- PRETORIA -- The unending
horror of Robert Mugabe's misrule reaches well across Zimbabwe's borders.
More than two million Zimbabweans are estimated to be in South Africa now.
Desperately hungry and often brutalised, they queue up in their hundreds
at border posts. Many more climb through electric fences and brave snapping
crocodiles in the 'grey-green, greasy' Limpopo river to cross into South
Africa.
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- Most are seeking work and food, but others are seeking
refuge from state torture and violence. I know several men whose wounds
from electric-shock torture are healing slowly. I have met a teenage girl
who is struggling to build a life after being gang-raped by Mugabe's youth
militia. And I have interviewed young men who have fled the militia, haunted
by the violence they inflicted on others. Even Mugabe's thugs are his victims.
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- These refugees have a difficult time in South Africa
because they are almost all illegal immigrants. Just as the South African
government refuses to condemn human rights abuses by the Mugabe regime,
so it has made it extremely difficult for Zimbabweans to get asylum. Without
that status neither the Red Cross nor the UN High Commissioner for Refugees
will assist them. So they are left to fend for themselves in the netherworld
of the streets.
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- I, too, am in exile from Zimbabwe. One year ago I was
abducted by Mugabe's secret police, held incommunicado for 10 hours and
illegally forced on to a plane out of the country. As a journalist I had
contradicted the state propaganda's rosy view of events. A year earlier
I had been held in jail for a couple of days and then put on trial but,
despite my acquittal, the government was determined to get rid of me. My
wife was thrown out shortly after me. There are many times when we miss
our home, possessions and friends which we had to leave behind, but we
are acutely aware that our situation is incalculably more fortunate than
that of the masses of Zimbabweans in South Africa.
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- I found it difficult to watch all the self-congratulatory
hoopla and pomp in April when South Africa celebrated its tenth anniversary
of majority rule on the same day that President Thabo Mbeki was inaugurated
for a second five-year term. More than 20 heads of state attended the ceremony,
which included a lively concert attended by 40,000. Robert Mugabe - the
dictator who has systematically dismantled Zimbabwe's democracy, destroyed
the economy and caused untold suffering - received a hero's welcome. South
Africa's political elite gave him a standing ovation with clenched fist
salutes. A fury of frustration welled up inside me as I watched the celebrations
on television.
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- My rage was assuaged by Richard, a Zimbabwean refugee
who called me on his mobile phone from the inauguration. He was typically
good-natured about the rapturous reception accorded to Mugabe. 'There were
cheers for him at the front, but back here where I am, many people were
booing him,' said Richard, an army engineer who left Zimbabwe after being
tortured for allegedly supporting the country's opposition party. 'Many
of these South Africans think Mugabe is just against the whites, so they
cheer him. But I tell people that he is hurting blacks more. Some understand
that, but others do not.'
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- Richard helped defuse my anger, but it returned when
I read a newspaper column entitled 'Mugabe an African hero' by Christine
Qunta, a lawyer known as one of Mbeki's key advisers. Defending the ovation
given to Mugabe, she wrote that the Zimbabwean leader 'represents, to the
average African in this country and elsewhere on the continent, dignity
and self-determination'.
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- Such opinion is maddening but it helps one understand
the thinking behind the Mbeki government's policy towards Mugabe. The South
African government has accepted Mugabe's line that he is crusading against
whites, and it ignores the fact that the main victims of Mugabe's vile,
violent policies are black Zimbabweans. Throughout Zimbabwe's decline over
the past four years, in which it has gone from one of Africa's most prosperous
democracies to one of the continent's most troubled countries, Mbeki has
avoided criticising Mugabe. Instead he has acted as Mugabe's apologist
and protector, defending him in the Commonwealth and at other international
forums.
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- When Zimbabwe had parliamentary and presidential elections,
in 2000 and 2002, in which violence and rigging were blatant, the South
African observer mission blithely declared the polls to be free and fair,
accepting all Harare's dissemblings about the glaring shortcomings of the
process. At the recent meeting of the United Nations Commission for Human
Rights in Geneva, the compelling proposal by the European Union to investigate
well-documented accounts of state torture in Zimbabwe was blocked by South
Africa, which led other African nations in voting against it, arguing that
it was up to African countries to make complaints about their fellow governments.
South Africa has maintained what it calls 'quiet diplomacy' to persuade
Mugabe to reform his ways. Mbeki said he would cajole the Zimbabwean leader
into negotiating with the opposition in order to form a coalition or government
of national unity. Last year, when George W. Bush visited South Africa,
Mbeki pledged that negotiations would begin to resolve Zimbabwe's problems
by June 2004. With the arrival of that deadline, Mbeki's policy is in tatters
as a result of Mugabe's categorical rejection of negotiations in a rare
interview on Sky News.
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- 'I don't see why we should talk about negotiations,'
Mugabe said, asserting that Zimbabwe's current situation is 'the normal
way of running a democratic system'. He said that on the day after an opposition
MP was publicly threatened with death by top Zanu-PF officials if he returned
to parliament or his constituency.
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- Following Mugabe's rejection of negotiations, the Pretoria
government has said it will continue with quiet diplomacy, suggesting that
the only alternatives are imposing full-scale economic sanctions or sending
South African troops into Zimbabwe to overthrow Mugabe. But as Zimbabwe's
giant neighbour, with critical economic links, South Africa is one of the
few countries that could wield considerable influence over the Mugabe government.
Mugabe is impervious to criticism from Britain. In fact, any criticism
from the West plays into his hands, as it merely adds lustre to the mantle
he has assumed as Africa's greatest anticolonial crusader, who is ridding
his country of the last vestiges of white minority rule.
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- But South Africa could lead the way to steer Zimbabwe
back to democracy. In 1976, under pressure from the United States, Pretoria
pushed the Rhodesian leader Ian Smith to enter negotiations that eventually
led to the birth of majority-ruled Zimbabwe in 1980. South Africa could
once again play a pivotal role for Zimbabwe if it was prepared to uphold
its commitment to democratic governance and human rights.
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- 'The Mbeki government should be willing to put pressure
on the Zimbabwean government to return to democratic traditions. It is
not doing that. It should, for instance, stop protecting the Mugabe regime
at international meetings,' said Welshman Ncube, secretary-general of the
Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) while in South Africa. 'Quiet diplomacy
for us has not delivered on its promises and we do not think Mugabe is
the sort of person who responds to appeasement. It simply encourages him
to do more and more wicked things.'
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- Others point out that South Africa could use its supply
of 20 per cent of Zimbabwe's electricity as leverage over Mugabe. Pretoria
could insist that Mugabe adhere to the same standards of democratic elections
as South Africa and other neighbouring states, or warn Mugabe that they
will not recognise the results.
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- More than 300 MDC supporters have been killed in election
violence over the past few years. There is no freedom of assembly or freedom
of the press. Many MDC leaders say they do not want to participate in any
further elections under the current system. Why should they? Participation
only gives legitimacy to the entire repressive system. If Zimbabweans cannot
count on support from the South African government in defending their democratic
right in the face of overwhelming force, their hopes of effecting peaceful
change are slim.
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- But my affable friend Richard, the Zimbabwean refugee
with scars from Mugabe's torture, tells me that South Africa could yet
adopt a more effective policy regarding Zimbabwe. Two key partners with
the African National Congress - the trade unions and the South African
Communist party - have condemned abuses in Zimbabwe and have urged a more
robust policy. The retired Anglican archbishop Desmond Tutu has denounced
human rights abuses, and the current Cape Town Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane
urged Mbeki to put more pressure on Mugabe. 'This is pressure from fellow
Africans, from eminent South Africans,' says Richard. 'Mbeki will have
to listen to them. It wonít be long before Mbeki tells Mugabe that
he must hold real elections.'
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- I want to have Richard's optimistic faith that South
Africa could yet influence a positive change in Zimbabwe. But for every
positive sign there is a discouraging one. On 8 June, for example, a white
opposition member of South Africa's parliament was roundly jeered by the
ANC majority when he criticised the Mugabe government's announcement that
it intends to nationalise all farmland. Some South Africans, and many within
Mbeki's party, it seems, think that Mugabe's example is laudable. They
applaud Robert Mugabe for spitting in the eye of the old colonialist, and
overlook the fact that he has sacrificed Zimbabwe's economy and the rights
of his people just to hold on to power.
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- © 2004 The Spectator.co.uk http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php?table=
oldßion=current&issue=2004-06-26&id=4751
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