This special issue on the 2008 Zimbabwe elections introduces the issues surrounding the elections and the current political violence leading up to the June 27th Presidential run-off. The first article, by political scientist Norma Kriger, provides a helpful analysis of what took place during the March 29th elections, the subsequent fallout and reworking of the results, and the decision to establish a run-off election for president.
Monthly Archives: June 2008
Jubilee Act Passes US Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Jubilee USA Network
212 E. Capitol St., NE, Washington, DC, 20003 * www.jubileeusa.org
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Thursday, June 26, 2008
Contact: Neil Watkins, Jubilee USA, 202-783-0129
Jubilee USA Network Welcomes Senate Foreign Relations Committee Passage of Jubilee Act to Expand, Reform Poor Country Debt Cancellation
Network Also Applauds House Panel’s Authorization of World Bank Funding, Including Significant Calls for World Bank Reform
WASHINGTON – Jubilee USA Network, an alliance of 80 religious denominations and faith-based networks, development agencies, and human rights groups today applauded passage of the Jubilee Act for Responsible Lending and Expanded Debt Cancellation (S. 2166) by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and passage of legislation to authorize funding for the World Bank (International Development Association), including strong calls for reform at the World Bank.
On Tuesday, June 24, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee passed the Jubilee Act for Responsible Lending and Expanded Debt Cancellation (S.2166), and reported the legislation out of committee for consideration by the full Senate. The Jubilee Act would expand debt cancellation to up to 24 of the world’s most impoverished countries, provided that they show their ability to use funds transparently to combat poverty. The legislation also prohibits the US representative at the International Financial Institutions from conditioning debt relief on policy reforms that would deepen poverty or degrade the environment.
Senator Robert Casey, the initial sponsor of the bi-partisan bill said in a statement, “I’m pleased that at a time when nations around the world are suffering and their citizens are dying of hunger, disease and poverty, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee recognizes the importance of helping the world’s poorest countries.”
Some improvements were made to the Jubilee Act in committee. An amendment was added urging the Secretary of the Treasury to work for immediate debt cancellation for Haiti in light of the current food crisis. Revised language to discourage so-called “vulture fund” activity (the purchase of sovereign debt at a discount with the intent to litigate) was included. The committee also stressed the importance of funding existing commitments to the international financial institutions.
“We are thrilled to see such strong bi-partisan support for the Jubilee Act in the Senate Foreign Relations committee, and we now call on Senate leaders to move this historic, life-saving legislation quickly towards consideration by the full Senate,” said Neil Watkins, National Coordinator or Jubilee USA Network. “We also welcome strong action by the House Financial Services committee this week to approve funding for the World Bank and to require strong reforms at the institution.”
In yesterday’s House Financial Services Committee action, legislation passed which authorized expanded support for U.S. funding to the International Development Association (IDA) arm of the World Bank, which provides grants and concessional loans to the world’s most impoverished countries.
Jubilee USA Network welcomed in particular three amendments offered by Representative Maxine Waters of California and approved by the committee. The first and second require the Secretary of the Treasury to urge the multilateral development banks to increase significantly their emphasis on food security and agricultural development in developing countries, and to provide immediate debt cancellation to Haiti or an immediate suspension of debt service payments. The third amendment authorizes up to $5 million to assist Liberia in buying back its commercial debt, which would help pave the way towards free Liberia from the burden of repaying debts owed to private creditors and from the threat of vulture law suits.
In addition to the approval of funds, the committee called on the US Treasury Department to advocate for reforms in the way the World Bank conditions its assistance on economic policy reforms. The legislation calls on the US Executive Director at the multilateral development banks to use his/her voice and vote to oppose all conditions other than those requiring budget transparency and accountability, civil society and parliamentary inclusion in economic policy decisions and measures to show that assistance is actually spent on poverty reduction. Similarly, any Country Assistance Strategy developed by the Bank must not undermine a country’s commitment to uphold international conventions, especially those that provide assurances of worker’s rights.
The legislation also calls on the US representative to the multilateral bank boards to work for changes to the World Bank’s Doing Business Report. It calls on the World Bank to cease use of the Employing Workers Indicator in the Report and as part of the Country Policy and Institutional Assessment score until it is changed to take into account the importance of worker’s rights. The legislation also makes it US policy to work for elimination of the Non-wage Labor Cost Index from the report (as it discouraged provision of benefits like health care).
The last section of the bill focuses on reform to the World Bank Inspection Panel, which was created to address the concerns of the people who may be affected by Bank projects and to ensure that the Bank adheres to its operational policies and procedures.
### Jubilee USA Network is an alliance of 80 religious denominations, faith based networks, development agencies, and human rights groups working to create the political will for debt cancellation and more responsible lending for impoverished nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. For more information see www.jubileeusa.org
Neil Watkins National Coordinator Jubilee USA Network Direct line: (202) 783-0129 / Mobile: (202) 421-1023 Skype: neil_jubileeusa www.jubileeusa.org
Washington Post: How to Handle Dictators
In a June 22 Outlook commentary, “The Only Answer to the Mugabes of the World May Be a Coup,” Paul Collier advocated encouraging coups to topple dictators and achieve “improved governance” in “such sad little states as Zimbabwe and Burma.”
For him, those countries’ governments are equivalent to their leaders, President Robert Mugabe and Senior Gen. Than Shwe. But history shows that coups beget counter-coups. While living and working in Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, I witnessed sprees of illiberal governance that only worsened the prospects for democratic rule in those places. And if developed countries were to adopt Mr. Collier’s recommendation, Mr. Mugabe would be likely to interpret that approach as
vindicating his contention that neocolonial rule is the cause of Zimbabwe’s ills.
The government in a country such as Zimbabwe or Burma is not merely a strongman but a collection of interests and groups.
Western countries should step up external pressure on the ruling cliques and support local initiatives that promote good governance.
This course is morally right and politically wise.
JAMES H. MITTELMAN
Bethesda
An Open Letter to South African President Thabo Mbeki
The motivation behind this issue originates in our dismay at the growing urgency of the situation in Zimbabwe. Human rights are being violated with increasing frequency. See, for one example, a report recently published by the Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights (ZADHR). Please read it; a link to the report appears at the end of this issue. We also have personal friends in Zimbabwe who have confirmed that such violations are indeed taking place, and at the hands of people acting in the name of the state. Such a development is in direct violation of all that the liberation struggles against colonialism in southern Africa stood for. We call for all speed and urgency from every agency acting to influence the government of Zimbabwe to allow for the run-off election to be free and fair. Additionally, we insist upon a halt to the intimidation, murder, and beating of persons deemed opposition supporters.
What has Mugabe’s rhetoric wrought, that the call to protect human rights is cast as a neo-imperialistic impulse? It was from studying the human rights abuses committed against colonized people in Africa, Jews in Nazi Germany, and enslaved Africans in America, that led many of us here in the United States to realize how important human rights are. We became teachers of African history in the interest of, among other things, making Americans aware of the evils of colonial rule as seen in the Smith and Apartheid regimes of the 20th Century. We want to see no more such atrocities committed, such as those suffered by Biko and countless thousands of others, by anyone in power against anyone, anywhere, no matter the race or religion or economic condition of the persons involved at either end of the power scale.
How is it that President Mugabe and his supporters can take the desire for a free Zimbabwe and from that somehow twist it to accuse people like us of neo-imperialism – we who cry out against the beating of grandmothers, children, pregnant and nursing women, beautiful and irreplaceable sons and fathers? The people of Zimbabwe sacrificed their lives and their well-being in the 1970s so that they could be free to express their views, to choose their own leaders, and to chart their own way forward to a prosperity that they could build for themselves. Zimbabwe’s people did NOT make the sacrifices of the liberation war so that Mugabe’s government could send militias out to beat, brutalize, and terrorize them. Haven’t southern Africans had enough of that under the previous regimes that were defeated at such cost and after such long struggle? The world looks to South Africa, the UN, and the SADC, to take courage and convincingly call upon Mugabe and his government to act in protection of its people, immediately, before another precious human life is damaged or lost.
_________
Wendy Urban-Mead, Bard College, wum@bard.edu.
Link to the May 9, 2008 Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights (ZADHR) Report, available at kubatana.net: http://www.kubatana.net/html/archive/hr/080509zadhr.asp?sector=HR.
See also the statement in support of the ZADHR by the Physicians for Human Rights:
http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/library/news-2008-04-30.html.
“Letter from Harare – May 8, 2008”
The following letter was sent out May 8, 2008 from an NGO worker living in Zimbabwe, who offers an eyewitness account from the capital city of Harare as news of political violence began to be heard from individuals, news sources, and rumor. The letter captures well the anger ex-patriates often feel as they hear from their Zimbabwean colleagues of political killings and torture and realize how implicated so many of the “big chefs” are in this violence, how the police and military along with their paramilitary “green bombers” and “war veterans” operate with impunity. Such a realization is jarring and disturbing, scary and depressing. Zimbabweans have no need to be told of this, but those of us outside the country may want to consider the costs such a state and society exact from its people. Zimbabweans have learned to cope with a now-familiar cycle of periods of calm followed by a brutal reaction from a state controlled by forces who know they have everything to lose should they be forced to concede power. — TS.
“Letter from Harare – 8 May 2008”
By Anonymous
Since the elections on 29 March, I have been trying, without success, to find suitable words with which to convey to those outside the country the experience of being here in this dreadful moment.
Some of my inability to construct a lucid account is surely attributable to the ever-changing rush of events that seems to shift the terrain of what is happening – or what I think may be happening, or what is reported to be happening, or what an army of experts believe to be happening, or what is rumoured to be happening – from hour to hour. The election results will be released tomorrow, or next week or not at all. The Chinese arms ship will dock in Durban, in Beira, in Luanda, or return to China and the weapons will be trucked, or flown to Harare or not. Sixty white-owned farms have just been seized, or 160 farms, or no farm invasion shave occurred. Morgan has won two-thirds of the vote, or a bare majority of the vote or a mere plurality of ballots. Bogus ballot boxes stuffed with phony ZANU-PF votes are seen delivered to the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission to steal the election, the ZEC has been seized by security forces, the police are arresting ZEC personnel. Mugabe and wife have flown to Malaysia or are happily relaxing in their Harare mansion. Mbeki has secretly arranged for Mugabe to step down, or share power or maintain control. There was almost a military coup, or there will be a coup or there has already been a coup and we are under military rule but don’t know it. There will or won’t be a run-off. It will happen in thee weeks, in three months, in a year, not at all. We will be saved by Jacob Zuma, by SADC, by the African Union, by the EU, by no one. On and on and on it goes, baffling, impossible, and we are left dazed, disheartened, flabbergasted.
The Government propaganda machine is in overdrive. “Farmers Attack War Veterans” was Tuesday’s headline. The story told the tale of a white farmer attacking with pepper spray, a band of war vets who happened to “visit” his farm and of three white farmers driving a truck with an improper licence plate. Such lawlessness by whites won’t be tolerated a police official is quoted. The ZBC radio news tells us that MDC thugs are attacking innocent villagers, that MDC leaders are trying forgo the proper legal process and to delay the run-off, that MDC agents have been aiding the return of deposed white farmers to retake the land and restore the old colonial master. I must confess that I find a certain morbid fascination in these ludicrous accounts, brazenly inverting reality, openly reversing victim and perpetrator, mobilizing the rhetoric of sovereignty, rule-of-law, racial-solidarity and patriotism to justify brutal oppression.
Make no mistake: at its core, the story of post-election Zimbabwe is all about violence. Overwhelming, intimidating, sadistic violence unleashed upon the rural black population; anyone – children and the elderly, women and men – perceived to have voted for the MDC, or to be a relative, friend or acquaintance of someone who may have voted for the MDC or to reside in an area that supported MDC. From our Harare island of relative calm and safety, we sit by, helplessly, as their stories trickle and then flood in from the countryside.
Here are some of the accounts that I have heard directly from local sources in the past few days:
• On Sunday evening, one of our local staff described his just-completed visit to his family in the rural Eastern Highlands. When he arrived the village Headman was in hiding, threatened by a roving gang of ZANU-PF youth led by the so-called war veterans. Many young people, he said, had been dragged from their homes, beaten and forced to chant ZANU-PF slogans. They were then told that they were now recruited into the ruling party and were forced to become part of the youth patrol terrorizing the district each night. If they refused they were beaten. The bus on which he traveled back to Harare on Sunday was stopped several times at impromptu ZANU-PF roadblocks. Youth and War Vets clambered on board beating those suspected of supporting the opposition and demanding that everyone chant ZANU-PF slogans and sing “patriotic songs.” Those who resisted were dragged out and beaten, as the police calmly watched from the sidelines.
• On Tuesday a colleague at work came into my office to show me a text message she had just received on her cell-phone. It announced that Monday night the younger brother of her recently diseased fiancé, suspected of being an MDC supporter, had been beaten to death by a group of naked ZANU-PF militants. Naked! Apparently, many others in the village had been beaten and terrorized.
• A friends’ daughter who broke her arm in a playground accident on Monday afternoon was scheduled to have a pin inserted and the bone set on early Tuesday. The parents told us that the operation had to be repeatedly delayed, as the medical staff rushed to attend to numerous seriously-injured victims of ZANU-PF violence who continuously streamed into the private clinic.
• Yesterday an NGO colleague reported seeing thousands of people on the Mazoe road – just north of Harare – carrying what possessions they could and apparently fleeing towards the city. Today VOA reported that eleven people had been murdered and at least twenty more seriously injured in Mazoe North, all victims of ruling-party assault.
• Here is a widely-published account from about two weeks ago, confirmed by several sources. While not directly reported to me, I have found particularly disheartening, as I have a professional link to the key perpetrator, David Parirenyatwa, M.D., the national Minister of Health and Child Welfare and a ZANU-PF Member of Parliament. Together with two other ruling-party politicians, the good doctor, brandishing an AK-47, is said to have invaded a peaceful MDC meeting, threatening and intimidating those in attendance and demanding that they attend a ZANU-PF rally instead. “There is no place in this district where MDC supports will be safe”, he reportedly told the crowd. This from the senior most Government official charged with safeguarding the public health and the well-being of Zimbabwe’s children.
Since my arrival in Zimbabwe fourteen months ago, numerous people here have referred to the apocryphal tale of the frog blissfully swimming in a pot of water as the temperature gradually increases to the boiling point, as perhaps a fit analogy descriptive of our own adaptability to an ever-worsening scene, an ever more menacing and manifest evil. We are well and still quite safe, but we can definitely detect the heat of the water.
Zimbabwe: Ndira Body Found
Tonderai Ndira’s body was identified in the mortuary at Harare’s Parirenyatwa Hospital by a bangle around what had been his wrist.
He had been dead a long time, or at least a week as it was on May 14, in the early hours of the morning that this extraordinary activist, probably the most persecuted political personality in Zimbabwe, was snatched from his working class home in Mabvuku township, eastern Harare.
They came at night, about 10 of them, and in front of his children, Raphael 9 and Linette 6, and his wife Plaxedes, beat him up and then dragged him screaming into a white double cab.
Tonderai Ndira, 33, was certainly Zimbabwe’s most renowned street activist who had been arrested and beaten up and hospitalised scores of times since he began campaigning for democracy in late 1999.
His decomposing, naked body was found in the bush near the old commercial farming district Goromonzi, about 40 km south east of Harare, close to the torture centre run by the security forces, usually the Zimbabwe National Army, where so many Zimbabweans have been worked over since independence.
Hours after his brothers identified the body – it was so decomposed and mutilated that his own father was not sure whether the long, slender remains on the slab was his oldest son – the police began harrassing the family saying they could not have the body for burial.
His brother Cosmos Ndira said yesterday: “He was in the mortuary where they keep the unknown people, the street kids. He was naked. The bangle was given to him by his wife.
“I think Tonde was arrested 35 times, but maybe more, we lost count. We were all so happy after the elections, thinking that the eight years was now over and we could begin new lives.
“We often talked about dying, and Tonde often used to tell us that he would be killed by Zanu PF because he was arrested and beaten up so often.”
Ndira was head of the Movement for Democratic Change’s provincial security department in Harare.
He was detained for five months last year in the pitiful prison cells, unfit for human occupation, and was suing home affairs minister Kembo Mohadi and police commissioner Augustine Chihuri for wrongful arrest.
Despite all the arrests since the MDC was launched Ndira was never brought to trial. All charges, including a two year period when he was remanded every two months, were dropped for lack of evidence.
The police have failed to convict a single MDC activist among the tens of thousands detained in the last eight years.
Ndira was one of the activists who was, occasionally openly critical of the MDC when he believed it had gone wrong.
He didn’t believe in “my party right or wrong” but was a founding member of the party and destined for high office one day although he always saw himself as a background activist.
“I do this for my children. I want them to have a better life than me,” he told journalists who asked him why he kept on going.
His death came on a day when two more MDC activists were buried at the Warren Park cemetery west of Harare. One of their friends was buried last Sunday.
Those three were beaten to death in a rural area about 65 km north east of Harare where most, but certainly not all of the violence has taken place since the March 29 elections.
No one is sure how many people have died since Zanu PF and President Robert Mugabe were defeated in parliamentary and presidential elections. So far 42 victims have been identified by relatives, but many people believe the real toll is much higher especially in remote parts of northern Zimbabwe. If there are any Zanu PF victims, police and the party have failed to provide details.
At least 600 terrified people including dozens of nursing mothers and babies are sheltering at the MDC’S Harare headquarters, Harvest House.
They have no blankets nor food, and the ablution facilities are blocked, and the conditions are inhuman as the building is an office block.
So far neither the International Committee of the Red Cross nor the United Nations has even been to inspect or assist the internally displaced, “It is an appalling crisis,” said MDC lawyer Alec Muchadahama yesterday.
“The people are supposed to go to a neutral area so they can get international assistance. Where is a neutral area? Where should they go?” he said.
“This is Zimbabwe’s darkest hour. Will anything or anyone rescue us? Can there be an end to this? We can’t keep up with it,” he said, and admitted he was exhausted.
Scores are in detention including two recently elected MDC MP’s, Iain Kay, Amos Chibaya and Dr Alois Mudzingwa, MDC executive member and close friend of MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai.
Kay was one of the first white farmers to be assaulted by Mugabe’s “war veterans” in 2000, and he was later forced off his farm. He won his seat on March 29 with support from people from his old farming area, around Marondera, 70 km south east of Harare.
He and Chibaya are being charged with incitement to public violence, according to Muchadahama and were due to appear in their local magistrate’s court yesterday.
No one has been arrested in connection with any of the MDC murders, nor in connection with tens of thousands who have been assaulted. No one has been arrested for arson of village after village in the last three weeks either.
“We can’t really keep up with all the deaths and arrests. I have to go and attend to someone else from the national executive who has been arrested.” Mchadahama said.
__________
Peta Thornycroft, Harare, May 22, 2008