The Portuguese government should send the Zimbabwean President an arrest warrant, not a summit invitation.
The Guardian – Comment is Free – 2 July 2007
One of the first acts of the new Portuguese presidency of the EU was to announce plans to roll out the red carpet for the Zimbabwean dictator, President Robert Mugabe. He is going to be to invited to December’s European Union-African Union summit in Lisbon , despite a prohibition on the blood-stained tyrant entering the EU.
While Zimbabwe burns, and millions starve, Mugabe will be wined and dined by the Portuguese President, Anibal Antonio Cavaco Silva, and received by other African and European heads of state.
What is the point in having an EU travel ban if it is not enforced? Nearly every time Mugabe wants to come to Europe, the EU caves in and agrees to waive its ban.
Portugal’s invitation is an insult to the many victims of his murderous regime, especially to black Zimbabweans who once looked to Mugabe as a liberator but who are now the main victims of his slaughterhouse. They don’t want him feted. They want him arrested and put on trial.
Only a few months ago the EU strengthened its travel restrictions against Zimbabwean leaders. Now Portugal wants to weaken them. What is going on? Where is the consistency?
At December’s EU-AU summit, Mugabe’s sole aim will be to grandstand, play the world statesman and capture the headlines. He has run rings around the EU before, and now the Portuguese are willing to hand him another PR coup. Where is the sense or morality in that?
It is time to stop playing diplomatic games and cease treating Mugabe as a legitimate head of state. No recent Zimbabwean election has been free and fair. There can be no business as usual with any regime that is guilty of disappearing, jailing, torturing, raping, starving and murdering its own people.
Instead of sending the Zimbabwean dictator an invitation to the summit, the Portuguese government should send him an arrest warrant under international human rights law, on charges of torture and other crimes against humanity (the same goes for other murderous heads of state, they should get arrest warrants too).
Mugabe is killing black Africans on a scale that is even greater than the killings by the evil apartheid regime of PW Botha. Yet there is no global campaign to boycott and sanction his regime. Nor is there any international solidarity movement to support the democratic, trade union, church and student opposition inside Zimbabwe . This is betrayal on a monumental scale.
It is also de facto racism. If Mugabe was white (like PW Botha) there would be a world-wide campaign against him. But a black tyrant killing black people somehow merits less concern and outrage. Why?
We have a precedent for legal action against human rights abusers, and it is a precedent here in Europe . In response to the killing fields of Bosnia and Kosovo, the international community said these vile crimes were a violation of humanitarian law. President Milosevic was indicted, and eventually arrested and put on trial in The Hague.
Given this precedent, why is Portugal , Britain , the EU and the UN, refusing to prosecute Mugabe? How many Zimbabweans have to die before the world’s governments start enforcing the human rights laws they have signed and pledged to uphold? One million? Five million? What will it take to finally provoke the international community to put Mugabe in the dock?
The latest outrage is Mugabe’s use of food as a political weapon. He’s withholding food aid from drought-stricken regions that voted for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Six million Zimbabweans, out of a population of 12 million, face starvation and death.
Dydimus Mutasa is Mugabe’s right-hand man and Minister of National Security and Land. I knew him in the 1970s, when I was a supporter of Mugabe’s war of liberation against Ian Smith’s illegal white minority regime. We went to China together in 1975. This once kind, gentle Christian man has, like his mentor Mugabe, turned into a monster. Mutasa now says it doesn’t matter if a few million people die because most of the dead will be MDC supporters: “We would be better off with only six million people, with our own people who support the liberation struggle.We don’t want all these extra people,” he boasted. This policy of genocide-by-starvation is unprecedented since the mass hunger inflicted on Cambodia by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa has argued against a get tough policy with Mugabe. He says “quiet diplomacy” is the way forward. But Mbeki has nothing to show for six years of behind-the-scenes negotiations. On the contrary, the human rights situation in Zimbabwe has worsened dramatically. Mbeki’s quiet diplomacy has been a spectacular failure, yet he is still flogging the dead horse of dialogue, and most African and EU leaders are still falling for this dead-in-the-water policy.
For the Portuguese, human rights in Zimbabwe don’t seem a priority. Despite signing international human rights conventions against genocide and torture, Portugal is doing nothing to enforce them. The British government has been no better. Tony Blair talked hard against the Mugabe regime, but bottled out of any effective action. He pushed through Zimbabwe’s suspension from the Commonwealth. This was a weak, futile gesture. It did nothing to undermine Mugabe.
Instead of empty gestures, why doesn’t the world community do something effective to challenge Mugabe’s tyranny? International human rights laws could be used to put him on trial, just like Slobodan Milosevic. The laws against torture are the strongest and easiest to enforce.
The UN Convention Against Torture 1984 has been ratified and incorporated into domestic law by Portugal, Britain, other EU member states and by most of Africa. It requires the arrest and prosecution of any person (especially a high state official) who commits, authorises or condones torture anywhere in the world.
In Zimbabwe, the use of torture by the police, army and the intelligence services is routine and systemic. It is inconceivable that Mugabe is unaware of what is going on. He has not condemned or stopped it. That makes him guilty of complicity under Portuguese, European and international law.
Reports from the Zimbabwean human rights groups – the Amani Trust and the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace – confirm that torture is endemic. What more evidence does Portugal want? The legal and moral case for Mugabe’s arrest is overwhelming.
Unlike the EU’s current feeble, slap-on-the-wrist sanctions, the issuing of an international arrest warrant would be effective and dramatic. It is something many nations could do – not just Portugal . Britain and the rest of the EU could give a lead. If a warrant was issued, it would create real anxiety for Mugabe; haunting him with the nightmare of ending up behind bars like Milosevic. This might make him think twice before ordering more torture and killings. It could help ameliorate his worst excesses; saving at least some lives.
Better still, the Portuguese government could lure Mugabe into a trap. It could invite him to December’s European-African summit and, when he arrives in Lisbon , arrest him on charges of torture. There is no point Portugal having human rights laws if it is not prepared to enforce them.
Legal precedent is on Portugal ‘s side. The 1946 Nuremburg Tribunal on Nazi war crimes established the principle that in cases of crimes against humanity, such as torture, nobody is above the law – not even heads of state.
This was reiterated in the case of Slobodan Milosevic. He was indicted for crimes against humanity in 1999, while he was head of state of Yugoslavia . The international tribunal in The Hague ruled that a head of state does not have immunity from prosecution for grave human rights abuses.
The indictment of Milosevic sets a contemporary precedent for the arrest of the Zimbabwean President in Lisbon in December. If Slobodan Milosevic can be put on trial, why can’t Robert Mugabe?