information warfare, we notice that the unleashing of all these supposed rates, as if they constitute reality, has had many destructive effects on the people.

It has denied many the use of their cheque books, because they are heavily penalised for using cheques. As the RBZ Governor pointed out, even the use of guaranteed bank cheques was recently rendered impossible because a score or so bank managers went on to guarantee and write bank cheques for which there were no funds. But the overall impact of all these contradictory rates has been to drive hyperinflation against the Zimbabwe dollar until the nation as a whole is now being denied the right to use its own currency.

In the end, most people do not know what to believe about the value of goods, the value of their money (in local or foreign currency), the value of their stocks, the value of their labour or the value of their produce.

The purpose of all the various types of warfare, intended to substitute or precede military intervention, is made clear in Chapter 2 of the IWS documents which chapter is called The Conduct of Information Warfare and International Law. The authors conclude that: ". . . manipulating an adversary nation to the extent that its citizens or leaders become unhinged from reality, especially when the effects cannot be known or controlled, may be no less wrongful than to force another nation into starvation or cannibalism. The potentially dangerous results of perception manipulation are more than theoretical . . . The use of propaganda, video morphing, or deceptive broadcasts to the extent that they spur unrestrained civil war or even genocide, may be thus illegal".

But these methods were used in Venezuela in late 2002; in Yugoslavia in 1999; in Iraq in 2003; and in Rwanda in 1994. They have been used in Zimbabwe.

The document produced for ZWNEWS by the so-called Zimbabwe Human Rights Forum and other NGOs was premised on the assumption that the combination of psychological war, financial and information warfare had made the Zimbabwean people and their leaders sufficiently "unhinged" or "freaked up" enough to precipitate a genocidal war far worse than Rwanda 1994. The document was called Is Zimbabwe on the Brink of Genocide? The researchers concluded that genocide was imminent in Zimbabwe and would happen by January 2003!

The fact that this has not happened despite all the attempts is reason to pay tribute to the people and leaders of our nation who have rejected illegal regime change.