SADC's responsibility on Zimbabwe

SADC's responsibility on Zimbabwe

• South Africa lays Zim crisis at MDC door

• Kaunda, Sata and Chiluba rail at Mugabe's critics

• South Africa insists on Zimbabwe dialogue

• Zambian leader calls Zimbabwe 'as sinking Titanic'

• Tanzanian leaders meets Mugabe amid crisis

• 24-gun salute and red carpet for Mugabe in Namibia

• Mwanawasa wins tight Zambian election race

• Unrest as chance of Zambian opposition victory fades

• Zambian opposition leader praises Mugabe

• SA envoy to Zimbabwe shot dead

• Sehlare Makgetlaneng: Nepad's fate cannot be decided on Zimbabwe

• Zimbabwe crisis spills into South Africa

• Mbeki pleased after meeting Mutambara

• Mugabe brands African leaders cowards

• Mbeki 'will not shout' at Mugabe

• 'Apoplectic' Mugabe spurned SA loan

By Tawanda Mutasah

AS THE wake-up calls buzzed on Wednesday morning in the bedrooms of heads of state and government of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), heralding their emergency discussions on Zimbabwe and the DRC, about twenty armed police were simultaneously raiding the house of Harare Ward 11 civic chairperson, Peter Bhokosi.

As the SADC discussions began, by late afternoon Wednesday, several other shocking human rights abuses had taken place in Zimbabwe, including the arrests of at least 10 MDC officials following the barricading by armed police of the Harare headquarters of the MDC, abductions and arrests of ordinary people and activists alike, threats to lawyers who are seeking accountability for the whereabouts of abducted people, and the raiding by about 40 armed policemen of the Zimbabwe Domestic Workers' Union offices in Gweru in pursuit of labour organiser Zacharia Chikwenya for his part in distributing flyers on a proposed national labour stay away.

For the last seven years of Zimbabwe's deepening political and economic crisis, the sentiment has often been expressed that, those who want to be effective in their correction of Harare's human rights misdeeds must beat Mugabe with an African stick, and not a Western rod.

After the shocking and still ongoing events that started with the torture of civic and opposition leaders two weeks ago on 11 March, this view gained even more currency.

Encouraging this approach has been a number of practical developments over the last two weeks. Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete jetted in to meet with Mugabe in Harare; Ghana's John Kufuor - the current African Union(AU) chair - and AU commission head Alpha Konare raised concerns about human rights abuses in Zimbabwe; Pretoria - whose politicians have been previously known for speaking on Zimbabwe with water in their mouths - sat up and expressed its discomfort over events next door; President Mbeki reportedly phoned Mugabe; a SADC troika on politics and security issues met on Zimbabwe; Zambia's President Mwanawasa forthrightly called Zimbabwe a "sinking titanic"; and the SADC summit that is meeting today was promptly convened.

All this is as it should be. But there is a lingering anxiety on the part of human rights defenders in Zimbabwe and on the African continent that, unless an approach radically different from their past efforts is adopted by SADC and the AU, Mugabe could yet still use African regional mechanisms as a shield behind which to hide as he oversees the implosion of his country.

Consider the record.

On the 22nd of August 2006, SADC chair Pakalitha Mosisili of Lesotho
announced that former Tanzanian President Benjamin Mkapa had been
appointed to "mediate between Britain and Zimbabwe" to resolve the Zimbabwe crisis. As strange as the terms of reference were given that Mugabe needs to negotiate not with Tony Blair but with fellow Zimbabweans in opposition, civic, trade union, business and other circles, Mkapa himself a little later indicated his reluctance to take up the brief.

Before that, an attempt had been made by former Mozambican President Chissano to help, and his efforts had come to naught. Before that, after US President Bush had stood beside President Mbeki in Pretoria and said that the latter was the "point man" on Zimbabwe, Mbeki had repeatedly assured the world for more than five years that he had assurances from Harare that a solution was six months away.

Then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan had spoken to Mugabe on the sidelines of the AU summit mid-2006, and that effort had also not yielded results.

When the 38th ordinary session of the African Commission on Human and People's Rights pronounced against human rights abuses in Zimbabwe, Harare had promptly reacted by questioning its 'Africanness'.

The list goes on.

The point is this: at the centre of the Zimbabwe crisis is the very inability of Mugabe and the small group of securocrats around him to have a bona fide national conversation out of the crisis. They are bound together by a web of entrenched and mutually reinforcing interests which are about retention of power, fear of accountability for human rights abuses, maintenance of a lootocracy that has assumed increasingly shocking proportions, and preservation of the few remaining benefits of Mugabe's patronage.

They have consistently put the wool over the eyes of their African neighbours, using a combination of diversionary national theatrics such as the current central bank driven "social contract" and church driven "national vision" processes, as well as poker-faced untruths such as the thirteen page propaganda document recently issued by Mugabe's Foreign Minister to African embassies, claiming among other things that Tsvangirai and Mutambara have been leading a campaign of violence against the State, and that on 11 March Tsvangirai was "at no time...assaulted while in police custody".

The energies of this group are singularly devoted not to a genuine resolution of the Zimbabwe crisis, but to keeping Mugabe in power until death - using his insecurity to shackle him to the presidential chair, while using his persona to prop up both the pretence at the national level of cohesion in the ruling Zanu PF, and, at the international level, the rhetoric and posture of Africanist liberationism.

It is even possible that the State in Zimbabwe has already disintegrated, and Mugabe - though he will not admit it - has lost control of a section of the security apparatus that may in fact be spearheading the current crackdown on pro-democracy forces, with the twin objective of precipitating social unrest to remove Mugabe while at the same time eliminating real political competition from leaders with mass opposition constituencies. Even then, Mugabe would have to be made to take responsibility for sinking the country into such an abyss.

Given such a reality, SADC and the AU must be crystal clear about the fundamentals. First, they must hold Mugabe accountable to the human rights and democratic norms and standards and African treaty law that Zimbabwe is signatory to - making it clear that human rights are human rights. This is what the new pan-Africanism ushered in by the transition from the Organisation of African Unity to the African Union should be about.

The new pan Africanism has put democracy and human rights at its core. At the same time, because of the historical memory of subjugation, as well as the reality of how much contemporary global relations are still far from equitable, Africans also, correctly, seek to assert their right to self-determine and to define their democratic ethos.

It is well and good that there is a commitment to be African. But surely the quintessence of being African should be about saying "never again" to human rights abuse and democratic arrest. Africa has played an important role in the United Nations, and other multilateral systems, in the elaboration of international human rights instruments.

Africa has led in the articulation of alternatives to slavery, colonialism, neo-colonial pillage, structural adjustment programmes, the debt burden, Washington Consensus dogma, and global superpower unilateralism and military adventurism. Surely such a rich rights tradition provides the basis for Africa to expand, rather than to diminish, the international struggle for democracy and human rights. In any event, the right to participate in governance, as well as other rights - such as assembly, expression and conscience, - associated with the suffrage, are universal human rights.

Just as any passenger sitting on a flight and having their life as it were in the hands of the pilot would hope that the pilot is not going to say that there is an African way of flying a Boeing, African citizen passengers often become frightened when they hear their political leaders threatening the spectre of an "African way" of respecting human rights. Human rights are universal.

Second, SADC leaders must now hold Mugabe accountable to an immediate and time-bound process aimed at getting Zimbabwe out of crisis. This must include, in the next 365 or so days remaining before Zimbabwe's presidential elections, a clear pathway for a democratic constitution, an immediate restoration to the rule of law, repeal of repressive legislation, a framework for free and fair elections under international supervision, and transitional guarantees of non-partisan control of key state institutions such as police, army and intelligence.

Those are the conditions under which President Mbeki's wish for Zimbabweans to "solve their own problems" can be peacefully realised.

Tawanda Mutasah is a Zimbabwean lawyer and was founding convenor of the National Constitutional Assembly

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