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Zimbabwe: Harare dismisses human rights abuse report as fiction
ZimOnline
January 06, 2006

http://www.zimonline.co.za/headdetail.asp?ID=11384

HARARE - President Robert Mugabe's government has rejected an African Commission on Human and People's Rights (ACHPR) report condemning human rights violations in Zimbabwe and accused the commission of blatantly lying against and vilifying Harare to please its Western funders.

In typical fashion, the Harare administration - which has in the recent past rejected findings of two United Nations humanitarian envoys whom it said were influenced by Britain to issue negative reports - said the ACHPR report was a work of "fiction" put together at the "whims of donors".

"What do you expect from them (ACHPR)? They are looking for money and what better way to make money than to vilify Zimbabwe," government Information and Publicity Minister Tichaona Jokonya told ZimOnline on Thursday.

"Their resolutions are a fallacy, just as was the case with the (ACHPR) 2002 report which was full of fiction. We are not going to accept the report," added Jokonya, a former representative of Zimbabwe to the United Nations.

It was not possible to immediately get comment on Harare's reaction to the ACHPR report from the commission's head office in the Gambian capital, Banjul.

But the commission, which is an arm of the African Union, strongly criticised Mugabe's government for failure to uphold the rule of law and human rights in a hard-hitting report released last month but made available to the Press this week.

The report, which political analysts say piles the pressure on Africa's political leaders to abandon solidarity with Mugabe and confront his controversial policies and human rights abuses, accuses the Harare government of repeatedly violating the AU charter on human rights to which it is a signatory.

The ACHPR report also condemned Mugabe's controversial urban clean-up exercise dubbed "Operation Murambatsvina" which the UN says left 700 000 people without shelter or income after the government mid last year demolished shantytowns and informal business kiosks without warning. The UN says at least another 2.4 million people were also directly affected by the exercise.

The Harare government had been given up to a month to formally respond to the findings of the continental human rights watchdog while African heads of state and government are set to consider the commission's report for either adoption or rejection at their next annual meeting scheduled for early next month.

Zimbabwe's human rights situation has rapidly deteriorated over the past six years as Mugabe and his ruling ZANU PF party were forced to adopt increasingly repressive methods as it grappled on one hand a new and powerful opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party and on the other its worst ever economic crisis.

At least four newspapers including the country's biggest circulating and only government controlled daily, the Daily News, were forced to close as Mugabe's government clamped down on widening dissension.

Several leaders and supporters of the MDC and civic society organisations were arrested while some were murdered allegedly by ZANU PF militias as the government battled to retain power.

But Mugabe has vociferously rejected charges of violating human rights saying these were trumped up by Britain and her Western allies to tarnish Zimbabwe's image in a bid to punish his government for seizing land from whites and giving it over to landless blacks.

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