JOINT STATEMENT BY DR WILMOT JAMES, MP AND KENNETH MUBU, MP

PARLIAMENTARY REPRESENTATIVE TO THE SADC PARLIAMENTARY FORUM AND DA SHADOW MINISTER OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND COOPERATION

Report on the current situation in Zimbabwe

On 27th July 2009, we embarked on a three day fact-finding educational mission to Zimbabwe. We learnt two fundamental things:

(1) that the inclusive Government of National Unity and specifically the role of the Movement for Democratic Change (main and breakaway incarnations) in elevating economic growth and service delivery deserve our fullest support, and

(2) that President Robert Mugabe and ZANU-PF should be held to account for failing to honour the SADC Judicial Tribunal's ruling on land seizures and, given the reports that he is mobilising his well-organised paramilitary terror apparatus in the countryside, they should be actively restrained by SADC and specifically by the South African President, Jacob Zuma, as its Chairperson, to abide by the Global Political Agreement (GPA) to which Mugabe attached his signature.

As Members of the South African Parliament with regional and global affairs portfolios we call on President Zuma to:

• Insist that President Mugabe do everything in his power to return the farms to Michael Campbell and the 76 other South African litigants as legally required by the SADC Judicial Tribunal;
• Be prepared to - in collaboration with other agencies - send enough election monitors to cover every voting station in time for the forthcoming referendum and any elections flowing from that;
• By assisting the Joint Monitoring and Implementations Committee (JOMIC) of the Global Political Agreement (GPA), keep President Mugabe and Prime Minister Tsvangarai to its terms and schedules including the writing of a new Constitution, the introduction of the rule of law, free political activity, freedom of assembly and association, security of persons, freedom of expression and other key elements as contained in the GPA; and finally
• As ZANU-PF and President Mugabe appear to be mobilising for war against their own citizens and as they have without fail at every moment in the past used national elections to terrorise the Zimbabwean people, we believe it is appropriate to request Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea to desist funding Mugabe's war machine and for South Africa to impose an arms embargo on Zimbabwe.

A full report follows.

FULL REPORT ON THE CURRENT SITUATION IN ZIMBABWE:

By Dr Wilmot James, MP (Democratic Alliance) & Parliamentary Representative to the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Parliamentary Forum.

Priscilla Misihairabwi-Mushonga is the Minister of Regional Integration and International Co-Operation in the inclusive Zimbabwean government of national unity. With a last name that long, ‘rather call me Priscilla' she says. A striking and forceful woman, it is astonishing to us that she has retained her sense of humour.

A month ago, ten heavily armed men beat up the security guard at her home and proceeded to assault the housekeeper, a visiting friend and her husband -an orthopedic surgeon. They had beaten her husband so badly that he is unable to recognize her. Nothing was stolen.

The men knew that Misihairabwi-Mushonga was absent. She was traveling at the time. This was no ordinary crime. Still, she reaches deep within her to say that she is determined to make the inclusive government work.

We were in Zimbabwe to bear witness to developments there. I was in Zimbabwe last in 1995 leading a team of MPs and academics on a study tour of migration patterns. It is today a country devastated by atrociously bad government and a vicious war led by Robert Mugabe's ZANU PF against his own people.

Zimbabwe writhes in pain and sorrow. The scale of destruction is summarized in some cold statistics. The economist John Robertson remarks that at its best performance in the late 1990s Zimbabwe's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was the same as the city of Durban. Today it is the same as Bloemfontein's.

Zimbabwe has a population of 8 million. Do the mental arithmetic and you will have some sense of the scale of the misery. We learnt from the non-governmental organisation Justice for Agriculture that Zimbabwean agriculture has the capacity to produce 400,000 tonnes of wheat. The 2009 harvest will be 12,000.

The railways are not running. Coal has to be transported by truck, that is why electricity supply is annoyingly spotty. Harare has no garbage collection. A private commercial firm will collect your garbage for a fee. Water runs through old and leaking pipes.  Sanitation is beyond Dickensian. The poor - the overwhelming majority - live in an area known colloquially as the ‘sewer'.

In the countryside, the source of Zimbabwe's wealth, 1.3 million ordinary Zimbabweans have been affected by the land seizures. ‘Little has been done' reads a report prepared by the Research and Advocacy Unit ‘to investigate the means by which ... a population of at least 1.3 million farm workers was subjected to 8 long years of political violence, intimidation and torture.'[1] Some have remained, others are ‘internally displaced' and yet others are refugees in South Africa and elsewhere.

The farm workers became destitute because of the land invasions that masqueraded as land reform. The 4,000 or so farmers whose land was seized employed the workers. Former farmers at Justice for Agriculture shared with us their tales of woe about their homes and properties lost.[2]

There is Ben Freeth whose farm was famously invaded by Zanu-PF thugs and whose bloodied face became the tragic expression of widespread land theft. Unfortunately we could not visit his farm. Freeth explained. The thugs turned up one day, seized the farm, beat him and his family up. They let him and his family stay in a small part of the large farm and compelled them to continue farming. Now that the harvest is due, they come like locusts, use Freeth's harvesting equipment and steal his crop worth US$4million.

For a government to perversely ruin the material basis of the country it governs' survival and growth makes to the uninitiated no sense at all. We learn that the explanation for this suicidal behaviour is as follows: ZANU PF under Mugabe became a corporate-military entity that had to constantly find largesse to feed itself and its supporters.

ZANU PF sucked the state dry. It helped itself to foreign currency. Then it raided the pension funds. ZANU PF helped itself to private bank accounts. It seized farms. Then, like locusts they simply came and took the harvests. But their number is beginning to be up: there are few available farms and little foreign currency left. There is already talk of drought for 2010, which is a warning - a lie - that next year's harvests will also be taken, for how else would one explain the national production statistics for what it is.

For this reason, we heard from credible sources that Mugabe is talking to Venezuela, Cuba and Korea to fund a war-chest in preparation for the referendum and election following on the implementation of the Global Political Agreement (GPA) brokered by former President Thabo Mbeki on behalf of the Southern African Development Community (SADC).[3]

It is only possible to do this, South Africans should note, if you do not have good governance. ZANU PF fused with and became indistinguishable from government. Parliament exercised little to no oversight over the executive. Mugabe ran the Treasury and the Reserve Bank as if they were his personal bank accounts.

It is only possible to have a government that may raid private bank accounts and pension funds if the judiciary is politically pliable, corrupt and obsequious. A truly independent judiciary protects citizens against the abuse of power. Mugabe lives in contempt of this fundamental democratic principle.

I wrote to President Jacob Zuma (on 11 June 2009) about Mugabe's contempt of the SADC's Tribunal finding declaring him to be in breach of a ruling that required government to make all efforts to return seized farms to a Mr William Campbell and 76 others litigants.[4] We may legitimately raise our concern because Campbell and the 76 others are South Africans working there, though of course the land invasions affect almost all farmers and is therefore a major issue of social-ethical principle.

Mugabe responded with dismissive impunity, describing the SADC -Zimbabwe is a signed-up member - Tribunal's judgment as ‘nonsense' and of ‘no consequence'.  As head of the SADC, President Jacob Zuma is duty bound to call Mugabe to account. He has not yet done so.

Prior to our visit we did not appreciate how well oiled is Mugabe's repressive machinery. It is the one thing - in addition to his personal assets stolen from the Zimbabwean citizens - which he maintains with care. Under his personal control he has a paramilitary machine consisting of soldiers, thugs, the so-called war veterans and ZANU political commissars. There are the hit squads. The police also collaborate, though some - regrettably few - local cops part of the local community do their best to ameliorate the human misery. This machine is built upon Ian Smith's legacy, bolstered during the pacification of Matabeleland in the 1980s and strengthened at every election or national event since independence. Mugabe unleashes his violence with unrestrained fury against his people as if he is an angry school principal legitimately handing out corporal punishment to his naughty children, as any good - in his case deeply misguided - Catholic pater familias would.

The Human Rights NGO Forum established that during 2008 alone there were 6 politically-motivated rape cases, 107 murders, 137 abductions and kidnappings, 1 913 assault cases, 19 instances of disappearance, 629 cases of internal displacement and 2 532 violations on freedoms of association and expression.[5] These were the reported cases, the tip of the iceberg. Cumulatively, since independence, Mugabe and his cronies surely have a record that would lead them to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

We are told that the climate of fear has eased. We speak with a very impressive young businessman Nigel Chanakira, owner of the Kingdom Bank and a chain of supermarkets, who says that he feels and experiences less trepidation, a sentiment echoed by many other individuals. Chanakira is no political patsy, as he spent many bouts in jail. If this is a relaxed police state, it must have been truly awful at its worst.

It appears though as if Mugabe is stirring that this is a calm before the storm. Fiona Forde reported that Mugabe has indeed been stockpiling modern weapons.[6] She cites a study by the respected Belgian research group International Peace Information Service (IPIS) to say that on 28 August 2008 a first of many arm shipments containing 32 tons of 7.62mmx54 cartridges was flown from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Harare (by Enterprise World Airways using a very old Boeing 707-3B4C aircraft registered as 9Q-CRM). On 30 August a second shipment of 20 tons of 7.62mmx39 cartridges used in AK-47s arrived. That is a lot of bullets to be used not for a defence of borders or war on external enemies but against, as has been the past pattern, their own citizens. The ammunition arrived in Zimbabwe, says Forde, after an arms consignment from China was turned away from Durban only to be flown into Harare by way of Angola. This one included mortar bombs, rockets and more ammunition. Zimbabwe itself does not have legislation regulating the importing and exporting of weapons and, as a result, no one within the country is providing oversight of what Mugabe is up to with the result that the Zimbabwe executive and ZANU-PF are circumventing whatever sanctions - the European Union's in particular - in existence.

We regret to report that our country South Africa is planning to export 7.62 and 9 mm ammunition to Zimbabwe. Our colleague David Maynier MP recently revealed - on 2 August 2009 - that Parliament's National Conventional Arms Control Committee is considering authorizing more than a million rounds of both types of bullets for export there. There is no question that the bullets will be used against civilians.

There are reports from credible sources of increasing paramilitary activity in the countryside, especially in the Shona populated areas. Hit squads are still busy. Land invasions have not ceased. The judicial machinery is still being used for ZANU-PF ends. The MDC has lost its majority in Parliament because of spuriously motivated arrests of MPs.  During the week of our visit NGOs were warned to not get involved beyond charity work. It might be that the repression has waned some but no one is under any illusion that Mugabe has lost any of his instincts to survive and that he is willing and able to use all he has without conscience to stay in control.

Still, the inclusive government has for now held and is, by all accounts, the only game in town. We speak with the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Moses Mzila-Ndlovu who is adamant that the SADC must do everything in its power to actively and robustly monitor the implementation of the Global Political Agreement (GPA) brokered - some say he was heavily biased towards ZANU-PF - by former President Thabo Mbeki.[7] Our assessment is that SADC is weakened by the inherent compromise of its membership consisting of (less than a few) democracies, (more) part-democracies and (many) authoritarian regimes and its repeated failure to sanction its members for breaking its own rules.

We call on President Zuma to do everything is his power to restrain Mugabe from pursuing another round of pacification by terror. This time he will take a lot more than his country down with him. We are delighted that President Zuma has met with Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangarai who has been in South Africa to solicit investments that would kick-start their economy. South African retail businesses have a presence there. There is room for expansion in all sectors, especially energy, transport and retail. Only should we do so if we also effectively restrain Mugabe, for his game is up.

In sum, we call on President Zuma to consider:

• Insisting that President Mugabe do everything in his power to return the farms to Michael Campbell and the 76 other South African litigants as legally required by the SADC Judicial Tribunal;
• Be prepared to - in collaboration with other agencies - send enough election monitors to cover every voting station in time for the forthcoming referendum and any elections flowing from that;
• By assisting the Joint Monitoring and Implementations Committee (JOMIC) of the Global Political Agreement GPA), keep President Mugabe and Prime Minister Tsvangarai to its terms and schedules including the writing of a new Constitution, the introduction of the rule of law, free political activity, freedom of assembly and association, security of persons, freedom of expression and other key elements as contained in the GPA; and finally,
• As ZANU-PF and President Mugabe appear to be mobilizing for war against their own citizens and as they have without fail at every moment in the past used national elections to terrorise the Zimbabwean people, we believe it is appropriate to request Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea to desist funding Mugabe's war machine and for South Africa to impose an arms embargo on Zimbabwe.

[1] Human Rights Violations and Losses Suffered by Commercial Farmers and Workers in Zimbabwe from 2000 to 2008: An Executive Synopsis (Research and Advocacy Unit for Justice for Agriculture and GAPWUZ, 2008, Harare) p.1.

[2] A Just Solution (Justice for Agriculture Trust, Harare, 2009).

[3] Agreement between the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (SANU-PF) and the two Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) formations, on resolving the challenges facing Zimbabwe (Harare, 15 September 2008).

[4] Dr Wilmot James, MP, Parliamentary Representative to SADC PF, to President Jacob Zuma (11 June 2009). Receipt of the letter has not been acknowledged nor has a reply been forthcoming.

[5] Political Violence Report December 2008 (Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum, 13 February 2009, Harare) p.2.

[6] Sunday Independent (12 July 2009).

[7] Report on Strengthening Monitoring Mechanisms of the Global Political Agreement (GPA) though appropriate Media Strategy hosted for Journalists (Harare, 22 May 2009).

Issued by the Democratic Alliance

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