Human Rights activists remain banned

HARARE – For nearly a week the Zimbabwe government has insisted that, while it will allow health and food relief supplies to rural areas, human rights organizations’ field operations remain banned.  

Dozens of human rights experts have remained confined to Harare – with a ban that prevents them from reaching the stricken rural areas to collect statistics of the junta’s on-going terror campaign.  

The government last week announced that it was lifting the ban on relief agencies operating in humanitarian assistance, food aid, relief, recovery and development; family, child care and protection; care and protection of older persons; rights and empowerment of people with disabilities as well as HIV and Aids treatment, care and related support services.  

While rights groups remain banned, the lift of the ban on relief agencies represents a significant shift in the official view of the humanitarian disaster in the countryside.  

Until now the ruling junta had insisted – against all the evidence – that it could look after the more than 4.1 million hunger-stricken Zimbabweans by itself. But now Robert Mugabe has been forced to bow to domestic and international pressure.

The government heeded a call by MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai and several Western and African diplomats for the lifting of the ban on humanitarian aid that has been in place since before the sham run-off election in June.

Tsvangirai in his letter last week stated that due to the massive starvation stalking the country, the government should immediately allow urgently needed humanitarian work to be carried out in the country.  

US ambassador James McGee also made a stark warning to Minister Goche.  

“If you choose not to act, we will hold you personally responsible for the inhuman suffering caused by this ban,”  McGee said in a letter to Goche, seen by The Zimbabwean.  

On Friday Goche issued a statement notifying all NGOs involved in humanitarian work that the ban on food, medicine and recovery and development work had been lifted. But there is an awful lot of detail to be negotiated with the Zimbabwean authorities before we know whether this is a real deal, or just another manoeuvre to deflect international pressure.  

The UN has had bitter experience dealing with Mugabe and his generals in the past, as apparent concessions have often proved illusory. The first point aid agencies want clarified is whether they will get free access to the whole country without threats of violence.  

They also want to know that they will be able to run their relief operations themselves, and not through the junta, which is notoriously corrupt and ineffective.