Madam Rapporteur, Thank you for giving us an opportunity to submit reports on our experience with the unilateral western sanctions on Zimbabwe.

As a nation, we have suffered much under the collective punishment of US, EU, UK and their allies’ (Australia and Canada) sanctions, hence, we have been encouraging our government to stop fighting these sanctions politically but to turn to multi-lateral institutions as recourse to international law and human rights law in pursuit of fairness, justice and equality for innocent Zimbabwean people.

As a nation, we have suffered much under the collective punishment of US, EU, UK and their allies’ (Australia and Canada) sanctions, hence, we have been encouraging our government to stop fighting these sanctions politically but to turn to multi-lateral institutions as recourse to international law and human rights law in pursuit of fairness, justice and equality for innocent Zimbabwean people. We hope that your visit, will expose the injustices and crimes against humanity that have been visited upon our people, and at the end of it all, we seek remedy for the victims of these western crimes that have prevailed for almost 600 years.

We believe that these sanctions exceeded the threshold of persecution and crimes against humanity to potentially genocide, the moment Zimbabweans began to died due to an intentional orchestration, by our former colonizers, to collectively punish our people by depriving them of food, water, healthcare, economic development; social, cultural, legal and political rights, which often has resulted in deaths of a part of our people.

As much as we are grateful for your visit, we must point out that we are concerned that sanctions being very sophisticated instruments that are not understood by most, many of our people [literate and illiterate] are going to struggle to identify and articulate the parts of their suffering caused by sanctions.

This is in light of the fact that for 20 years since the inception of these sanctions, the United States, EU and UK, have spent huge resources, to convince the people of Zimbabwe that the erosion of their basic rights, standards of living, healthcare, economy, currency, employment, education, government service delivery, the displacement of over 3 million people from Zimbabwe and the escalation in human suffering since the advent of sanctions; is as a result of black leadership incompetence, corruption and mismanagement, and not their economic war.

As the US sanctions strategist Zarate Juan Carlos outlines in his book Treasury’s War, he was part of the US treasury team that came up with the strategy of relying more on economic warfare (sanctions) to neutralize opponents and maintain US primacy in international relations. In fact, Zarate brags about how they chose sanctions because they are an effective weapon that most citizens and officials do not understand, hence they remove the need for the United States to invade countries as citizens can be pushed (weaponized) to revolt against their governments due to the suffering caused by sanctions. And in all this, little or no blame will be pointed at the sanctions’ senders who are destroying the people’s lives.

I do hope, however, that such revelations by Zarate, coupled with the fact that the United States Congress Subcommittee on Global Human Rights, Health and Organization also decided to undertake an impact assessment of its own sanctions on human rights and health in Africa (in June 2021, for the first time in 63 years of African independence), will confirm that despite the lies, even the Americans realise that their sanctions are affecting human beings’ enjoyment of their human rights. In fact, they are intentionally targeting civilians to effect regime change as another author and sanctions strategist Richard Nephew intimates in his book, Art Of Sanctions.

Here, I might add that, the US Congress seem to have taken the decision to undertake an impact assessment, after engaging us (through persons who have worked, and we suspect still work in US intelligence) and we articulated our intention to lobby our government to take the issue of these crimes against humanity to the ICJ for both the targeted sanctions (punishment) upon Special Designated Nationals who have never been tried or given an opportunity to defend themselves, as well as those measures collectively punishing civilians.

In this document, I will endeavour to establish the context under which these sanctions were imposed, from there I will define the sanctions, illustrate how they work and give real examples and anecdotes of how they impact human rights in Zimbabwe.

Because of confidentiality and secrecy surrounding doing business in Zimbabwe and the fear of reprisals by the west; gathering meaningful data on these sanctions from the private sector, has been a challenge. However, we hope that those affected by these sanctions will give you more facts since they can submit information in confidence.

Read more: UN Special Rapporteur On The Negative Impact of Unilateral Coercive Economic Sanctions

INTRODUCTION

Sanctions Are From The Same Toolbox As Slavery And Colonialism.

1. History must be clear that in the same way slavery and colonialism were used to under-develop black and brown peoples across the world for centuries, the extrajudicial collective punishment of 15 million innocent Zimbabweans by the United States, United Kingdom, European Union and other third party’s coercive economic measures, are crimes against humanity in the same way slavery and colonialism were because the measures are:

• • Unilateral (punishment not imposed by the international body of nations, international legal bodies, international law or due process as is required by the UN charter and the bill of rights),
  • They are indiscriminate, disproportionate, racially biased, collective and extrajudicial punishment or persecution of innocent civilians, investors, administrators, business people, government officials, politicians, their relatives and anyone who does business with them, without those people who are being punished being given a fair trial, the right to defend themselves (due process) and being found guilty, beyond reasonable doubt by a court or tribunal in this world, before being sentenced to sanctions.
  • As a result, this collective punishment or persecution deprives innocent Zimbabwean civilians of food, water, medicine, healthcare, jobs, economic development, infrastructure, which in turn displaces millions of people into being refugees, leading to the deaths of thousands of people as a consequence of the above extrajudicial punishment, prohibitions and deprivation.
  • These sanctions also deprive innocent civilians of their rights to life; social cultural, political and legal rights. They are literally akin to carpet bombing of civilians in peacetime.
  • More critically, they are an extraterritorial imposition of US, EU and UK domestic laws upon a sovereign nation as if Zimbabwe is a non-self-governing territory or colony of these imperialists who are repeating their former crimes of suzerainty.
  • What is problematic about these sanctions is they were imposed unilaterally by the same Berlin Conference nations that built their high standards of living by collectively punishing and exploiting Africans over the last 600yrs, through discovery law, slavery, colonialism and now they maintain their economies by sanctions for resources, the civil wars that emanate from them and the western interventions that follow without UN multi-lateral oversight.
  • The sanctions are also characterized not only by economic coercion but what we define as total war consisting of:

1. • 1. negative sentiment generated through mainstream media and social media against the government and the country to evoke pessimism, divide the people, encourage the isolation of the country and to erode global solidarity.
     2. false flag events to paint the government in bad light to justify sanctions purported to be targeted at those violating human rights. These events include activities like the staging of fake abductions (which are being planned as we speak for your trip), assaults, rapes by the opposition in cahoots with US and EU sponsors.
     3. Violent, illegal protests intended to provoke a reaction from security forces to paint the government in bad light with the intention of creating a casus belli for western intervention.
   • The US, EU, UK, Canada and Australia (The Berlin Conference Cabal), which are all UN Charter signatories, imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe unilaterally, without pursuing their purported grievances with Zimbabwe through the multi-lateral, impartial UN dispute resolution mechanism as the UN Charter enjoins member states to do.
   • Additionally, these countries, unilaterally imposed these sanctions without undertaking prerequisite Human Rights Impact Assessment Studies, to ensure that civilians would not be deprived of the enjoyment of their human rights under these unilateral sanctions.
   • Over the past twenty years, these same countries did not undertake human rights impact assessment studies each year that they reviewed and renewed their sanctions on Zimbabwe, as mandated by the UNHRC for all multi-lateral UN sanctions.
   • The sanctions senders have not mitigated or addressed the intentional violation of civilian human rights or suffering caused by their unilateral, illegal sanctions, which they are meant to do after each annual human rights impact assessment.
   • This goes to show that the intention of these sanctions is to punish Zimbabwean civilians and to violate their human rights, to force them to revolt against their government and not to punish purported and untested human rights violations by the Zimbabwean government.
   • According to the definition of a Crime Against Humanity by the Rome Statute, an accepted international legal custom aligned with international conventions on human rights, Zimbabwean civilians are being persecuted (tortured and discriminated by the deprivation of food, clean water, healthcare, education, jobs, life, economic development, technology, global trade, the use of the global reserve currency, payment clearances; social, cultural, economic and political rights) as a nation and group, as punishment for decolonizing the economy, taking back their land from colonial settlers and going to defend the Democratic Republic of Congo when the President of that country invited SADC countries to assist them to protect their territory from invasion by western sponsored Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi and their rebels.
   • We could even go further and define these sanctions as a racially engineered genocide because a part of our people are being killed and displaced by the west intentionally depriving the Zimbabwean people of food, clean water, healthcare, medicine, sovereignty, free international trade, payments, markets and economic development through these coercive measures.
   • This persecution is in pursuance of the systematic objective of reversing decolonization in Zimbabwe in order to maintain neo-colonialism in Africa, white supremacy in the colonial administrations of the United States, Australia and Canada, and to perpetuate the domination of native peoples all across the world for the unfettered exploitation of the resources of these non-self-governing and self-governing territories.
   • All this is done with the support of the EU and their post-colonial systems [against the EU Human Rights Convention] to protect and maintain the benefits the EU derives from the unjust enrichment gained from 600 years of the crimes against humanity of slavery, colonialism and today’s neo-colonialism.
   • For this reason, the EU is complicit with the US, UK, Australia and Canada in perpetuating these crimes against humanity, because they continue to benefit from the cheap resources, brain drain and captive markets in former and current colonies, in which their corporations hold property rights earned from the 1453 Discovery Doctrine, which brought about the crimes against humanity of slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism.
   • We believe these sanctions must be called what they are, a continuation of colonialism [crimes against humanity] and thereafter we enjoin you to assist in exposing these crimes as we intend to continue lobbying our government, SADC, the AU, civil society organizations, humanitarian organizations, impartial media and political groupings to back up a legal fight in international courts and multi-lateral institutions, against this prevailing crime against Africans.
   • As Africans, we can never expect to be treated as human beings, until we start claiming our humanity from those who treat black humanity as secondary and divisible to other human rights.
   • As with slavery and the genocide of American Indians over the centuries, the US, EU and UK imposed these illegal economic measures to destroy the capacity of black Zimbabweans to control their resources and use them to advance the nation.
   • This is in line with what Henry Kissinger said in NSSM39, where he enjoined the American government in 1963, to stop the radicalization of Africans to prevent them from competing against US economic interests by controlling the region’s strategic resources in Southern Africa, which he coined the Persian Gulf of Strategic Mineral Resources.

Read more: UN Special Rapporteur On The Negative Impact of Unilateral Coercive Economic Sanctions

How We Know Sanctions Are Causing Suffering.

2. All things being equal, the cause and effect of sanctions is pretty clear when considering that from 1980, the same Zimbabwean government that is under sanctions today, built one of the most stable economies with some of the most educated people in Africa in just 25 years of independence from 1980 to 2005. By so doing, Zimbabwe attracted many migrants from South Africa, Zambia, Angola, Mozambique and Botswana, to seek refuge, education, skills training and healthcare over the 25-year period, despite corruption being an inherent cancer inherited from the colonial capitalist system.

BACKGROUND.

Where The Problem Emanates.

3. Zimbabwe is a nation that liberated itself from imperialism by the barrel of the guns of 14 and 16year old guerrillas, in a territory (Southern Africa the Persian Gulf of Strategic Mineral Resources) which is of great importance to western development, industry and military industry.
4. To win its liberation, ZANU and PF ZAPU (who united to form ZANU PF) not only defeated the Rhodesians, but they defeated them together with 15000 professional mercenaries, who were actively recruited by arms of the US government from US marines and commandos coming from Vietnam, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Canada, Australia, Israel, apartheid South Africa and even Reza Shah’s Iran, to fight for Rhodesia as a means to maintain white supremacy in Africa, in pursuance of the objectives of Kissinger’s 1969 NSSM Memorandum 39 that said Africans should never be allowed to defeat Europeans in Africa because it would threaten white interests in Africa.
5. And not only did ZANU PF (the combine of PF ZAPU and ZANU) defeat Europeans, but they also defeated the best of the best, comprising of US marines, commandos, seals, British and Australian SAS mercenaries.
6. Buoyed by their victory over a respected white army, ZANU PF went onto drive a hard bargain at Lancaster, agreeing to a ten-year moratorium in which white property rights would be respected in the name of reconciliation, but thereafter they would amend the constitution to deliver restitution. The US and her western allies did not believe ZANU PF would follow through but to their dismay, they did.
7. Then, when the west treacherously funded the apartheid government to destabilize Zimbabwe and SADC immediately after Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980 (to preserve white supremacy in South Africa and remove ZANU PF), once again, this pain in the side of white supremacy in Africa, led by State Security Minister Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa, was more than up to the task of defeating CIA and apartheid sponsored rebels in Zimbabwe and RENAMO rebels in a second front in Mozambique, where they were sabotaging Zimbabwe’s access to port.
8. These defeats of proxies of apartheid South Africa and their western sponsors, drained apartheid South African resources, leading to her eventual defeat and retreat from Angola and her subsequent loss of Namibia after 45years of illegal occupation.
9. This went on to shatter the western plan to position white South Africa as the superpower of black Africa and the Bantustans, to legitimize apartheid.
10. From here, Zimbabwe went on to disrupt western plans to overthrow President Laurent Kabila in Congo in 1998, where Rwanda and Uganda intended to install a puppet leader to re-establish the Hima Tutsi 1670 Mapororo Empire in the Great Lakes and beyond.
11. The final straw came when Zimbabwe pursued Restitution In Integrum by sequestrating land from the white settler farmers (who stole it during colonialism) and returned it to its rightful owners.
12. The bold and brazen manner in which Zimbabwe asserted its military might in the region, while ZANU PF took a moral high ground amending laws to decolonize Zimbabwe and reverse property rights in a manner that would change international custom and inspire leaders like John Magufuli to follow suit ten years later, frustrated the west.
13. More insidiously, ZANU PF’s drive to empower blacks who it had adequately educated was causing then to demand more control of their factors of production, threatening white monopoly over resources in the Persian Gulf of strategic mineral resources, that they so desperately need.
14. All this brinksmanship was threatening western control of African resources, radicalizing Africans (Julius Malema, Magufuli and Namibian youth) and more importantly reversing the international property rights customs established by the 1453 Doctrine of Discovery, which established global property rights on the notion that non-European lands were Terri Nulius (not occupied according to European land use standards) before the Europeans came and so the European colonizers obtained pre-emption rights (the so-called property rights) to stolen native property by developing it.

The Western Counterattack.

15. All this brinksmanship was threatening western control of African resources, radicalizing Africans (Julius Malema, Magufuli and Namibian youth) and more importantly reversing the international property rights customs established by the 1453 Doctrine of Discovery, which established global property rights on the notion that non-European lands were Terri Nulius (not occupied according to European land use standards) before the Europeans came and so the European colonizers obtained pre-emption rights (the so-called property rights) to stolen native property by developing it.
16. So, in a world where some of the most powerful western nations are established on a doctrine that Zimbabwe is successfully challenging and reversing; a world where European nations have depleted all their resources, eaten all their wild animals, exhausted their land and their prosperity and the maintenance of white supremacy (as Lothrob Staddard wrote in his book The Rising Tide of Colour) is dependent on the perpetual underdevelopment and dispossession of Africans, for the west to continue controlling and exploiting African resources and captive markets. Zimbabwe’s posture threatens western survival, civilization and peace according to eugenicist logic.
17. As a result, in 1998 after the Land Donor Conference in Harare, the 1997 compensation of war veterans who fought the Zimbabwean war of liberation, Zimbabwe’s 1998 entry into Congo War 2 and indigenization in key economic sectors; the western world conspired to use multi-lateral finance institutions to deny Zimbabwe reconstruction and development loans, cancellation of colonial debt and balance of payment support, in the hope that the financial pressure emanating from denying Zimbabwe fiscal support, would help MDC win the 2000 parliamentary elections and reverse decolonization.
18. In the year 2000, the Broad-based Civil Alliance which would later become MDC, tricked Zimbabweans to vote against the referendum to amend the constitution that would have enabled fast track land reform.
19. That same year, MDC narrowly lost elections to ZANU PF, after spending most of their effort campaigning for the referendum no-vote. Subsequently, the US Congress imposed the first set of sanctions coined ZDERA, in February of 2001.

SANCTIONS EXPLAINED.

ZDERA (Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act).

20. ZDERA is a clear example of how US sanctions target Zimbabweans collectively by blocking the Zimbabwean government from accessing debt and colonial debt cancellation from multi-lateral financial institutions.
21. To create these coercive economic measures, we saw the very esteemed US Congress converge to create a specific law for a small, insignificant country called Zimbabwe, that was threatening the colonial world order by taking back colonized [stolen] factors of production [land, resources, labour and economy] from white settlers to put them back into the hands of their rightful dispossessed owners.
22. That law was misleadingly called Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act or ZDERA, yet it was crafted to handicap [not recover] the Zimbabwean economy by prohibiting the government (national & local governments), ministries, state-owned enterprises and institutions from getting development & reconstruction loans and more critically, blocking cancellation of colonial debt by multi-lateral lending institutions like the IMF, the World Bank and the International Development and Reconstruction Bank.
23. This means the sanctions affect the ability of the national government, local governments, ministries and parastatals to borrow money to deliver basic services like water, sanitation, electricity, education, social development, disaster relief and support of businesses in the country. They also limit the government’s capacity to service the most vulnerable members of our society who constitute over 60% of our population.
24. These sanctions also prohibit reconstruction of the country from colonial pillage, the devastation of the liberation war which displaced a million Zimbabweans and for which the country never received restitution or reparations to rebuild.
25. They also prevent the nation from seeking redress for the destabilization visited upon Zimbabwe and SADC by the apartheid South African government’s Total War on the region (1980-1992) in pursuit of a negotiated settlement desired by Kissinger’s NSSM39 to preserve white domination and ill-gotten property rights. Ths destabilization cost Zimbabwe in excess of $2.8 billion ($4.7 billion today) and SADC over $60 billion (over $100 billion today).

ZDERA Transfers The Colonial Legacy And Its Debts As The First Sanctions Zimbabwe Inherited.

26. As a result, ZDERA has maintained the yoke of short term, high interest colonial loans of about US$800 million [US$2,4 billion today] taken by the Rhodesian government illegally during UN sanctions, to buy weapons, in an effort to stop our parents from getting independence.
27. These loans, which had to be repaid by 1987 at interests of above 11%/annum, were repaid by the IMF and other multi-lateral institutions forcing the Zimbabwean government to take more loans to pay off these colonial debts in order to maintain a good credit rating and good relations with the west.
28. These repayment loans were bundled into a US$1 billion package from the IMF, Standard Chartered Bank and Barclays loans given to the newly independent Zimbabwe, in part, to save it from the terrible drought and recession of 1984; kickstart the construction of 5709 schools, 1261 hospitals and clinics, the creation of 19321 new hospital beds; construction of 700 000 houses, Hwange Power Station phase 1-4 to produce 1500kw of electricity output and construction of 7000km of roads that were never built by the colonial government in contravention of their Human Rights legal obligations as a governing power.
29. The mathematicians among us would know that any debt above 10% interest, doubles every 7yrs because of compound interest. The implication being, Rhodesian sanctions, their underdevelopment and high interest debts that doubled every 7yrs, were inherited by the Zimbabwean government to become the first set of sanctions [restrictions] upon the recently independent country.

IMF Sabotage.

30. After independence the Zimbabwe dollar was devalued quickly, due to onerous conditions imposed by the IMF for the country to access loans to develop the infrastructure outlined above. Repayment of previous debts and new debts had to be sustained by government taking more loans as narrated previously, however, the IMF refused to give any loans for reindustrialization, technology upgrades and retooling in manufacturing (the same thing US sanctions are doing today). A deliberate strategy to deindustrialize Africa as the Morgenthau Plan that was designed for Germany after WW2 and then repurposed for Africa, prescribed.
31. Accompanying that, the government was also induced to buy back idol land from the colonial settlers at market prices, in foreign currency in the name of reconciliation. These unsustainable financial obligations would lead to ESAP (the Economic Structural Adjustment Program) and eventually an inevitable default compounding colonial legacy debt repayment that the nation can’t cancel today due to ZDERA.

The Intention Of ZDERA.

32. ZDERA therefore affects each and every Zimbabwean and not a few targeted individuals as purported by the sanction’s senders. The colonial debts and their interest, continue to mount; inhibiting reconstruction, capital accumulation, the building of power generation capacity, roads,
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    hospitals and railways, to lift ordinary people out of poverty, in line with the UN Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals.
33. It was for the purpose of stopping economic development in Zimbabwe [in line with the African Morgenthau Plan], that ZDERA was enacted with similar restrictions placed upon blacks during slavery and Jim Crow, and the American Indians under the Monroe Doctrine.
34. The whole idea was to make the Zimbabwean people suffer to a point where they would be forced [through economic terrorism] to vote against ZANU PF in the then upcoming 2002 Presidential elections, to end the pain.
35. In the event that MDC lost the elections, the hope was that citizens [ tired of suffering] would rise to push ZANU PF out of power to end the suffering. These were the first attempts to replicate the Popovic applied non-violent action strategy used in the Orange Revolution to overthrow Milosovic, in Africa’s most educated society.
36. As the political parties were campaigning for these elections, EU observers began to interfere with the campaigning, influencing their partners in the MDC and creating negative sentiment aimed at casting a shadow upon any electoral outcome other than an MDC victory. As a result, the government of Zimbabwe dismissed the head of EU observers, Pierre Schori from the country.

EU Sanctions.

37. Within five days of Pierre Schori’s dismissal, 13 out of 15 EU nations (Portugal and Greece opposed) voted for sanctions upon a number of Zimbabwean politicians and government without trial. This saw the EU withhold $132 million earmarked for aid between 2002 and 2007. All the same, ZANU PF would once again win the Presidential elections in a clear indication that ZDERA had failed.

Executive Order Sanctions.

EO13288

38. With ZDERA failing to achieve the desired outcome, a new hurdle was engineered in 2003 when George Bush declared a National Emergency on 80 individuals referred to by the US as SDNs [Special Designated Nationals]. These included government officials, state owned enterprises, key national investors and financial institutions in the country.
39. The point of this second set of sanctions was to prevent these decision makers, investors, financiers and anyone who does business with them, from transacting with US companies, organizations, citizens and foreigners from other countries seeking to do business in the US.
40. Worse still, sanctions were placed on government officials deliberately, to prevent them from attending western meetings as a regional or continental bloc, in order to isolate the country and dull its influence.

2005 Executive Order Sanctions EO13391 Added.