Excerpts from No News From Harare

 

An exclusive interview with

Dr Lovemore Madhuku, Chairman of the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA)

 

It was very cruel. Extremely cruel.

They would destroy the homes, make people homeless. We believe the theory that they were trying to prepare for a cleaning out of the urban areas, it was the bedrock of opposition in the urban areas. And you want to dissipate these people, send them over to the rural areas where you can control them. Or you can be able to at least monitor what they were doing.

 

I understand that the security intelligence network that Mugabe has was warning against some events in Southern African countries like what happened in Zambia where it was felt that there was more of an urban population.

In the rural areas there is traditional leaders, you have all sorts of things that make it difficult for free political activity.

It would not just be a meaningless brutality on people, it was a brutality that was calculated, to still achieve a political process. Because Mugabe still wants to pretend that he wins elections - that he is running a democratic country. So he is not still wanting to exercise dictatorship outside the process which looks democratic. So he will still call an election.

If he were to step down, or if his ill health were to lead to an early presidential election, they would want the party to remain in power. So Mugabe himself plus the system surrounding him focused on operating Murambatsvina as a way of really controlling the rural urban divide of the population. With a view to ensuring that the bulk of the population remains rural oriented.

We know that over 700,000 people were displaced from the urban areas. That is the report you get from the United Nations reports.
But the people who were affected by Operation Murambatsvina, the side effects and so on, there are over 2 million Zimbabweans.

This government knows that rioting here or the possibility of mass resistance is a daily thing, its always possible because of the extreme levels of hardship. Extreme levels of political persecution.

 

So at the time in 2005 when the govt embarked on that process, there was always a feeling in the air you could breath, in the political air, you say that this country is ready for a mass uprising at any time.

99% of the people, who were affected by operation Murambatsvina, had to look after themselves. Some are absorbed by extended families. Some you know – simply there are others who are dying of course. Because they have no food.

Or you find that things become even more difficult. You might have an ailing person who subsequently finds no medication. You get those people who were on HIV treatment. No-one is responsible for the affect after this.

They were simply dumping people on the farm. Some people were taken at night. Those who were homeless, who would be sleeping and so on, and then you would just be dumped in Hopley farm. And that farm is a farm that Government acquired I think from a private farmer. And that is where they are now putting people. You can go and stay there - With tents and so forth.

They just have a small tent. A whole family can be in just one small tent. No toilets, no nothing. There is one farm where of course there was food coming from the UN agencies and so forth. That farm is still there.

And there are some people who are still there, who were there originally on the basis of the Murambatsvina operation.

Once you are there, and most people, you are not free. Because they don’t really have the means to be free. You see? So most people who get dumped at Hopley Farm remain in there. Except for a few who may have a relative who comes and takes them.

And then within that farm if you have gone through the trauma of Operation Murambatsvina you wouldn’t want to hear anything political. Because you would be told that if you become political we will chase you out of here. And they don’t have anywhere to go.

So people in the Hopley farm and so forth, eventually what has become of this situation is that most of them have become sympathisers of government. Because they are told now look you are here because of government and you have to toe the line etcetera. And some who went there, who were taken advantage of in Murambatsvina, are war veterans, former war veterans.

 

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They check the tactics or the techniques or the strategies of the former communist states and so on, and it is exactly more or less like that. The way you operate. They have now for example trained some young people, a program that they claimed was the national youth service. But they trained them to be a militia for the ruling party.

 

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There is still a lot of anger against government. What is lacking is the fact that there is no space to express your anger. But otherwise the majority of all Zimbabweans are angry with what happened with Murambatsvina, that most of the victims, in fact almost all of the victims, would definitely be against government. But there is no scope for that.

I mean if you were in a different country you would express your anger during an election for example. You would vote for the opposition. But here the elections are neither free nor fair.

So you would never know that Zimbabweans are angry and they want to express it this way. If they were to want to participate in a physical march, they cannot do that. The police would stop them. And so every legitimate form of expressing your anger or unhappiness with Government is closed.

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Our work involves mainly two things. First spreading awareness among ordinary Zimbabweans, on the need for a new constitution, the reasons for a constitution, the reasons for the rule of law, the reasons for ensuring that governments must respect human rights, what are they, how are they ensuring the constitution, the reasons for making govt accountable.

So it’s a massive project of civic education we are involved in, across the country. Ordinary people. That is the main big thing.

Then the second thing is to try and encourage Zimbabweans themselves to put pressure on govt through peaceful marches, pressure like demonstrations, peaceful marches- things like don’t go to work while making a particular point. So putting pressure on government.

We have on several occasions our people getting arrested, our members getting arrested in the streets when they are protesting against govt and so forth. But they are getting their own determination. And sometimes myself I get arrested, I get beaten up, by police, in the process of demonstration, but we keep doing these things.

 

The government here spends a lot of money on the secret intelligence arm. And these are people that are implanted. Some of them, they join our organizations as if they were genuine members. You discover that after 3 or 4 years. Others that even when they join become in the opposition, all they do would be to leak out information. Or to undermine you from within.

For instance you have some persons assigned, 1 or 2 intelligence persons assigned, to monitor on a daily basis what we do, who goes into the office, who comes out, what kind of meeting.

If there is any suspicion, they suddenly see that there is a lot of activity in this office, within minutes you just see the police appearing to check what is happening. So government has deployed a lot of man power, people to do that.

There is a law here that they call the public order security act. Its well known and popularly known as POSA. Public order and security act. That law makes it illegal to hold a meeting without informing the police. And a meeting means anything more than two people is a meeting under that law.

So for our organization with the police we don’t respect that law. We defy it. If we want to have a meeting we will just go ahead and have a meeting.

They just come in, 20, 25 police officers, they storm in a meeting, start beating people etc. and this is the kind of things that they do. So any meeting that you hold you need to inform them.

But we survive by overstretching them. I mean they don’t know, 90% of our meetings are not known by the police.

It is extreme, the extent to which the government goes against the opposition and the media in particular here. You would assume that that is the role or that is the main function of govt.

They can kill you in the process of you being involved in an action, especially like in a demonstration. Or in a public protest. That is what they will do. They can do that.

The killing which we know also happened last time was during the election, in 2002, when people were beaten to death etc. That happened. Quite a number of deaths took place at the time.

So we can have those statistics - Even as we are going towards 2005, last year, where people were beaten up during campaigns, beaten up for being opposition supporters, etc.

And so they wouldn’t pick you just as a journalist and kill you direct like that. They wait, and you get involved in a political matter, like you are at a rally and so on.

The secret people will create chaos, can do that targeting certain people. But we haven’t seen any prominent journalist die directly as a result of that. Any deaths might be indirect. Like you would get arrested.

They have arrested so many journalists. You get subjected to inhumane conditions in prisons. And then as a result of that you can develop a health difficulty. Which can then kill you after 4 years.

The first thing that they do, with the media its clear, you outlaw the independent media.

They have a law that says you must be licensed, they don’t give you the licence if they believe that you are going to do anything. And if you try and do anything else, they arrest, they clamp down.

We have had the independent media place of operation being bombed. The paper here which was coming out daily, it used to be called the daily news, it was not given the licence, its printing press was bombed.

And the private radio station, they bombed the broadcasting station, and then they went on to arrest the directors of that private radio station.

 

Those were the kind of reactions. The opposition, apart from the arrests and the harassments and so forth, stopping the meetings from happening, they infiltrate them. You infiltrate, you create a situation from within the organizations which leads to division.

Currently we are a split opposition. I mean we used to have a party that was strong, the movement for democratic change. It posed a serious threat to the govt in 2000, 2002.

But government succeeded. A very very clever way of cutting the organization, identify which leaders that you can encourage to differ, in the name of democratic debate.

But we know that it is not, it is a government orchestrated attempt to split the opposition. And then suddenly you find that it is a split and so forth.

And then of course there is victimisation. They go after the finest people who are prominent individuals, in organising the opposition, check where you are working, you are likely to have problems with your employers there. For something that might even appear genuine on the face of it. They go after you. Some people even have their private lives torn apart.

The response of the government has been even more hostile. I think the hostility against us is increasing every day.

It simply means that you are never certain at any one time what might happen to you the next day.

 

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Our government here has almost every power that is thinkable, imaginable. The president he can do anything here. He can declare war, he can pass a law.

We have been governed by the so called presidential powers. So he can just come out, wake up in a day and pass legislation. and that legislation has validity for 6 months. That legislation by the president can override any other law made by parliament. Perhaps except the constitution.

 

So we would want to reduce the powers of the president. Then of course we would want to have a limit of the number of years the person can serve as president of Zimbabwe. And a maximum of 10 years. Currently there is no limit in that and so forth.

Then we need strong protection for human rights, which is absent at the moment.we would want first and foremost to get a constitution which provides for an accountable government that would be required to explain to its population what it is doing in parliament for example.

Currently that is not there. The president who is the head of government is not a member of parliament. So the president need not come to parliament to answer questions from MPs or to explain the political situation too, nothing like that.

I think he has never answered a question from parliament in the past .. ah… its now close to 20 years.

 

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He was a great African leader at one point, who stood for good values and so forth. We didn’t know that he had internal weaknesses. The internal weakness of Mugabe is the love for power. The love for power would override anything in his estimation.

I mean land redistribution could still have been done in Zimbabwe. Without persecuting the white farmers. And that those who oppose Mugabe oppose him for that reason that you know, we need land redistribution, Zimbabweans need land redistribution.

But that land redistribution must not undermine certain individuals. Or certain races in this case.

Mugabe was benefiting from an anti white process because then he was saying the whites support the opposition. And that the whites represent an attempt to reverse the gains of the independent struggle.

So it was a selfish way of trying to remain in power. And then utilising land as a basis. So we think it was wrong, I think the way that they handled the whites.

Whites were supposed to be – like what has happened in South Africa, they are part and parcel of that wider society. That is what in fact was meant by the 1980 declaration. After 1980 it was clear that every Zimbabwean had a place here.

But then 20 years down the line, well that was in 2000, you turn around and say well it was wrong for whites to have land.

 

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The international community generally has been supportive in that they have been showing solidarity, you know. They make statements critical of what is happening in Zimbabwe. Statements critical of govt’s human rights abuses here. That is good in itself, those kind of things.

And beyond that, in some cases we have had support given to organizations like my organization and others, some money here to do what we are supposed to do, printing papers, or having 1 or 2 vehicles to assist us in what we are doing, there has been some support from some sections of the international community and so on.

 

But that is all really. I mean there is a lot that they are not doing, for example. Things like completely isolating the regime etc. and there are some members of the international community who still think that the govt here, you can still work with it, they can talk to it...

Especially in southern Africa for example. Almost all the countries that surround Zimbabwe. In The Southern African development community. They still do these things. They call it African solidarity. And that is very clear.

 

And then within the European union, I mean you have countries like France, for example. They are quite sympathetic. I mean they don’t believe that this government must just be totally isolated.

I think what you need to understand is that isolation of the regime is a good starting point to building pressure in Zimbabwe. If we in Zimbabwe are fighting an isolated regime we are likely to succeed more than if we are fighting a regime that still has several connections.

 

So what has been lacking has been our own follow ups ourselves as Zimbabweans here, and so that within our community we must keep that pressure. They shouldn’t really be disappointed that that pressure has been kept for 4 or 5 years but has not produced a tangible. They put that pressure, the isolation remains, then they have the other promoting activities I was talking about, you know.

 

Then you promote internal processes that could then have the affect on the regime. Because the only way that could work is to put pressure on the regime. And so the isolation weakens them. It weakens the regime. Then you build up.

 

We have not yet built up sufficiently. And so our failure to build as an internal group of Zimbabweans is the reason for no progress. It is not because the strategies employed by the EU and others are not working. We have not yet supported it internally. Only when that happens will we make progress.

 

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We are in a very difficult fix. It’s a very difficult one. We cant say oh no no no tourists. That then sounds like we have been accused of promoting sanctions. Or accused of saying we don’t want progress in the country.

 

But I think if tourists come, be very conscious that they are coming to a country that still requires political change. And then they don’t just come and see the mountains. And then they also understand the politics. And then when they go back they become like ambassadors. You know, look Zimbabwe, that country is in trouble. The good country, beautiful country, but its in trouble. It needs democratic reform.

I don’t know whether that is possible, to combine that kind of thing. Tourists come yes but then when they go back they must send the correct messages. And then they shouldn’t come and then promote an image which says there is not a problem in Zimbabwe. Because they were able to spend 3 nights at a hotel without any problems.

 

When people who do that – they fly into Zimbabwe, have a very good 4 days here, go back and then say ah we never saw anything wrong. That is when tourism will be bad. If it gets somebody to come in and get out and then distorting the political picture. The political picture is quite bad.

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In the terms of Australians, they have been useful to the extent of their role in the commonwealth, and so forth. Putting pressure. The point that I have made about isolating the Zimbabwean regime. And that actually that isolation is an important element, because you isolate so that you weaken, when there is pressure coming in. and that role has been.

What they have not done, the Australians, has been to work more with internal organizations there in Zimbabwe, - promoting what they are doing, and so on. That I think is the only role that they need to do.

 

(Excerpts from an exclusive interview with Dr Madhuku, Chairman of the National Constitutional Assembly, September 2006 )

 

Further links:

No News From Harare - a new documentary by Wendy Dent