Zimbabwe - A letter from the diaspora

26th January 2008

Dear Friends.
Following this last week's events in Zimbabwe was rather like trying to disentangle the twists and turns of a particularly lurid political thriller. Yet in a strange way it was all entirely predictable, knowing the ruling party as we do - or ought to by now - we should all have realised that Zanu PF were never going to allow any real exercise of democracy on the streets of Harare. One of the problems for Zimbabweans so far away from home was that hard facts were almost impossible to come by because of an almost complete breakdown of communications due to constant power cuts in Zimbabwe and restricted telephone contact.

It wasn't until I read Thursday's account by Jan Raath in The Times that I felt reasonably able to sort out the details though I'm still not clear exactly how many Zimbabweans risked the wrath of the Zimbabwean police and assorted thugs, acting presumably on orders from above. Perhaps it doesn't really matter how many there were out on the streets; the truth is that despite all the barriers in their way, despite the daily privations and misery of their lives hundreds of ordinary Zimbabweans found the courage to demonstrate their anger and frustration at their government's total inability to control any aspect of the crisis gripping the country. We should salute their courage instead of complaining- as many commentators have - about the lack of strategic planning..

Wednesday was the day of the MDC's Freedom March in Harare. The police had initially given their approval for the march and then withdrawn it at the last minute. We remember that Zanu PF's so- called Million Man March earlier this year went ahead without any interference from the 'custodians of law and order'; on the contrary the police actually escorted the marchers right through the city centre. Not so with the opposition demonstration, the MDC were forced to apply for a court order to overturn the police refusal to allow the march. The MDC believed that in the light of the amended POSA they had the right under the law to demonstrate and accordingly they appealed to the courts. A magistrate duly granted the opposition the right to rally at Glamis Stadium- albeit with a strict time limit for the rally to end - but disallowed the march through the city.

That judgement in itself created the perfect opportunity for the police to attack the demonstrators as they assembled for the twenty minute walk to Glamis Stadium. In charged the police, discharging acrid teargas with batons flailing in all directions. There were several arrests and dozens of people were badly beaten. Undeterred the crowd made their way to the rally venue where they believed they would be addressed by their president, Morgan Tsvangirai.

But the police had already dealt with that contingency. In pre-dawn darkness at 4.30 that Wednesday morning they had gone to Tsvangirai's home and arrested him. Later Wayne Bvudzijena the police spokesperson claimed that they had 'invited' the opposition leader to accompany them to Harare Central. Strange time to issue an invitation you might think but, as usual, the Zimbabwe police were reduced to Keystone Cops as they frantically sought to make themselves look like bona fide and impartial custodians of the law. The MDC they claimed had 'sinister motives'. Well, yes you would say that I suppose if you consider that the MDC demands nothing less than a new constitution, a new voters' roll and an independent electoral commission. Those things could only be construed as 'sinister' if you were a police force supporting a regime that has blatantly denied the people of Zimbabwe their democratic rights and, even after ten months of negotiations, still has no intention of allowing the opposition's voice to be heard.

I believe that there are two important lessons to be learned from the chaotic events of Wednesday the 24th January. The most important, the one that should give us all hope for the future, is that resistance is not dead in Zimbabwe. There are still men and women who find the courage to stand up for the common good even when it seems all hope is lost. The words of the MDC banner carried by the demonstrators said it all;
NO to high prices; NO to water and power cuts; NO to corruption; NO to hyperinflation; NO to misgovernance. What the people want is the right to live with decency and dignity. There is nothing 'sinister' about those demands, they are for simple human needs; only a ruling party that clearly has no intention of listening to the people could be frightened of them because they know they cannot - or will not - deliver.

The second lesson for all Zimbabweans in and outside the country is that we will never achieve our freedom unless we are prepared to unite and stand together against a common enemy. The one achievement of the Zanu PF government is that they have created disunity in every area of life. We see it even in the Anglican church with the behaviour of the rogue bishop Kunonga and the tragedy of divided worshippers. There has been no national vision for a united future. 'Each man for himself' has become the norm in the desperate struggle for survival. And we see these divisions even here in the diaspora where ambitious individuals with their own agendas struggle for positions of power. Zimbabweans at home and in the diaspora need to remember that as individuals we can achieve little but united in peaceful protest we can bring an end to this nightmare of injustice and deprivation that prevails in Zimbabwe.

One for all and all for one cause, the cause of freedom and justice.
Yours in the struggle. PH.

18th January 2008

Dear Friends.
President Mbeki has come and gone. On Thursday he flew into Harare and had talks with Mugabe, Tsangirai and Mutambara in what we must assume was a last-ditch attempt to break the logjam in the talks between the two sides. Having assured the Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern earlier in the week that the talks were on track with only a couple of sticking points remaining, it seems odd that Mr Mbeki should feel the need to rush to Harare to consult the principal players. Interesting that they did not all sit down together to talk; could it be that Mugabe's arrogance will not even allow him to sit down with the man he knows poses a real threat to his position?

Whatever the reason, Mbeki flew out on the same day that he flew in; like Julius Caesar 'he came, he saw'…but he definitely did not conquer Mugabe's rock-like intransigence. According to independent Zimbabwean press reports this morning, Friday 18.01.08 Mugabe has refused a) to implement the agreed constitutional changes before the elections and b) to postpone the date of the so-called harmonised elections. Those are the 'sticking points' that are holding up progress but Mbeki continues to believe - and tell the rest of the world so - that he will achieve a breakthrough. It is an ongoing process he says. I call it fiddling while Rome burns.

Looking in from the outside, it is hard to see what basis Mbeki has for optimism. The South African President appears to be suffering from a nasty case of delusion, a dangerous condition for a politician who is himself facing serious problems at home with his own credibility at stake. Mbeki needs a settlement of the Zimbabwean problem to restore his standing on the national and international stage. Yet he continues to mislead himself and the world that he has the situation under control and that a settlement is just round the corner.

Meanwhile Zimbabwe staggers from one crisis to another. One would think, with the horrendous example of Kenya's rigged elections, that any politician with the people's interests at heart would understand that free and fair elections in Zimbabwe are an urgent priority. Instead, we clearly see that Zimbabwe is heading for yet another rigged election with the connivance of a SADC appointed mediator who appears blind to the suffering of the Zimbabwean people.

That suffering worsened this last week as Zimbabweans continued the desperate search for cash, for food, for uniforms for their children returning to school for another year. Gideon Gono magnanimously announced that ' to provide relief and convenience' for the Zimbabwean public larger denomination notes up to 10 million will be available as from this Friday. It is surely an admission that the economy is totally out of control when the size of cash withdrawls is increased ten times from 50 to 500 million of the useless bearer cheques. And what can the desperate Zimbabwean buy for his or her monopoly money? With power cuts a daily reality the price of one candle is $3 million, a loaf of bread, if you can find one, will cost you over a million, a chicken costs $24 million and a packet of sausages $30 million! And now some schools are instructing parents to send their children back to boarding school with food and all the Minister of Education can say is that he will look into the situation.

For me, looking in from this secular island, one story from Zimbabwe more than any other absolutely shocked me. I myself have no religious affiliation but I understand very well that my fellow countrymen and women are for the most part believers. For Zimbabweans, their faith is their comfort and solace in these terrible times. The thought of police and CIO agents violently expelling priests and parishioners from churches in and around Harare is truly shocking. It seems there are no depths that Mugabe's supporters will not descend to; in this case it was followers of the Mugabe puppet Bishop Kunonga who called on their thugs in the police and CIO to prevent Kunonga's opponents from holding church services. Even the normally passive Anglican church in the person of the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has unequivocally comdemned Kunonga's action.

Truly there is no area of life in Zimbabwe that Mugabe and Zanu PF has not managed to infiltrate and divide. While South Africa and the rest of the world look on, the country is rent asunder by internal divisions in all walks of life, including the opposition party. Never before has it been so important that the opponents of Mugabe act with wisdom and true leadership. The fate of 11 million people lies in their hands.
Yours in the struggle. PH

12th January 2008
Dear Friends.
For Zimbabweans at home and in the diaspora watching the tragedy unfolding in Kenya is rather like seeing past, present and future in one blinding flash. We are forcibly reminded of our own recent past with its rigged elections and we see what may well be our immediate future; the past and the future are blended into the present reality of Kenya's cataclysmic upheaval.

Are there lessons to be learnt from Kenya's experience, Zimbabwe's political analysts ask. The major difference between the two countries as I see it is that superficially Kenya appeared to be a peaceful prosperous democracy with a free press and a flourishing economy. Zimbabwe, on the other hand exhibits all the signs of imminent collapse. No one expected Kenya to burst into flames, that's what made the present upheaval so shocking, whereas most observers are astonished at how Zimbabwe manages to stagger on.
For students of African politics, Kenya and Zimbabwe have always been considered roughly comparable, sharing as they do a similar colonial experience with settler occupation of huge areas of land and a bitter struggle to gain independence. What unites the two countries now is the shared experience of stolen elections and the ensuing sense of injustice and unfairness felt by the mass of the population. When that happens, it is very easy for politicians to tap into those deeply-held grievances and persuade a suffering and impoverished people that it is all the fault of some other ethnic group. It is the 'blame someone else' syndrome that we are so familiar with in Robert Mugabe's rhetoric.

What we have not seen in the Zimbabwean situation, even after patently rigged elections, is the rush of international big names eager to add their voices to the so-called negotiations to bring about a peaceful solution. This last week has seen Jendayi Fraser the US Assistant Secretary for African Affairs, Desmond Tutu, Joachim Chissano, the former President of Mozambique, and Ghana's John Kufor, the President of the AU, among others, all rushing in to broker peace talks. President Kufor has now left Kenya having failed to bring the warring sides to the negotiating table and his role has been handed over to Kofi Annan, the former UN Secretary General. It is hard not to conclude that the only reason all these big names are in Kenya is the outbreak of violence following the rigged election. The violence that these prominent people have all condemned is the very reason they are there in Kenya; violence on the streets certainly concentrated their minds. An estimated death toll of between five and six hundred people and a quarter of a million made homeless is, one could argue, a strong enough reason for international intervention. Zimbabweans, however, will remember with some bitterness that Operation Murambatsvina made seven hundred thousand people homeless, destroying their livelihoods and homes in one fell swoop and causing countless numbers of deaths.

The world's response was a strongly worded Report to the UN - and that was it.

Kenya, it seems, is another matter; Jendayi Fraser remarked that there were faults on both sides. She was talking about the highly suspect election statistics but she must surely know that it was the Kenyan President and his government, not the opposition leader Raila Odinga, who appointed the Electoral Commission, organised the election and counted the votes? Joseph Stalin is reported to have once said ' It's not who votes that counts – but who counts the votes.' The fact is that without an absolutely impartial election machine, democracy cannot begin to flourish.

It's hard to see how Kofi Annan or any other eminent person can bring a successful conclusion to negotiations in Kenya unless there is an acceptance that the count was rigged and the only way forward is a fresh election under international supervision. Odinga has promised to keep up the pressure, calling for mass rallies. 'Just provoking the government' say some commentators but what other way does the opposition have of expressing the people's profound dissatisfaction with the stolen election?

Meanwhile in Zimbabwe, our own negotiations between Zanu PF and the MDC appear to have ground to a halt. Talks cannot resume, we are told, because Mr Chinamassa, the Zanu representative, is having an extended Christmas break. This, while ordinary Zimbabweans experience the unspeakable misery of endless queues in the pouring rain for cash, for non-existent food and non-existent transport. Worst of all are the unprecedented floods not only in remote rural areas but in the urban high-density suburbs where house walls collapse and flimsy shelters are swept away in swirling muddy water and raw sewerage. But Mr Chinamassa is away on holiday and the crucial talks that will determine the country's future are put on hold – again. Chinamassa's boss, too, is away on his annual vacation, somewhere in Malaysia we are told. Was it not Robert Mugabe who said two months ago, ' Their welfare is my welfare, their suffering is my suffering.' Ordinary Zimbabweans are surely entitled to ask whether their leaders actually give a damn about them. It's hard to believe that anyone in their right mind would willingly vote for a party that has caused such desperate suffering and shows such callous disregard for the people's welfare.

The Zimbabwe Election Support Network issued a report this week on voter education and registration. The report revealed that Zanu PF is handing out free ploughs to the people but there's a catch. The recipient must be a paid–up member of the ruling party, able to produce a party card and chant three party slogans. Furthermore, some villagers are being told that the ploughs are free but only on condition the party wins in that area. No win, no plough.

If Robert Mugabe gets his way the elections in Zimbabwe are less than three months away. Can anyone seriously believe that the elections will be free and fair? If there is a lesson to be learned from Kenya it must be that Zimbabweans themselves have the power to bring about change but we should never forget that it comes at a high price.
Yours in the struggle. PH




4th January 2008

Dear Friends.
Kenya has overtaken Pakistan at the top of the foreign news this week with comment from all sides of the political spectrum about the state of African democracy. Comment ranges from the usual Eurocentric tut-tuttery about Africa's alleged inability to govern itself democratically right through to the politically correct post-colonial guilt that sees the whole problem as a consequence of Europe's colonial history in Africa.

Listening to the British Foreign Secretary's remarks about Kenya broadcast on the BBC, I was struck by one particular comment. Mr Milliband remarked that events in Kenya would have a profound effect on forthcoming elections in Africa this year. He mentioned Malawi and Angola where elections are due but interestingly made no mention of Zimbabwe. The omission was surely no accident. Perhaps Gordon Brown's non-attendance at the AU/EU Summit in Lisbon last year was a signal that the UK is not prepared to do anything publicly about the Zimbabwean problem? Whether that is the case or not, the fact is that there has been no mention at ministerial level or in the British media of the absolute chaos in Zimbabwe's banking sector over the past few weeks or of the forthcoming elections and the impossibility of those elections being free and fair in the current climate in Zimbabwe. Meanwhile, the level of suffering amongst ordinary people rises in direct proportion to the callous incompetence of the Zanu PF regime, yet the British government and the British media remain silent.

There had been repeated phonecalls, Mr Milliband revealed in his BBC interview, to President Kibaki and the opposition leader, Raila Odinga, urging the two men to respect democracy and get together and talk about the way forward. It's hard to see what that way forward might be when the election in Kenya was so clearly stolen as the figures in at least two constituencies show. The fact that no African state has congratulated Kibaki on his victory would seem to suggest that even the AU is unhappy with the result; indeed they have already announced the dispatch of an AU delegation to Nairobi to see for themselves the reality on the ground. Meanwhile, there is continuing violence on the streets and the western media, always ready to label unrest in Africa as 'tribal', is making comparisons with Ruanda and suggesting that this is the start of ethnic cleansing on genocidal lines. I do not believe that to be the case. Yes, Kenyan politicians from all sides are probably inciting the violence for their own ends but the truth is that if the people did not feel so strongly that the election had been stolen from them they would not be in such an angry and volatile mood. Stolen elections are bound to produce this result; it all sounds very familiar to Zimbabweans, accustomed as we are to rigged elections and police clampdowns on all forms of democratic expression.

Writing in The Guardian this week Simon Jenkins, a respected journalist with a left-wing perspective argues that the state of Britain's own democracy is too flawed for it to 'lecture' the developing world about democracy. With the examples of Pakistan and Kenya very much in mind, Jenkins contends that democracy is in a sad state in this New Year but as he remarks, 'it depends what you mean by democracy'. Elections every five or six years are not the only requirement for a functioning democracy, supporting structures and institutions need to be in place for a democracy to be considered as the valid expression of the people's will. There are, as Jenkins points out local cultural and historical influences that will affect the way democracy operates in different parts of the world but students of politics are taught that there are certain key tests that can be applied to determine whether a democracy is in a healthy state:
* Are there free and fair elections.
* Can the franchise turn a regime out of office
* Are there supporting institutions such as an open parliament, security of public assembly, elected local government, a free media, the rule of law?

The whole thrust of Simon Jenkins' article is that Britain has no right to 'lecture' less-developed states about the health or otherwise of their democracy since Britain itself has in many instance set up the very conditions of aid and trade together with support for tyrants which make the practice of democracy difficult if not impossible.

Simon Jenkins is right when he says that Britain has no right to 'lecture' the rest of the world about democracy when British democracy itself is so flawed but, and it is a very big but, what alternative does he offer? Should Britain remain silent as it has done very largely about the Zimbabwean problem? The silence and lack of action from Britain on the Zimbabwean question, is, I would argue, a denial of its moral responsibility for the former colony. Having exploited Zimbabwe and its resources, natural and human, for close on a century of colonial rule should not the British government now take a more positive role in assisting the Zimbabwean people in their passionate desire for democracy? Silence, after all, implies consent.
Will Britain and the rest of the world wait in paralysed inaction – as they did with Ruanda – until there is blood running in the streets of Harare and a million lives are lost? Whatever Britain and the west may say, however objectionable their hectoring tone may be, the undeniable truth remains that African people themselves yearn to participate in the democratic process. It is corrupt and power-hungry African leaders, too often kept in power by western governments, who overturn the results and deny the people their rightful place in the democratic process. Whatever definition of democracy we use, it surely must not exclude the will of the people?
Yours in the struggle. PH