The ZIMBABWE Situation | Our
thoughts and prayers are with Zimbabwe - may peace, truth and justice prevail. |
There are many places in
the world where you could go to explore the violation of human rights. Why did
you choose Zimbabwe?
The alarm bells are ringing in Zimbabwe
right now in a way that they aren't ringing in many other countries in the
world. And in the other countries where they are ringing, we already seem to be
involved: Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea. Zimbabwe, it seemed to me, was very
likely to get left off the foreign-policy agenda. So it seemed like a good time,
with a crisis unfolding, to draw our attention to this tragedy.
But there
was another reason I was interested in Zimbabwe. One of the most provocative and
intriguing claims in human rights in the last decade is the claim of Nobel
Prize-winner Amartya Sen that no country with a free press has ever had a
famine: essentially that civil and political rights are what enable social and
economic welfare. For a leader to have economic policies that cause mass poverty
for his people, and to have 30 percent of the population infected by HIV—and for
the local press not to be able to put pressure on him to alleviate these
problems—that's a very dire situation. So it seemed like it would be useful—not
just for Zimbabwe but for other countries—to try to understand the interplay
between these forces.
Foreign journalists have been banned from
Zimbabwe since February. How did you get into the country, and how did you
manage once inside?
You know, we journalists sometimes
mythologize the dangers of our movements, creating images of "deep throat"
meetings in a variety of settings. When I went to Zimbabwe I was definitely
afraid, because of all I heard. I had all my contacts buried in very discreet
places in my baggage. I expected to get searched, and I expected my itinerary to
come under scrutiny. But when I walked in it was like, "hey, mon." Literally,
there was a sign that said "Tourists," and so I went through that. It's a lot
harder if you're a photographer, especially if you're a video photographer. But
print journalists can easily get in.
In terms of getting around,
initially I was very careful. I was worried about being followed, so I stayed
out of the city and out of the main hotels and took a variety of precautions.
But it got to the point where I started to be a little bolder. I wanted to see
the leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), Morgan Tsvangirai
(pronounced chang-er-rai), so even though I knew that his house would be
watched, going there was a risk worth taking. There were enough foreigners and
enough Caucasians in the country that I could have been an NGO worker, a lawyer,
a local white—there were a lot of things I could have been. But what never got
easy was actually getting people to trust that they would be secure in talking
to me. I could get people to talk to me at length about their frustration and
suffering, but when it came to taking names and so on, there was still a real
fear that there would be accountability issues.
You knew you were
headed for a country that was in bad shape, but what surprised you about
Zimbabwe?
I'd never been to Zimbabwe before, and I'd been
hearing so much about how awful and screwed up the place was. So I was actually
shocked at how much possibility was there. The fertility of the land, the
industriousness of the people, the education and the literacy, the role of
religion and sense of community that was still maintained... all of this really
blew me away.
Of course the corollary to that is the enormous lengths
that someone had to go to screw a place like Zimbabwe up. And so that was the
second thing that surprised me—the "all-systems assault" Mugabe has launched.
The inflation was so bad that I had to carry the cost of one night's stay at a
guest house—maybe fifteen U.S. dollars—in a pillowcase: it was that many bills.
I've been to a lot of countries that are going through or have just been through
war or genocide, but I've never been to a peacetime country where civilians are
suffering as they are in Zimbabwe. And again, this is all the more striking
because you can see that it doesn't have to be that way. Sometimes, you go to a
country and it's so overpopulated or it's so poor that you know that the cycle
of despair is very long-standing, and it's hard to find hope. But in Zimbabwe,
this turn of events is so recent, so rapid. It wasn't long ago that Zimbabweans
considered themselves to be the success story of southern
Africa.
It seems almost insane, the lengths Mugabe has gone to
destroy his own country. Your piece points out that after independence, Mugabe
was initially doing some positive things for Zimbabwe, including an education
drive that brought the literacy rate up to 85 percent. But then, in the past
five years, he's begun this wholesale destruction of his country. I'm confused.
What exactly happened to Mugabe?
Yeah, that's something I didn't
try to explain in the piece. First, destruction like this tends to happen
incrementally. Shockingly incrementally. Of course Mugabe didn't write a manual
called "I want to destroy my country." So what happened is that at a certain
point, something became more pressing to him than the welfare of his country—and
I think that's personal power.
When he took over, Mugabe built on the
education system and the transport system, and built up the infrastructure of
Zimbabwe. But the war veterans who'd helped him win the country's independence
in 1980 were not compensated for their sacrifices. Through the 1980s and 1990s,
they were clamoring for compensation, which Mugabe had promised them. Meanwhile,
Mugabe had surprised many by allowing the white farmers—often seen as vestiges
of England's colonial rule—to maintain their farms. As time wore on, these white
farmers appeared to sort of be "living high on the hog." This became politically
embarrassing for Mugabe.
Then Mugabe invaded the Congo: a single decision
with big consequences. He sent troops to the Congo partly to try "African
solutions for African problems," but once he got there, the spoils of war became
everything. Army officers took what they wanted, and Mugabe had to hold his
cronies at bay back at home—they ran the country's ministries and were the
people who could challenge his power. So he started to buy them off with these
spoils. Well, then the still-living veterans from the war of liberation said,
"wait a second, how come the veterans of this blunderous war in the Congo get
these jewels and riches, and we're still left seventeen years after liberation
with nothing?"
So in a sense, the invasions of white farms were Mugabe's
attempt to kill three birds with one stone—to get the war veterans off his back,
to further satisfy his cronies, and to get rid of the white farmers, who had
begun teaming up with the black opposition as a political force. So I think you
can see there is no one answer to how Mugabe became this way—he certainly didn't
roll up his sleeves one day and say, "I've had enough of running the jewel of
Africa, now I want my country to become the joke of Africa." But everything sort
of fed on itself, and the only unifying theme through it all is his personal
power. Power comes first, second, third, and last—and nothing can stand in its
way.
One of the casualties of Mugabe's personal power struggle
that you mention is the Daily News, an independent newspaper in Zimbabwe. Once
an important voice of dissent, their printing presses were bombed in January
2001; then this past September Mugabe denied the paper a license to print,
shutting it down. If Amartya Sen's claim is true—that a free press will always
provide the dissent necessary to prevent a famine—then this development is
especially troubling. Did you meet any Daily News reporters while you were in
Zimbabwe? Are they hopeful that they'll find a way to start up
again?
Yes, I met a lot of them. The Daily News was the
liberalization force. I don't think any of them were really prepared for this
ploy by Mugabe. They would say, "I don't know why he lets us publish," but then
they would say, "He has to let us publish."
I've been in e-mail touch
with some of them since I've come back. They're pretty much on their own—they're
fighting it out in court. Some sound very relieved in the most basic sense to
still be getting paid their salaries. The publisher and the owner have taken it
upon themselves to keep people afloat.
When the Daily News was
operating, did it reach the rural areas of Zimbabwe?
Generally,
the rural areas are still pretty cut off—and they're very dependent on state
television and radio, which are of course in Mugabe's hands. There is the sense
that Mugabe has given up on the cities, but that the rural areas are still his
stronghold. Rural Zimbabwe voted with Mugabe in the presidential election; even
their parliamentary seats went to Mugabe's party. So that's the key—Zimbabweans
in the city say that's where they have to get their message.
And that's
the irony of the international aid programs like the World Food Program: the
rural areas are more likely to be fed by international aid givers than people in
the cities, which appeases some of the discontent that might be brewing out
there, in terms of malnutrition and so on. This helps Mugabe to keep the rural
areas at bay.
It all feeds on itself. The activists in the cities, who
are strong MDC supporters, might have wanted to ship the Daily News to rural
areas. But because there's no money, and because there's no fuel being imported
because the state has such a huge external debt and doesn't have the foreign
currency to buy fuel, the activists' means of transport—of literally getting out
there to sow unrest and expose people to a new way of thinking—has been taken
away by the economic hardships. So it's this quasi-stalemate.
Mugabe has also attacked the other source of dissent you
mention, the MDC. Despite winning the last election by all "unofficial counts,"
Tsvangirai is in court battling charges of treason. Does the MDC have a chance
as the future of Zimbabwe's government?
Everyone you meet who
isn't in the ruling party wants a change in Zimbabwe, so they're all invested in
the MDC. The MDC has positioned itself as a "come one, come all" kind of
umbrella coalition—and that's what's scary. Teachers, farm laborers,
shopkeepers, Ndebele speakers, Shona speakers, white farmers... it's huge. Too
huge, of course, to be a governing body. If the MDC was tasked with governance,
the divisions among its constituents would make themselves apparent, and many
would feel betrayed. So I guess one of my fears is that all civil society groups
have been completely absorbed by the MDC. If the MDC does finally defeat Mugabe
and come to power but appoints all the civil-society leaders in government, then
who's there to keep Tsvangirai honest? The fear is that again, the society will
invest all its hopes in one man. It's dangerous. One of the ways to inoculate
Tsvangirai from Mugabe-style tendencies would be for civil-society organizations
to be developing independent of the political party. And right now, that's not
happening.
Despite those problems, you mention your admiration of
the many Zimbabweans who are speaking out against their leader. Given that
70,000 people, according to Amnesty International, were killed or tortured by
Mugabe last year, aren't Zimbabweans afraid? What fuels this voice of
dissent?
I asked myself that same question, because it is
striking, given the brutality, that people remain willing to take tremendous
risks. I think right now that hope lies in history. In many cases people have a
fresh memory of prosperity, and of basic respect for their rights. I mean,
Mugabe's crackdown on the country is so new that I think that a lot of the
protest is incredulity, it's "what's happening?" In addition, there's a huge
Zimbabwean exile community or émigré community abroad, which reminds those
who've stayed behind that not everyone is living as they are, hand to mouth, or
without the ability to speak out. I think these things have emboldened
Zimbabweans and caused them to reject the inevitability of what's being done to
them.
On the other hand, one of the impressions I got in Zimbabwe that I
didn't write about in the piece was the patience of the people. You see people
waiting in these bank lines that go around block after block after block—they're
waiting to take out money that is no longer worth anything, money that basically
just pays for their bus fare home. And they're there the next morning to wait
again. And so there's a strange endurance. It's a weird combination, I think, of
expectation for something better but patience with something quite
dire.
Patience? How?
Maybe the patience comes
from the belief that this can't continue. The whole country is frozen in this
moment of expectancy. No one believes it can get worse. How can you get worse
than 80 percent unemployment? How can you get worse than 500 percent inflation,
and rising every day? How can you get worse than having your highest bank note
so devalued that it doesn't even buy you a loaf of bread? They've never
experienced anything like this before, so they just assume it can change. It's
got to change!
Even after all of this intimidation—the posting of armed
agents at the polling stations, arrests, torture, shutting down the
newspapers—they know they still defeated Mugabe in the election last year. They
voted the MDC into office in all the major cities and then basically voted
Morgan Tsvangirai in as president. That not only shocked Mugabe—that shocked
Zimbabwean voters. They realized, "Whoa, we are a force." So the country right
now contains parallel universes: one is the universe as it ought to be, and the
other is the universe as it is, which is Mugabe-ville. In Mugabe-ville, none of
the facts that they've created on the ground have translated into much. So the
people feel like, "Well, we won the elections, so we're just waiting for the
world to come around and recognize it."
It's interesting that
even though Mugabe has tried to silence the MDC and the Daily News, those
battles are now being fought in court. Do you think the courts in Zimbabwe could
actually rule against Mugabe?
Well, the Daily News lawyers
believe that will happen because they have to believe it. They have a lot
invested in the hope that they will stumble upon a judge who remains
independent. And the government has a lot invested in retaining the appearance
that the paper was shut down for legal reasons—that it hadn't met registration
requirements. There's this crude legalism in Zimbabwe, a pretence of "legality"
to everything the government does. It's a very peculiar autocracy. It stands out
from other contemporary dictatorships in the lengths it goes to to work through
the legal process. Even when it comes to the stealing of the farms, white
farmers receive "legal notices," against which the farmers sue on "procedural
grounds"—and they're much more likely to succeed than if they sue on the grounds
that the stealing of farms should be illegal in and of itself! Everybody is
caught up in this whole fiction that the rule of law still holds. And yet, what
little inroads that are being made on behalf of human rights are being made in
the courts. There's really no other route.
A number of judges have gotten
caught up in Mugabe's crimes and have become corrupt; they're kleptocratic and
have amassed various farms and other assets. But a number of other judges are,
like other citizens, saying, "Wait a minute—what the hell happened to our
democracy? What the hell happened to our breadbasket?" Mugabe has forced a
number of these judges off of the high court. They got too independent for his
taste. But some have survived in the lower courts. So the hope of white farmers,
the Daily News journalists, and the Tsvangirai supporters is that their cases
will happen to cross the desk of somebody who's in that camp.
It
sounds like a crapshoot.
It is a total crapshoot. The poverty
and the economic and social breakdown are such that a judge debating his future
isn't just saying to himself, "Do I stand by Mugabe to get fringe benefits, or
do I stick to my principles?" Many pose the question more starkly, like, "Do I
feed my family, or do I starve?" Many are afraid that if they lose their job,
they fall prey to all of the ravaging forces in Zimbabwean society—they join the
70-80 percent of the country that's unemployed, waiting in bank queues, trying
to somehow scrounge up food.
The day may come, and it may not be far off,
when people give up on the courts altogether. And if that day comes, the only
option will be for the disgruntled to take to the streets—and that's where you
get a very dangerous and potentially violent scenario. I worry about
Zimbabweans. They bend, they bend, they bend, they bend—where do the people
break? How long can they go on scrounging for food in garbage dumps and using
the moisture from sewage drains to plant vegetables? They're losing weight,
they're severely malnourished, they rely on humanitarian aid—the supplies of
which are shrinking. Where, physically, is the breaking point? When does massive
malnutrition become outright starvation? When, politically, do they say "enough"
and really rise up?
I wonder if religion has provided a place
for people to rise up. Has the Anglican Church spoken out against Mugabe's moral
atrocities?
I went to a number of church services while I was
there, and I was stunned by the vocalness of local church leaders, by the extent
to which they were willing to put themselves on the line, and to politicize
their sermons. But those local church leaders who do speak out will tell you
that the official church hierarchy, those more closely associated with Mugabe,
were mute for a very long time. In fact, there was an amazing church statement
issued while I was there by the council of churches and other official leaders,
formally apologizing to the people of Zimbabwe for turning their heads away from
their suffering, and for not speaking out sooner.
But I don't think the
church is going to be a force for revolution—it's a cultural force, a glue for
communities that helps insure that people who would otherwise be left behind at
least have a place to go to find food. And, it's one of the few places where
people feel they can gather and talk. The security act that Mugabe recently
passed insures that churches are one of the few places where more than five
people can still gather without a permit.
Unfortunately, Mugabe is so
determined to maintain control of food supplies himself that churches have to
hide them—I visited one church that used its confessional booths to hide little
dried fish and beans. You'd think the state would be bending over backwards to
make it easy for churches to help feed the people, but Mugabe wants to control
them. He treats church leaders like he treats judges—many can be co-opted in
terms of church lands, grain, and things that the government has access to that
the local people don't. Mugabe seems to believe that every leader of every
institution has a price.
We haven't talked about your own brush
with Mugabe's government yet—which took place when you were poking around at the
Grain Marketing Board. Despite having a surplus of maize and wheat in years
past, the GMB has run dry—and they weren't thrilled about your peeking. You
wrote that your encounter with them led to a "harrowing car chase." What exactly
happened?
It was as scared as I ever remember being in a non-war
situation. Which is saying something—I've been very scared on a number of
occasions. I was driving in a van with a colleague who had been filming the
Grain Marketing Board Warehouse as we drove by. We thought we had been subtle.
Suddenly, somewhere between a half dozen and a dozen men in a white pickup truck
pulled up behind us. Ordinarily, we would have pulled over and handed over the
tape, which wasn't exactly juicy stuff, but in the back seat of our vehicle was
a Zimbabwean farm worker, and we were afraid that he would get into serious
trouble for talking to journalists. So we decided to make a run for it. Our
driver quickly revealed a certain amount of experience in such situations, and
the whole thing turned into something of a "Starsky and Hutch" chase, at 80
miles an hour. They'd give a burst of gas and come alongside us, motioning
furiously for us to pull over, then fade back, then come up again, and fade
back.
I thought we were either going to crash or get machine-gunned—I
couldn't imagine how else the sequence would end. And I remember thinking to
myself, I can't believe I'm going to die over maize stocks. Because in any
society like this, when something means that much to those in power, they just
don't lose. And they always use guns.
But these men never did use guns,
and eventually they gave up. That was when I first really understood how unusual
Zimbabwe is. It's very violent and very coercive and confrontational and
repressive, but it is not yet a gun culture. Many white farmers, too, describe
being thrown off of their land without the use of firearms.
Land
reform has emerged as one of the biggest issues in Zimbabwe right now—and it is
the first "step" you highlight of Mugabe's program of destruction. Even though
Mugabe has made a real mess of land reform, you write in the piece that a
"well-ordered, selective re-distribution program" is necessary. What might that
involve?
That's a great question. Everyone you meet in Zimbabwe
now, and certainly every white farmer, says "we all agree" that land reform is
necessary. But saying that you agree on ends is one of the oldest tricks in the
book. There's this prickly set of questions about the means to that
end.
In Zimbabwe there are a number of proposals on the table that are
quite reasonable. One is the idea of one man, one farm—so that any farmer with
more than one farm sells those extra farms for reasonable compensation. Or
another proposal would allow for multiple-farm holders who would have to pay a
tithe for the privilege. Money would be gathered to help the landless, and black
farm ownership would be incentivized with tax programs, apprenticeships, and the
like. Any land-reform program would, once and for all, also have to provide for
the legitimate war veterans of the civil war, as they are a political force that
will need to be involved in any long-term settlement.
Now that Mugabe
has already taken the white farms, redistribution becomes much more complicated.
Because now you have to ask yourself how you can start the whole process over
again. What do you do about the people who are now squatting on these farms—do
you just go in and bulldoze their concrete huts down? And a lot of white farmers
are going to want to leave now anyway, because they're never going to feel safe
again after what they've been through. But they need compensation of some kind.
And where does that compensation come from? Well, I think Mugabe's palaces are a
good place to start.
I wonder if Great Britain could get involved
in some way. As a recent colonial power, they gave 70 million dollars back in
1980 to help Zimbabwe get off its feet, and they were prepared to help again in
1998 before Mugabe went off the deep end. Could you speak more broadly about the
involvement or responsibility of former colonial powers in Africa
today?
Yeah, I mean it's really tricky. There's always a smack
of paternalism involved. It's, "Oh, Tony Blair to the rescue. Here I come with
my Windsor fortune to bail out 'the natives' who can't sort out their own mess."
In much of southern Africa, these initiatives have often been put forth with the
wrong tone. On the other hand, though it's in nobody's interest to boast about
it, the British, the Europeans, and the Americans are paying to keep Zimbabwe
fed right now. So when it comes to food aid and other forms of investment,
nobody complains. But when it comes to something as prickly as land reform, it's
just really tricky because the white farmers are seen to be the vestige of the
colonial empire.
It would be ideal if the response could be forged
through the African Union, or a southern regional organization, with the backing
of Western powers. It's so important that these regional solutions are
generated. Not only because of our soiled hands in so many of these countries,
but also because of our general indifference to these kinds of places. And so
it's really time for local actors to start acting. Thabo Mbeki (the president of
South Africa) is taking a strong stand on Burundi and on the Congo, but he has
turned away from Mugabe's brutality. I think it's just too close to home. Not
only geographically, but because Mbeki is the leader of a liberation party, like
Mugabe's, that someday soon, too, will have outstayed its welcome. And I think
Mbeki is terrified that the same kind of future awaits his party in South
Africa.
What about U.S. involvement? When President Bush made
his tour of Africa back in July, he talked about the problems in Liberia and
Zimbabwe, but only sent troops to Liberia. Should the U.S. also intervene
militarily in Zimbabwe?
If we needed a reminder of how
dangerous military intervention is, I think we've all gotten that reminder in
Iraq. My basic feeling about military intervention is that it should be a last
resort, undertaken only to stave off large-scale bloodshed. I think the trigger
for it, on the humanitarian side, anyway, has to be something on a mass scale
like genocide. Tony Blair said, "Well, I would go to Zimbabwe if I could, but I
can't. So let me go to Iraq." That level of trigger-happiness is unwise because
of all the risks inherent in military intervention. The visible evidence through
history is that the most successful transitions come when they are organic.
Neither the African Union nor the West has even begun to exhaust high-level
diplomatic options.
What about diplomacy? As you pointed out, the
U.S. hasn't exerted much pressure in that arena, either.
We
haven't even tried. Actually, Colin Powell wrote a very appropriate and
unusually "undiplomatic" Op/Ed in The New York Times, laying out the
human-rights case against Mugabe and talking about the steps the U.S. and Europe
were taking and how we needed help from our African allies. But then President
Bush completely pulled the rug out from underneath Powell. At a joint press
conference with Mbeki on his Africa trip, Bush was asked if he had raised the
issue of Zimbabwe with Mbeki, and Bush said, "This man knows what he's doing.
Who am I to tell this man how to run his country or run his neighborhood?"
Wait a minute. Zimbabwe's human-rights record is the business of the
world. The U.S. has diplomatic interaction with Zimbabwe, and with pretty much
every other country on the planet, pretty much every minute of every day. And so
the question is, as we are deciding what our policies should be, are we
factoring in the welfare of Zimbabweans? Are we factoring in the abuse record of
the leader? Are we leveraging the clout we have in terms of foreign investment,
trade, diplomatic options, food aid? We have to fashion our diplomacy not just
around the abuser country, but with any other countries that might have more
influence. Right now, I don't think we are.
If the U.S. did apply
diplomatic pressure in Zimbabwe, would it work?
Honestly,
diplomatic intervention on human rights is pretty hard to do these days because
the Bush Administration has so little credibility. Because of our hostility to
international institutions, human-rights treaties, and multilateralism, it's
really difficult for the U.S. to speak out on behalf of human rights. We have to
understand that we're not always the best lead actor when it comes to advancing
these principles—and that's something that American diplomats have a very
difficult time understanding. We have the tradition of not ranking human rights
and the welfare of foreign citizens high enough in our set of priorities, or on
the occasion that we do rank human rights high, we're like a bull in a china
shop, not understanding the ways in which our decisions in other policy areas
really affect and undermine our ability to get what we want in the human-rights
arena. We need something between the extreme of condescension and
know-it-allness on the one hand, and outright indifference on the
other.
Generally speaking, what should the U.S. policy be in
terms of when to intervene abroad on behalf of human rights?
I'm
very wary of absolutist doctrines of humanitarian intervention—there's always a
balancing act that needs to take place. The question is how can you aid a
country in its efforts to liberalize in a gradual fashion, so that the reformers
can get courts set up and lawyers and judges trained, so that minority rights
are guaranteed in the constitution, so that the military is placed under
civilian control, so that citizens get multiple sources of news and opinion, so
that people can vote their conscience in a secure environment. These are all
excruciating questions. I mean, we don't even have the balance right in our own
country. It's not just as simple as saying, "Yeah, we're all for human
rights."
According to the newspapers, Mugabe got really sick on
October 23, and has been sent to a hospital in South
Africa.
That's what they say. But there's a big debate as to
whether he's really there.
If his illness is severe and he passes
away, what will happen next in Zimbabwe?
As with Cubans when
Castro dies, I think there's gong to be a really conflicted reaction among local
people. I mean, Mugabe is their liberation leader. And he has destroyed their
country. So there's going to be a sense of liberation from the liberator, yet
mourning—because he brought them something that they wanted and deserved. When
you are the father of a country, the people cut you a lot of slack. Nobody who
follows Mugabe will get the same benefit of the doubt. Even though Mugabe is
despised in the cities and even though people talk about his palaces and his
trips and his jewels and his opulence, they still have a tiny little soft spot
for what he did for them. His successors will be judged strictly on the state of
the country, which is disastrous.
I wonder if you could tell me
about how you become interested in human rights initially?
I
graduated from college in 1992, and that was the year that there were these
dreadful images coming out of Europe of emaciated Muslim men behind bars. In
Europe, fifty years after the Holocaust. Those images were haunting to me. Out
of college, I went to work in Washington as an intern for a man named Mort
Abromowitz, who was president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
He was completely consumed with what was going on in Bosnia. Working for him, I
learned much more about what was happening there. And the more I saw, and the
more of those images I encountered, the more helpless and hapless I felt. We
just weren't doing anything about it. I had no skills, but I could string
sentences together—I had been a sports reporter in college. So I moved over to
Bosnia in 1993 and became a freelance journalist, a year into the war.
What was that like?
It was easy to break in,
because it was a long war and it wasn't a place where more-senior correspondents
wanted to spend time. At that time it felt really dangerous, although I must say
that Chechnya, Iraq, and other wars that have happened since then seem a lot
worse. There was a community of us who were in Bosnia who believed this was our
Spanish civil war somehow—we just really believed that this was really
unpardonable, and that the world was letting this happen.
I was there
for about two and a half years, and that sort of planted the seed that in turn
got me interested in ethnic conflict and in genocide, and how it relates to U.S.
foreign policy. And that's the place on the spectrum that I find myself most
drawn to now—trying to understand why the world stands by and allows large
numbers of preventable deaths. I gravitate toward places where the stakes seem
really high in terms of human life, and where there actually seem to be things
that the outside world can do.
OPINION: “Ruling
politicians…have become extremely nervous about their
precarious hold on
power…Empirical evidence throughout the world shows that
when ruling
politicians become nervous about the security of their political
positions,
they target the Press with reckless abandon. Typically,
politicians do this
by making preposterous claims about threats to national
security. A few
months ago, the Minister of State for National Security, Dr
Sydney
Sekeramayi, claimed that Zimbabwe was facing a serious threat to
national
security from the nation, especially sections of the Press.”
This,
as a riddle, would carry a huge prize for guessing who uttered
these most
profound words.
The wisdom came not from the mouth of a babe, but
from none other than
Zimbabwe’s Minister of Information and Publicity Prof
Jonathan Moyo.
And the occasion? A 1993 seminar on Press freedom
organised by the
Willie Musarurwa Memorial Trust, and the paper Moyo
delivered appears in a
booklet subsequently published in March of the same
year entitled Press
Freedom in Zimbabwe.
Why then the
belligerence towards the Press today, some ten years
after Moyo avowed his
disapprobation of Press muzzling by a government he
now so fervently
defends?
He perhaps explained it himself in that one sentence about
nervous
ruling politicians bent on holding on to power by all means
necessary.
The most logical starting point then for him became the
Press, of
which he knew in his days as a respected academic that given its
freedoms
inherent in any democracy, the Robert Mugabe regime was not going to
last
long with an intrepid Press corps “obsessed” with exposing bad
governance.
However for Zimbabwe, the affliction that has made sure
that the woes
here continue without abating is not only the ruling party’s
disregard for
all ideals that form democratic governance, but in fact the
arrogance of the
leaders therein, elected and unelected.
And
these are the same people who harp on about protecting the
interests of the
people of Zimbabwe.
If that were true, the closure of the country’s
sole source of
objective news reportage, the Daily News, is then an affront
to those same
people the government, through its spin doctors, likes “to
protect!”
For starters, the statistics about the banned paper’s
readership show
that a million people read the paper each day during the days
it appeared on
the streets. Now how is that for Zimbabwean
literacy?
What it means therefore is that Robert Mugabe’s regime is
regretting
that Zimbabweans are a literate lot who, by their ability to read,
actually
injected the lifeblood of a publication critical of the
regime.
Thus the country would be better off with millions of
illiterates! If
we are to indulge ourselves in an exercise favoured by
logicians, this is
exactly what we would conclude about Mugabe’s
regime.
The only useful patriots are those who cannot read; if they
can, then
they become those who read only what the State’s propaganda
machines spew
each day masquerading as kosher news.
After all,
from the February 2000 referendum onward, some ruling party
zealots actually
made it a punishable offence for anyone “caught” reading
the Daily News, the
Financial Gazette, The Zimbabwe Independent and the
Zimbabwe
Standard.
And all this informed by what Moyo himself censured in
that 1993
seminar on Press freedom in Zimbabwe.
After all, these
are the same papers who told Zimbabweans about him
being a fugitive from
Kenyan law; about his binges in South Africa while he
compatriots starved;
about having taken the money and ran while supposedly
on a teaching post with
South Africa’s Wits University.
So, why not hit that snake (the
press) on the head and get it over
with once and for all? Zimbabwe is nowhere
near war, but for the country,
the truth has definitely become another tragic
casualty. Thanks to that
information mandarin Jonathan Moyo.
It
is only in Zimbabwe that readers can get a newspaper headline that
screams,
“ANZ cannot publish –Government.”
It is most frivolous when we all
know a judgment like that can only be
proclaimed by a court of
law.
But then in Zimbabwe the courts have now become nothing but
ceremonial
where the judiciary no longer has a place in the arms of the state
as
defined by democratic considerations.
It is government or
rather Zanu PF officials who now wear judicial
wigs and carry gavels wherever
they go!
By Marko Phiri
IOL
Church leaders stand firm on Zim abuses
December 27 2003
at 09:42AM
By Siphiwe Mpye
Despite strong condemnation
from the Presidency, Johannesburg religious
leaders have declared that they
will not back down from the fight to
highlight human rights abuses in
Zimbabwe.
In a statement released this week, the leaders, representing
various
denominations, noted with "concern" a statement released by Reverend
Frank
Chikane, the director-general in the Presidency, denouncing the
group's
position on human rights abuses taking place in Zimbabwe. He was
reacting to
the statement issued last weekend.
A member of the
religious leaders' collective has also told Saturday Star
that, as a fellow
man of the cloth, Chikane's strong language was
"saddening" and "puzzling" to
his peers.
'He used strong and inappropriate language'
In the
original statement, the church leadership - which included Catholic,
Greek
Orthodox, Anglican, Presbyterian and Methodist church leaders in
Johannesburg
- said that "to remain silent any longer renders us complicit
in the
brutality being visited by Zimbabwean authorities on their
own
citizens".
The statement described the horrendous torture exacted
on those seen not to
support Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's regime and
also spoke of
alleged corruption and ineptitude in the South African
department of home
affairs, which compounds Zimbabwean refugees' difficulty
in finding asylum
in this country.
Chikane responded strongly to the
statement this week, unleashing a
broadside at those who criticise President
Thabo Mbeki's diplomatic stance
on our neighbour and those who maintain that
the government is silent on
human rights abuses in Zimbabwe.
Chikane
charged that the religious leaders had resorted to "fabrications and
clubbing
together with political self-seekers in order to achieve
their
goals".
In an article in the Citizen, Chikane, referring to the
corruption
allegations against the home affairs department, said the
religious leaders
had not provided the "information they claim to have".
Chikane said that
Mbeki had in the past spoken out about human rights in
Mugabe's presence.
'To be called fabricators was very
distressing'
In their Christmas Day counter-punch to Chikane, the leaders
re-iterated
their stance on human rights abuses in Zimbabwe, saying they
would not
remain silent in the face of these "atrocities".
They stated
that through Chikane, the Presidency had unfairly used the
group's first
statement as a departure point to address allegations levelled
against the
Presidency's approach to the Zimbabwe crisis. They said they
were aware of
work being done by the Presidency in addressing Zimbabwe's
woes and were
therefore careful not to mention political figures in last
week's
statement.
The Anglican church's Right Reverend Peter Lee said he had
been "saddened"
by Chikane's words.
"He used strong and inappropriate
language. To be called fabricators was
very distressing, especially coming
from a fellow member of the clergy. His
was a broadside prompted by our
statement but had very little to do with its
contents."
Lee added that
it was sad that in his statement, Chikane had not mentioned
anything about
the torture happening in Zimbabwe.
On the issue of communication between
religious leaders and the government,
Lee said they remained open for
discussions, but added that their frequency
needed to be increased in order
for them to yield significant results.
Although Lee would not be drawn
into a position on Mbeki's so-called "quiet
diplomacy" approach, the
opposition to this stance is implicit in both
statements released by the
religious leaders.