A MESSAGE FROM MORGAN TSVANGIRAI, PRESIDENT OF THE MOVEMENT FOR DEMOCRATIC CHANGE (MDC) TO ALL ACP MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT PARTICIPATING IN THE ACP/EU JOINT PARLIAMENTARY SESSION, ADDIS ABBA, ETHIOPIA, 16-19 FEBRUARY 2004.
I write to you at a critical time in the international community’s consideration, review and response to the Zimbabwe crisis of governance. Zimbabwe is a specific item on the agenda of the Joint Parliamentary Session and we believe this provides the ACP countries with an excellent opportunity to collectively contribute in mapping out a way for a peaceful negotiated end to the political crisis in Zimbabwe. We are therefore hopeful that the outcome of the deliberations at the forthcoming ACP/EU Joint Parliamentary session in Addis Ababa will play a cardinal role in mapping out a course of action for the peaceful resolution of the Zimbabwe crisis.
It is tragic that too often, political crises in our regions are allowed to deteriorate unchecked, leading to unnecessary loss of life and development opportunities before the international community intervenes. In most cases the international community’s intervention comes too late to salvage anything, if at all. We therefore firmly believe that this is an opportune moment for the ACP to lend its weight to the efforts of the rest of the international community and bring pressure to bear on the Mugabe regime to come to the negotiation table in order to effect an end to the crisis of governance that has already cost too many lives.
The crisis has gone on for over four years now, at a great cost in terms of human life and the social and economic welfare of the people of Zimbabwe and it has set in as a permanent political culture of repression and economic decay. Various efforts by eminent African statesmen, regional and international organizations to persuade the Mugabe regime to adopt a pacific or peaceful formula in the resolution of political disputes have been contemptuously ignored.
There is no indication that the Mugabe regime is prepared to voluntarily abandon its programme of violent rule. We therefore believe that only a coordinated effort by the international community, with the ACP playing an active role, stands a chance of resolving the crisis.
Repressive laws still remain on the statute books; the rule of law continues to be violated; the judiciary is routinely subverted and judges harassed; policing is heavily politicised and partisan, freedom of speech and expression is ruthlessly suppressed and state-sponsored violence is a permanent feature of the electoral process. As I write to you the Mugabe regime is busy preparing to run the forthcoming 2005 parliamentary elections under the same violent and ant-democratic conditions that characterized the June 2000 parliamentary elections, all subsequent parliamentary by-elections since then and the March 2002 presidential poll. The unilateral withdrawal from the Commonwealth by the Mugabe regime was part of a grand strategy to try and escape international scrutiny. The international community must not allow this political gimmick to constitute a smokescreen behind which the Mugabe regime continues to violate human and democratic rights and commit heinous crimes against the people of Zimbabwe.
In other words, in spite of the various attempts at a peaceful resolution of the crisis by the region, the African continent, the Commonwealth and the international community at large, the infrastructure of tyranny remains firmly established and active plans are in place to strengthen and consolidate it. The Mugabe regime has taken advantage of the fragmented approach by the international community to ignore pleas for a return to democratic legitimacy.
Media reports from some quarters that there is political dialogue currently under way between the MDC and the ruling Mugabe regime are without any foundation whatsoever. There is no political dialogue going on. Within the MDC, all our efforts to resolve the political crisis through peaceful negotiations have been contemptuously spurned and dismissed as a sign of weakness. Attempts by local and regional church leaders to foster dialogue were similarly rejected by the Mugabe regime and the ruling party, ZANU PF.
Events on the ground in Zimbabwe clearly indicate that the time has come for the international community to abandon fragmented approaches to the resolution of the crisis in favour of a single international effort to save the country from a looming catastrophe. We are convinced that outside sustained international pressure to force the Mugabe regime to the negotiating table, there is no other way left to resolve the crisis of governance in Zimbabwe.
We in the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) therefore humbly suggest that perhaps the time has come for the ACP together with the rest international community to request the good offices of the United Nations Human Rights Commission to send a fact-finding mission to Zimbabwe to investigate and report on the grave human rights situation in the country and the ever mutating humanitarian crisis. This will constitute the launching pad for a process of conflict resolution brokered and backed by the international community. The MDC and the broad democratic forces in Zimbabwe stand ready to facilitate and play a constructive role in such a process.
It is critical for the ACP to come to grips with the reality that the Zimbabwe crisis is not a racial issue because among the victims of violent rule are people from all racial and ethnic groups in Zimbabwe. The root cause of the crisis is certainly not land reform. The chaotic and violent land reform process has been used as an alibi to mask violent tyrannical rule designed to perpetuate the Mugabe dictatorship. If the crisis were about land reform as the Mugabe regime claims, then the international community must ask:
Why is it that the continued targets of violent rule are poor landless peasants who should be the beneficiaries of land reform and not those perceived to own land?
Why are journalists, lawyers, students, churches, civic groups, intellectuals and ordinary Zimbabweans who do not own land, routinely brutalized, tortured, raped and murdered?
Why are urban workers who do not own any land the targets of state-sponsored violence?
This record of violent misrule is an unequivocal proof and demonstration that the root cause of the crisis is the Mugabe regime’s violent refusal to submit to the will of the people and heed to the people’s demand to choose a government and political leaders of their choice in a free and fair electoral process. The people’s refusal to submit to dictatorship is met with violent repression. This is the root cause of the crisis.
Similarly, the crisis is not a North/South issue and it is not a South/South issue. The cherished universal political values of democracy and good governance, human rights preservation, justice and the rule of law, which are routinely violated by the Mugabe regime and therefore constituting the pillars for its survival are neither racial issues, North/South issues nor South/South issues. These are clearly universal political values that are cherished internationally and are meant to deliberately defy race, culture and geography.
The Zimbabwe crisis is therefore about democracy versus dictatorship; it is about human rights violations versus the preservation human life and human dignity; the rule of law versus chaos; and universally accepted values of democracy, good governance and human rights against a regime that feeds on and destroys these noble values.
The Zimbabwe crisis is, thus now clearly an international issue, which requires a well-coordinated and systematic international response.
As you and your colleagues meet to deliberate on the Zimbabwe crisis at the EU/ACP Joint Parliamentary session in Addis Ababa it is therefore critical to realize that any signal that seeks to accommodate the Mugabe regime will only serve to exacerbate the crisis. It will be interpreted by Harare as a tacit approval of the violent misrule that continues to envelope the country.
In their darkest hour, the people of Zimbabwe remain confident that a strong statement of disapproval and a concrete course of action towards a peaceful and prosperous future for Zimbabwe will come out of Addis Ababa.
Morgan Tsvangirai.
END OF MESSAGE.
|
|
You can make a difference
|
|
 |
Make a donation |
|
Support Zimbabwe at an event |
|
Lobby your local Government member |
|
Become a member of the ZIC |
|
