AUs conspiracy of silence

There is, indeed, a conspiracy of silence, as Morgan Tsvangirai said when he was receiving an award in the United States recently. AU efforts at resolving the Zimbabwe crisis have been very weak and essentially fruitless.

To date there is no meaningful AU resolution on the crisis in Zimbabwe even though the crisis has been running for close to ten years. The gross violation of human and peoples rights by the Mugabe regime has gone unnoticed by the AU since 1982 when Gukurahundi resulted in the massacre of more than 20 000 Zimbabweans. The devastation of poor peoples livelihoods through Operation Murambatsvina in May 2005 was never acknowledged or condemned by the AU. Perhaps to do so would have been misconstrued as undue interference in the internal affairs of a member state.

The AU has generally turned a blind eye to the repression and oppression that the Mugabe regime is notorious for. Mugabe has never been asked to explain why so many Zimbabweans have fled the country since his ascension to power. It is obvious that although all the African leaders know why Zimbabweans are quick to run into exile, they lack the courage and political will to challenge Mugabe on these clear indications of repression and oppression in this country.

Many AU member states refuse to grant Zimbabweans refugee status arguing that there is no war in Zimbabwe. This has caused many Zimbabweans in exile to live in these African countries illegally. Both the AU and SADC have often shielded Mugabe from criticism and condemnation by civil society and Western democracies even when he has driven his own people into destitution. For example, the political violence that has become the hallmark of Zanu (PF) rule has never been the subject of any AU summit.

The former UN secretary general, Kofi Annan has called this practice a pernicious, self destructive form of racism that unites citizens to rise up and expel tyrannical rulers who are white but to excuse tyrannical rulers who are black. The AU is reluctant to pressure Mugabe to fully implement the GPA he signed in September 2008. The AU is essentially a toothless bulldog whose bark is a lot worse than its bite. It is a club of African dictators and human rights violators who protect themselves against the oppressed people of Africa.

Equally useless and irrelevant to the cause of the people of this country is the SADC, which has taken more than two years to resolve the crisis, and has tended to covertly support the Mugabe regime against the wishes of the majority of the people of Zimbabwe. Jacob Zuma made several attempts to persuade some Western countries to lift the sanctions against Mugabe and his cronies. Fortunately none of the approached countries paid any attention to the South African presidents efforts.

Recently, the DRC president also made feeble attempts to get sanctions lifted, but his efforts amounted to nothing. The people of Zimbabwe will be best advised not to expect any meaningful assistance or support from the AU in resolving the current crisis in Zimbabwe. The recent call by the MDC to the SADC to conduct a summit on the Zimbabwe crisis is not likely to result in the resolution of the outstanding issues between that party and Mugabes decaying little group of old men and women. It is probably time that we started working on alternative ways of resolving our problems without the assistance of all external forces. Zimbabwean solutions for Zimbabwean problems.