Back to Index

Canada must stand up to Mugabe
Innocent Madawo
October 23, 2006

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/Page/document/v4/sub/MarketingPage?

Last week, The Globe and Mail carried a story about Zimbabwean human-rights lawyer Gabriel Shumba, who was tortured and forced to drink his own blood and urine by President Robert Mugabe's notoriously brutal security agents.

Mr. Shumba, executive director of the Pretoria-based Zimbabwe Exiles Forum, is in Canada, for the second time, lobbying Ottawa to indict the Zimbabwean dictator under federal crimes-against-humanity legislation. His first attempt, in 2004, received what I can only describe as a snub of the highest order. Mr. Shumba was told by a then-Liberal government spokesperson that there must be a Canadian victim or a Canadian connection for a case to proceed under the existing legislation.

This is disheartening to me and to the thousands of other Zimbabweans exiled in Canada who look to the leaders of this country to spearhead a worldwide campaign to force Mr. Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party to allow democratic reform and respect for human rights in Zimbabwe.

And yet, despite all the killing, the jailing, the torturing and the exiling of millions of Zimbabweans since 2000, there has been no action by Canada.

Related to this article Latest Comments Canada needs to do something. We've sat back and watched Africa... While I have always respected and been proud of the fact that... This really should be a no brainer!! However, for it to be effective... Canada has no interest in Mugabe. Why should my son be killed... Granted, Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay issued a statement last month when 15 labour unionists were beaten and tortured by the police and secret agents for demonstrating against shortages of food and medicine and a lack of employment. But it was a brief and, in my view, very lame statement: "I am deeply troubled that the Government of Zimbabwe has once again denied its people their rights to freedom of expression and association as well as the right to peaceful assembly. Canada condemns the arrest of these peaceful demonstrators and calls for their immediate release."

Mr. MacKay added that Canada "urges" Zimbabwe to refrain from using intimidation, violence and repression, and to respect the human rights and fundamental freedoms of its citizens.

Frankly, Canada does not need to urge anything. It needs to demand that Robert Mugabe and his government stop victimizing people.

Of course, given that the Mugabe government has banned most foreign media organizations from operating in Zimbabwe, one could argue that Mr. MacKay might not have received a full picture of the extent to which the labour unionists were tortured. Well, there is now indisputable evidence in the form of a 15-minute video that has been circulating on the Internet in the past week. It features a gang of uniformed Zimbabwe Republic Police officers beating up the union leaders, including an elderly woman, on a Harare street.

Under normal circumstances, the video would be seen as the work of an amateur cameraman: unfocused, unevenly cut and a not-so-flowing script. But one needs to understand the circumstances under which this video was shot: Using a hidden camera, gutsy journalists risked being discovered and thrown in jail (if they were lucky).

In the video, the union leaders are also shown in their hospital beds and at home recovering from injuries they said were not only inflicted in public on the street but in the police cells, where they were kicked, punched and stomped on.

This video is but the tip of the iceberg when you consider the violence to which Zimbabweans are subjected on a daily basis by a dictatorship that will stop at nothing to stay in power.

Since 2000, when bands of self-styled war veterans led a government-sponsored invasion of white-owned land, killing some farmers and looting their property, the once- robust agri-based economy of Zimbabwe has deteriorated to a level below subsistence farming. When people who lost their jobs protested, by voting for the opposition, 700,000 of them had their homes and small industries destroyed in an operation sarcastically called Operation Murambatsvina (Operation Clear Filth).

It would be a shame if the Conservative government turns away Mr. Shumba, and all of us supporting his mission, with an excuse similar to that given by the Liberals.

The entire Zimbabwean population might be decimated before a Canadian victim or connection materializes. Can this country live with that?

*Innocent Madawo is a Zimbabwean journalist living in Toronto.

Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.

TOP