Zoot has been traveling during the past 2 weeks which explains this unprecedented (since October 2006!) extended silence!
But events in Zimbabwe have not been quiet. Others have been doing a creditable job chronicling the Mugabe regime's continuing reign of terror consisting of abductions, torture, beatings and arbitrary arrests, the most brutal examples of which began on March 11th with the vicious assault on opposition MDC President Morgan Tsvangirai, and many others, as they attempted to attend a peaceful prayer meeting in Harare.
World media attention to this outrageous abuse of Mugabe regime power was, for a period of around 3 weeks, excellent. However, now that the ZANU-PF and CIO thugs have begun targeting middle and lower level activists in the democratic civil society and in democratic political opposition parties, most often via nighttime raids of their homes that result in abductions, beatings, and arbitrary arrests, international media coverage has petered out to a great extent.
More on Mugabe's torture squads in upcoming posts.
But the issue we would like to address today has to do with South Africa and Thabo Mbeki and, in particular, his apparently reluctant role as SADC-designated mediator in the Zimbabwe crisis--and an idea for how pressure can be brought to bear on him to take a more robust and serious interest in his SADC-mandated role as Zimbabwe mediator.
Following several weeks of unrelenting violence by the Mugabe regime following the March 11th prayer meeting, the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC), called an extraordinary meeting in Dar e Salaam, whose main purpose was to discuss the Zimbabwe crisis. Although Mugabe attempted, in a geriatric saunter with clenched fist, to proclaim victory after the meeting--claiming that "not even one" of his fellow Southern African presidents had criticized him—it is clear that, behind closed doors, a very clear message was delivered by SADC to Mugabe. That message consisted of telling him that he had this time gone too far in sanctioning what amounted to the attempted murder of the opposition leader, the rounding up of hundreds of civil society pro-democracy activists and the documented beating and torture of many of those.
The most concrete outcome of course was the naming of Mbeki as mediator. There is ample reason to doubt that Mr. Mbeki will take his role seriously, based on his past invertebrate stance with regard to Mugabe.
But there are also ways to bring pressure on him to undertake his role in a serious way and one way is to tell Mbeki that his country's bid to host the 2010 Soccer World Cup may be compromised if he continues to turn a blind eye to (some would say to be complicit with) the widespread human rights violations being committed by the Mugabe regime against its own people.
A recent article in the New York Times with regard to the pressure presently being brought on another country (China) that has much at stake as it prepares to host another important world athletic competition (the 2008 Olympics) with regard to its complicity in another situation of widespread human rights violations (Darfur), is instructive.
On March 18th, the American actress, Mia Farrow (who also serves as UNICEF's "Goodwill Ambassador"), published an Op-Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal entitled "The Genocide Olympics". In that piece, she called on her fellow American artist, Steven Spielberg, to use his influence (Steven Spielberg is serving as artistic advisor to the Chinese government for the Beijing Olympics) to call on the Chinese government to use its influence to urge Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir to halt the genocide in its western Darfur region.
(The Washington Post may actually have coined the term "Genocide Olympics" in an editorial that appeared in its pages in December.)
Farrow warned Spielberg that he would go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing games, referring to the German dancer and film maker who gained notoriety when she made propaganda films for Hitler, if he did not speak out to China about Darfur.
Four days later, Mr. Spielberg sent a letter to Chinese President Hu Jintao asking him to do something about the genocide in Sudan through its influence with the Sudanese government.
According to the Times article, Hu sent a high level delegation to Khartoum 2 weeks ago to tell the Sudanese government to accept a U.N peacekeeping force.
As a colleague said to me last week, "it is a shame to have to get Hollywood involved" in order to push China to speak out against its strategic partner, Sudan. It might also be seen as a shame to have to use Hollywood (or to use football players with a social conscience?) to get Mbeki to do something about Zimbabwe.
But just as the Beijing Olympics are too important to Hu, to allow a rogue regime like Sudan to ruin it for him and China through "guilt by association", as Hu and his apologists will probably see it, so the World Cup is too important to Mbeki for him to allow a rogue regime in Harare ruin the chances for him.
My colleague is correct to say that it is a shame that it took getting Hollywood involved to force China into acting with regard to its friend in Sudan and that it is similarly shameful that Mr. Mbeki would need the prospect of an "embarrassment" on his northern border that could potentially interfere with his plans to host the World Cup, to move him to act in a robust manner on Zimbabwe. But all methods that move us towards achieving the desired outcome of putting a stop to the violence and misery in both countries are fair and useful, I think.
Because the massacre of hudreds of thousands of innocent Sudanese in Darfur and the slow death of hundreds of thousands of others in Zimbabwe are both much more than simply an embarrassment.
They are crimes against humanity and genocide in the case of Sudan (some have also called the vast human cull in Zimbabwe a genocide too, a viewpoint with which we are in agreement) and it would be amoral and perverse that the 2 countries the most strategically placed to put an end to the violence in Darfur and Zimbabwe, respectively (China and South Africa, respectively), should be given a "pass" and allowed to peacefully pursue their glorious dreams of hosting the Olympics and World Cup.
Read the New York Times article here.
