People’s Enemies, Our Best Friends?
CHINA is our best friend if we believe what our ruling party’s leaders say and what the Einsteins of the SPYL say. If we believe them, well, then there are no more noble people walking this earth than the Chinese and especially the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, a party that murdered millions of Chinese people over the years.
Then we also believe in the kindness of Mao Zedong and the decency of Joseph Stalin and in the existence of Father Christmas. Then we believe even in a Robert Mugabe!
Weeks, even some months before the great 10-year-event, being the convention of the communist Party, took place, this party and its government ‘prepared’ Beijing and China for this. Taxis had to remove the opening devices for their windows and busses, whose destination included Tiananmen Square, had to cover their windows with paper. Dissidents were jailed or put under house arrest and everything possible was done to ensure a smooth congress without demonstrations – in which process untold human rights were violated all over China. All of us who are interested in world politics know that. However, in Namibia, nothing was reported on this.
How is it possible that the people of Namibia do not protest about the rubbish they hear about ‘our best friends’? What our ‘best friends’ – all of them – do, is completely contrary to what this nation fought against for more than half a century.
What these ‘best friends’ still do today has been declared as a violation against people, a violation of human rights and it was declared as an abomination by us Namibians when we started our own freedom war. And all those who then violated our human rights were declared as our number one enemy by the same who now say China and Zimbabwe are our best friends.
How was it possible that a fundamental truth could change ‘overnight’, that today leaders may say ‘people do not eat human rights, they eat food’? How is it possible that those who declare themselves as the old ‘freedom fighters’ now tolerate in China and Zimbabwe and elsewhere everything of the same they fought against in Namibia?
This is my question for Christmas 2012.
Alfred Angelo
By E-mail