Mugabe’s repression in Zimbabwe mirrors the brutality of apartheid South Africa – but with an international community passive and supine.
The Guardian – Comment Is Free – 13 March 2007
The scenes of violent state repression in Zimbabwe this week are tragically reminiscent of another time and place. Machine-gun toting armoured personnel carriers swamp the black townships. Police and soldiers fire tear gas and live rounds, shooting at least one protester dead. They beat others with rifle butts, clubs and whips. Hundreds have been hauled off to interrogation centres where they are, right now, being beaten and tortured.
We have seen such images many times before – during the apartheid era, in neighbouring South Africa. The brutality may be similar, but that is where the comparison ends. In Zimbabwe, it is a black minority that is terrorising the black majority. The tyranny isn’t racial; it’s political. But it is still tyranny – and on a monumental scale. Comparisons with the savagery of PW Botha’s repression in the 1980s are, if anything, understatements.
President Mugabe’s regime no longer cares about Zimbabwean or international public opinion. It cares only about clinging on to power and maintaining the looted wealth and privileges of the ZANU-PF kleptocractic elite.
State repression knows no bounds, as evidenced by the bare-faced police battery of the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, which required him to have hospital treatment for head injuries. Dozens of other opposition leaders have been beaten and tortured.
This is nothing new. Mugabe has murdered more black Africans than the evil South African apartheid regime. In just one region of Zimbabwe in just one decade – in Matabeleland in the 1980s – his army slaughtered an estimated 20,000 civilians. This is the equivalent of a Sharpeville massacre every day for more than nine months.
The world was outraged by Sharpeville but not by Matabeleland. Why the double standards? A black state murdering black citizens does not, apparently, merit the same outrage as a white state murdering black citizens. I call that racism.
Over recent years, thousands of Zimbabwean opposition activists have been kidnapped, detained without trial, tortured and raped. You heard correct. Raped! Mugabe’s most pathological storm troopers use sexual violence as a weapon of war. They rape both female and male political detainees, in a bid to psychologically humiliate and break them.
Hundreds of opposition supporters have disappeared or been murdered. Nearly all the victims are black. Human rights groups like the Amani Trust, which used to monitor and publicise these abuses, have folded because of state-sanctioned harassment and intimidation. At least two million Zimbabweans have fled to neighbouring South Africa to escape the terror.
Mugabe and his thugs no longer care about Zimbabwean or international public opinion. They are now ruling by brute force, in the full knowledge that the African Union and the United Nations will do nothing. White racist oppression stirs the international community to action, as we saw during the apartheid era. But black-on-black ‘fascism’ produces only indifference. Mugabe is skilfully exploiting these ethical double standards to get away with the destruction of a whole nation.
Zimbabwe’s inflation rate is over 1,700 percent. Unemployment is 80 percent. The budget deficit is nearly half the country’s GDP. About 3,500 Zimbabweans die every week from a combination of malnutrition, poverty and HIV/AIDS, which means that more people are dying in Zimbabwe than in Darfur. A quarter of all Zimbabwean children (1.6 million) are orphans, which is the highest proportion anywhere in the world. The United Nations has warned that six million Zimbabweans face starvation.
The response of the international community to this inhumanity has been feeble and ineffectual. Zimbabwe’s suspension from the Commonwealth did nothing to weaken President Mugabe’s dictatorship. The EU travel ban is lifted whenever the regime’s top officials apply to attend diplomatic conferences; even though they often make only fleeting appearances and spend the rest of their time in Europe’s top cities wining and dining.
World leaders who rant against Mugabe’s barbarisms refuse to enforce international human rights laws against him. Under the UN Convention Against Torture, any government could issue an arrest warrant and seize Mugabe on his overseas trips. He could be put on trial in The Hague, as happened to Slobodan Milosevic.
But when this point is put to international leaders they plead that, as a serving head of state, Mugabe has immunity from prosecution. What, then, is the point of having international human rights laws if the chief abusers are exempt and cannot be prosecuted?
One of the most depressing aspects of the Zimbabwe crisis is the failure of South Africa to speak out. President Mbeki has endorsed as free and fair a succession of fraudulent elections. He has also gone out of his way to thwart international action against Zimbabwe, arguing against external pressure to promote democracy and human rights.
Ironically, when he was a leader of the ANC’s liberation struggle two decades ago, Mbeki argued the exact opposite. He said the world had a moral duty to impose economic sanctions to undermine the apartheid government. Why is there a moral duty to challenge a white tyranny, but not a black one? Are black Zimbabwean lives worth less than the lives of their South African counterparts?
Despite having benefited from an international solidarity campaign to win black freedom, the ANC is now refusing to show solidarity with the freedom struggle of the people of Zimbabwe. The ANC had a Freedom Charter for South Africa. Don’t Zimbabweans deserve freedom too – and shouldn’t the ANC be helping them win it?