A little hopeful today … but still very frightened for the people of Zimbabwe

I haven’t seen the full report yet but I am daring to hope that at last an organisation that Mugabe will find difficult to ignore has come out and criticised his actions against all of us. Thank you Anna Tibaijuka for your United Nations report.

I was hopeful, but fearful of this report - and I am still holding my breath in case the full version softens the truthful force of the executive summary. We have had betrayal after betrayal after betrayal by Mugabe apologists - like the South African government at election time, or the AU just before the G8 - and the disappointment is unbearable each and every time. I didn’t know if this report would try and pretend that things weren’t too bad in Zimbabwe and step into the murky dark underworld of African patronage and ’silent diplomacy’.

This gives us hope. If the truth is finally told it will support the real experience of ordinary Zimbabwean people and place us at the centre of our country’s future where we belong instead of Mugabe and his band of cruel and evil thugs.

I want
to hear Mugabe describe this report as a ‘western fabrication’. I want to see if Thabo Mbeki can find a way to claim that this report exists only because ‘white people’ are being affected. I want to hear how the AU is going to back track from its position that it won’t criticise Mugabe.

Mugabe got his copy of the report on Wednesday. How could he, knowing the critical nature of the document, go ahead and allow night time raids on that very same evening? Raids against frightened children and their desperately poor families sheltering in churches, frogmarching them against their will into overcrowded ‘holding camps’? Why do this under the cover of darkness? Why would the police then forbid church leaders from having access to the people they’ve been helping by barring them from the holding camps? What are they trying to hide in there?

I can’t help think of history and how dictators have tried to cover their tracks and conceal evidence when things started getting a bit hot. I don’t know what’s happening to the people in the holding camps? Why is it so important that people are locked away, out of the sight of good people and honest witnesses? What’s happening?

I hope this report means that the world is watching. Please watch very carefully. I hope that nations are ready to protect us from any danger that might occur when the Zanu-PF monster goes into a death throes.

Africa, Zimbabwe, Mugabe, Human Rights, United Nations, Refugees