Comment from The Nelson Daily News (Canada), 7 December: Zimbabwe experience

André Carrel

All personal secrets have the effect of sin or guilt - Carl Jung

Why do they put up with it? Why are Zimbabweans not protesting in the streets by the thousand? Why is there no sign of a popular revolt against Mugabe? I was hoping to find answers to these questions during my visit. Zimbabwe has elections, but it is not a democracy; it is a dictatorship. ….. During this last visit I was given a copy of a banned report, published in 1999 by the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe and the Legal Resources Foundation. This report, titled Breaking the Silence, Building True Peace, is a summary of a much larger report documenting the terror Mugabe unleashed on his country in the 1980s. The report recounts how, a few months after his first election, Mugabe made a deal with North Korea’s Kim Il Sung to train a special security force. The report describes the physical torture, deprivation, psychological torture, and disappearances Mugabe’s special force inflicted on civilians in the provinces of Matabeleland and Midlands.

The Fifth Brigade, as this internal security force was known, operated independently of the army, police, and the Central Intelligence Organization. The Fifth Brigade was not accountable to parliament. It took its orders directly from Mugabe, and the atrocities it committed are of the kind associated with the regimes of Hitler and Stalin. The difference is merely one of scale. Mugabe’s torture victims number in the tens of thousands, not in the millions. When Mugabe disbanded the Fifth Brigade, he integrated its members into the regular security forces. Nobody has ever been held accountable. To this day Zimbabweans are afraid to talk about the activities of the Fifth Brigade. A disillusioned former guerrilla fighter, who bitterly claimed that what is happening in Zimbabwe today is not what he fought for, told me that he believes that Mugabe clings to power because of the legacy of the Fifth Brigade: Mugabe fears losing his immunity as head of state. The banned report is on the internet, but few people in the communal lands in rural Zimbabwe have access to the internet.

They learned about what happened in the province of Matabeleland in the 1980s by word of mouth. People in every community of every province now know about Mugabe’s capacity for terror and brutality from first-hand experience. What is happening in Zimbabwe today is not new; it is consistent with Mugabe’s rule since his first election in 1980. For a quarter century Mugabe’s obsession with secrecy in the name of state security has served as a cover for his corruption and his state-sponsored lawlessness, thuggery, torture, beatings and killing, and the indoctrination of youth gangs to act as agents of terror. Foreign embassies and their intelligence services must have known what was going on in the 1980s. Yet many developed countries, Canada included, praised Mugabe’s government while they poured millions of dollars into the country. I was one of many ignorant Canadian volunteers (all expenses paid by the federal government) holding to the naive belief that Mugabe’s government welcomed our efforts to help develop open and accountable local government in Zimbabwe.

Zimbabweans do not believe that the world will come to their assistance if they rise up against Mugabe. Having read the banned report, I understand their mistrust of the outside world. How could I have explained to my friends the decision by Queen Elizabeth II, our Queen, to bestow on Mugabe an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath, a British order of chivalry, after all the atrocities of the 1980s? How could I have explained to them the equally despicable decisions by several prestigious European and North American universities to reward Mugabe with honorary doctorates? The combination of government secrecy and willful blindness is fatal to democracy. We betray democracy with our silence. When we accept anything short of full public accountability and disclosure from any level of government in cases such as Maher Arar, the tasering of Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver airport, and the arrest of war resisters in our communities, we betray democracy, and we do so at our own peril.

to be continued...