Although no clear terms of reference for this visit have been settled  a UN spokeswoman said as recently as last Thursday that they were still being finalised  and Menkerios is said not to be acting in any special envoy capacity, it represents the surest sign yet of the UN’s growing alarm at the Zimbabwean crisis.
So, what might Menkerios do while there? No doubt, he must observe diplomatic protocol, paying a visit to State House to thank his hosts for their hospitality and entertaining their views on what has transpired. But we must hope he goes his own way after these rites.
A first priority every morning might be checking in at Matapi police station in Mbare, to confirm that Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) secretary-general Tendai Biti, arrested last week as he arrived back in the country, remains alive and well.
Concern here is warranted: Matapi is where numerous Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Union (ZCTU) and MDC activists have been tortured and the Zimbabwe Supreme Court has condemned it as unfit for human habitation.
Yet while there’s much else to do in Harare, Menkerios will want to concentrate his time in the provinces of Mashonaland East, West and Central and Manicaland and Masvingo. This is where much of the postelection violence  characterised by abductions, killing, beatings, looting and destruction of property  has occurred.
There, he’ll want to meet religious leaders, faith-based organisations, women’s groups, health workers and teachers about their postelection experiences and the nature and extent of the violence they’ve observed.
He’ll want to visit hospitals such as Howard Mission, Mvurwi District and Bindura Hospital in Mashonaland Central  in fact, any of the rural district hospitals  where he’s likely to find a large number of the most recent victims of the political violence.
He’ll want to collect copies of medical records and death certificates, putting paid to all the talk of alleged killings and alleged assaults. He’ll also want to go to Mayo in Manicaland to see for himself the destruction of property and displacement of communities. There, he’ll find the remains of 40 homesteads, burnt to the ground, together with all the food storage facilities in the village.
If he’s brave  and it really will require courage given the recent attacks on diplomats in Zimbabwe  he’ll insist on being taken to inspect Tendai Hall in Bindura, a Zanu (PF) base for youth militias being deployed to harass and intimidate local communities, and also a torture centre.
In Manicaland, he’ll ask to see Odzi Country Club in Mutare, and the Nyanga Country Club and Ruwange business centre in Nyanga district. In Mashonaland East, he’ll visit the Dumuyera shopping centre. All have similarly been turned into militia bases and torture centres.
Back in Harare, he’ll want to visit any of the larger state-run hospitals, where the most serious casualties of the political violence have been transferred, such as the three men who were set alight two weeks ago in Zaka, a village southeast of Harare.
In Harare, it’s inevitable that he’ll meet the heads of the two main political parties, but perhaps Menkerios might request that he call upon them at their respective headquarters.
At Harvest House, the MDC’s headquarters, he’s likely to encounter hundreds of people camping out in the offices, having fled the violence engulfing their communities. In Zanu (PF)’s headquarters, things are likely to be much less chaotic  the blood that was shed by Zimbabwe Progressive Teachers Union members, who were taken there and beaten two weeks before the March 29 election, long since wiped away.
Menkerios will also want to stop by the Zimbabwe Election Commission’s command centre in Harare. The deadline for the application for postal votes will have passed and Menkerios, like any member of the public, will be entitled to examine the list of applications received.
There isn’t any lawful reason to anticipate a larger number of applications for the presidential election than for the harmonised elections of March 29, for which about 8000 applications were received and 3600 approved.
Yet if there is a far larger number, Menkerios will want to make further inquiries to ensure that the postal ballot system is not being abused, as so many fear, to secure President Robert Mugabe tens of thousands of illegal votes.
He will also want to inquire about the reasons for the delay in accrediting domestic electoral observers, knowing that continued delay only makes it less likely that sufficient numbers of domestic electoral observers can be mobilised to be in place at all 9231 polling stations.
While this seems a lot to ask of Menkerios, it is in fact in keeping with the precedent set by his colleague, Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka, UN special envoy on human settlement issues in Zimbabwe. Her visit to Zimbabwe in 2005 to investigate the effects of the government’s notorious Operation Murambatsvina involved discussion with numerous different parties and groups.
It resulted in a report that concluded the government’s actions had been carried out in an indiscriminate and unjustified manner, with indifference to human suffering and, in repeated cases, with disregard to several provisions of national and international legal frameworks.
A similarly independent and frank assessment of the postelection, pre-runoff environment by Menkerios might lay the groundwork for more decisive action by the UN. Of course, however hard-hitting Menkerios’s report, there are those  SA’s government chief among them  who will resist all efforts at greater UN involvement.
Interestingly, while Menkerios once served as an Eritrean ambassador, a UN spokeswoman confirmed that he enjoyed South African citizenship at present.
If that is true, Menkerios, in his capacity as a South African citizen, not a UN representative, might want to ask President Thabo Mbeki and SA’s representatives to the UN why it is that they act so resolutely to defeat UN Security Council action on Zimbabwe.
It can’t be that they fear such action will imperil their own mediation efforts. The arrest of Biti last week, despite assurances to SA’s government by their Zimbabwean counterparts that he would be safe on his return home, must conclusively establish that mediation with a duplicitous Zanu (PF) leadership will never amount to much.
More poignantly, he might ask Mbeki and UN ambassador Dumisani Kumalo why it is that South Africans’ suffering and human rights violations mattered enough to justify UN Security Council action all those years ago, but today that of Zimbabweans does not.
Yet that, perhaps, is a question that all South African citizens are equally well placed to ask.
Fritz is the director of the Southern Africa Litigation Centre.
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