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Post-election violence 2008 - Index of articles & images
The
lion who didn't roar: Why hasn't Mandela spoken out against Mugabe?
Christopher Hitchens, Slate
June 09, 2008
http://www.slate.com/id/2193213/
The scale of
state-sponsored crime and terror in Zimbabwe has now escalated to
the point where we are compelled to watch not just the systematic
demolition of democracy and human rights in that country but something
not very far removed from slow-motion mass murder a la Burma. The
order
from the Mugabe regime that closes down all international aid groups
and humanitarian non-governmental organizations is significant in
two ways. It expresses the ambition for total control by the state,
and it represents a direct threat"vote for us or starve"to
the already desperate civilian population. The organization CARE,
for example, which reaches half a million impoverished Zimbabweans,
has been ordered to suspend
operations. And here's a little paragraph, almost buried in
a larger report of more comprehensive atrocities but somehow speaking
volumes:
The United Nations Children's
Fund said Monday that 10,000 children had been displaced by the
violence, scores had been beaten and some schools had been taken
over by pro-government forces and turned into centers of torture.
While this politicization
of the food situation in "his" country was being completed,
President Robert Mugabe benefited from two things: the indulgence
of the government of South Africa and the lenience of the authorities
in Rome, who allowed him to attend a U.N. conference on the world
food crisisof all thingsdespite a five-year-old ban on
his travel to any member of the European Union. This, in turn, seems
to me to implicate two of the supposed sources of moral authority
on the planet: Nelson Mandela and the Vatican.
By his silence about
what is happening in Zimbabwe, Mandela is making himself complicit
in the pillage and murder of an entire nation, as well as the strangulation
of an important African democracy. I recently had the chance to
speak to George Bizos, the heroic South African attorney who was
Mandela's lawyer in the bad old days and who more recently has also
represented Morgan Tsvangirai, the much-persecuted leader of the
Zimbabwean opposition. Why, I asked him, was his old comrade apparently
toeing the scandalous line taken by President Thabo Mbeki and the
African National Congress? Bizos gave me one answer that made me
wincethat Mandela is now a very old manand another that
made me wince again: that his doctors have advised him to avoid
anything stressful. One has a bit more respect for the old lion
than to imagine that he doesn't know what's happening in next-door
Zimbabwe or to believe that he doesn't understand what a huge difference
the smallest word from him would make. It will be something of a
tragedy if he ends his career on a note of such squalid compromise.
As for the revolting
spectacle of Mugabe flying in to a Food and Agricultural Organization
conference in Rome last week, there were quibbling FAO officials
who claimed that the ban on his travel to the European Union did
not cover meeting places of U.N. organizations. This would not cover
the luxury hotel on the Via Veneto where Mugabe and his wife stayed.
And it seems he bears a charmed life in Rome. He was there only
recently as a guest at the funeral of Pope John Paul II and was
able to claim that he was on Vatican soil rather than Italian territory.
Which in turn raises an interesting question: What is it going to
take before the Roman Catholic Church has anything to say about
the conduct of this member of its flock? Mugabe has been a devout
Catholic ever since his days in a mission school in what was then
colonial Rhodesia, and one is forced to wonder what he tells his
priest when he is asked if he has anything he'd like to confess.
By way of contrast, look
what happened to Archbishop Pius Ncube of Bulawayo. This Catholic
churchman in Zimbabwe's second city was a pillar of opposition to
the regime and a great defender of its numberless victims. After
a long campaign of defiance, and after surviving many threats to
his life, the archbishop was caught on video last year having some
fairly vigorous sex with a woman not his wife. Indeed, she was someone
else's wife, which made it adultery as well as fornication. You
might think the church would have been glad of a bit of heterosexual
transgression for a change, but a dim view was taken of the whole
thing, in spite of the fact that it bore all the marks of a setup
and was immediately given wide publicity by the police agencies
of the Mugabe state. Ncube is no longer the Roman Catholic archbishop
of Bulawayo.
Very well, I do understand
that he broke his vows and that the rules are the rules. But he
didn't starve or torture any children, he didn't send death squads
to silence his critics, he didn't force millions of his fellow countrymen
into penury and/or exile, and he didn't openly try to steal an election.
Mugabe has done and is doing all these things, and I haven't heard
a squeak from the papacy. A man of his age is perhaps unlikely to
be caught using a condom, but one still has to hope that Mugabe
will be found red-handed in this way because it seems that nothing
less is going to bring the condemnation of the church down upon
his sinful head.
It is the silence of
Mandela, much more than anything else, that bruises the soul. It
appears to make a mockery of all the brave talk about international
standards for human rights, about the need for internationalist
solidarity and the brotherhood of man, and all that. There is perhaps
only one person in the world who symbolizes that spirit, and he
has chosen to betray it. Or is it possible, before the grisly travesty
of the runoff of June 27, that the old lion will summon one last
powerful growl?
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