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(NEWZIMBABWE) When going gets tough, NGOs go overboard

When going gets tough, NGOs go overboard
by Petina Gappah
03/08/2010 00:00:00

IN HIS memoir, Zimbabwe: Years of Hope and Despair, former British diplomat Philip Barclay writes of the years he spent in the country known to Western journalists and their governments as "Mugabe's Zimbabwe".

His book reflects not only his country's attitudes towards the actors in Zimbabwe's crisis but his personal antipathy towards a man and a regime that he considers responsible for massive human rights violations.

Barclay writes in glowing terms of the human rights activists he met daily - his job was to be a sort of point man for civil society groups. But even this staunch supporter of activists in Zimbabwe was forced to concede that amid the useful information that came his way was some exaggeration.

As he writes, during the period prior to the run-off election in Zimbabwe: "Some contacts reported that Zanu PF was amputating hands and arms in the style of Sierra Leone's barbaric rebels. In fact this story was untrue."

He is not the only opponent of Mugabe' s regime to have found that human rights organisations occasionally stretch the truth.

In 2005, a respected NGO reported of Darfur-like political rapes among women in Zimbabwe, and concluded that political violence was the "biggest killer of women in Zimbabwe". This is not true because domestic violence, a daily occurrence in Zimbabwe, is a bigger killer of women than the sporadic electoral violence which occurs mostly around the elections.

But while domestic violence may have been the fashionable cause in the 1980s when the Msasa Project conducted nation-wide campaigns, it is political violence that is all the rage now.

Yes, the Zimbabwean government has been guilty of gross human rights violations, particularly around the elections. And it has failed to provide redress through the courts. Only the hardest heart can be unmoved by the fates of the dead, the missing and the tortured from the last election and those before.

But it is also the case that reports of human rights abuses have often been exaggerated. The more cynical of my cynical brethren will tell you that human rights abuses are the bread and butter of activists, that from there comes funding, and, the more abuses, the more the money.

I admit to small quantities of cynicism, but I believe many activists are essentially well-meaning. It strikes me that most of the hyperbole arises from the need to focus "international attention" and action in a world saturated with abuses that drives activists to make outrageous claims.

The recent discussion around the Kimberley Process certification of Zimbabwe's diamonds is instructive. Again, it is beyond doubt that there are abuses in the Marange alluvial fields. The reports from the various groups that have visited the area make for chilling reading. Extra-judicial killings. Forced labour syndicates. Child labour. Looting and harassment.

But by no stretch of the imagination can you take from this that Zimbabwe is in some sort of war zone in which the sale of diamonds is being used to fund an insurgent group.

Africa Partnership Canada made the extraordinary claim that the Joint Operations Command is a rebel movement funded by diamonds that is trying to unseat the legitimate government of Zimbabwe. By legitimate government they mean the unity government, made up of MDC ministers who are as keen to get the diamond certification as their Zanu PF counterparts.

One group after another rallied around the term "blood diamonds", conjuring up images of international criminal trials and Naomi Campbell and Charles Taylor and Leonardo di Caprio with a Rhodesian accent. Something, they insisted, must be done.

And yet the something that must be done cannot be done because the Kimberley definition of conflict diamonds is clear: conflict diamonds are diamonds from areas controlled by forces opposed to legitimate governments used to fund military action. Zimbabwe's diamonds simply do not meet this definition.

This past week, lawyer and activist Beatrice Mtetwa received an award for her work from the American Bar Association. The Association has made the same award to a group of Zimbabweans whom it considered to have made a contribution to the achievement of human rights - the Supreme Court of Zimbabwe.

That was in 2001, nine short years ago, but they may as well be an eternity because it was another court in another country, a court that insisted on habeas corpus after the incarceration of Dumiso Dabengwa, Lookout Masuku and others; a court that struck down corporal punishment, a court that strained to avoid imposing the death penalty, a court that recognised that equality for women was a human right, a court whose judgments were used as precedent in courts beyond Zimbabwe.

If we had that court, we would not need our hard-working activists. But until that time we must rely on them to highlight the many instances of oppression and injustice in our country.

But for as long as they exaggerate situations that are terrible enough not to need exaggeration, activists will play into the hands of their opponents.

Petina Gappah is an award-winning Zimbabwea writer and lawyer. This article was originally published in the Times (SA)

Labels: NEOCOLONIALISM, NGOs, PROPAGANDA

posted by MrK @ 7:14 PM