THE TRAGIC MUGABE SAGA CONTINUES…
FreeAfrica (November 30, 2003)

Photo: Robert G. Mugabe (Reuters)

Time was, in African politics, when African political leaders knew and understood the difference between the rights and obligations of an elected leader and the inviolable rights and legitimate expectations of the Electorate. But that was a long time ago; that is until 1991 when the good governance principles of the Commonwealth were reaffirmed by way of the Harare Commonwealth Declaration of 1991 –– http://www.thecommonwealth.org/
whoweare/ declarations/harare.html.

But back in 1991 when Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe hosted the Commonwealth Heads of Governments in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare, Mugabe’s generation of African leaders had never made such a public and solemn commitment to good governance. But during that year at the Harare Commonwealth Summit, there was the inscrutable Robert Mugabe the improbable statesman gloating and basking in the glow of the good and proper diplomatic niceties of such an important Commonwealth Summit - as if he understood and cherished the principles of the Commonwealth. And consequently, the outcome of such important Commonwealth Summit was the adoption of the Harare Commonwealth Declaration of 1991 (named after a city that Mugabe likes to call home).

But hardly before the ink was dry on the Harare Declaration, Mugabe was aggressively and shamelessly back to his old ways: systematic gross human rights abuses, murder and mayhem, during his watch as President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Zimbabwe; which, in this case, includes rogue generals and armed militia who terrorized civilian communities that are supposed to be protected by the Harare Commonwealth Declaration.

These untenable tragic developments raise serious questions about Mugabe’s patriotism and respect for a Convention whose adoption he presided over as an African statesman and as a Zimbabwean Head of State who is supposed to care about the good name of the city after which the Convention is named.

QUESTION 1: How can Mugabe expect the world to respect the City of Harare, and the Convention that is named after Harare, when his actions amount to insult and contempt for such Convention? Mugabe is reportedly threatening to pull Zimbabwe out of the Commonwealth if Commonwealth leaders continue to insist that the Harare Commonwealth Declaration be respected and upheld by all Commonwealth leaders.

QUESTION 2: How can Mugabe hope to run away from compliance with the Harare Commonwealth Declaration when he is busy building a palatial home around Harare, with funds of dubious origin (an ignominious monument to folly and bad governance that costs more than Mugabe could possibly afford to fund from his wages as the illegitimate leader of Zimbabwe)? No doubt the people of Harare quite rightly do not expect Robert Mugabe to get away with disgracing Harare by unilaterally defying a Convention that the whole world associates with Harare, the Harare Commonwealth Declaration of 1991(and hence the need for Mugabe to fraudulently cling to power as Harare’s ‘favourite son’ that the people never voted for).

QUESTION 3: Since the Harare Commonwealth Declaration empowers and protects the rights of Commonwealth citizens (including non-Zimbabwean Commonwealth Citizens), how can one man unilaterally defy the will of 54 nations (including the people of Zimbabwe) by threatening to make Zimbabwe the Commonwealth Wild West Bandit country for outlaws bent on committing ethnic cleansing (over 20 000 victims in Matabeleland and the Midlands so far), a litany of war crimes and gross human rights abuses by armed rogue generals and blood-thirsty militia, and a host of other crimes against humanity that you would not wish on your worst enemy on a bad day?

QUESTION 4: If what evidently appears to be the Bandit King of such new outrageous Commonwealth Wild West is allowed, by the good men and women of the Commonwealth, to get away with such terrible plan, why don’t we give Slobodan Milosovic a medal for his ethnic cleansing sordid enterprise in the former Yugoslavia? Or is there one moral standard for ethnic cleansing war crimes committed by white war criminals, and a different moral standard for war crimes committed by a black war criminal? And if this is not so, where is the conscience and commitment of conscientious black and white Commonwealth leaders – if they cannot stand for what they know and believe to be the right course of action; that they may be counted on the right side of history for the Harare Commonwealth Declaration, in the face of Mugabe’s brutal serial ethnic cleansing murder and mayhem?

QUESTION 5: Since the Bandit King has attacked and insulted whole communities and nations of Africa (Mugabe attacked "apologetic" African countries "who fear to be complete Africans, who hesitate to be in complete solidarity with us" –– a report from www.irinnews.org, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs), how can we and the insulted African nations and leaders, in good conscience, continue to accept and respect Mugabe’s elevated position as the Vice-President of the African Union and as a prominent SADC statesman? Or, perhaps, is it a case of “silence means consent”, and that we ‘inferior’ Africans are supposed to accept and agree with what Mugabe says about us, that we “…fear to be complete Africans…” That, perhaps, like the Fuhrer (Adolf Hitler), the Bandit King has ideas about a superior African race or tribe that he, as a leader of such race/tribe of the African Union, is about to install in the landscape defiled by his ethnic cleansing notorious policies and programs whose mass graves continue to ignominiously stand as a provocative challenge to our psyche, as a yet unexplored frontier for our collective sense of duty to such forgotten victims…

QUESTION 6: Assuming that the African Union, and the SADC, have no problem with the Commonwealth Harare Declaration, and, in particular, wherein the Harare Declaration states that: “we believe in the liberty of the individual under the law, in equal rights for all citizens regardless of gender, race, colour, creed or political belief, and in the individual's inalienable right to participate by means of free and democratic political processes in framing the society in which he or she lives”, how can the political leadership of these institutions continue to hold court with the Bandit King in an evidently Faustian umbilical cord of damnation?

QUESTION 7: Given that good men and women of our time have found it necessary to indict an alleged Caucasian war criminal (Slobodan Milosovic) for ethnic cleansing and genocide relating to less than 20 000 victims (in the Balkans), how do we rationalize about the apparent profound absence of purpose and loud silence in the face of the need for justice for the victims of an alleged black war criminal (Mugabe, the Bandit King), whose notorious track record is well documented (please refer to the CCJP report: http://www.zwnews.com/
issuefull.cfm?ArticleID=6611)? Or is it a case of Caucasian victims of ethnic cleansing and genocide being more equal than their African counterparts? Alternatively, are black war criminals more equal than their Caucasian counterparts in our jurisprudence?

To the leaders of the Commonwealth, we at FreeAfrica, and our fellow Commonwealth citizens, believe that it is important to appreciate and understand that Zimbabwe’s membership of the Commonwealth consists of two parts: the victims of the illegitimate Mugabe regime, as well as the Bandit King himself. That, there arises, in these circumstances, the legitimate justice and redemption question: are you the Commonwealth leaders willing and able to lead the peoples of the Commonwealth in dealing with justice for the victims of a rogue dictator? And, for redemption of the Commonwealth purpose, in an overdue accommodation of the long suffering victims of the Bandit King (the people of Zimbabwe and other Commonwealth citizens), are you willing to employ ingenuity and creative force to accommodate the people – instead of adopting a simplistic inhumane cut-and-run strategy of throwing out the baby with the bath water…?

In the celebrated beautiful game, the people’s game (soccer), justice demands that collective punishment be outlawed and be taboo; therefore we hope that –– in the spirit and tradition of such time-honoured wisdom –– the Commonwealth Abuja Summit will be good sport by not seeking to impose a red card against the illegitimate Mugabe regime as a collective punishment against the people of Zimbabwe… That the possé for the Bandit King might be for the nefarious Bandit King and the Bandit King alone...