Posted on 04/21/2003 7:55:53 AM PDT by Clive
Harare - South Africa's inaction over the Zimbabwe crisis is being increasingly condemned by both the opposition and ordinary Zimbabweans. After Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, the foreign minister, recently said there had been "movement" in the right direction in Zimbabwe, the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) said her comments were "unhelpful".
Tensions were further heightened when South Africa blocked a United Nations vote condemning human rights abuses in the troubled country. Dlamini-Zuma says the Zimbabwe government has vowed to ease draconian laws and make peace by offering farms back to evicted white farmers. But the laws she referred to, the much-slated public order and security act (Posa) and the access to information and privacy act (Aipa) remain unchanged.
Posa is used routinely to arrest opposition MDC officials.
Paul Themba Nyathi, the MDC spokesperson, says that all but four of his party's national executive have been arrested since February 2000.
In direct contradiction to Dlamini-Zuma's claim, Patrick Chinamasa, Zimbabwe's hardline justice minister, has said his government sees no reason to amend Posa, saying the law is necessary to control those intent on destabilising Zimbabwe.
And harsh press laws in Aipa, the brainchild of Jonathan Moyo, the information minister, also remain unchanged.
Journalists from Zimbabwe's beleaguered independent press remain largely unaccredited and subject to indiscriminate harassment at the hands of police and shadowy state agents from Mugabe's notorious Central Intelligence Organisation.
Dlamini-Zuma's claim that white farmers have been offered back land has been dismissed by farmers, hundreds of whom are sitting idle in Harare.
A Commercial Farmers' Union (CFU) farm association chairperson from the violence-plagued Mashonaland West province said: "There was a memorandum of agreement, but the CFU wanted certain conditions regarding violence, evictions and human rights abuses put in writing and signed by the agriculture minister. Nothing has been forthcoming, so the whole thing is just sitting. Any farmer who went back without written guarantees would be mad after everything that's happened in the last three years.
"If the government isn't prepared to give those guarantees, it seems obvious to us that they're not serious about all this, it's just being done to placate foreigners," he said.
It is Posa that has wreaked the most havoc on Zimbabwe's civil society. The law makes it illegal to ridicule Mugabe or cause "feelings of hostility" towards the police.
A recent spate of arrests directed at MDC leaders after last month's mass action was conducted mainly under Posa. And despite widespread proof of torture and violence, Dlamini-Zuma has dismissed the abuse as "overzealousness" on the part of Zimbabwe's security forces.
Her glib dismissal of hundreds of cases of torture drew real anger from torture victims and civil society in Zimbabwe.
"I doubt Zuma would describe it as overzealous if she was whipped with barbed wire or raped with an AK47 barrel," said Temba Chituwu, who fled his home in Harare's western Kuwadzana township after soldiers began imposing curfews on the MDC stronghold. - Foreign Service
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