How SA backed Zim lie

Mail & Guardian (SA) via ZWNews ^ | 9 July 2004 | Jean-Jacques Cornish and Nazeem Dramat

[Clive]

South African Minister of Foreign Affairs Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma backed Zimbabwean government moves to stifle an explosive report on human rights abuses in Zimbabwe at the African Union summit in Addis Ababa.

At the same time, there is mounting evidence that Zimbabwean Foreign Minister Stan Mudenge lied when he claimed his government had not seen or had a chance to respond to the report, prepared by the AU's Commission on People's and Human Rights (ACPHR).

Summit sources said that at a meeting of African foreign ministers last week, Dlamini-Zuma had stepped up to the plate for Mudenge when he angrily insisted the report be suppressed before it reached the assembly of AU heads of state, as his government had not seen it. She later told the Mail & Guardian it had been agreed to hold the report until Zimbabwe could comment. It would not be correct to circulate the document - which also covered other countries - without the official reaction of those states.

Mudenge's claim began to look threadbare this week. One of the report's authors, South African churchman and academic Barney Pityana, told the M&G he could not believe the report had not been made available to President Robert Mugabe's government. Pityana pointed out that he and the senior vice-chairperson of the ACPHR, Gambian Jainab Johm, had finalised the report in 2002. The commission's practice was to present its findings to the relevant African state as soon as they were completed. He said he was proud of the report's even-handedness.

This chimed with the Archbishop of Bulawayo, Pius Ncube's, criticism of the AU's apparent decision to back away from tackling the report during the summit. The Zimbabwean government had had the report for two years, Ncube insisted.

In addition, the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum said the Zimbabwean government was given a copy of the report in February this year. And a senior Southern African Development Community delegate told the M&G: "If the Zimbabweans arrived here ignorant of the report, they were the only delegation in that position. We have reason to believe the report reached Harare at least six months ago." Zimbabwe has agreed to react to the report within seven days.

To the chagrin of the AU's heads of state, Mugabe's run-in with the fledgling organisation dominated its third summit in the Ethiopian capital. They had wanted to concentrate on the mission, vision and strategy presented by the AU commission chairperson Alpha Oumar Konare, and avoid dealing with the Zimbabwean president, as they had managed to do at previous summits. But when the ACPHR's findings found their way into the public domain a week ago, their options ran out.

The normally soft-spoken Mudenge went ballistic when the report was presented to African foreign ministers in the executive council. He warned that if it was not stifled in that forum it would overshadow everything else in the assembly of heads of state. "It's just a question of where the blood flows, here or in the summit," he is said to have told the council.

Mudenge was apparently pulled up for his threatening behaviour by Nigeria's Foreign Minister, Oluyemi Adentji, who was chairing the meeting. Adentji was disinclined simply to throw the matter out at Mudenge's behest. But in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, the council accepted Mudenge's word that the ACPHR accusations came as a surprise to his government. Asked how long he would need to reply, Mudenge said: "Once we have studied it - no more than seven days."

He then attempted to mollify his peers by thanking the AU for helping to "recover more than 11-million hectares of stolen land without paying one cent". For this he was rewarded with a round of applause.

But the foreign ministers were having none of his appeal to shelve the report - not even when Dlamini-Zuma climbed into the ring to support him.

Dlamini-Zuma's defence of Zimbabwe may have come as a surprise to some of the other African ministers at the summit. Executive director at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, Charles Villa-Vicencio, argues that South Africa had a hand in the drafting of the report and would have wanted the AU to have adopted it as part of a broad African effort to deal with the crisis in Zimbabwe.

However, faced with Mudenge's - and probably Mugabe's - fierce reaction to the report, the South Africans may have decided to back down and let Zimbabwe off the hook.

The report relates to events after the Zimbabwean parliamentary and presidential elections in 2000 and 2002. It was not presented to last year's summit in Maputo ostensibly because it was not translated into French. "It has been out there a long time and it simply cannot be hidden away any longer," commented one delegate. he council thus "noted" the report. It also noted that mission reports on specific countries - without naming Zimbabwe - were circulated without comment by the states concerned. It urged the commission to see that this did not happen again.

[Clive]

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[Carry_Okie]

He (Mudenge) then attempted to mollify his peers by thanking the AU for helping to "recover more than 11-million hectares of stolen land without paying one cent". For this he was rewarded with a round of applause.

Documentation of the evident complicity of the entire AU in the racist atrocity that is Zimbabwe. Under no circumstances should we bail these people out until the whole thing collapses.

[Malesherbes]

What is happening is Zimbabwe is just a dry run for what is in store for South Africa.