Tag Archives: Zimbabwe

Lewis Goes After Mugabe

Posted on by elizabeth
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Here’s one of those stories that’s simultaneously horrifying and inspiring.  In Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, female political foes are subject to gang rape as punishment for their opposition (there’s no word as to what they do to men).  But Stephen Lewis is on the case.  From The Globe and Mail:

Former United Nations ambassador Stephen Lewis is spearheading an effort to bring to justice perpetrators of politically motivated sexual violence in Zimbabwe, a powerful addition to existing attempts to hold Robert Mugabe’s regime accountable for gross human-rights violations.

AIDS-Free World, an advocacy group founded last year by Mr. Lewis, is quietly collecting the testimony of women who survived gang rapes by leaders in Mr. Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party, after the Zimbabwean President lost the first round of presidential elections in March.

Over the past week, international human-rights lawyers enlisted by Mr. Lewis collected sworn affidavits from eight women, all of them supporters or organizers for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change who were raped and brutally beaten after elections this past spring.

Each of the women described how her attackers, who openly identified themselves with Mr. Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party, made clear that she was to be the victim of a systematic policy of punishment because she dared to challenge Mr. Mugabe’s rule.

The stories the women tell are harrowing. “When they were finished with me, I could no longer stand,” said Carol, 39, an MDC supporter from the southwest of Zimbabwe. (The identities of the women have been confirmed by The Globe and Mail but pseudonyms have been used here for their protection.) The ZANU militia men who had detained her made her crawl on her belly to the bored bureaucrat holding a list and sitting nearby, and tick off her name to acknowledge that she had had her punishment. “Mine was the fourth name on the list for that day.” Her name crossed off, they moved on.

This is not the first effort to collect evidence of crimes against humanity committed by the Mugabe regime: Several Zimbabwean human-rights organizations are also working to gather and preserve evidence of state-sponsored human-rights abuses, which have typified the recent years of Mr. Mugabe’s rule but exploded after the Zimbabwean leader lost the first round of the presidential election to the MDC’s Morgan Tsvangirai, the first open challenge to his authority in 28 years.

But Mr. Lewis’s organization has some advantages. The AIDS-Free World team, which is U.S.-based, can operate much more freely than Zimbabwean lawyers and activists. Plus they have, through Mr. Lewis’s long years as a politician and diplomat, access to resources and to influential people. The lawyers involved are experts in the field, some of whom have prosecuted war crimes and are donating their time.

“We’re in a position to collect durable sworn affidavits that would hold up in any proceeding, so that if we end up somewhere like the International Criminal Court, a defence lawyer will not be able to throw it out,” Mr. Lewis said in a telephone interview from Canada.

“The affidavits bear out that these attacks were directed at the political opposition in a very methodical way – the women chosen were chosen because they were part of the political opposition and the links made to ZANU-PF are unassailable.”

Long concerned about the implosion of Zimbabwe, Mr. Lewis, the former UN special envoy for AIDS in Africa, was horrified to learn last summer from Betty Makoni, a firebrand Zimbabwean human-rights activist with whom he has worked on AIDS issues, about the systematic campaign of gang rape that accompanied the first election and the runoff vote in late June. Mr. Lewis and his co-director and long-time colleague Paula Donovan were soon making calls to try to figure out what they could do – to help victims, but equally important, to try to end the gross impunity with which Mr. Mugabe and ZANU-PF have operated.

Mr. Mugabe and Mr. Tsvangirai signed a power-sharing deal in September but Mr. Mugabe has refused to relinquish any control of the state. A third of Zimbabweans now face famine, and inflation has spiralled into the billions per cent. The two leaders left another round of power-sharing talks in Johannesburg this weekend without a workable agreement.

AIDS-Free World works with women’s groups in Zimbabwe to identify rape survivors who would take the risky step of giving testimony, and in some cases has helped get them across borders to do so. The group finds doctors to provide them medical care – many of the women still have unhealed wounds five months later, since Zimbabwe’s medical system has entirely ceased to function, and all need HIV tests – and also brings the lawyers who record the testimonies.

A first group of nine women produced affidavits in September with the help of pro bono lawyers from the Toronto firm Blakes; eight more gave their testimony this week. Shonali Shome, an AIDS-Free World lawyer collecting the evidence, said it is “chilling.”

“We’re hearing the same thing over and over, we’re seeing the same patterns in different parts of Zimbabwe: the women tell us about the same words coming out of the perpetrators mouths,” she said. “The language that’s used, the pattern of how they were abducted, it speaks to a hierarchical level of command.” It shows the rapes were both systematic and widespread (Ms. Makoni said she knows of 700 cases), the two criteria for crimes against humanity, Ms. Shome said.

Carol, for example, said she was told repeatedly by the ZANU-PF leader who raped her: “You deserve this, this is your punishment for daring to support the MDC. We have a list and everyone on it like you will get a punishment.”

The AIDS-Free World team is also researching the best route for a prosecution: Zimbabwe has crimes-against-humanity legislation, but its judicial system has been entirely hijacked by the Mugabe regime. The next choice, Ms. Shome said, is prosecution in a neighbouring state, all of which are signatories to the Rome Statute that says crimes against humanity can be prosecuted in another nation when a state cannot or will not take action domestically.

Mr. Lewis and his colleagues are also considering bodies such as the African Court (the judicial wing of the African Union) or the AU’s human-rights commission (although this would not be a criminal prosecution). A final option is the International Criminal Court, although this is unlikely for political reasons.

The women who gathered to give testimony this past week are adamant that they want their individual attackers prosecuted – most can name at least some of those who raped and beat them – but also wish to see senior people in the ZANU-PF leadership, starting with Mr. Mugabe, held accountable. The challenge in such a prosecution, Ms. Donovan acknowledged, is how to prove that the rapes and beatings were not criminal acts, carried out by individuals or rogue ZANU-PF members, but rather part of an orchestrated campaign for which responsibility originated with Mr. Mugabe and a handful of his close advisers.

There’s more here

No One Will Play With Americans

Posted on by elizabeth
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I wish I could sit down and have a chat with Thomas Friedman today.  He seems upset and confused about the unpopularity of America in the world.  He warns us (the world) that we’d be in considerably worse shape if American power wasn’t available:

Perfect we are not, but America still has some moral backbone. There are travesties we will not tolerate. The U.N. vote on Zimbabwe demonstrates that this is not true for these “popular” countries — called Russia or China or South Africa — that have no problem siding with a man who is pulverizing his own people.

So, yes, we’re not so popular in Europe and Asia anymore. I guess they would prefer a world in which America was weaker, where leaders with the values of Vladimir Putin and Thabo Mbeki had a greater say, and where the desperate voices for change in Zimbabwe would, well, just shut up.

Uh, Mr. Friedman, “moral backbone” you say?!

Friedman’s comments remind me of that old canard about dissent: if you don’t like it here, go somewhere else.  Friedman is saying, if you think we’re bad, check out the others.  At this moment in time, I don’t care too much about “the others”, the bad actors who behave so badly they make America look good.  Perhaps the biggest problem this planet has at the moment is that America has squandered whatever moral authority it might have had.  It has squandered it in Afghanistan and Iraq.  It threatens to squander it in Pakistan and Iran.  It has squandered it at home, amongst its own citizens.

Nor can I think of any country other than the US that can claim both the power and the requisite ethical standing.  Britain lost it shortly after 9/11.  It took a only a bit longer for Canada to collapse at the feet of its powerful neighbour.

Sure Robert Mugabe is “worse than” George Bush.  But how can Friedman believe that an American President ought to command a following in the world simply because he isn’t as bad as one of its worst dictators?

Mugabe appears to have wrested power from his people in brutal fashion.  Dissent is repressed.  No doubt people are being detained, tortured and killed.  In sharp relief to the citizens of that country, the American people have willingly granted their President authoritarian power.  He can now detain and torture innocent people along with those merely not yet proven guilty.  He can detain them seemingly endlessly and without meaningful judicial review, and I say this despite the decision of the Supreme Court in Boumediene – because it seems to me unlikely that detainees will be released even after habeas corpus review.  Now the American President  can spy on his own people without accountability, without regard to any law. 

There is some general moaning and groaning in the US about all this.  And not much else.  But for those hysterical, hand-wringing leftwing traitors … whose voices are studiously ignored.

In the rest of the world, we are only beginning to understand the consequences of America’s loss of moral authority.  The American people are victims of their own passivity.  The suffering that this will bring upon them will not be as desperate as that of the people of Zimbabwe.  Sudan.  The Democratic Republic of Congo.  Iraq.  Afghanistan.  Guantanamo Bay.  And more.  Not for quite awhile.

And what Glenn Greenwald said.

UPDATE:  The US is not always so uncomfortable keeping company with Russia and China:

The moral center of humanity slowly asserts itself. Only the most powerful are too afraid to join.

You may have missed the news: At the end of May, 111 nations, including, at the last minute, Great Britain, showing the world the power of an unleashed conscience, agreed to an international ban on cluster bombs, surely one of the cruelest and, given the nature of war today, most unnecessary weapons in modern arsenals.

Among those not endorsing the treaty and MIA at the conference in Dublin where it was debated were Russia, China, Israel and, to the surprise of no one, the United States of George Bush, that increasingly isolated moral rump state of which so many are so ashamed. Indeed, the treaty is widely seen as a “diplomatic defeat” for the U.S., so identified is the Bush administration with the sanctity of its WMD.

US, Sudan & Zimbabwe

Posted on by elizabeth
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There’s no defense for the ugliness in Sudan and Zimbabwe. But US policy in connection with those two problematic nations is running into a buzzsaw. In both cases, the United States is acting clumsily, and it is facing stiff opposition from Russia, China, and many African nations.

Two obvious conclusions: the Bush Administration’s muddled pursuit of democracy-by-force has made the entire world suspicious of America’s motives in world crises, especially when they’re tied to possible armed intervention. And confronting nations’ real-world strategic interests, such as China’s interest in Sudan, under the guise of humanitarian concerns won’t fly, after Iraq.

The Ugliness in Sudan and Zimbabwe

Robert Dreyfuss

Canadian Silence, US Cruelty

Posted on by elizabeth
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On Sunday I posted this horrible video of David Addington and John Yoo testifying before the House Judiciary Committee.  Or should I say not testifying.  Now Linda McQuaig has voiced the thoughts I found myself unable to form out of sheer disgust:

Does the president of the United States have the right to order a detainee buried alive?

Oddly, this grotesque question was posed at a U.S. Congressional hearing last week. Even odder was the answer — from John Yoo, former deputy assistant attorney general in the Bush administration, now a law professor at the University of California.

“I don’t think that I’ve ever given the advice that the president could bury somebody alive,” Yoo told a judiciary subcommittee hearing into detainee interrogations.

Well, I guess that’s comforting to know. But it was striking to watch Yoo evade answering whether he considered there was any treatment so vicious and inhuman that it would be beyond the president’s power to inflict it on a detainee, in the interests of national defence.

Apparently there isn’t. In a public debate in 2005, Yoo was asked if he thought it would be lawful for the president to authorize crushing the testicles of a detainee’s child.

It would seem like a simple “no” would suffice. But here’s how Yoo responded: “I think it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that.”

Asked about that line last week during his Congressional testimony, Yoo didn’t deny saying it, but protested that it was taken “out of context.” Does that mean there’s a context in which a top legal adviser might advise the president that that’s okay?

After 7 1/2 years of George W. Bush, much of the media and political establishment — which have never shown much interest in holding Bush to account — now appear anxious to simply move on. They seem determined to leave unexamined the full cruelty and mendacity of the Bush administration, with its unlawful wars and blatant violations of the Geneva Conventions.

Moving on is a great idea – once there’s been some accountability, with a full public recognition of wrongdoing, and a commitment to bring about change. Otherwise, nothing will have been learned.

The comments of Yoo, who authored top-level internal memos justifying torture and virtually unlimited presidential power, suggest a moral depravity in very high places.

That depravity led to the horrific abuses at Abu Ghraib and at other U.S. prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and “black sites” around the world.

The dean of the Massachusetts School of Law, Lawrence Velvel, argues that Bush and top administration officials, including Yoo, should be tried for war crimes. His law school is holding a conference in September to map out ways to try to pursue these prosecutions “if need be, to the ends of the Earth.”

Meanwhile, here in Canada, it seems we’re supposed to avert our gaze. Strong critiques of Bush are slapped down for being “anti-American.”

Certainly, the Harper government, while quick to spot anti-democratic behaviour in Zimbabwe, is blind to it south of the border. Not only has Ottawa failed to join European nations in protesting Guantanamo Bay — and refused to do anything to help the Canadian imprisoned there — it actively co-operates with the United States on security matters and has sent thousands of Canadian troops to Afghanistan to fight in the front lines of Bush’s “war on terror.”

All this is presented as helping our neighbour, and building democracy in Afghanistan. Another way to look at it is that we’re lending support to an administration whose moral compass doesn’t seem to rule out burying people alive or crushing the testicles of children.

[emphasis mine]

Rape as a Tool of Politics

Posted on by elizabeth
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From the Guardian/UK:

Yvonne Chipowera doesn’t know the names of those who raped her, whipped her with sjamboks and urinated on her face while making her call Zimbabwe’s opposition leader a dog. Her ordeal lasted 16 hours.

Her attackers were young men drawn from Robert Mugabe’s militia, armed with knives and slingshots, who rule the streets of Epworth, a sprawling poor township on the edge of Harare.

But Chipowera, a 24-year-old opposition activist, knows who she blames. There is the ruling Zanu-PF party’s district chairman, Teddy Garakara, in whose house she was held and tortured along with other opposition activists, some in a hole in the ground. Then there is Amos Midzi, a former cabinet minister and parliamentary candidate for the Epworth seat who lost to the opposition. He appeared at the house to encourage the militiamen as Chipowera was beaten. The victims say he is orchestrating the campaign of home burnings and demolitions engulfing Epworth. And there is Joana Mawira, a Zanu-PF local councillor, who other women say was giving the orders as they were assaulted.

“Some people are afraid to tell the truth that they have been raped. There was a girl raped seven times but she won’t tell,” said Chipowera. “But people should know. I just wish God could take those who did this and kill them.”