"A cruel and heartless act": MURAMBATSVINA mark 2

CATHY BUCKLE TELLS IT LIKE IT IS
If we, exiles from our beautiful Zimbabwe, find it hard to imagine how the innocent victims of Robert Mugabe's brand of freedom can bear to go on, here is Cathy's latest depiction of what they are enduring. I have abridged her piece which should be published in every paper, journal or magazine where readers care about human rights and, better still, where they might do something to alleviate unending suffering:

".... For the first time ever in my memory the water in my birdbath turned to ice
overnight and didn't thaw until mid morning. A cold wind, drizzle,
mist and grey skies are now the order of our highveld winter days. In
this atmosphere a cruel and heartless act was undertaken in my home
town.

The word being used on the street in my neighbourhood is
"Murambatsvina." People were comparing the cruelty of events this week
to the government's massive human evictions of mid winter 2005.

ZESA, the government controlled electricity supply company went door
to door and disconnected people's electricity. Working in pairs, they
walked through residential neighbourhoods and house by house they
switched people off. In the road where I live, 90% of homes were
disconnected on a freezing July afternoon. The picture was repeated
across town. Families with babies in the house were not spared; homes
with sick and disabled occupants were switched off; homes with elderly
people in their 90's were disconnected. There was no mercy or
compassion, no compromise or humanity - just like it had been in
Operation Murambatsvina.

Worst affected were civil servants who earn just 100 US dollars a
month. Not even these dedicated professionals who could be earning ten
times their wage if they left the country were spared. Their
patriotism was punished with the flick of a switch

Since February most civil servants have been paying ... ZESA for their electricity. ... on a salary of 100 dollars, it is 10 or 20% of their wage. Zesa say it's not enough and are demanding massive and backdated amounts ranging from 250 to 500 US dollars for small residential homes.

The reality of the disconnections is very cruel. Teachers at work all
day educating our children are coming home an hour before dark and
having to light fires outside to cook on, to heat water for bathing
and washing and then have to sit and mark books by candle light.
Four months into our supposedly new and improved Zimbabwe the sound
of wood chopping fills the air, smoke constantly rises and women
stream out of the bush with mounds of newly cut Msasa branches
balanced on their heads. Shame on you ZESA!"

May I, this blog writer, suggest that the followers of a failed statesman need re-educating far more than do many unfortunate Zimbawean youngsters who are still being dragooned into brainwashing sessions at those brain damaging, politically led institutions, fatuously and erroneously called Training Centres.

Arresting the law in Zimbabwe

Oh Mann! What a scandal!

Those ridiculous people who pose as the forces of law and order in Zimbabwe have arrested Simon Mann after he has served his sentence – and now they have arrested his lawyer, Jonathon Samkange for daring to help his client. Reading between the lines in today’s ZWNEWS (M&G- SA) it is fairly obvious that Samkange had the brilliant idea of bringing a living witness to the cruelties of Equatorial Africa’s prisons in order to save the life of his client. The so-called police have cooked up a case against him under immigration `laws' for not declaring his intention to bring the witness from Spain so that he could bear witness in a Zimbabwe court. This is yet another example of arbitrary law making by the Mugabe regime. I remind myself - and anyone interested - that white lawyers, many of whom defended nationalist prisoners before Independence, were not treated like criminals under the Smith regime. Plenty of living witnesses to that. Perhaps Mugabe’s storm troopers, disguised as policemen, will try to search them out and arrest them?

Who will save Zimbabwe's dying prisoners?

37 YEARS ON – PRISON DEATHS

AND MEMORIES OF LEOPOLD TAKAWIRA

A Zimbabwean emerged from A notorious Harare prison after serving 5 years for armed robbery. Christina Lamb and John Makura reported in the Sunday Times (UK) that he went to jail with two accomplices but has emerged alone. This is what he had to to say:

“I saw two of my friends wasting away as a result of disease… I saw them dying one night and knocked and knocked (..to alert the guards) They only arrived at 9 a.m the following and it was too late”

These words are almost exactly what the late Dr Edson Zvobgo used when recounting the death in Salisbury (Rhodesia) prison in 1970 of revered nationalist leader, Leopold Takawira. Only this time it is black Zimbabwean guards who mercilessly leave a man to die in a prison cell. Takawira died because his diabetes was neglected in prison and the guards ignored Zvobgo’s desperate banging on the cell bars to call for help. Robert Mugabe’s minions imitate the cruelty of that one death with callous treatment of dozens of fellow human beings. Zimbabwe prisoners are starved and diseased and have no rights – except the right to die.

(Diana Mitchell is a former life member of the Rhodesian Association for the Rehabilitation of the Offender – RACRO)

Human Rights and Sustainable Development

"What has sustainable development to do with human rights?”

Thus spoke Zimbabwe’s UN Ambassador Boniface Chidyausiku when Zimbabwe’s Minister of the Environment, Francis Nhema became the current official responsible for the UN’s Commission for Sustainable Development.

Zimbabwe, being currently ruled by a clique most of whose jobs depend upon kith and kin one must assume that the fellow at the UN got his position because of a certain Chief Justice Chidyausiku. Nothing wrong with that so long as the guy’s brains are in good, working order. Perhaps this morally challenged individual clearly cannot make the connection between an abysmal human rights record under his clique’s 27-year leadership and the near collapse of a once-great country’s economy? Not a chance of sustainable development now or for the foreseeable future. As for the pathetic Francis Nhema who is or was a son-in-law of the real Founder of free Zimbabwe, the late Joshua Nkomo, it is a pity that he lacks the wise counsel that Joshua might have supplied. I offer poor Boniface at the UN a single sentence in answer to his idiotic question: sustainable development has EVERYTHING to do with human rights.