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Lawyers- body fights for return of Rhodesia
Tafataona P. Mahoso
August 06, 2006

http://www.sundaymail.co.zw/inside.aspx?sectid=1404&livedate=8/6/2006%2012:00:00%20AM&cat=10

Our African Focus instalments for July 9, 16 and 23 2006 dwelt on the history, economics and propaganda of devaluation and on the need for African leaders, African institutions, African intellectuals, African academics and journalists to engage in revaluation research which is required in order to reclaim and revalue African society and its assets.

Among the institutions which on paper would be expected to lead in this process of reclamation and revaluation is the Law Society of Zimbabwe (LSZ).

This would be so because all over the world and throughout modern history, great societies and great economies have found their breakthroughs or turning points through political revolutions underpinned by appropriate changes in values, in law, in legal education and legal practice.

It is in this context that Zimbabweans who accept the call to reclaim and revalue African society and its assets must also face the fact that the leadership of the LSZ is still fighting either for the restoration of the Rhodesian past or at least for the foreign-sponsored regime change project to reverse the African revolution.

What is the basis for making such an allegation? We cite a few illustrations:

The current leaders of the LSZ have been harassing legal practitioners with whom they disagree ideologically, especially those lawyers who have participated in or who accept and celebrate the achievements of the Second and Third Chimurenga.

Using Rhodesian and neo-Rhodesian law firms, leaders of the LSZ have been making efforts to deregister African lawyers who have benefited from the African land reclamation movement, accusing them of theft of property and of ethnic cleansing.

In March 2005, leaders of the LSZ issued a prejudicial and prejudiced statement condemning the parliamentary elections as not free and fair before the elections had yet been conducted.

Their reason for condemning the elections ahead of time was that the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act and the Public Order and Security Act made it impossible to conduct free and fair elections in Zimbabwe.

What made this pronouncement astounding was that the LSZ had accepted to be one of the observers of the elections and the impugned pieces of legislation had been challenged and upheld by the courts.

Since 1992, the LSZ has consistently encouraged and worked with external forces and organisations opposed to Zimbabwe’s African land reclamation movement.

One of these, the International Bar Association, sent British and North American lawyers to Zimbabwe who were hosted by leaders of the LSZ and who later engaged in orgies of vilification and demonisation against Zimbabwe and its African land reclamation all over the world.

Between 2005 and 2006 the LSZ went to the Constitutional Court to stop legislation which would have made it easier for the State to investigate, document and prosecute cases of economic sabotage, corruption and fraud.

The LSZ had a hard time demonstrating how it was in its interest to stop such a law and how such a law indeed prejudiced the society or any of its members, leaving some progressive nationalists to guess that maybe a law making it easier to curb economic crimes was seen by some of the ideologically inclined leaders of the LSZ as prejudicing chances of the foreign-sponsored regime change project ever succeeding. The Constitutional Court dismissed the application, saying the LSZ lacked a clear standing in terms of the Section 24 of the Constitution upon which it relied.

In other words, the LSZ failed to show why a law to improve the arrest, detention and prosecution of economic criminals would injure the society.

In all these examples, it can be demonstrated that the position taken by leaders of the LSZ did not, in fact, represent the wishes and interests of the majority of its members.

In the case of the premature condemnation of the 2005 parliamentary elections, several lawyers told The Sunday Mail that the leaders of the LSZ had not consulted members and that, if they had done so, the majority would not have agreed with them.

These facts raise a fundamental national question about Zimbabwe in the Third Chimurenga. The Law Society of Zimbabwe is, in fact, a Government institution set up and administered through the Legal Practitioners’ Act as a means to promote and insure justice in the development and administration of national laws. It also has responsibility to develop and direct legal education throughout the country.

Zimbabwe has experienced its breakthroughs in the form of the Second and Third Chimurenga. Is the LSZ part of this revolutionary movement or is it still a Rhodesian and Anglo-American instrument?

The breakthrough for the rise of China as an industrialising centre came with the Long March and the Chinese Revolution; the breakthrough for the United States as a superpower came with the American Revolution and the later Civil War which abolished the legal basis for chattel slavery; the rise of Britain as a world industrial power started with the English Revolution; just as the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution also made possible the emergence of France and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, respectively.

In every one of those societies men and women of law played their roles in transforming old legal systems, transforming legal education, to match the great transformations in society, culture and the economy.

As the authors of African Perspectives on Development point out in their very first chapter of the book, among the prerequisites for the development of a vibrant economy and society is the need to create new and revolutionary "transaction rules" responding to and consistent with the new order:

"The very process of development itself cannot take place without some kind of trusted agreement between the main categories of actors in society about how to transact business and other social relations . . . Struggle is usually necessary and unavoidable in attempts to rectify unfairness and injustice in the process of social change . . . the struggle for greater fairness and justice of transaction rules is one aspect of the development process itself, unless such rules and procedures can be agreed by consent."

This is where Zimbabweans since 1992 have been asking to which "society" the Law Society of Zimbabwe belongs, because the leadership of that association has consistently resisted the African revolution and attempted to devalue every gain, every asset, which the First and Second Chimurenga have reclaimed.

In fact, it can be shown that the leadership of the Law Society of Zimbabwe has not even grasped what the real problem was which the First and Second Chimurenga resolved.

A clear grasp and understanding of that problem would enable the leaders of the LSZ to lead the process of creating progressive laws instead of leading in demonising the revolution.

What Zimbabweans are not told today, which used to be common knowledge during the liberation struggle, is the central fact that in both South Africa and Rhodesia the most pivotal act in the crime of apartheid was the white land theft. This land theft was the foundation for most of the other forms of oppression, exploitation and discrimination throughout the region.

In 1978 economist Roger Riddell put the effects of this land theft precisely, saying:

"The total surface area of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) covers 94,4 million acres. Under the Land Tenure Act (of 1969) 45 million acres have been set aside for Africans and Europeans respectively. At the end of 1976 there were . . . 680 000 African farmers . . . nearly three times the maximum number that can be safely carried . . . and 6 682 European farmers, so that on average every European had access to one hundred times as much land as every African . . . the European areas contain almost twice as much of the land most suited for crop production."

Moreover, of the best agricultural land under white settler control in 1976, more than three million acres were not being used at all.

They were being held as collateral for speculative purposes for the white settlers. As the number of white farmers fell from 6 682 to 4 000 in 1992, more and more prime agricultural land went unused or underutilised.

John Sprack in the International Defence and Aid Fund booklet Rhodesia: The Sixth Province of South Africa then demonstrated how the racist land tenures of South Africa and Rhodesia were central to the crime of apartheid:

"The foundation of white supremacy in both Rhodesia and South Africa lies in the area of land policy, and in the labour policy which complements this. The two are interrelated and their development has followed a similar pattern in both countries. South Africa’s experience, because it both pre-dated similar processes in Rhodesia and provided several variations of a native policy" . . . furnished the main guidelines in the shaping of Rhodesian policy on land and labour . . . In both countries the (racist) allocation of land served a dual exploitive purpose. The white settlers’ first requirement was land for cultivation (and mineral speculation), their second labour to enable them to do this . . . The white demand for both land and labour, was served by a policy of expropriation of land from the African peasantry."

The United Nations Human Rights Commission was supposed to compile lists of organisations, institutions and individuals to be prosecuted for the crime of apartheid.

As Professor Kader Asmal pointed out in his legal paper on Namibia in September 1984, the prosecutions were supposed to lead to judgments for reparations and other forms of compensation to be paid to victims of apartheid throughout Southern Africa.

Where member states of the UN or representatives of the victims could not agree on the reparations, the International Court of Justice was supposed to arbitrate.

The Law Society of Zimbabwe is pursuing a policy the opposite to what international law requires.What do these findings mean?

In order for Zimbabwean society to figure out what it wants Government to do with the LSZ, we must understand the full implications of the conduct of the leaders of the LSZ especially since 1992.

First, there is a strange logic in the rationalisations created by the leaders of the LSZ: that as lawyers they could not do much to change the legacy of UDI and apartheid as envisaged in the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid because that was a political task beyond the confines of the professional practice of law.

Even such participants in the crime of Apartheid as Professor R.H. Christie can still give keynote addresses to lawyers and students of law in Zimbabwe without raising questions about their enthusiastic participation in making Rhodesian laws and serving in the Rhodesian armed forces against the Second Chimurenga.

However, African lawyers who have actively participated in trying to reverse that Rhodesian legacy and to fulfil the ideals of the 1973 international convention are a different issue altogether, with Arnold Tsunga, the current secretary of the LSZ stating categorically that an African lawyer is accountable to the LSZ even if the act in question was "outside the course of his/her duties as long as one is a registered legal practitioner".

Third, this ideologically fanatic position is characteristic of sponsored politics in Zimbabwe: the majority of the people vote overwhelmingly to re-elect President Mugabe and Zanu-PF for 26 years; the election observer teams from AU, the ACP, NAM, Sadc and other parts of the world have consistently declared these elections to be free and fair; and opposition parties have participated and accepted results in those constituencies where they won.

Yet despite all this, the President is denounced throughout the West as an "unelected despot" and Zimbabwe vilified as a totalitarian dictatorship.

The same politics has entered the Law Society of Zimbabwe. As one of the targeted and hounded lawyers wrote to Arnold Tsunga:

"In my response to you dated 16 December 2004 I referred you to two Chinhoyi Magistrates’ Court and High Court Harare cases both on the same matter and both of which I was involved in and won against the complainant. In other words . . . other competent judicial institutions had dealt with and disposed of the matter. You cannot therefore continue to put me to the same jeopardy in respect of which I have already been subjected lawfully."

To show that we are not involved in matters of law but in regime change ideology and politics embedded in the leadership of the LSZ, it is perhaps helpful to quote the white man who lost in court and yet still pursues the matter through the LSZ. He refers to lawyers benefiting from the Third Chimurenga as "rotten eggs".

"The above mentioned people are unfortunately examples of rotten eggs in our society . . . Honourable professionals of our society (meaning the leaders of the LSZ), I implore you to investigate the above allegations and hope that you weed out the rotten eggs in your midst. It would be a great day in Zimbabwe when lawyers can be seen as upholders of the law and champions of Human rights."

Therefore trying to reverse the legacies of UDI and apartheid cannot be honourable or consistent with the rule of white law.

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