The empire has struck once more.
On March 4, the US imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa for corruption and critical human rights abuses via the International Magnitsky Act.
It additionally sanctioned 10 different people, who it designated as “key actors”. They embody Mnangagwa’s spouse, Auxillia, Vice President Constantino Chiwenga, Defence Minister Oppah Muchinguri, Police Commissioner Godwin Matanga, the deputy director basic of Zimbabwe’s Central Intelligence Group (CIO), Walter Tapfumaneyi, and a number of other businesspersons who’re aligned with the president.
On the similar time, US President Joe Biden’s administration additionally introduced the termination of the 2003 Zimbabwe sanctions programme. Transferring ahead, it defined in an announcement, the Biden administration will as a substitute implement “sanctions on clear and particular targets”, reminiscent of Mnangagwa and his shifty cronies.
Enacted in December 2016, the International Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act permits the US government department to impose visa restrictions and focused sanctions on international authorities officers chargeable for crimes together with extrajudicial killings, torture, and different gross human rights violations or acts of significant corruption.
There may be little doubt that Mnangagwa behaved in methods and took part in acts that made him a professional goal for an act aimed toward sanctioning human rights abusers and corrupt political actors.
Mnangagwa is a veteran politician who has held numerous cupboard posts since Zimbabwe gained its independence from Britain in April 1980. And his many-decades-long political profession has been blighted with accusations of sleaze, corruption, intolerant conduct and direct participation in human rights violations from the very starting.
Simply final 12 months, an expose by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit (I-Unit) positioned Mnangagwa, his partner, a senior ambassador and numerous shady businesspersons on the centre of a fancy gold-smuggling and money-laundering scheme.
This landmark investigation led the US to conclude “Mnangagwa gives a protecting defend to smugglers to function in Zimbabwe and has directed Zimbabwean officers to facilitate the sale of gold and diamonds in illicit markets, taking bribes in alternate for his providers.” His spouse, Auxillia, in the meantime, was discovered to have excelled at “the misappropriation of state belongings and corruption associated to authorities contracts or the extraction of pure sources, or bribery”.
And Mnangagwa’s document on human rights and corruption was not any higher earlier than his rise to Zimbabwe’s highest workplace in 2017.
In October 2002, a United Nations Safety Council report revealed Mnangagwa was the “key strategist” for an elite community that systemically plundered diamonds, cobalt, copper, and germanium from the mineral-rich Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
This transnational community, which included political and army actors and businesspersons from Zimbabwe and the DRC, allegedly transferred at the least $5bn of belongings from the state mining sector to non-public corporations underneath its management whereas the 1998-2003 Second Congo Battle was underneath method.
And lengthy earlier than taking over a number one position within the DRC’s systematic plunder, as state safety minister, Mnangagwa additionally performed a crucial position in facilitating the Gukurahundi massacres of 1983-1987, which many students and activists take into account a genocide.
At the least 20,000 largely Ndebele-speaking folks in Zimbabwe’s southwestern provinces of Matabeleland and Midlands had been killed in what was alleged to be an anti-rebel operation, led by the Fifth Brigade, a crack military unit. For 5 years, the Fifth Brigade subjected tens of millions of civilians to enforced disappearances, rape, sexual violence, mass hunger, extrajudicial killings, pressured displacement, and ethnic cleaning.
The International Magnitsky Act, after all, didn’t exist again then. Nonetheless, the US nonetheless had many different means to exhibit its displeasure with the way in which Zimbabwean authorities, together with Mnangagwa, carried out themselves. It did nothing. It turned a blind eye to genocidal violence within the nation, regardless of being conscious of the slaughter. Actually, the US authorities repeatedly went out of their method to specific their help for his or her Zimbabwean counterparts.
In September 1983, because the exterminations in Matabeleland gathered momentum, for instance, then US President Ronald Reagan invited his Zimbabwean counterpart Robert Mugabe to a “working lunch” on the White Home in a transfer that bordered on outright complicity.
The Gukurahundi killings finally got here to an finish after the so-called Unity Accord was signed in December 1987. However to this present day, not a single Zimbabwean politician, military official, or authorities operative has confronted worldwide sanctions for his or her complicity within the state-sanctioned violence. Mnangagwa and his first deputy, Chiwenga, who participated within the Gukurahundi marketing campaign as a brigadier within the military, confronted no international condemnation.
Regardless of the well-documented carnage, within the eyes of the West, Zimbabwe remained a trusted associate and alleged paragon of democracy in Southern Africa.
At the least till February 2000, when landless black Zimbabweans started to invade business farms owned by white farmers. Confronted with an try to rectify a colonial injustice, and cases of violence in opposition to white folks, the US instantly modified its stance and started to castigate the “horrible human rights circumstances in Zimbabwe”.
Ultimately, US international policing solely made it to our dusty villages, cities, and cities after just a few white farmers had been killed in politicised violence. White lives mattered – clearly – however the 20,000 Black Africans killed in Gukurahundi didn’t.
It was then that I realised the utter hypocrisy of the US declare to being the worldwide policeman. And because of this I can’t rejoice on the sanctions imposed on Mnangagwa by the US underneath the Magnitsky Act this month.
After all, as somebody who by no means forgot or forgave Mnangagwa’s previous crimes, or turned a blind eye to his apparent corruption, I cannot lose any sleep over the hardship he and his cronies could expertise on account of these sanctions.
That being stated, I can’t recover from the illogical and unjust method through which the US is – nonetheless – trying to police the globe, both.
Since its 2016 inception, the International Magnitsky Act has solely served to assist Washington unilaterally decide which lives matter, and which crimes necessitate a punishment.
Thus far, a number of the act’s different high-profile targets included Yahya Jammeh, former president of The Gambia, and Alpha Conde, the deposed chief of Guinea.
There may be little doubt that these leaders, like Mnangagwa, are chargeable for their fair proportion of human rights violations, and thus rightful targets for an act aimed toward sanctioning human rights offenders with governmental powers.
Nonetheless, there are numerous different leaders with lengthy, well-documented histories of violating worldwide humanitarian legislation, who’ve by no means been focused by the Magnitsky Act.
Certainly, the US has by no means sanctioned, simply to present just a few examples, Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, Ethiopia’s Abiy Ahmed, Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, or Rwanda’s Paul Kagame.
It has by no means sanctioned, or in another method meaningfully punished, a high-ranking official from the rogue, violent and lawless state of Israel, both.
Israel, for a lot of a long time, constantly refused to respect probably the most primary socioeconomic and human rights of Palestinians within the occupied West Financial institution and East Jerusalem, and launched 15 brutal wars in opposition to the besieged Gaza Strip.
The systematic repression and grotesque violence directed at Palestinians quantity to the crimes in opposition to humanity of apartheid and persecution, in accordance with Human Rights Watch and Amnesty Worldwide.
Disappointingly, although, the US has not sanctioned Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu underneath the International Magnitsky programme.
As a substitute, it supplied his authorities with all of the weapons it must proceed oppressing Palestinians and vetoed numerous UN Safety Council resolutions aimed toward placing a cease to Israel’s seemingly endless violations of worldwide legislation.
Even right this moment, as Netanyahu’s authorities commits, within the evaluation of the ICJ and a number of other UN consultants, a “believable genocide” in Gaza, the US reveals no actual intention to sanction any Israeli chief.
The repression that Gambians, Guineans and Zimbabweans undoubtedly endure underneath their corrupt leaders isn’t any worse or extra worthy of worldwide intervention than the systemic oppression skilled by the Ugandans, Ethiopians, Rwandans or Palestinians.
A sanctions regime that makes an attempt to ship justice in some nations however not others can’t ship justice in any respect.
A sanctions regime that targets solely those that should not helpful to US pursuits, and ignores the wanton violations by valued US allies, serves solely to additional Western hegemony, deepen white supremacy, and divide victims of repression who needs to be united of their resistance in opposition to empire.
For this reason I, together with many different Zimbabweans who haven’t any love misplaced for Mnangagwa, refuse to help or have fun the US sanctions in opposition to the president.
If the US desires the world to see the sanctions it imposed on leaders like Mnangagwa underneath the Magnitsky Act as a real try at delivering justice to oppressed folks, then it ought to do the correct factor and in addition sanction el-Sisi, Museveni, Abiy, Kagame, and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
If not, it ought to put an finish to its decades-old, drained hypocrisy and abandon its controversial sanctions regime for good.
Empire’s days of impunity are over.
It’s time for the US to strike down its shameful makes an attempt to protect Western hegemony, and white supremacy, internationally.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.