The genocide in Gaza, Hichilema and the UPND government
By Azwell Banda
IT has come to pass what I wrote on this column on 10 November, 2023: finally, Israel is invading Gaza with the sole purpose of either exterminating the people of Gaza or forcing them to relocate out of Gaza. And Hakainde Hichilema and his UPND government are friends of the current extreme Zionist and fascist government of Israel. They have already jointly announced Israel will soon set up its embassy in Zambia.
The 2.1 million people of Gaza urgently need the genocide to stop. They urgently need shelter, safety, water, food, medicines and fuels. Israel has destroyed most of their homes. Hospitals in Gaza can only deliver first aid, as medicines, equipment, fuel and congestion with refugees, injured and dead bodies render them totally useless to function as hospitals. This is part of the conscious plan by Israel to cleanse Gaza and the West Bank, of Palestinians. Israel has blockaded Gaza for 17 years now. During this war, it has simply tightened the noose and worsened the living conditions of Palestinians in Gaza in order to make it easier for its invading ground troops to enter Gaza and further kill and displace Palestinians.
More than two million Zambians are acutely hungry today. Eight out of every 10 Zambians in our rural areas are extremely poor while six out of every 10 Zambians throughout the country are extremely poor. The majority of Zambians, who are young people, are unemployed, starving and poor. The majority of Zambians today cannot afford paraffin, petrol, diesel, transport, rent, water, medicines, mealie-meal, sugar, cooking oil, soap, Vaseline, clothes and shoes, and many other basic human necessities. And yet Hichilema and his friends are stealing donated poor Zambian people’s medicines.
Hichilema refuses to take urgent executive decisions to cause the Zambian government to create mass access to these basic humanitarian needs for the majority of Zambians. No matter how many Zambians will die from poverty, Hichilema is determined not to disturb his emerging economic relationships with the United States (US), its Western allies and Israel in his economic schemes to lock Zambia permanently into the US sphere of influence. We now know that the killing of the Patriotic Front (PF) is part of this diabolical scheme, by Hichilema and the West.
Hichilema and his friends in the UPND stand to benefit massively from the lucrative shares, rents, commission and bribes, in the new relationship Hakainde is crafting with the US, the West, East and Israel. Hichilema voted against an urgent “pause”, not even a permanent cease fire, in the ongoing genocide by Israel in Gaza. It is impossible for Hichilema to have sleepless nights because the majority of Zambians are suffering from curable diseases, acute hunger and poverty. This is classic political sociopathy. It is social genocide.
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum documents that on December 9, 1948, the United Nations (UN) approved a written international agreement known as The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This convention established genocide as an international crime, which signatory nations “undertake to prevent and punish”.
The Holocaust Memorial Museum explains that “Genocide” is an internationally recognized crime where acts are committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. It says these acts fall into five categories: killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” The government of Israel is now fully committed to killing and removing Palestinians from Gaza.
The Museum cautions that “there are a number of other serious, violent crimes that do not fall under the specific definition of genocide. They include crimes against humanity, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and mass killing.” One need not be a genius to conclude for themselves what both the intentions and actions of Israel and its US and European allies’ mean for Palestinians: genocide of Palestinians. The coloniser, such as Israel, after all, is never safe as long as a single colonised native is alive. The US now wants Gaza for itself, for modern real estate development.
We are witnesses, live, in Gaza, of how the global capitalist and imperialist worlds were born and are nourished: demonisation of natives so that they can be robbed of their lands and other possessions, so that they can be dispossessed and thereby rendered economic and social invalids, to survive they become dependent upon their colonisers, oppressors, dominators, and their population is partially or wholly exterminated, for the security of the colonisers. In Gaza today we are witnessing, live, the genocide at the heart of the colonial enterprise and its massive accumulation of real wealth which creates “capitalism” and when this “capitalism” is exported, it becomes “imperialism”.
Benjamin Netanyahu, fascist prime minister of Israel, has embarked upon the systematic bombing and murdering of people of one kind – Palestinians – in Gaza, and the occupied West Bank. This is also known as conducting a holocaust. The final solution of all holocausts is the indefinite state of siege of those being colonially exterminated. Netanyahu has announced Israel will “provide security” in Gaza, indefinitely, when his war is over. Hakainde Hichilema has invited the US to set up its military presence in Zambia, to secure its, and those of its western allies, economic interests in Zambia, indefinitely.
The US and its allies ruthless arming of Israel and their threats against Arab and Palestinian countries not to interfere as Israel commits genocide in Gaza is part of the permanent capitalist and imperialist wars all over the world, led by the US: a global permanent war to continuously re-divide, loot and plunder the world’s resources and secure markets, among themselves. These wars will be with us as long as capitalism and imperialism continue to exist: they cannot be prevented and stopped by appeals to capitalist governments or their politicians, such as is being done by the current world anti-war and pro free Palestine movements and demonstrations. Nor can they be prevented from occurring in imperialist contested countries, such as Zambia.
Our acute and painful problems in Zambia, all the ongoing wars in the world today, are rooted in, and caused, by the world capitalist and imperialist systems. The world can halt and stop the genocide in Gaza, and all the current wars in the world, and abolish hunger and poverty in the world.
To achieve a hunger, poverty, war free and peaceful world, demands the urgent world agitation, mobilisation, education and organisation of the only world forces capable of defeating and therefore abolishing both world capitalism and its international form, imperialism: the world working class and their poor rural peasant cousins into a formidable conquering force for a world in which they are the dominant, dictating forces; a socialist world, the only true democratic world. The alternative to this is the now fast unstoppable world march to a combined climate catastrophe and nuclear World War III.
(Comments to kalindawalo2010@gmail.com)
