Is Mugabe being helped by Hutus who took part in the genocide of Tutsis?
I know the UN consistently lets down ordinary people when they need them most. I hoped a strong message would be sent to Robert Mugabe’s regime by the Security Council but I didn’t really expect much to come of it.
Vitaly Churkin, the Russian Ambassador to the UN, justified their veto of the recent UN Resolution on these grounds: “This draft is nothing but the council’s attempt to interfere in the internal affairs of a member state.â€
I guess it depends how you look at it.
Ordinary Zimbabweans who believe in democracy and their right to participate in free and fair elections feel that they have been subjected to interference and meddling by other states in Zimbabwe’s internal affairs for years now.
Robert Mugabe and Zanu PF do not make up Zimbabwe: Zimbabwe belongs to its people.
The people have been meddled with and messed about consistently.
We queue to vote all day, choose our leaders, see our votes overturned and the fraud is upheld by states outside Zimbabwe. We are beaten and tortured and then subjected to the shock of hearing leaders outside Zimbabwe say, ‘No crisis’. Our rights are eroded before our eyes but certain states outside Zimbabwe refuse to speak the truth and acknowledge what is going on. If you ask me, supplying a country with arms that can be used to murder civilians is the ultimate act of meddling with the people of a county, and Zimbabweans have seen this too.
If Mugabe invaded a neighbouring country, the UN would consider this an act of interference worth responding too; but if soldiers from other countries are sent to Zimbabwe - controlled by a regime that the whole world recognises is illegitimate – this is not a problem. It is not ‘interference’, and it is not an act which could potentially destablise a region?
Tell an ordinary Zimbabwean how this makes any sense at all?
We know that Chinese soldiers were seen in Zimbabwe a couple of weeks after the March 29th elections:
The Chinese, together with about 70 Zimbabwean senior army officers are staying at the Holiday Inn, in the city’s central business district.
There are about 10 Chinese soldiers. “We were shocked to see Chinese soldiers in their full military regalia and armed with pistols checking at the hotel,” said one worker.
“When they signed checking-in forms they did not indicate the nature of the business that they are doing and even their addresses.”
But this article published in the The Independent (UK) really chills me because it points to foreign mercenaries – possibly Hutus – being recruited and involved in Mugabe’s war against his people.
Eyewitnesses say the men are more vicious than their Zimbabwean counterparts, with the marauding gangs attacking suspected members of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), forcing them to renounce the party.
They dress in army fatigues, carry Russian-made guns and are accompanied by interpreters when out with the militias. [...]
“We have observed that some of the people leading the violence are foreigners because they speak a different language and they do not understand our local languages.
“Also the tactics they are using are not peculiar with Zimbabweans because they are cutting out the tongue, removing eyes and genital parts. We are not sure where they come from.” [...]
Local people claim the irregular forces are Hutus from Rwanda, but the human rights representative said he could not be definitive. There are an estimated 4,000 Hutu refugees living in Zimbabwe, some of whom took part in the genocide of Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994.
Does the need for mercenaries show that Mugabe can’t find enough ordinary Zimbabweans to do his evil deeds?
How many other nations and people will be drawn into Robert Mugabe’s fight to hold on to power against the will of his people? When does this involvement hit a tipping point where the world recognises this type of behaviour could threaten to destablise a region?
The worlds values are all upside down if it is OK for an illegitimately elected state leader to pay foreigners and recruit foreign support to help him go out and kill and torture innocent non-violent civilian people.
July 15th, 2008 14:40
This has appeared on the UN website.
“A Third World diplomat told IPS that both Russia and China, which jointly vetoed a Western-sponsored resolution to impose sanctions on Zimbabwe last week, apparently indicated they were willing to abstain on the vote provided the United States, France and Britain would give an “up-front assurance” that the Security Council would hold back the indictment”
link: http://allafrica.com/stories/200807141818.html
This is getting to be really cynical.!!! or is it just me.
July 15th, 2008 14:41
From: THE WASTE LAND by T.S.Eliot
Burial of the Dead
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
Come in under the shadow of this red rock,
And I will show you something different from
Either your shadow at morning
Striding behind you,
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
July 15th, 2008 17:34
SHAME ON AFRICA!!!!!!!!!
Will, think for a second that hutus are there only to kill people???? that is again a shame for African to beleive in Western fablicated story, yes i beleive Mugabe has to go, but sugesting that Hutus are implicated in these fights? BIG SHAME ON AFRICANS. Remember British and American Provided maps and sattelites images, wich Kagame used to track and kill about 200 000 of those Hutus, yet he is the one asking Mugabe to not kill his own poeple, huuum. This shows a desparation (for british) to removing Mugabe by all means.
SHAME ON AFRICA!!!!!!!!!
July 15th, 2008 18:14
The presence of foreign “soldiers” has been reported by human rights groups and local people. It can not be ignored and it doesn’t matter what nationality they might be.
Should it be true that mercenaries are now ‘employed’ it would be for the benefit of their greater experience in warfare tactics, discipline, etc. something that many of the militia lack. Every effort should be made to confirm if there are indeed mercenaries involved.
It would certainly, put a whole new perspective on what some seem to regard as an ‘internal affairs’.
July 15th, 2008 20:19
Shame
What a shame indeed. Try going on to the u- tube website and see what mugabe did before this. He had murderers trained by the Koreans to kill zimbabwean citizens.
Koreans, chinese and Hutus are not zimbabwean by the way. How long will it take people like ’shame’ to stop theorising about the ‘west’s negative reports’. Do you seriously believe that locals who have witnessed this are lying.
Please understandad one thing. There is something called propaganda it is used to stifle accurate information and fuel zanu friendly information.
During an earlier genocidal venture like this (in Matebeleland), any ordinary citizen who said the truth about what was happening was charged with treason.
I am not surprised at all if mugabe and his people are using hutus or anybody else. They have been to the great lakes region on military so called peace keeping operations, I’m sure they saw what could benefit them if a similar situaution arose in their country. Learn this one thing, they are clutching on to power at all costs.
To the extent of treating their own people in a dehumanised and atrociuos manner. Rape, mutilation, torture, beatings, burnings, on ordinary citizens, unarmed is cowardly and disgraceful. And you Shame think reports about this are a western ploy. What a shame!!
You may be hutu yourself and might have taken offence to what some of your kinsmen have suddenly been turned into, which is a shame!!
July 15th, 2008 22:09
Like Sok I also felt completely chilled on reading this. Although the report I saw came from Harare Tribune which I don’t really trust as a news source, it has the ring of truth.
When not hand wringing over Zimbabwe, I’m a psychologist by occupation, and from that viewpoint have been wondering about these extremely gruesome acts of torture, which can only occur when in the eyes of the perpetrator, the victim has been completely dehumanised.
Ghastly as the alcohol fuelled, morally lost Green Bombers and Zimbabwean paramilitaries may be, it seems much more likely from a psychological perspective that these acts are being carried out or at least initiated by foreign mercenaries.
I am not saying that all Hutus or any other group are bloodthirsty and barbarous. You have to look at the history: how these particular individuals came to carry out such acts in their own country, their sense of frustration and rage at being driven out, their involvement as mercenaries in other conflicts and much else. It is so much easier to see a victim of another ethnic or language group as non-human than one who speaks your own language, even if you hate what that person stand for. Such perpetrators will carry out their acts with the unemotional savage efficiency of Roman soldiers crucifying Jewish dissidents!
It would be very dangerous, but if it is possible to obtain proof of these foreigners being involved in torture camps, or of material Chinese support for the Zimbabwe military, that is the kind of information that might finally inspire the moribund institutions of the AU, SADC and UN to react, if anything can. Certainly it would cause a fresh torrent of outrage, including in South Africa and make it clear to anyone in ZANU PF who still has a conscience, that criminal prosecution is inevitable for those who collude.
July 16th, 2008 02:14
We hear various people justifying their inactions by saying that if we do the wrong thing it could end up in a civil war. Perhaps those people can explain what there is about the current situation that distinguishes it from a war.
I remember the previous war, and it really wasn’t that different except that then there were two groups of people bullying the rural populace into accepting their authority, rather than one.
July 17th, 2008 08:15
Before the international community acts they need to see more deaths, more mutilated bodies, preferably floating in the Zambezi and Limpopo. The truth of the matter is they will not act soon enough. Even when the hired mercenaries are proven to exist they will first deliberate on the validity of the evidence etc. How many will be traumatised by what they have seen by then? How many people will have died by then? Died of the various reasons why people in Zimbabwe die everyday. The life expectancy is 37years currently and this is not because of the mercenaries. This situation has not been acceptable for a long time now. Proving the presence of mercenaries will not accelerate anything. Zimbabweans we need to defend ourselves, no one will in a long time yet. How far does this have to go?
July 17th, 2008 22:20
Mugabe must go. Just seen this site http://www.MugabeGo.com
Some hard vibes there!