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Zim's mooted amnesty raises concern
Hans Pienaar, The Star (SA)
August 08, 2008

http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=84&art_id=vn20080808061336622C149057

Human rights experts and activists have joined Justice Richard Goldstone in expressing their alarm about a proposal for blanket amnesty to perpetrators of human rights abuses to resolve the Zimbabwe impasse.

Christof Heyns, University of Pretoria faculty of law dean, said the mooted amnesty "worries me a lot".

This would steer the pursuit of international justice in a "whole new direction", sending the signal that "you could do just what you liked and then earn praise as the founding father of your nation".

Part of one proposal for a political settlement is that President Robert Mugabe would be hailed as founding father of the Zimbabwe nation and retain a ceremonial presidential role, while opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai would be made executive prime minister. Another version gives Mugabe an executive presidency.

Heyns said this might be a short-term solution, but "somewhere one had to draw the line" in accommodating perpetrators of crimes against humanity and human rights abuses.

On Wednesday, Justice Goldstone told a Wits University audience that the ruling party elite would sooner or later have to face international justice, even if there is a deal and Zimbabwe is not yet a signatory to the Rome Statute, which launched the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Mugabe, 84, will probably be saved by his age from standing trial, but younger generals in the Zimbabwe armed forces will not be so lucky.

Justice Goldstone, who shot to fame as chair of the Goldstone Commission into apartheid human rights abuses, was speaking on the future of international criminal justice.

He pointed out that Zimbabwe had not yet ratified the Rome Statute of 1998 instituting the ICC.

Only the Security Council of the United Nations or Mugabe's own government could start with his prosecution on war crimes committed during the notorious Gukurahundi campaign in the early 1980s.

Both are unlikely, as it would either be vetoed or a political settlement in the Zimbabwe crisis would avoid dealing with it.

But, said Justice Goldstone, while he, like everybody, wants to see peace and prosperity return to Zimbabwe, the country "at some point will become democratic".

Amnesty and other measures agreed upon to facilitate a new dispensation could easily be set aside by a future government, he added.

"Mugabe is safe mainly because of his age, but generals who are in their thirties and forties" could stand trial, he said.

Justice Goldstone compared Mugabe to Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslavian dictator, who thought he was immune from prosecution if he stayed home.

He did not reckon with a revolution in his own country, which delivered him to justice before the ICC's tribunal for Yugoslavia, where Justice Goldstone was the chief prosecutor.

He conceded that critics of the ICC's indictment of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir might have a point that it could have an effect on peace negotiations with rebels in Darfur.

This was cited by South Africa as the main reason for its strong opposition to the ICC move, despite it being one of the ICC's strongest proponents under ex-president Nelson Mandela.

But, he said, "the global community has to ask: Are we a better world for withdrawing immunity from war criminals?".

He believed that this was the case and asked whether a delayed peace process was not an appropriate price to pay for international justice.

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