January 17, 2018
From the article:
...ever since the United States implemented targeted sanctions on Mugabe’s government in 2003 over its disastrous indigenization plan (which involved the seizure of thousands of white-owned farms and led to the country’s financial ruin), American diplomats have grown accustomed to being scapegoated for Zimbabwe’s myriad failings. Boilerplate calls by U.S. emissaries to respect human rights and rein in corruption have been met with forceful denunciations and accusations of neocolonial meddling. After Christopher Dell, who served as U.S. ambassador from 2004 to 2007, blamed the country’s economic woes on graft and mismanagement, the pro-government Herald famously ran the banner headline “Mugabe to Dell: Go to Hell.”
But for African-American diplomats, the abuse has been intensely racialized. Dell’s successor, the towering Air Force veteran James McGee, was also branded an Uncle Tom, as were Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell. When Johnnie Carson, who served as assistant secretary of state for African affairs from 2009 to 2013, mentioned Zimbabwe’s poor record on human rights during a speech in Washington in 2010, a heckler yelled that he was “talking like a good house slave!” That heckler turned out to be Machivenyika Mapuranga, Zimbabwe’s then-ambassador to the United States.
Relations between Washington and Harare weren’t always so poisonous. When Carson served as U.S. ambassador in Harare in the 1990s, he enjoyed what he called a “pretty good relationship with Robert Mugabe.” The two had met decades earlier in northern Mozambique, not long after Mugabe had been released from a decade in prison and joined the guerrilla war against the apartheid government of Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe was then called). As president, Mugabe invited Carson to tea on a number of occasions. Their conversations were always cordial, but they left little doubt about the depth of Mugabe’s animus toward white Zimbabweans, Western multinational corporations, and international financial institutions such as the World Bank.
That animus intensified after the George W. Bush administration imposed sanctions and dubbed Zimbabwe an “outpost of tyranny.” Mugabe and his cronies are “men with long memories who lived through a lot of racial injustice,” said Todd Moss, who served as deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs from 2007 to 2008. “They take any criticism, particularly from a foreign government, as racially motivated. And therefore an African-American working for the U.S. government that is critical of [their] misrule is immediately seen as a patsy for American racial interests.”
Of course, the language of racial grievance has also proved a convenient way to deflect attention away from the regime’s own shortcomings. In 2009, the country was forced to abandon its currency after annual inflation hit 500 billion percent in 2008, and the economy has halved in size since 2000. Together with the United Kingdom, the United States now feeds roughly a quarter of Zimbabweans with emergency food aid, according to Thomas. “It’s a distraction,” Moss said of the racial attacks against U.S. diplomats, “an excuse not to deal with the real issues at hand.”