FOUR MONTHS on from his coalition agreement with President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party, the leader of the Movement for Democratic Change and Zimbabwe prime minister Morgan Tsvangirai has been meeting Swedish, German and US government leaders pleading for economic aid. They have been clearly sympathetic about its necessity but highly sceptical as to whether political and legal conditions have changed enough to justify releasing it.
The latest report from Amnesty International on human rights in Zimbabwe explains why that scepticism is fully justified. Issued following a six day visit to the country by Amnesty’s secretary general Irene Khan, it says there has been no real reform in the police, army and security forces. Activists, lawyers and journalists continue to be harassed and arrested. Demonstrators are being beaten. Food is in desperately short supply, health and education resources are in crisis. Farm invasions persist and those forcibly evicted from their housing in Harare four years ago are still without homes. As Ms Khan puts it, “there seems to be no sense of real urgency to bring about human right changes on the part of some government leaders. Words have not been followed by effective action”.
This reality on the ground makes it extremely difficult for Mr Tsvangirai to make a persuasive case for a prompt and generous response to Zimbabwe’s desperate needs. The formation of this coalition represented a definite change of strategy by Mr Tsvangirai and his party. They decided to enter it because of the truly awful humanitarian crisis facing the country, and especially its collapsing economy. Their decision enjoyed popular support, too, even encouraging some hope that it would help reverse the spiralling decline in its fortunes under Mr Mugabe.
Mr Tsvangirai’s trip represents a small opening to the outside world, as does Amnesty’s field investigation and a visit by an International Monetary Fund team investigating economic conditions. There are also expectations that the new South African prime minister Jacob Zuma will be able to exert more influence on Mr Mugabe through the Southern African Development Community. If the climate of intimidation is to end, as Ms Khan says, President Mugabe and Prime Minister Tsvangirai “must make public statements clearly instructing all party activists to stop harassment, intimidation, and threats against perceived political opponents”. This is a matter of political will, not of international financial aid.