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Mugabe trashes new AU resolution on human rights
Basildon Peta, Sunday Independent (SA)
January 08, 2006

http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php?click_id=68&art_id=vn20060108094220132C526387&set_id=

The African Commission on Human and People's Rights (ACHPR), which falls under the African Union, has once again excoriated Zimbabwe over human rights abuses, but Zimbabwean analysts don't foresee the commission's latest indictment of the regime spurring African leaders to censure Robert Mugabe.

The Mugabe government has trashed the ACHPR's latest damning resolution. In typical style, the Zimbabwe government said ACHPR was criticising Zimbabwe as a convenient excuse to raise money for its operations from Britain and America.

"What do you expect from them [ACHPR]? They are looking for money and what better way to make money than to vilify Zimbabwe," Tichaona Jokonya, the information and publicity minister, told ZimOnline on Friday.

Earlier John Mayowe, a junior foreign ministry official, denied knowledge of the report.

Jokonya accused the ACHPR of "blatantly lying" and "vilifying" Harare to please potential western funders. He said the ACHPR resolution, which was adopted on December 5 but not made public, and leaked to the media only this week, was a work of "fiction" put together at the "whims of donors".

Zimbabwean analysts believe the resolution, which strongly condemned the Mugabe government for human rights abuses, was an important statement from Africans.

It effectively robbed Mugabe of his tendency to resort to the race card whenever rights abuse issues in Zimbabwe were raised by western countries.

The analysts also underscored the importance of criticism from Africans who have spoken out against the Mugabe regime before, including Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary-general; Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his fellow Nobel Prize laureate Wole Soyinka.

But Lovemore Madhuku, the chairperson of the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA), Zimbabwe's largest civic group, said it would be futile to expect that the resolution would spur African Union leaders into changing their docile approach to Mugabe when they met in Sudan later this month.

"As has happened in the past, the latest ACHPR report might not even get a mention at the AU summit," said Madhuku. "It is futile to expect anything serious from these African leaders."

Madhuku said African leaders eager not to offend Mugabe might seek to play down the report by portraying it as a result of the work of technical people in the ACHPR, but which did not reflect the AU's political sentiment.

"How can you expect a club of leaders, which include the likes of Omar Bongo and Yoweri Museveni, to censure Mugabe when they are changing their constitutions to do exactly what Mugabe is doing, if not worse?" asked Madhuku.

His sentiments were shared by John Makumbe, a University of Zimbabwe political scientist, who recalled the evasion of African leaders at dealing with the first damning report of the ACHPR against Zimbabwe in 2003.

Two subsequent AU summits did not table the report for discussion. At the first, the excuse used was that there were no French translations of the report.

At the second, the excuse was that Zimbabwe had not been given an opportunity to respond, an argument later refuted by Barney Pityana, who was then the ACHPR chairperson as well as chairperson of Unisa.

Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, the South African foreign minister, later strongly denied suggestions that South Africa had helped Zimbabwe evade discussion of the report during the second summit.

Lawyers and other Zimbabwean analysts interviewed said it would be in the best interests of democratic development in Africa if AU leaders discussed and adopted the resolution.

The harshly worded resolution said the ACHPR was "deeply concerned" about the "continuing human rights violations" in Zimbabwe.

These included the Mugabe government's disrespect for the independence of the judiciary "through defiance of court orders, harassment and intimidation of independent judges and the executive ouster of the jurisdiction of the courts"

*This article was originally published on page 3 of Sunday Independent on January 08, 2006

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