A person is a person through others – especially in Zimbabwe

I spent a great deal of time yesterday, on International Human Rights day, thinking about Jestina Mukoko. I sat down and wrote a post paying tribute on this special day to all our human rights defenders. Just before I was finished late last night, I checked my email. Someone had forwarded me an email they’d received from a Facebook group they had joined. This was the exact text, sent widely to all the other Facebook members of that group:

Subject: Latest on dumped body

“I have talked to Fambai Ngirande of NANGO and the Lawyer Beatrice Mutetwa and they have dispatched a team to go to the scene. We must pray for all activists abducted and keep hope alive”

From that moment on I was compulsively checking and re-checking my email, wondering if what I would be writing instead was the one thing we all dread. It was not long before my friend forwarded me a second email:

Subject: ITS NOT JESTINA

“JM’s lawyers say its not her, but another unidentified woman, we are still concerned about the body count who ever it is. The body is still there.”

It took me a split second after the initial surge of relief to register that someone else’s loved one had died: who is it? Or was it a poor soul, desperately sick from cholera, who died somewhere alone. I felt wiped out. My head struggling to hold the contradictory, guilt-inducing feelings of relief, confusion and trying to make sense of it all, and also find a way forwards.

So the post I wrote last night went unposted.

What I was stuck thinking about instead was how my initial rush of relief had given weight to a comment made by a friend on the weekend: “Lots of other people have been abducted too”, she said. “Why does Jestina matter more than the rest?”

The inference my friend had drawn from the huge outcry was that because Jestina is high-profile and well-known, her life counts in a way others don’t.

My response to my friend was, “But how did you KNOW that fifteen people disappeared over a month ago?”

It was only then that it dawned on her that it was because of people just like Jestina Mukoko, and the work they do for Zimbabweans, that the world knows how horrifically many Zimbabweans have been treated. Jestina Mukoko matters a great deal – all our human rights defenders matter a great deal – because what they do is so critically important for all us.

It isn’t so much that she matters more than the rest of us; rather, its because of what she does that the rest of us matter at all.

I don’t know who that woman was whose body was found, and I may never know. But I am sure that there are people just like Jestina who will be trying hard right now to give this person a name, to find her family, to carefully record what happened if what happened to her was the product of evil cruelty rather than natural causes. When that woman has a name, and her story is told, she may have a chance of justice.

The work of our human rights defenders is a loud defiant yell that says “How dare you!” over and over again, their commitment to truth and justice for the rest of us is a firm: “Damn it! Zimbabweans matter”.

We should hold our human rights defenders close, thank them, and protect them in their hour of need with the same commitment, passion and dedication that they would do for us.

I do not believe for a second that the people working in the front line of defending our human rights would ever think that they were more significant than the people they stand in defense of. I think they recognise that the work they do is about all of us equally, about building a community and a society and future we can believe in, feel safe in, and dare to dream in. Human Rights is about equality.

You only need to think of the circumstances of Jestina’s abduction to know how grotesque and perverted the concept of justice has become in Zimbabwe.

The police have denied that they are holding her but apparently they didn’t even go to her home to find out what had happened – you would think the police would turn out in full force to defend a civilian who was ripped from her home, wearing just a nightdress and without her medication or her glasses. Instead lawyers needed to go to court and first try persuade a judge to even hear the case  (no one wanted to do so because the case was too ‘hot’). Then the judge had to issue a judgement ordering the police to look for her, and the state media to flight adverts about her disappearance.

I can’t imagine what would happen in any other country in the world if the same abduction had happened to a civilian. How would the police and the media in South Africa, or Australia, or the UK, etc, react if a single mother was abducted at gunpoint from her home by fifteen men?

In Zimbabwe, fifteen men with guns can walk into a home and force a mother to leave and it takes a court order to ask the police to do their job.

This is ignoring the fact that the outcry and condemnation after her disappearance wasn’t enough to make our rancid government-junta think twice about going on to abduct three more people (I’m not going to bother with the word ‘allegedly’ here – we all know the crowd of people behind this!)

It makes me wonder what their underlying motivation is behind all of this. How desperate are they? What have they got planned next for the rest of us that they need our ‘defenders’ to be disappeared? Or are they so confident that SADC will turn a blind eye that they just do what they like, and get away with it.

There is little certainty about anything in Zimbabwe these days, but I can tell you one thing for sure: without the human rights defenders just like Jestina, we can be one hundred percent certain that justice would never happen at all, and that the truth would never be told.

To all our human rights defenders – I promise that I will do what I can to ‘watch your backs’.

Ubuntu: “A person is a person through others”. That has so much more meaning when dealing with a country and a government that thinks humans don’t matter at all, and with human rights defenders who work at the coal-face of terror and tyranny.

I also want to say thank you.

Please continue spreading the word – install the widget -  and please visit this page and do what you can to fight for those who fight for us.

This entry was posted by Hope on Thursday, December 11th, 2008 at 1:53 pm. You can follow any comments on this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.