BARBARISM WITH IMPUNITY

At the beginning of the last century the leader of the British Liberal Party, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, coined the term ‘methods of barbarism’ to describe the British Army’s policy of sweeping Boer women and children into concentration camps during the Boer War. ‘Methods of barbarism’ are again being used in southern Africa, this time in Zimbabwe.

Zimbabwe security forces have over the past six weeks launched operations against people suspected of having voted for the opposition during that country’s March election. Thousands of homes and businesses have been destroyed in a campaign to drive urban residents into rural areas where they will be under the control of government militias and at the mercy of government distributed food aid. Conservative estimates put the number of people made homeless at 250 000; others put the figure at over 1m.

The number of people affected is greater than the number of farmers and farm workers displaced over five years by Zimbabwe’s violent and chaotic ‘land reform’ process. The destruction wrought by the recent assaults threatens a human catastrophe.

Yet these recent purges have attracted much less condemnation than was directed at Zimbabwe during the initial farm invasions.

After five years of abuses we have come to expect such behaviour of the Zimbabwe government. That the behaviour causes suffering is obvious but thousands of words have already been written about that country’s suffering and there is little more anyone has to say.

There is also little more anyone is willing to do. The institutions and charters entrusted to protect democracy in Zimbabwe —  its constitution, civil society, the political opposition, the free media and independent judiciary, the African Union, the United Nations, the Southern African Development Community, the Commonwealth, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international human rights law — have all failed.

As new tragedies have competed for international attention, the Zimbabwe government has become free to act with impunity.

Despite Zimbabwe’s media laws information about the latest purges is widely available because the Zimbabwe government proudly boasts of how many kilogrammes of sugar the police have confiscated and how many arrests have been made in raids against vendors. Video footage smuggled out of the country has failed to arouse the reaction that we would expect had such footage originated from elsewhere on the globe.

It has taken less than five years to resign ourselves to Zimbabwe’s fate and to its government’s barbaric behaviour. In the process we have resigned ourselves to the future abuses still to be perpetrated by its government against its people.

—Frans Cronje