SADC lets us down

Zimbabwe Standard - Sunday, 17 February, 2002 - www.mweb.co.zw/standard [2]

By Lilian Patel's folly

IT is a sad fact that every democratic-minded and peace-loving Zimbabwean
believes our Sadc brothers and sisters have let us down when it mattered
most. While the rest of the international community, particularly the
European Union and the United States, is taking steps to ensure that
Zimbabwe conducts its presidential election in a democratic fashion, Sadc
has decided to look the other way and let Zimbabweans bear the brunt of both
state-orchestrated violence and a flawed electoral process.

It is folly for Sadc to claim that it is in the best interest of Zimbabweans
to let "Harare solve its own problems". History has shown that the Zanu PF
government falls short when it comes to administering elections where there
is a real chance of it losing. The 1990 and 2000 general elections bear
testimony to this. Faced with defeat in 2000, Zanu PF decided to take a
shortcut to victory by embarking on an orgy of terror to cow people into
voting for it.

It is now a fact that thousands of people were terrorised by Zanu PF thugs
during the run-up to the last parliamentary election, while many others
either lost their lives or were beaten and maimed. The same pattern has
emerged during the campaign for the March 9/10 presidential election in
which short of a massive fraud, 78-year-old President Robert Mugabe is
expected to lose soundly.

Against such a background of state-sanctioned terror and electoral
chicanery, our friends in Sadc have the audacity to claim that democracy
exists in Zimbabwe and that the international community should leave us
alone.

Leading this exercise in deception is Malawian foreign affairs minister and
Sadc Zimbabwe task force chair, Lilian Patel. Last week she was here to lend
legitimacy to a shamelessly flawed electoral process. How a person who flies
to Harare and stays in some city hotel, mixing only with government
officials, can claim that political persecution does not exist in Zimbabwe
is difficult to understand. The silly woman claimed the independent press
was totally free in Zimbabwe because she had seen "piles" of the "opposition
press" on the streets of Harare.

Did she ever bother to stop and ask the newspaper vendors themselves whether
they were able to freely conduct their business? What about those towns
where her so-called "opposition press" has been banned together with the
opposition?

She is blind to the raft of repressive laws that were hastily enacted in the
weeks surrounding her visit, including a draconian press law passed while
she was still here.

Perhaps it is too much for one to expect tough and honest talk from Patel.
She hails from a country which has experienced 30 years of dictatorship and
is struggling with corruption and the usual indispensibility syndrome by its
current leadership. There has been systematic intimidation of the
opposition.

Many Sadc leaders regard their organisation as a mutual support group. Their
commitment to the democratic values set out in the Sadc protocol is paper
thin. And they have chosen to ignore the electoral principles laid down by
their parliamentarians as recently as last year.

Admittedly South Africa and Botswana are inclined towards a more robust
policy on Zimbabwe. And Mozambique is becoming increasingly disenchanted
with its former allies in Harare.

But Sadc is not an organisation we can look to for principled leadership
given the sort of acumen demonstrated by Patel and Co. Sadc has so far
ignored violations of laid-down procedures in the land acquisition process,
turned a blind eye to orchestrated political violence-pretending that both
parties are equally guilty-and collaborated with Zanu PF in the facile
pretence that the media is responsible for Zimbabwe's poor image. They even
touchingly asked our ministers to send them details of what was happening in
the country so they could put the record straight!
__________