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Zimbabwe's blunders turning out costly
Comment, The Standard (Zimbabwe)
March 19, 2006

UNITED Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan did not include Zimbabwe on his valedictory trip of Africa last week because to do so would have been to reward a rogue administration.

But he has thrown us a bone in the form of a separate visit later in the year. That visit, his spokesmen say, will be related to the growing humanitarian crisis in Zimbabwe. There will be no indulgence, we can safely conclude, of the catastrophic Murambatsvina episode or any other State scheme aimed at repression and illusion.

Last year the government announced that after two of Annan’s special envoys had been to the country, the Secretary-General would visit Zimbabwe in March this year, an announcement which appears to confirm that a Zimbabwe visit was mooted during Annan’s farewell tour of Africa last week during which he swung through South Africa, Madagascar, Congo-Brazzaville, and Democratic Republic of Congo.

However, in view of the zero progress made in addressing the humanitarian crisis the government authored, and especially after the undiplomatic treatment of Annan’s envoys — Anna Tibaijuka and Jan Egeland — by the regime, a visit would have had the effect of validating Zimbabwe’s position viz a viz Annan’s envoys. It is unlikely the Secretary-General would have rewarded Harare for rebuking his special envoys, especially after expressing his support for their work and confidence in them. The wide berth Annan gave Zimbabwe last week appears to signal his displeasure with Harare.

Since Tibaijuka’s damning report, the government has done little or nothing to address the plight of the estimated one million people rendered homeless by its urban cleansing exercise. Nobody has been taken in by the Garikai project which even the State media agrees is riddled with cronyism.

Nearly 10 months after the State-initiated cleansing campaign, the victims are still to be housed properly.

The absence of records of the victims was deliberate: the government never intended to rehouse them. It was always its strategy to disperse them. The UN is not blind to this gerrymandering.

The role and impartiality of the UN would have been compromised seriously had Annan made the trip to Harare at this stage. Last week’s contrived coup plot that ended up with a farcical State case that a High Court judge dismissed with a call to "censure" the security agents involved only helped to advise Annan that Harare had done nothing so far to deserve his presence.

In his remarks in South Africa Annan said: "The situation for Zimbabwe is extremely difficult. It is difficult for Zimbabwe. It is difficult for the region and it is difficult for the world.

"It is easy to blame these ills on the past and on outsiders. The depredations of imperialism and the slave trade, the imbalance of power and wealth in a flagrantly unjust world. But that cannot absolve us, the Africans of today, from our own responsibility to ourselves…"

Those remarks provide a telling rebuke to Africa's apologists for whom colonialism is to blame for every single failing.

Harare put on a brave face saying the dates of Annan's visit have yet to be agreed. But Annan understands perfectly that his reputation would be hostage to a visit that rewards an unrepentant perpetrator of violence, rights abuses and politically motivated internal destabilisation.

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