Zimbabwe, Soros, Abramoff, and British Africa

The Dirty Operation Against Zimbabwe: Soros, Abramoff, and British Africa
Increase DecreaseThe Dirty Operation Against Zimbabwe: Soros, Abramoff, and British Africa

by Anton Chaitkin

This article will appear in the July 11th edition of Executive Intelligence Review.

The British empire's effort to overthrow the Zimbabwe government is run through the political apparatus of billionaire speculator George Soros, via the U.S. government-based National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and the NED's London partner organization, the U.K. government-funded Westminster Foundation.

The Soros Open Society Institute's southern Africa operations are, in effect, directly co-owned by the NED.

These arrangements were put in place in 2000-05 by British strategists and white plantation owners from Southern Rhodesia (the name of Zimbabwe before its 1980 independence from Britain), renewing an imperial partnership in Washington with the gangster grouping around Jack Abramoff and the NED machine. This partnership stems from the earlier British-steered covert action initiatives of the 1980s Reagan-Bush Administration, which involved Abramoff and the current NED leaders, working in the service of the South African apartheid regime, including in its assassinations, white supremacist propaganda, and spying apparatus.

George Soros himself got into the business of manipulating African governments in the 1990s, when he was already heavily invested in British imperial African plantations and mining. His current push to topple the Zimbabwe government is given clout and critical resources by the NED, through the person of its international chief David Lowe. Lowe is Abramoff's political partner, and the man who earlier hooked the South African gestapo into an illegal U.S.A.-based spy network.

- Soros and NED: On the Ground in Zimbabwe -

Soros's Johannesburg-based Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa operates in ten countries. Throughout the recent agitation against the Zimbabwe regime, Reginald Matchaba-Hove has been the chairman of that Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa; he was, simultaneously, the chairman of the Zimbabwe Election Support Network (ZESN)--an anti-government ``non-partisan, independent group of 38 non-governmental organisations.''

On June 27, 2006, the NED presented its annual Democracy Award to Reginald Matchaba-Hove and three other African recipients. The British Broadcasting Corporation, BBC, reported on June 29: President ``George Bush met the award winners from Africa for about an hour ... in the Oval Office.... `You could almost feel the power radiating from the Oval Office,' our reporter said.... Mr. Bush [praised the NED's activists] for their `courage and fortitude and strength in promoting freedom.... My spirits are enriched by talking to freedom lovers and freedom fighters.' ''

On the public record, the NED paid Matchaba-Hove's ZESN tens of thousands of dollars in 2005 to train election monitors, who were to feed the media clamor against the regime and to supply the NED machine with a database on activists in the Zimbabwe elections.

Matchaba-Hove himself is a director of the NED's worldwide organization, World Movement for Democracy, which is led by David Lowe, and the ZESN is a member group of the NED/David Lowe's Africa Democracy Forum, an even larger grouping of ``nonpartisan'' foreign-guided organizations.

Until 1999, Soros's Matchaba-Hove had been chairman of the Zimbabwe Human Rights Association (Zimrights). In 1997, that group got funding from the British government's Westminster Foundation for Democracy (on top of more money from Westminster in 1998), to set up its offices in Zimbabwe's capital, Harare. In 2004, Zimrights got tens of thousands of dollars from the NED to organize marches, demonstrations, and so on.

The Zimbabwe director of Soros's Open Society Initiative on Southern Africa (OSISA) is Godfrey Kanyanze. Kanyanze has long served as the director of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), which is funded by the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy, with money conduited through the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (formerly known as the American Institute for Free Labor Development or AIFLD). ZTCU, which was formerly headed by Zimbabwe opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, is the central trade union federation in Zimbabwe; it was used by the British and their U.S. connections as the main force behind the formation of the Movement for Democratic Change, to overthrow President Robert Mugabe.

The NED and Soros emerged from the shadows to run a joint event in Washington on Sept. 18, 2007, entitled ``Zimbabwe: An Update from the Ground.'' The speakers were Isabella Matambanadzo, Harare-based Zimbabwe program manager for OSISA, and Deprose Muchena, OSISA's economic justice program manager. The event was moderated by Dave Peterson, senior director for the NED's Africa program.

- The Imperial NED and the Abramoff Gang -

In the year 2000, a series of articles by Dean Andromidas reported exclusively in Executive Intelligence Review on London's initiative to overthrow the Mugabe government. The British were angry at Zimbabwe's program to distribute back to Africans some of the agricultural land taken by force by British colonial masters--70% of the country's prime agricultural land. They were also angry at Mugabe's resistance to further destruction of the economy by the ruinous International Monetary Fund structural adjustment program.

EIR documented that the anti-Mugabe agitation was steered by London's Zimbabwe Democracy Trust, set up in 2000 by Lord Robin Renwick, Margaret Thatcher's ambassador to South Africa and the United States, and a director of mining operations, such as the Rupert family's diamonds and cigarettes empire). Other founders included Lord David Steel, Liberal Party leader and partner of oil-and-mercenaries tycoon Tony Buckingham; and Lady Soames, Winston Churchill's daughter, the wife of the last British governor of Rhodesia; and Chester Crocker, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs under President Ronald Reagan, and a director of African mining companies including the Soros-linked Modern Africa Growth and Investment Co.

EIR further showed that the International Republican Institute (IRI)--the original ``Republican Party'' component of the NED--was seconding, from Washington, London's manipulation of Zimbabwe.

Finally, EIR documented Soros's own Africa resources grab. For example, Soros's Quota Fund manager Nicholas Roditi bought two-thirds of the Plantation and General Company, chaired by Rhodesia-born Rupert Pennant Rea, a former deputy governor of the Bank of England, and a director, along with Lord Renwick, in the Rupert family Richemont group, with assets in Zimbabwe and Russia. Through these holdings, Soros tried to take over the vast interests of Tiny Rowland in Lonrho Africa, the London and Rhodesia Mining and Land Corp.

The EIR expose@aa on the Zimbabwe Democracy Trust as instigator of anti-government operations was played up in the Zimbabwe press, and the Trust was then exposed in London newspapers.

In 2002, two years after founding the Zimbabwe Democracy Trust, Lord Renwick quietly picked up the Trust from London and moved it to Washington, D.C., where it was incorporated as a tax-exempt charity. The Tony Blair-Dick Cheney axis was in power, and perhaps it was thought that the British could get their anti-Zimbabwe initiative passed off as coming from the Americans.

The directors of the Trust, after it sneaked into Washington, were then Lord Renwick; Annabel Hughes, the daughter of a white Rhodesian farm owner; and Edward Stewart, the founder and leader of the Africa subversion programs for the National Endowment for Democracy, which were run through the IRI component of the NED.

The administrator of the Trust was Julie Doolittle, the wife of California Republican Congressman John Doolittle. Throughout her management of Lord Renwick's group, Mrs. Doolittle was on the payroll of Jack Abramoff and his partners, while Trust director Ed Stewart was Abramoff's partner in dirty international lobbying pursuits. Stewart ran the foreign operations of House Speaker Tom DeLay's ``K Street Project'' headquarters company, the Alexander Strategy Group, which served to enrich Abramoff. Alexander Strategy has gone out of business since DeLay was indicted, while his consigliere, Abramoff, went to prison for hundreds of millions in fraud.

The Abramoff gang was ideal for the task of hatching British African destabilization operations in Washington. Lobbyist Abramoff himself had worked at the center of the white South African apartheid regime's foreign propaganda machine (see box, ``Abramoff and Africa''), while his associate, Ed Stewart, had pioneered the NED's African schemes. And NED foreign-operations boss David Lowe, who now co-sponsors the Soros fronts in Zimbabwe, was himself a leading figure in the South African apartheid regime's mass-spying on Americans, in a criminal case that broke in the early 1990s (see box, ``David Lowe and Africa'').

NED's David Lowe had long been in Abramoff's jet set. The Russian oil company Naftasid flew Lowe, Abramoff, and DeLay together to Moscow in 1997 to arrange a $1 milliion payment to ASG, for DeLay's okay on an IMF action to aid the Russian oligarchs.

- The Handoff to Soros -

The two Americans running the Zimbabwe Democracy Trust (ZDT) for the British in Washington, administrator Julie Doolittle and director Edward Stewart, were otherwise very busy in those three years, 2002-05.

Kevin Ring, who had been the chief of staff for Julie Doolittle's Congressman husband, went to work under Abramoff at the Greenberg Traurig law firm. The Washington Post reported on Nov. 26, 2005, that sources close to the subsequent Federal investigation of Julie Doolittle and her husband said that Kevin Ring was the intermediary through whom Julie's own consulting firm, Sierra Dominion Financial Solutions, was hired by Abramoff and Greenberg Traurig to fundraise for Abramoff's ``charity,'' the Capital Athletic Foundation. This was the channel through which camouflage suits and sniper scopes were bought for Armageddonist Israeli settlers.

The Capital Athletic Foundation paid a monthly retainer to Julie's consulting firm from at least January 2003 to February 2004. On the day when Ring finally resigned from Greenberg Traurig, April 13, 2007, the FBI raided Julie's home in Virginia.

From 2002 to 2005, while Julie Doolittle was administering the Zimbabwe Democracy Trust, she was simultaneously administering a Korean lobbying scam for Abramoff and Stewart. The Alexander Strategy Group paid Julie's firm for running the books of the Korea-U.S. Exchange Council. This was set up by the DeLay-Abramoff group in 2001, ostensibly as a lobbying initiative for the Korean tycoon running Kia Motors. The Council's Washington representative was Edward Stewart himself, and Heritage Foundation president Edwin Feulner was a Council board member.

This grouping, managing the British attack against the Zimbabwe government as a supposed American enterprise, faded out of existence after 2005. By that time the campaign for Zimbabwe's regime change was in full swing as the joint work of the NED, Lowe, and Stewart, with Soros.

NED's announced 2006 grants for Zimbabwe operations included $400,000 for ``promoting the media, economic, and informal sector activities of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions''--directed by Godfrey Kanyanze, who is simultaneously the director for Zimbabwe of Soros's Open Society Initiative on Southern Africa. And NED brought Soros's southern Africa chairman, Matchaba-Hove--the election clamor man, in for their meeting with Bush.

The British thus completed their handoff to the ``philanthropic'' Soros political machine, which is now digging under the national governments of many African countries.(footnote 1)

Footnotes:

1. Soros's Africa operations include the Open Society Foundation-South Africa (OSF-SA), the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA), the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA), and the Open Society Initiative for East Africa (OSIEA).