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This article participates on the following special index pages:
2008 harmonised elections - Index of articles
Our
silence is deafening
Justice Malala, The Times (SA)
March 31, 2008
http://www.thetimes.co.za/News/Article.aspx?id=736745
What will we say when
our children ask what we did to end Robert Mugabe-s dictatorship?
When our children learn
the history of post-colonial Africa, they will be confronted with
a case history: Zimbabwe.
They will learn how the
breadbasket of Africa descended into chaos, with the highest inflation
rate in the world.
They will learn that
about four million Zimbabweans fled hunger and political persecution.
They will learn about
a kleptocracy that lined its pockets while the poor died.
This will not be a history
lesson. It will be a dissection of a massacre.
By the elections of March
29 2008, our children will read, the average life expectancy of
a Zimbabwean woman was 34 years and that of a man 37.
Television footage of
that day will show women with babies on their backs crawling under
barbed-wire fencing into South Africa in the hope of finding food,
safety and a life for their children.
Election day 2008 will
be a slice of tragic history.
Our children will learn
that, in a country with one of the highest literacy rates in the
developing world and blessed with a vibrant press for more than
two decades, only two daily newspapers inside Zimbabwe reported
on these elections.
Both were owned by the
state and neither published a single positive story about the opposition
in the run-up to elections.
On that day, election
observers from Europe and the US were banned from the country. Only
SADC observers were allowed in.
Our children will learn
that during the previous election the South African observers were
beaten up by police. And that those bandaged heroes declared as
free and fair an election universally condemned as rigged.
Election day 2008 will
be remembered for the fact that broadcasters such as Sky News filed
their stories from Beit Bridge in South Africa because they were
banned from entering Zimbabwe. Independent stations such as South
Africa-s e.tv were also banned.
Our children will learn
that police inside the polling booths "assisted" Zimbabweans
to vote. They will read that these same police had, for 10 years,
put a stop to any kind of democratic activity by the opposition
or civil society.
They will learn
that, only a year before these elections, the same police officers
destroyed the homes of thousands in President Robert Mugabe-s
inhumane "Operation
Murambatsvina".
Our children will learn
that these same police beat opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai
to within an inch of his life only a year earlier, forcing him to
seek medical treatment in South Africa.
At this point our children
will ask the teacher (perhaps a Zimbabwean who is a naturalized
South African): "But what did our parents do? What did South
Africa say when all this was happening?"
And our children will
learn that for nine years the president of South Africa pursued
a senseless, immoral policy of "quiet diplomacy".
In essence, the policy
meant that South Africa chose to be friends with Mugabe, aiding
and abetting the dictator while desperate Zimbabweans fled torture
and imprisonment.
They will learn that
Nelson Mandela, the iconic first president of the new and democratic
South Africa, spoke out about leaders who clung to power at the
expense of their people and was told to shut up; that Archbishop
emeritus Desmond Tutu spoke up and was vilified by the dictator
Mugabe, the South African presidency and its acolytes.
And they will learn that
most South Africans expressed neither outrage nor shame at what
was happening just across their border; that they went about their
business without a care.
Our children will learn
that a good man, Bishop Paul Verryn, gave refuge to hundreds of
Zimbabweans in his church in central Johannesburg. And they will
learn that police raided the church and arrested refugee children
as young as five months old.
By the time our children
ask what South Africans did about this outrage, Zimbabwe will be
just another African country paying off massive debt to the World
Bank when it could have been a beacon of peace, prosperity and hope.
The silence of your parents,
the history books will say, was deafening.
About
Justice Malala
Justice Malala is one of South Africa's most respected political
commentators and journalists. A
former newspaper editor, he is currently a media consultant and
is the resident political analyst for independent television channel
e.tv.
Malala was an
executive producer on Hard Copy I and II, a ground- breaking television
series on SABC 3 which recently won the Golden Horn Award for best
television series. Malala was founding editor of This Day, the quality,
upmarket South African daily newspaper which was launched on October
7 2003 and folded a year later. Between 1999 and 2002 Malala was
the Sunday Times Correspondent in London and New York.
Malala was awarded the
Foreign Correspondents Association-s Award for Outstanding
Journalism in 1997. He also won the Adult Basic Education Book of
the Year Award for his novella, Before the Rains Come, that year.
His work has been published
internationally in newspapers such as The Guardian, The Independent,
Financial Times, Institutional Investor, The Age and The Observer.
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.
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