ASA ACAS Panel Chicago 2024

“Lessons from the Covid-19 Epidemic for the Next Pandemics in Africa and Needed Responses from the U.S. and Globally

The Advocacy Network for Africa (AdNA), the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars (USA), and the African Studies Center at Michigan State University are inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting. At  Chicago African Studies Assn Mtg Panel 
Time: Saturday, Dec 14, 2024 08:00 AM Central Time (US and Canada)
Times are displayed in (UTC-06:00) Central Time (US & Canada) Change 

Roundtable Title: (IX-AN-27) “Lessons from the Covid-19 Epidemic for the Next Pandemics in Africa and Needed Responses from the U.S. and Globally

Roundtable Members: 

Session Time: 12/14/2024, 8:00 AM – 9:45 AM (US EST:9:00 AM – 10:45 AM)

Session Room: Denver (5th floor)Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81263389072?pwd=yLi6gVkFnKjzMwKxL2538NObbodWiQ.1

ACAS action on Sudan

Dear President Biden,

I write with deep concern over the situation in Sudan. The crisis is deepening, with no end in sight for the suffering of civilians in Sudan. Heavy weaponry including artillery, tanks and jet aircraft have been used in densely populated areas in Khartoum, killing hundreds and injuring thousands. The conflict has quickly spread across the country, making it difficult to seek safety. Human rights and aid organizations – including Amnesty International – are reporting that civilians are bearing the brunt of the fighting. Food and fuel prices have soared, and there are power and water outages.  And the healthcare system has collapsed, with 60% of Khartoum’s hospitals closed.

With the lives of so many civilians at risk, I urge you to appoint a Presidential Envoy who can lead U.S. diplomatic efforts with Sudanese and regional partners to develop a robust policy response that centers itself on protecting civilians.

Specifically I ask you to appoint a Presidential Envoy who will report directly to you and lead a robust cross agency U.S. Government response. Given the magnitude of the crisis, a Presidential Envoy is necessary to lead a coordinated international community response.

This unfolding crisis is happening at the same time as the 20-year anniversary of the atrocities committed in Darfur. Civilians there remain at the mercy of the same security forces who committed crimes against humanity and war crimes in Darfur and other parts of Sudan. Longstanding impunity has allowed those suspected of war crimes in Darfur to remain in leadership positions today, contributing to the current violence in Sudan.

I implore you to take action – the Sudanese people must have our support.

David Wylie, Association of Concerned African Scholars

———

Take action yourself in this Amnesty International effort at:  Amnesty International USA | Amnesty International USA (amnestyusa.org)

Letter in support of new Special Drawing Rights (SDRs)

Dear President Biden and Secretary Yellen,

The U.S. economy has created more than 
12 million jobs since President Biden took office, thanks to the sound policies and leadership of your administration. But there is general agreement that the risk of recession is substantial. 

The Federal Reserve has raised interest rates dramatically, and the impact of those increases is ongoing. This policy is intended to cause an increase in unemployment and appears to have contributed to the current instability in the banking system.

These conditions in the U.S. could worsen the already expected decline in growth and employment around the world. The International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s April World Economic Outlook concludes that “Risks to the outlook are heavily skewed to the downside, with the chances of a hard landing having risen sharply.” The IMF estimates that 56% of low-income countries are in or at high risk of falling into debt distress.

Downturn and recession around the world would eliminate many export-related jobs in the United States and reduce growth and employment here. From January 2020 to May 2021, the U.S. economy lost an estimated 2.2 million export-related jobs due to the fall in global demand for U.S. exports, as this demand fell during the pandemic and recessions in many countries. While some of these jobs have since been recovered, the current global downturn could reverse this recovery, potentially threatening the livelihoods of millions of U.S. workers. 

Unfortunately, if more action is necessary to counteract economic slowdown and recession, a divided Congress is unlikely to be able to provide a new round of effective economic policies. But your administration can take effective action on its own by supporting a new issuance of Special Drawing Rights (SDR) at the IMF. 

SDRs have zero cost to the U.S. federal budget or taxpayers. A new SDR issuance would create more than $200 billion worth of international reserves for developing countries, helping to stabilize global economies and U.S. export markets and therefore preserve and create U.S. jobs that would otherwise be lost to a global recession. 

During the pandemic in August 2021, the U.S. supported the IMF’s issuance of $650 billion worth of SDRs. This measure was by far the single most important action taken to support the economies of developing countries in the face of combined global health, debt, economic, and climate crises. The amount of assistance received by developing countries from this SDR issuance was more than all of the development aid from high-income countries to developing countries over the span of a year. In the first year after the allocation, over 100 low- and middle-income countries used their SDRs in some form, including to stabilize currencies and avert balance of payments crises, to repay debts to the IMF, and to purchase critical imports such as food, vaccines, and personal protective equipment, including from the United States. Based on the Bank for International Settlements’ research on the relationship between mortality and global recession, the 2021 issuance very likely saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

Notably, this issuance did not benefit U.S. adversaries. Countries that are subject to financial sanctions or whose governments are not recognized by the IMF — including Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran, Myanmar, Russia, Sudan, Syria, and Venezuela — have not been able to use a single SDR from the 2021 issuance. Cuba and North Korea are not IMF members and are therefore ineligible for SDRs. And China has over $3 trillion in foreign reserves and therefore could not use SDRs under current IMF rules.

Leading your administration now to support a new issuance of at least $650 billion in SDRs is a simple, cost-free, and effective way of supporting the economic recovery of the U.S., while saving many lives in developing countries and mitigating the effects of a global recession. So long

Association of Concerned Africa Scholars (USA)

CELEBRATING JENNIFER DAVIS – Saturday, July 11, 11am (New York), 5 pm (South Africa)

Dear friends and colleagues of the struggle,

An online celebration of the life of Jennifer Davis was held on Saturday, July 11. Although it is sad that there will not be a gathering in person, there is a silver lining that her memorial service can now be viewed online.

This is a sad moment in history when, in the last few years, we have lost so many who were heroes in the struggle against apartheid especially in South Africa but, here in the States, Jennifer’s co-worker at ACOA/Africa Fund, Dumisani Kumalo, Immanuel Wallerstein, Ann Seidman, Sean Gervasi, and others.

Jennifer Davis Memorial Service Recording – July 11th, 2020

For more information: Jennifer-davis.org

Facebook: Remembering Jennifer Davis

Association of Concerned Africa Scholars Statement on President Trump’s racist remarks

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2018, ACAS expresses its solidarity with people living in African countries and in the African diaspora who were so brutally disparaged in the racist remarks made by President Trump on Jan 11, 2018. As concerned scholars of Africa, with friends, colleagues, and family members in these regions, we are outraged by his bigoted, offensive, and inaccurate characterizations. Sadly, such comments from the White House have become the norm.  We demand that President Trump retract his statements and apologize for the harm he has caused.

To students and visitors who hail from the African continent and from diaspora countries, we reiterate that you are our valued friends and colleagues. Those of us who were born in the United States have a great deal to learn from you. Please continue to work with us to improve the tenor of American civic discourse and American understanding and appreciation of peoples on the African continent and in the African diaspora.

We also are dismayed at your Administrations’s plans to cut funding of UN Peacekeeping funds for more than a dozen African countries and for announced plans to cut funding for HIV-AIDS remediation in Africa as well as reducing contributions to the World Health Organization (WHO) as it coordinates research and action against Zika, Ebola, and malaria, diseases that threaten Haiti and parts of Africa as well as these United States.

Deportation of African and Other Black Immigrants Is Quietly Increasing And No One Is Taking Note –By David Love

David Love’s article, “Deportation of African and Other Black Immigrants Is Quietly Increasing And No One Is Taking Note” (Altanta Black Star March 20, 2017) investigates a topic ACAS is following closely. Immigrants living in the US are increasingly insecure and worried about real dangers presented by the new strategies used under the Trump administration to harass, detain, and deport immigrants.

 

As Love writes: “Since the 2016 election, the ICE raids on Black immigrant communities have intensified. For example, in January, 86 men and women were deported to Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, after being detained and imprisoned, as Africanews.com reported. In November, 108 immigrants were deported to Ghana and 20 people also were deported to Liberia, while 53 others were processed for deportation. Earlier this month, ICE deported 130 people to Senegal, six times the number recorded by the agency in its 2016 report.”

ACAS Statement on Presidential Executive Order No. 13769

The Association of Concerned Africa Scholars (ACAS) registers its outrage and its opposition to the Presidential Executive Order, “Protecting The Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into The United States,” issued by Donald Trump on January 27, 2017, which has cut off legal immigration and travel to the United States from three African nations: Sudan, Somalia and Libya as well as from Iran, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. This ban directly affects refugees from Somalia, Libya, Iraq, and Syria where the U.S. military actions contribute to the exodus of thousands of refugees. Ironically, this ban is directed toward refugees in a continent whose nations have opened their borders to refugees and people fleeing violence while the U.S. is closing boundaries and building walls.

This ban is an ill-advised, religiously-based attack on the rights of people from these majority Muslim nations. This unwise action will not make the U.S. safe, is in opposition to American values, and will fuel anti-American sentiment in Africa and around the world. This scatter-shot action is a threat to all refugees, to the global system of protection for refugees and other displaced people, and to the future of human rights and of U.S. democracy. In addition, this EO violates the Geneva Convention on Refugees which obliges all member states to take in those fleeing war.

In stating that he plans to favor Christian refugees, the President makes clear that this is a religion-based discrimination. Such discrimination has been condemned by many leaders of U.S. Protestant, Catholic, and Evangelical churches. It also violates the ban on government establishment of religion in the first amendment of the US Constitution as well as U.S. law that bars discrimination “in the issuance of an immigrant visa because of the person’s race, sex, nationality, place of birth or place of residence.” (8 U.S. Code § 1152).

This EO violates the most basic of humanitarian norms at the core of our democracy and puts severe burdens on families in Africa, the other affected countries, and the United States. It will have a severe impact on students and scholars who have or would have sought to have, ties and links with US institutions of higher education.

With many other organizations in the United States and around the world, we therefore call for the immediate rescinding of this executive order and a new U.S. policy to accept more of those fleeing the conflicts around the world.

ACAS  January 31 2017

Re: Lessons of Zimbabwe (Timothy Scarnecchia, Jocelyn Alexander, et. al.)

For a number of scholars, Mahmood Mamdani’s ‘Lessons of Zimbabwe’ requires a further response, given Mamdani’s stature as a scholar and public intellectual. Some aspects of his argument are uncontroversial: there was a real demand for land redistribution — even the World Bank was calling for it in the late 1990s as the best way forward in Zimbabwe — and some of the Western powers’ original pronouncements and actions were hypocritical. There is a real danger, however, in simplifying the lessons of Zimbabwe. It isn’t just a matter of stark ethnic dichotomies, the urban-rural divide, or the part played by ‘the West’.

One of the more difficult tasks for scholars working on Zimbabwe is to convince peers working on other areas of Africa to look more deeply at the crisis and not to be fooled by Mugabe’s rhetoric of imperialist victimisation. Mamdani has, unfortunately, fallen in with this rhetoric by characterising Zimbabwean history and politics as fundamentally a battle between what he sees as an urban-based opposition, supported by the West, and a peasant-based ruling party besieged by external forces. This flight of fantasy portrays Mugabe and his Zanu-PF cronies as heroes of a landless peasantry (which is how they see themselves) and the state — backed up by the paramilitary violence of war veterans and others — as the vanguard of a peasant revolution. We suggest that Mamdani acquaint himself with the large body of Zimbabwean scholarship, which is easily available, rather than selectively using the arguments of scholars such as Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros on land reform, and Gideon Gono, Mugabe’s Reserve Bank governor, as his source on sanctions. Citing Gono is rather like using Milton Obote’s writings as a source for conditions in Uganda in the 1960s and 1970s. A starting point for more informed scholarship is the recent Bulletin of the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars.

Mamdani’s portrayal of Zimbabwe’s opposition politics is insulting to those who continue to endure so much in their struggle to build a better Zimbabwe. He argues that urban trade unions have always been marginal to the nationalist movement because of their supposed ‘Ndebele leadership’, and that the current opposition follows in this ‘weak’ trade-union tradition as well as being in thrall to Western interests. What he doesn’t mention is the trade unions’ hard-fought battle against repression before and after 1980. There were many challenges to overcome, among which ethnic politics was hardly the most prominent. That leaders such as Morgan Tsvangirai managed to reshape the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) from what had been a pro-Zanu organisation into a viable political opposition by the early 1990s reflects an Africa-wide and Africa-based phenomenon that Mamdani apparently missed. By accepting Zanu-PF’s argument that the MDC is primarily limited to urban areas and is the product of the West, Mamdani’s account loses credibility.

Mamdani has also sugar-coated his portrayal of political violence in Zimbabwe. He fails even to mention that many ‘peasants’ in Shona-speaking Zanu-PF strongholds turned against Mugabe and major Zanu-PF leaders in the March 2008 elections. It was this reversal that sparked a new round of state-sponsored violence against the same Shona peasantry that Mamdani cites as the beneficiaries of Mugabe’s benevolent dictatorship. In addition, during the months preceding the run-off election (April-June 2008), food relief was denied to rural areas, leaving the World Food Programme and other groups to scramble to re-establish supply to the Zimbabwean peasantry Mamdani suggests are at the centre of Zanu-PF’s concern. Repressive legislation and actions by Zanu-PF activists are magically transformed by Mamdani into acts of generosity to outsiders. After noting discrimination against farm workers in gaining access to land on the grounds they or ‘their elders’ came from another country, Mamdani adds that ‘some were given citizenship.’ Yet he omits the fact that just before the 2002 presidential election the Zanu-PF government removed citizenship from many farm workers and other Zimbabweans whose parents or grandparents had non-Zimbabwean citizenship rights. The disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of perceived opposition supporters disappears in Mamdani’s analysis.

Mamdani’s contention that the West, not Mugabe and the Zanu-PF government, is responsible for the current crisis is as dangerous as it is wrong. By selectively citing instances over the past eight years when the West has cancelled donor funding, Mamdani gives the impression that the West has not been involved in sustaining life in Zimbabwe. The reality is that there are whole sections of the Zimbabwean population that the Zanu-PF leadership would rather punish with starvation than allow to support the opposition. ‘We would be better off with only six million people, with our own [ruling party] people who supported the liberation struggle,’ Didymus Mutasa, one of the key insiders in Zanu-PF, said in 2002, when drought again threatened to kill thousands of rural Zimbabweans. ‘We don’t want all these extra people.’ Western food aid has been a lifeline for ‘these extra people’ — when the state has allowed access.

Sanctions cannot excuse the callous disregard for human life Mugabe and his associates have shown, dating back to the Gukurahundi between 1983 and 1986 (which Mamdani glosses over as a brief bout of violence following from the tension between Zanu-PF and the ‘Ndebele unions’ in 1986), or the repeated land seizures which have been going on since the 1980s, the forced removals, violent reprisals, and the withholding of food aid. Furthermore, Mamdani’s suggestion that the fall in direct investment in Zimbabwe is the result of sanctions is dishonest. There are no sanctions against direct investment in Zimbabwe, as shown by Anglo American’s willingness to invest $400 million in Zimbabwe during the summer of 2008 to protect access to platinum mines. There have been large investments from South Africa, India and China, as Mugabe has bartered away the nation’s resources for short-term interests. It is the kleptocracy and violence fostered by Mugabe and Co that has scared off other investors, not sanctions.

At a time when thousands of people in Zimbabwe are threatened by a cholera epidemic — in part at least as a consequence of Zanu-PF’s decision to replace MDC municipal officials with Zanu-PF ‘urban governors’ — and international donors are scrambling to help deal with the collapse of the health sector and widespread hunger, intellectuals such as Mamdani should display more responsibility and less posturing in their attempts to draw meaningful lessons from Zimbabwe.

Jocelyn Alexander, Linacre College, Oxford
Andrea Arrington, University of Arkansas
Michael Bratton, Michigan State University
Bill Derman, Michigan State University
William J. Dewey, The University of Tennessee
Matthew Engelke, London School of Economics
Linda Freeman, Carleton University
Petina Gappah, Zimbabwean writer and lawyer
Kenneth Good, RMIT University Melbourne
David Gordon, Bowdoin College
Amanda Hammar, Nordic Africa Institute
David McDermott Hughes, Rutgers University
Diana Jeater, University of the West of England
Tony King, University of the West of England
Bill Kinsey, University of Zimbabwe
Norma Kriger, Cornell University
Todd Leedy, University of Florida
JoAnn McGregor, University College London
Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Showers Mawowa, University of KwaZulu Natal
David Maxwell, Keele University
Donald Mead, Michigan State University
John Metzler, Michigan State University
David Moore, University of Johannesburg
Shylock Muyengwa, University of Florida
Blair Rutherford, Carleton University
John S. Saul, York University
Richard Saunders, York University
Timothy Scarnecchia, Kent State University, Ohio
Anne Schneller, Michigan State University
Marja Spierenburg, Vrije University of Amsterdam
Colin Stoneman, JSAS Editorial Coordinator
Blessing-Miles Tendi, Oxford University
Wendy Urban-Mead, Bard College
Elaine Windrich, Stanford University

This letter originally appeared in the London Review of Books 31, n.1 (December 1, 2009) in response to Mamdani’s ‘Lessons of Zimbabwe’. It is republished here with the kind permission of the LRB editors.

Editorial: In the Shadow of Gukurahundi

A number of the contributions to this Special Issue on Zimbabwe have made more than passing references to the Gukurahundi, the brutal campaign of violence carried out against the mostly Ndebele populations in Zimbabwe during the 1983 and again during the 1985 elections. It is worth reflecting on the meaning of the Gukurahundi for anyone interested in understanding why the ruling party, ZANU(PF), when it found itself backed against the wall by election results they thought could never happen (the March 2008 defeat of so many ZANU(PF) members of parliament AND President Mugabe himself), turned to such depraved forms of terror and political violence to punish individuals and rural villages en masse for having voted for the opposition rather than their supposedly “beloved” ZANU(PF).

In April, word started to spread of the violence against mostly Shona villagers and MDC supporters in the smaller towns of the northwestern provinces of Zimbabwe. There was here and there talk of “Gukurahundi” again. People began see familiar examples of tactics from the Gukurahundi in much of the news: the forced “conversions” of entire villages by ZANU(PF) youth, war veterans, police, and soldiers in April, May, and June 2008; the public beatings of civilians accused of voting for and supporting the MDC; the murders of party activists, of their families, and even their relatives for attending funerals.

Memories of Gukurahundi are extremely painful to those who survived it, or were born afterward and told of its horrors by their relatives who had lived through it, and this editorial is not seeking to make a direct comparison of recent events with those of the 1980s. While there are chilling similarities in the tactics used by the ZANU(PF) regime against its opponents in the aftermath of the March 2008 elections, this editorial does not seek, by noting those similarities, to minimize the extent of the suffering and persecution that occurred during the Gukurahundi. Those who were affected by that wave of violence in Matabeleland and Midlands in the 1980s deserve recognition for the scale and depth of their losses, and the attendant political alienation that they have suffered ever since, as marginalized members of the body politic of independent Zimbabwe. The salient point to emphasize here is that the perpetrators of the Gukurahundi were never brought to book. The Gukurahundi campaign’s designers in fact remain in positions of power in the current government. The continued non-admission from the regime as to the scale and intent of the 1980s atrocities, their refusal to admit the Gukurahundi’s ethnic character, along with the continued access to power by those who helped plan and command the Gukurahundi is what has allowed the ruling party to re-deploy Gukurahundi-like actions of political punishment at the grassroots level once again in 2008, and once again to devastating effect, albeit this time not aimed at Ndebele-speaking supporters of ZAPU, but at the Shona-speaking ZANU heartland that had turned away from the party of Mugabe and voted for the MDC.

For many people outside of Zimbabwe, the details of what the Gukurahundi was and how it has shaped Zimbabwean politics is little known. A great deal of criticism has been made of scholars and the international community for not looking more critically at the Gukurahundi when it was occurring because the world was “in love” with Mugabe and the newly independent Zimbabwe. In addition, much of the world was concentrating on fighting apartheid South Africa, so the crimes of Mugabe–seen at the time as a liberation war hero and a staunch anti-apartheid leader among the Frontline states–could be overlooked in pursuit of the goal of bringing down apartheid in South Africa.

This was a sad failure on the part of the international community, but one that should not be allowed to be repeated in 2008. As Clapperton Mavhunga’s article in this issue reflects, the attempts at press censorship that were available to Mugabe’s insiders in the early 1980s are much less effective in the Internet age. As described below, the details and photos of victims of these most recent attacks on innocent people are well documented and available for the world to see. The same cannot be said for the evidence of the Gukurahundi, but that does not mean the details are unavailable. Thanks to a republished version of the extraordinary document from 1997, the “Report of the Disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands, 1980-1988” originally written and published in 1997 by the Zimbabwean Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace (CCJP) and the Legal Resources Foundation, it is possible to research and understand the stark similarities between state violence then and now.

The report republished in 2007 as Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe: a Report of the Disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands, 1980-1988 (London: Hurst & Company, 2007) is well worth finding in your library or requesting that your library order a copy. The Report provides a very clear historical account of the Gukurahundi, a term that translates from chiShona as “the early rain which washes away the chaff before the spring rains.” To briefly outline the Report’s account, Gukurahundi was a military campaign launched in January 1983 against the civilians of Matabeleland South, Matabeleland North, and Midlands provinces by Robert Mugabe and others in the ZANU-PF leadership. In addition to military leaders, the Report suggests it was Enos Nkala and Emmerson Mnangagwa along with Mugabe who were most responsible for the planning and implementation of the campaign.

As the report details, two sources of instability had prompted Mugabe to organize the 5th Brigade, a North Korean trained force estimated to include between 2,500 to 3,500 soldiers. The first was the presence of dissidents after Independence. The report describes how the growth of dissident numbers had increased after violence broke out between demobilized soldiers of Mugabe’s ZANU and Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU at Entumbane, a suburb of Bulawayo, in 1980. In addition, the apartheid State in South Africa used former ZAPU soldiers to destabilize Zimbabwe in this period, creating a small group of “Super ZAPU” dissidents responsible for brutal attacks on civilians in an attempt to destabilize Zimbabwe and hamper the use of Zimbabwe by the ANC and PAC to organize their attacks on South Africa. The kidnapping of six foreign tourists in July 1982 became the event used by Mugabe to justify ZANU’s unleashing of the 5th Brigade on the civilian population in predominantly Ndebele areas. When the 5th Brigade received their marching orders in January 1983, Mugabe handed them a flag emblazoned with the term Gukurahundi on it. He then sent the soldiers off encouraging them to “plough and reconstruct.” It soon became clear that the 5th Brigade was not going after the dissidents and super ZAPU directly. Instead, whole villages and districts were targeted for collective punishment and the tactics used showed a strategy of terror, killing, and beatings in order to punish villagers for the presence of dissidents. The Report suggests that there were already adequate regular troops to engage the estimated 200-400 dissidents active in Zimbabwe in 1983. But the specially trained 5th Brigade, made up almost exclusively of Shona-speaking soldiers loyal to Mugabe, began to terrorize the civilian population of Matabeleland. Mugabe’s call to “plough and reconstruct” was meant in terms of sending a message in the predominantly Ndebele-speaking areas of the country that ZAPU itself was no longer welcome to remain as a viable opposition party.

It is important to obtain a copy of the republished Report to understand the systematic use of torture and collective punishments during the Gukurahundi. Based on over 1,000 personal testimonies, the Report details extensive and extended beatings of individuals both in their home villages and also in special camps set up to make the beatings more “efficient”. These torture camps became death camps for many victims, and those who survived often suffered physical and psychological injuries that would cause many lifelong disabilities. Families were traumatized by these beatings and the disappearances of loved ones. An appendix at the back shows one example of a list from a hospital of admitted patients, a list that shows how systematic the beatings on the buttocks causing open sores was used, as were the breaking of bones. These same tactics were deployed during the violence this past summer. A Human Rights Watch report from April 2008 describes the tactics used after “base camps” were set up in areas that had voted for the MDC;

During the day, ZANU-PF and their allies (so-called “war veterans,” youth militias and some armed men in military uniform) gather at these camps to decide on their targets, generally those known or thought to support the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). According to witnesses, the targets are then rounded up and brought to the camps at night, where they are beaten for hours with thick wooden sticks and army batons. Human Rights Watch has interviewed more than 30 people in the last two days who have sustained serious injuries, including broken limbs, as a result of these beatings.[1]

Another tactic used during the Gukurahundi was literally to starve out the people of rural Matabeleland. Rural shops were forced to close and curfews imposed to stop individuals from moving from urban areas to their rural areas with supplies. Most importantly, food aid was withheld from areas during periods of serious drought. People risked their lives to get to urban areas, while others were reduced to surviving off of foraging and other strategies. The same tactics have been used against the MDC over the past 6 years, with rural populations told in the past that they needed ZANU(PF) membership cards to receive food aid. This year may be the worst yet, as the shortage of seed and fertilizer has meant fewer and fewer people can afford to plant food, and the politicizing of food aid distribution compounds the situation. During the period of the political violence, Mugabe’s government banned relief agencies and NGOs from working in Zimbabwe, and now that they are allowed to return they are finding the situation to already be dire. In addition, the Zimbabwean government reportedly managed to influence the SADC food security report to show areas of need in ZANU(PF) areas, and leaving out of the report areas controlled by the MDC.

As Alexander and Tendi have described in this issue, during the period between the March election and the June run-off, it was not the 5th Brigade, as in the 1980s, who carried out the violence but by what has been alleged to be a coordinated plan by the Joint Operation Command (JOC) to make sure that when it came time for the June 27th presidential run-off vote, the areas of traditional ZANU(PF) support would have no choice but to vote to reelect Mugabe. Once the violence began, a number of MDC candidates who had won seats in parliament were forced into hiding. The MDC organizers and anyone suspected of harboring opposition views were targets, and once again the rural teachers were forced to run or face torture and public beatings.[2]

In addition to the direct parallels of tactics used in both the Gukurahundi and this past year, the shadow of Gukurahundi is still an issue because of the culture of impunity it created. In 1985, as the Report describes, political violence was used before and after Zimbabwe’s second general election to guarantee a ZANU victory, and by 1988, with ZAPU no longer a political threat and the ZAPU leadership brought into the ZANU(PF) government, the perpetrators of the Gukurahundi were given a blanket amnesty. The authors of the Gukurahundi Report expressed the following concerns about the 1988 amnesty offered to all those involved in the Gukurahundi:

Whilst we have grave reservations about amnesties of this nature, given the lapse of time between 1988 and now and the fact that those responsible for the (more numerous) human rights violations which occurred during Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle area also immune from prosecution, we do not suggest that human rights violators be prosecuted. However, it is important that those who were directly responsible for human rights violations be removed from positions which may enable them to violate human rights again in the future. History shows that the retention of the human rights violators in positions of authority can lead to those same people reverting to their old ways.[3]

Writing in 1997, the authors understood then what has now come to pass: to give amnesty to the soldiers and civilians involved was one thing, but to give blanket amnesty to those in power, to the ministers and generals, to the politburo and the President, only heightens the risk that the political and military leaders will use the same deadly tactics again.

The parallels between the tactics of the Gukurahundi and 2008’s Operation Mavhoterapapi (“How did you vote?”) will require a systematic examination by scholars and students writing on the political situation in Zimbabwe today. There are plenty of documented cases and reports of the 2008 violence available on the web. For example, reports written for Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Solidarity Peace Trust are a good place to start. The hardworking team of Zimbabwean journalists at the Voice of America’s Studio 7 for Zimbabwe have produced a number of valuable stories of this past summer’s violence, as have many Zimbabwean and non-Zimbabwean journalists for the major English-language newspapers. Perhaps the starkest imagery available to show the extent of the torture and beating are the photos of victims of the violence on the Sokwanele’s Flickr photostream.[5] These photos should be enough to convince even the most skeptical person of the magnitude and depravity of the political violence this past summer. Similar photographs from the 1980s appear in the original Gukurahundi Report. The psychological trauma experienced by families and survivors of this past summer’s violence has been and will continue to be great. And while the Zimbabwean health infrastructure has currently ground almost to a halt, the heroic work done by churches, medical workers, and others to assist victims requires greater international recognition and financial support.

The Shadow of Gukurahundi and the Power Sharing talks

The national unity model of negotiations that Mbeki, SADC, and the AU pulled out of their hat in August and September 2008 seemed at first a perfect way to save face. It allowed South Africa and SADC to claim “ownership” of the crisis, and allowed the international community to show their concern but also to absolve themselves of any tough diplomatic choices, in particular making the illegitimate election and political violence in Zimbabwe a priority at the UN Security Council. One major problem with the talks soon became apparent, that was the inability of SADC to convince the very same ZANU(PF) leadership, who are also close business and military associates with the most powerful players in SADC (South Africa, Angola, Namibia, the DRC), that they must negotiate in good faith.

Now that this lack of good faith on the part of ZANU(PF) is self-evident to the world, there is talk of offering an alternative by organizing a new election. Here again the shadow of Gukurahundi appears. As David Moore perceptively observes in this issue, who will stop the current ZANU(PF) from returning to violence again if another election was to be organized? At a recent conference, Mac Maharaj facilitated a lively discussion on the topic of the suitability of a South African-style ”power sharing” negotiations in other African states, as has been attempted now in Ivory Coast, Kenya, and Zimbabwe. In an interview by Peter Alegi and Peter Limb after the session, Maharaj pointed to what he saw as the main danger of such generic applications of the model in each new African crisis: “So what we are creating in these other countries [by insisting on a “national unity” or “power sharing” model]… that is, it is almost creating a culture of impunity by those who may commit gross violations of human rights and atrocities against people.”[6] There is serious concern that Mugabe will come out of these negotiations even stronger and with the support of South Africa and the majority of SADC member states.

Whatever the outcome of the SADC power sharing negotiations, it is clear that Mugabe and his ZANU(PF) insiders have managed to buy more time for themselves by understanding how fickle world interest has always been when it comes to a nation like Zimbabwe. As Horace Campbell argues in this issue, they also buy time thanks to the high levels of international mining interests in Zimbabwe. While the United States and other Western nations have used “selective sanctions” against Mugabe, the mining interests from North America, Europe, and South Africa continue to support ZANU(PF) through their constant flow of new capital investment and in their share of profits. Richard Saunders wrote a detailed report this summer of South African investments in Zimbabwe.[7] Saunders’ report is worth reading to better understand the way South African economic interests continue to invest and take over key areas of the Zimbabwean economy. Chinese and Indian businesses have taken over key areas in mining and in steel and coal production. All of this will continue whether or not a power-sharing agreement is reached, and the general absence of discussion of how the shadow profits from these contracts are “eaten” by the predatory nature of the Zimbabwean political elite makes talks of power sharing as purely a “political” solution all the more suspect.

As concerned scholars, we need to consider ways to advise our own leaders to once again engage the Zimbabwean crisis meaningfully. The excitement around an Obama administration should be seized as an opportunity to reinvigorate US policy toward Zimbabwe. The Bush administration was very slow to realize that Mbeki was failing to negotiate in good faith between ZANU(PF) and the MDC during his six years of “quiet diplomacy”. And when U.S. Undersecretary for Africa Jendayi Frazier did finally lose patience with Mbeki, she managed to alienate the South Africans even further by deciding to go to South Africa and declare the MDC’s Morgan Tsvangirai as the outright winner of the presidential election while Mbeki remained quiet about the results. It would be helpful if Frazier and the US State Department could do more in the next few months behind the scenes to push SADC and South Africa toward a more responsible role in protecting Zimbabweans from violence both within Zimbabwe and within the region. The US has lost a lot of its legitimacy in Southern Africa over the past 8 years, if not the past 28 years, but the Obama administration can do a great deal to mend fences with a new South African president in January, as well as with other regional leaders. However, it is important for US policymakers not to simply accept the status quo of “on again off again” negotiations and tacitly accept South Africa’s role as the key negotiator. South Africa is deeply implicated in the Zimbabwean crisis, mostly through its neglect even to recognize it as a crisis until quite recently, and then only after xenophobic violence within South Africa targeting Zimbabweans caused an “embarrassment” to South Africa’s international image. As Hammar and Rutherford have shown in their articles in this issue, the use of Zimbabwean labor in South Africa, both highly skilled and less skilled, has been a large benefit to the South African economy— but the poor treatment and precarious status of Zimbabweans in South Africa and the region need to be taken more seriously by SADC, and with greater coordination with relief organizations who can assist displaced and at risk populations.

The risks involved in accepting the current dispensation of on-going negotiations and lack of serious attention to food insecurity and displaced populations are troubling to say the least. Consider the results that came from the South African brokered peace in the DRC in 2002, or the American-led negotiations over the CPA in the Sudan in 2005 and again over Darfur in 2007. None of these processes have turned out particularly well, with each conflict returning to a cycle of political violence and humanitarian crises where the death tolls are still mounting. Will it be possible to avert such a fate for Zimbabwe? Is it really the case that the Zimbabwe situation constitutes a conflict resolution model? Or is it a case of a one-sided war against a civilian population? If SADC does manage to force an agreement–and the ANC’s Jacob Zuma has used that term this weekend, that “regional leaders must ‘force’ Harare deal”, who will protect the opposition from further violence once the meetings are over and the handshake photo ops are over?[8]

Since 2000, Mugabe has gambled with the use of elections, hoping to convince the world that he actually cared about the results, while at the same time deploying violence to guarantee a ZANU(PF) victory. Each time he did this, his allies in SADC gave their stamp of approval. The events around the 2008 election showed the world just how the shadow of Gukurahundi has returned to action when the corrupt group around the state leadership saw their privileges challenged through legal means. SADC and the AU were unable to sweep this election under the rug, but the international community has thus far been satisfied with allowing South Africa and SADC to continue to legitimate Mugabe’s use of violence by first legitimating his role as president of Zimbabwe, and then by urging him to offer up to the MDC a piece of the political and economic pie. It now would appear that Mugabe and his “super-patriots” have failed even to agree on sharing the crumbs, as reports from this past week show renewed beatings and disappearances of MDC politicians and their supporters. To most casual observers, it would seem illogical and suicidal for Mugabe’s insiders to refuse a deal in order to protect their hold over the economic patronage they command, particularly as the Zimbabwean economy sinks even deeper for the majority of citizens. Students should investigate the intricate links this ruling group maintains to many forms of accumulation, almost all of which depend on using the privileges of state power to ensure their continued economic “success”.[9] This is not simply a class of business elites who can give up their hold on the state and do something else, nor can they possibly consider any attempts at opening the state to those who might find them guilty of abusing state offices. The people around Mugabe’s rule are not about to cede their power through a negotiated “power sharing” exercise.

As word of more violence in Zimbabwe begins to reach the world in November 2008, it will be very essential that South Africa and SADC be pushed towards a more active role in peacekeeping and food security. The factions within ZANU(PF) are once again preparing to prove to Mugabe–before the December ZANU(PF) meeting in Bindura–that they are more hardcore in defeating the MDC than the other factions. Again, innocent Zimbabweans will inevitably suffer. This is therefore not a time to wait for drawn-out negotiations or to expect that the new administrations in South Africa and the United States will offer a quick fix. Concerned scholars need to work together with policy makers to devise strategies and approaches. Otherwise, all the best-laid plans for a “post-Mugabe redevelopment” that now circulate around Washington and European think tanks will be meaningless. We all need to realize that there are a number of men and women in ZANU(PF) who will continue to defend the status quo should Mugabe, like two of his previous vice-presidents Joshua Nkomo and Simon Muzenda, die in office.

Notes

From ACAS Bulletin 80

1. Human Rights Watch, “Zimbabwe: ZANU-PF Sets Up ‘Torture Camps’” (April 19, 2008) http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2008/04/19/zimbab18604.htm

2. The Sokwanele website has provided detailed accounts of the violence during the summer. A total of 2,168 cases were reported as of November 7, 2008. http://www.sokwanele.com/map/electionviolence

3. Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe: a Report of the Disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands, 1980-1988. Introduction by Elinor Sisulu. (London: Hurst & Company, 2007) 379. Another important book is Brian Raftopoulos and Tyrone Savage (eds), Zimbabwe: Injustice and Political Reconciliation (Harare: Weaver Press, 2004). See especially the chapter by Sheri Eppel, “’Gukuranhundi’ The need for truth and reparation” pp. 43-62.

4. Amnesty International, Zimbabwe: Time for Accountability: http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/report/zimbabwes-victims-of-violence-can-no-longer-wait-for-political-solution-20081031 ; Human Rights Watch, “They Beat Me like a Dog”: Political Persecution of Opposition Activists and Supporters in Zimbabwe http://hrw.org/reports/2008/zimbabwe0808/ ; Solidarity Peace Trust http://www.solidaritypeacetrust.org/index.php

5. Sokwanele Photostream http://www.flickr.com/photos/sokwanele/

6. See Peter Alegi and Peter Limb, “Africa Past and Present: Episode 16” http://afripod.aodl.org/ The quote above is from about the 16:30 minute mark.

7. Richard Saunders, ”Painful Paradoxes: Mining, Crisis and Regional Capital in Zimbabwe” Ezine: South Africa in Africa” No. 4, August 2008 http://www.africafiles.org/atissueezine.asp

8. Blessing Zulu, “South Africa’s Zuma Says Regional Leaders Must ‘Force’ Harare Deal” November 7, 2008: http://www.voanews.com/english/Africa/Zimbabwe/2008-11-07-voa57.cfm

9. For just one recent example, see the reporting by Oscar Nkala in the Mining Weekly, “Zim loses $2bn worth of diamonds a month through smuggling – central bank” (November 7, 2008). After reporting the amount claimed lost by Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) chief Gono, the author interviews a “senior police officer from Manicaland” who explains

‘…that the diamond smuggling syndicates cannot be uprooted because they have political and security establishment connections.’

‘Like all illegal activities that involve huge amounts of money, this problem of illegal panning and smuggling will simply not go away. Many a time we have arrested people with big stashes of diamonds and even cash in US dollars, only to get a phone call from some high-ranking government or party official to say we should release the suspects and give them back ‘their’ loot.

‘The RBZ may want to see this ended quickly, but they would have to arrest top government and security establishment officers, who are bleeding this country to death,’ says the officer.

http://www.miningweekly.com/article.php?a_id=146460 Also available at the very helpful website for research, the Zimbabwe Situation, http://www.zimbabwesituation.com/

Introduction: The Zimbabwe Crisis

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.