ZIMBABWE - LETTER FROM THE DIASPORA

2nd January 2009

Dear Friends,

I know that I am not alone in my anger and indignation at the continued imprisonment of Jestina Mukoko and the other abducted MDC activists on trumped up charges of plotting to overthrow the regime in Harare via a military operation based, the State alleges, in Botswana. We had a few brief moments of relief at the end of 2008 that perhaps there was still justice in Zimbabwe after all. The High Court had ordered the abductees' release to a hospital of their choice and further ordered that they be accorded full access to their lawyers and visits from relatives. Our relief at the good news was short-lived. Having denied that they had any knowledge of Jestina's whereabouts, the police finally produced her and thirty two other activists who the appeared before Magistrate Misrod Guvamombe. What happened next could only happen in Zimbabwe as the activists' lawyer, the courageous Beatrice Mtetwa commented, " It's only in Zimbabwe that an inferior court can really implement a High Court order differently. The High Court made an order that was deliberately subverted by the state." The reason for Magistrate Guvamombe's decision to disobey Justice Omerjee's ruling was that the State had already filed an appeal against Omerjee's ruling. Wearing prison garb with shackles and leg irons, the accused were paraded in court and then dispatched to Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison to await trial.

Thus 2009 began in Zimbabwe with yet another gross abuse of human rights, another travesty of justice that makes the Mugabe regime even more of a pariah state in the eyes of the world. Shamefully South Africa and SADC continue to protect Mugabe, claiming that even the arrest of activists need not be a bar to the implementation of a Government of National Unity. Today we read that Police Chief Chihuri has declared a ban on all political meetings, citing the security situation in the country which he describes as 'volatile'. The courts and the police have become totally complicit in the regime's increasingly desperate hold on power. Any hope that Zimbabweans had that justice might ultimately prevail has once again been cruelly dashed. With magistrates, judges and police supporting the regime's every move, there seems little hope that 2009 will be any better than the previous year for long-suffering Zimbabweans. The rains are falling but there is no sign of planting and without the NGO's to feed the people, starvation looms while the cholera toll continues to mount. And Mugabe just sits back and allows it to happen, knowing that the world will not allow the people to starve. He has virtually abdicated all responsibility for the people's welfare; his only focus now is on his own survival and he will use every means to ensure it, assisted by the greed and avarice of his cronies whose own survival depends entirely on his staying in power - as his does on their continued sycophantic support.
I am reading Heidi Hollands' book Dinner with Mugabe at the moment and it makes an engrossing read. Holland's central purpose is to attempt to understand Mugabe's psyche and disabuse the popular notion that he is a madman, another Idi Amin. She interviews all sorts of people, friends and enemies of Mugabe's, who throw light on his very complex personality and in the course of her analysis she asks the question, 'Does it actually help to understand the sort of man he is?' Understanding why Hitler was the way he was does not after all make the murder of six million Jews any less shocking. Similarly, Gukukahundi and the massacre of 20-30 thousand Ndebele people or the terrible violence now meted out on innocent Zimbabweans for no reason other than their opposition to his rule is hardly excusable on the grounds that his father left home when Mugabe was ten years old. More understandable perhaps is his supposed hatred of whites. What is not excusable is that the confiscation of white-owned farms has caused such dreadful suffering to the very people Mugabe claims to have liberated. Early childhood trauma hardly explains such an act of massive injustice. Perhaps the explanation is more to do with the fact that Mugabe simply cannot tolerate opposition or criticism whether it comes from inside his own party or from the MDC or the populace at large. Does it help to understand why Mugabe is like this? 'By your deeds shall you know them' says the Christian doctrine which Mugabe claims to espouse. On that basis, history will not, I believe, judge him kindly and neither will the thousands of victims of his arrogance and cruelty.

May 2009 be the year when the hope for change becomes reality for Zimbabwe.

Yours in the (continuing) struggle PH