Zimbabwe

This post originally appeared on Change.org's Human Rights blog.

The Obama administration rolled out an impressive full afternoon event last week at the State Department, headlined by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, which was very clearly designed to win over an audience of 300+ Africa specialists.

If the sampling of people I spoke to there were representative of the larger group, and I believe they were, there’s a sense of disappointment about President Obama’s limited engagement with the continent. Some pundits, like the New Yorker’s George Packer, point out, “Obama never placed democracy and human rights at the center of his foreign policy.” But President Obama’s well-regarded speech in Ghana last year certainly raised these expectations.

However, the briefing didn’t alleviate these concerns about the Obama administration’s follow-through, at least not on the conflict mitigation/prevention front.

Among my colleagues at the Enough Project and our partner organizations working on some of the most egregious human rights abuses, there is a particular frustration about the Obama administration’s hesitancy to criticize or use pressure to influence some of the continent’s most repressive leaders. Certainly after the policies of the Bush administration, the trend toward humility and respectful engagement is refreshing. But where’s the red line? So far, the Obama administration has been shockingly tolerant of backsliding on human rights issues and disrespect for democratic values, seemingly favoring policies that maintain the status quo rather than push for bold reforms.

Take the volatile Horn of Africa, for instance. The United States has good relations with most governments in the region, which is a useful diplomatic tool. But as Somalia expert Professor Ken Menkhaus aptly pointed out at a House subcommittee hearing recently, many of these governments are despised by their own people. The United States risks undermining the renewed good graces that the Obama administration ushered in if the U.S. government doesn’t using its leverage to push these “partners” to reign in corruption, address impunity rampant among security forces, allow press to report freely without fear of retribution. (I could list specific countries for each of these abuses, but this paragraph would get awfully long.)

Click here to continue reading.

Photo: Billboard honoring President Obama in Ghana (AP)

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• Africa
• Darfur and Southern Sudan
• Eastern Chad
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• Prevention
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• Somalia
• War Crimes
• Zimbabwe

Here at Enough, we often swap emails with interesting articles and feature stories that we come across in our favorite publications and on our favorite websites. We wanted to share some of these stories with you as part of our effort to keep you up to date on what you need to know in the world of anti-genocide and crimes against humanity work.

An even less talked about humanitarian crisis brewing as a result of violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (this time not in the east) comes to life in this BBC slideshow. Fighting in the northwest corner of Congo beginning last October has forced an estimated 100,000 people across the river into the Republic of Congo in just a few short months.

Stunning photographs make this post on the International Rescue Committee’s Voices from the Field a standout of the week. A film crew captured footage among urban refugee communities in Kenya’s capital for an upcoming short film, and this glimpse suggests that it will be visually spectacular film and challenge typical notions of what it means to be a ‘refugee.’

The IRC’s blog also highlighted the benefits of a community-centered program, Tuungane (Swahili for “let’s unite”), in communities in eastern Congo that allocates money to villages according to the projects the villagers themselves decide they want to pursue. Peter Biro’s photos help illustrate the stories of some of the individuals impacted by the program.

In the upcoming print edition of Newsweek, Joshua Kurlantzick of the Council on Foreign Relations offers a dismal overview of governments’ lack of interest in human rights these days: “Obama's waffling [on human rights issues] was hardly unique. Across Europe, Asia, and Latin America, many democracies have abandoned global human-rights advocacy, trotting it out only for occasional speeches or events like International Human Rights Day.” Kurlantzick suggests some (equally depressing but interesting) reasons why the case may be.

An investigative piece by Colum Lynch of the newly launched Turtle Bay blog at Foreign Policy reveals some quiet lobbying on behalf of the notorious military junta leader of Guinea, who stands accused of orchestrating the mass atrocities that took place in the Guinean capital during a peaceful protest last September. The legal advice came from a surprising source.

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• Zimbabwe

The plight of 17 million refugees and internally displaced persons in Africa, or IDPs, are finally receiving the attention of African of states—or at least five of them. Thursday marked the beginning of the two-day special African Union summit, convened by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, that aims to ratify the Convention on the Protection and Assistance of the Displaced People in Africa. The treaty is the first of its kind to address the issue of IDPs on a continent-wide level and would legally bind participating countries to its provisions.

According to AFP, the draft convention calls for the prevention of forced displacement protection of refugees and the internally displaced, helping victims of conflicts and natural disasters, and providing assistance to IDPs with special needs. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon commended these efforts.

Given the occasion, here’s a quick look at the IDP and refugee situations in Enough’s conflict areas, citing figures from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.

Sudan: 4.9 million IDPs, 397,013 refugees

Aside from having the world’s largest number of displaced people, about 250,000 people were displaced from South Sudan due to violence in 2009. The large number of Sudanese refugees over the border in Chad is also a huge humanitarian concern; a recent Amnesty International report details the alarming use of violence against refugee women.

Democratic Republic of Congo: 2 million IDPs, 367,995 refugees

During the first six months of 2009 alone, more than 800,000 people were displaced in eastern DRC—the highest rate of newly displaced in the world. These displacements are among the “catastrophic” civilian costs of a United Nations-backed Congolese military operation launched this year. Click here to read Enough's latest strategy paper on the situation.

Uganda: 710,000 IDPs, 7,548 refugees

Two-thirds of the 1.8 million people who were displaced at the height of hostilities between the Ugandan government and the Lord’s Resistance Army, have returned. However, challenges remain to ensure that returnees have access to basic services.

Somalia: 1.3 million IDPs, 559,153 refugees

After his mission to Somalia, Walter Kaelin, Representative of the U.N. Secretary General on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons, concluded that the international community has failed displaced Somalis.

He said, “Existing humanitarian aid is pitifully insufficient compared to the needs of the displaced who often face severe protection risks and marginalization.”

Photo: Displaced by fighting, people arrive at a camp in eastern Congo. (Enough/Laura Heaton)

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• Zimbabwe

Yet another MDC activist was brutally murdered last week, bringing the month’s number of victims killed in apparently politically motivated attacks to at least four. According to the Movement for Democratic Change, Godknows Dzoro Mtshakazi, 33, was drinking beer with some friends and playing a well-known MDC party song called “Nharembozha” (meaning “Cellphone”) when four soldiers from a nearby base began harassing them, asking them why they were playing the song. Accusing the group of spreading hatred in the neighborhood, the soldiers proceeded to accost many people in the bar.

Godknows died of his wounds, which a spokesperson for his family said included burns. Some of the other victims were so severely injured that they had to seek treatment at a nearby hospital

The other MDC activists who were recently murdered, Edwin Chingami, Joseph Munyuki, and Noel Denias, were all attacked by known ZANU-PF supporters, reminding followers of the deep, and potentially violent, political divisions that rumble just beneath the surface as Zimbabwe attempts to work towards unity.

• Zimbabwe

South African President Jacob Zuma is set to head to Zimbabwe this week for the first time since he was inaugurated in May. Zuma will be in the capital, Harare, on Thursday to participate in the opening ceremonies of a farm trade show. However, what he will or will not say about Zimbabwe’s continually fragile unity government remains the real question.

A report from IRIN underscores the tension between MDC and ZANU-PF officials regarding the purpose of Zuma’s visit. President Mugabe’s spokesman George Charamba recently noted, “President Jacob Zuma is coming here to officially open the agricultural show and not to resolve the MDC's issues.” However MDC officials emphasized their belief that Zuma “will hold deliberations with the three principals [in the unity government]."

In the first months of his presidency, Zuma seemed to look inward instead of outward and did not actively engage with Zimbabwe’s political stalemate. Comparatively, Zuma’s predecessor, Thabo Mbeki, almost single handedly dragged parties to the negotiating table and basically forced them into signing last October’s Global Peace Agreement, or GPA, which led to the creation of Zimbabwe’s unity government.

However, recently President Zuma has certainly stepped up his game vis-à-vis Zimbabwe. Zuma met with Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai in Johannasburg last month and promised to engage with Zimbabwe’s crisis. Furthermore, Zimbabwe sat atop Zuma’s agenda with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when she visited South Africa during her recently completed Africa trip. South Africa has a keen interest in stopping any re-ignition of intense violence in Zimbabwe, especially in the run up to the World Cup next summer, which must be seen as a coming-out party of sorts for southern Africa.

Zuma carries enormous leverage in Zimbabwe, and South Africa is far and away Zimbabwe’s largest trading partner. As fissures within the Zimbabwean government remain, corruption continues to rage, and disturbing reports of paramilitary training in Zimbabwe’s rural areas increase, there is no time like the present for South African leadership to help Zimbabwe navigate the treacherous road toward stability.

• Zimbabwe

Here at Enough, we often swap emails with interesting articles and feature stories that we come across in our favorite publications and on our favorite websites. We wanted to share some of these stories with you as part of our effort to keep you up to date on what you need to know in the world of anti-genocide and crimes against humanity work.

If you weren’t following Secretary Clinton’s every move during her 11-day, 7-country trip to Africa, the Christian Science Monitor put together this valuable map and narration of the messages the secretary delivered at each stop, complete with colorful icons to represent each of the primary nine themes she emphasized. (HT to Michael Wilkerson at FP Passport)

A series of photographs from photojournalist Stuart Price offers an insider's look at Darfur from the perspective of a peacekeeper. Price spent 13 months embedded with UNAMID troops, capturing some remarkable shots from the frontline.

A distressing report about the conditions for Chinese-employed workers in Congo appeared this week on McClatchy, emphasizing the difficult position that many laborers find themselves in when they have to choose between working in abdominal conditions or having a job at all. “The weakness of our government, for the Chinese, represents a business opportunity," said Jean-Pierre Okemba of the Congolese watchdog group Action Against Impunity for Human Rights, who was quoted in the article. The Chinese ambassador to Congo unwittingly validated these concerns: “The Chinese government's position is very clear: Every Chinese company working overseas must strictly follow the laws of the country it works in. I have confidence in the Congolese authorities to regulate their activities."

The New York Times published an insightful article today about former fighters in Burundi who are making their way to eastern Congo to fight alongside their Hutu brethren in the FDLR. Even though the fighters agreed to disarm under a program targeting former Burundian rebels in the aftermath of the civil war there that ended in 2005, many are finding compelling reasons to travel to Congo to take up arms in the bush again. A key quote:

But for his disarmament package, [the former Burundian rebel] said he was given $41 and a frying pan, while the Hutu rebels in Congo dangle promises of up to $500 cash. “With money like that,” he said, “it’s easy for them to find people."

An excellent video posted on The Hub back in May (but which we discovered and circulated in the office this week… which sort of counts) features the stories of four Zimbabwean women who were targeted for their political affiliation and abducted by state-sanctioned groups, ending up in secret torture centers where they were raped. They have bravely come forward to share their experiences and demand justice for the more than 2,000 women and girls believed to have fallen victim to these tactics.

The Enough Team contributed to this post.

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• Zimbabwe

In Zimbabwe political unity suffered another blow yesterday when Zimbabwean police officials arrested 10 parliamentarians who are members of Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement of Democratic Change. The officials were arrested while visiting a senior official within the finance ministry, which is a notoriously corrupt stronghold of Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF.

Reuters reported that those arrested were at the office attempting to investigate the current status of MP allowances as well as a vehicle loan scheme. Tafadzwa Mugabe, the lawyer for those detained told AFP that the officials were “detained for causing disturbances at the offices belonging to the permanent secretary at the ministry of finance.” The MPs were released but the charges against them remain.

While the details of the circumstances surrounding the arrests are unclear, the possible political motivations behind them seem hard to ignore. Throughout the summer, MDC politicians have been arrested without proper cause by police forces controlled by Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party. Continued harassment of the MDC underscores the fragility of the political situation in Zimbabwe, where a tenuous unity government attempts to lurch forward with reforms in the midst of continued rampant corruption.

Writing for the New York Times, Celia Dugger noted that many MDC party members believe these arrests are connected to the country’s nascent constitutional process. Currently, the MDC has a small majority inside the Zimbabwean parliament and arrests of MDC parliamentarians have put that majority in jeopardy throughout the summer. The insinuation then, of course, is that ZANU-PF officials might be attempting to put themselves back in the majority as negotiations begin in parliament. This latest case illustrates in stark terms the difficulty of attempting to cultivate lasting change through a power sharing arrangement  in which so many intransigent and unpalatable characters still have jobs.

• Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe’s political stalemate will sits atop Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s agenda in South Africa later this week, where she is set to meet with South African President Jacob Zuma. The situation in Zimbabwe in the run up to that meeting remains precarious, as politically motivated arrests (Amnesty International reports today on the arrest of four student leaders, HT to reader Eliane D.)  and corruption continues despite recent victories for a free press inside the country.

Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai met President Zuma in Johannesburg earlier this week. During the meeting, Tsvangirai reportedly discussed Mugabe’s continued intransigence and unwillingness to implement key provisions of last year’s Global Political Agreement, or GPA, and Zuma promised to follow up with President Mugabe directly. Zuma thus far has been less interested than his predecessor Thabo Mbeki – who, through South African leadership in Southern African Development Community, or SADC, was instrumental in the drafting and signing of the Global Political Agreement last year – in engaging with the situation in Harare. And while it is disappointing that Zuma has rejected calls from MDC officials to convene a formal SADC inquiry into the current Zimbabwe situation, his recent attention and follow up is a useful step.

Amid the corruption that abounds inside the government of national unity, however, have been a series of steps forward. As my colleague Katherine noted last week, the government has officially allowed BBC and CNN’s to report from inside the country. This is a promising step for a country with a brutal history of squashing press freedoms, but it comes at the same time as a spate of arrests underscore the Zimbabwe’s political repression.

In recent weeks, so many MDC politicians have been arrested that the party is at risk of losing its majority in Parliament. In one bizarre incident, Thamsanqa Mahlangu, the deputy youth minister, was arrested under allegations that he had stolen the cell phone of a ZANU-PF official, who had left the device on a table during the lunch break of a conference in Harare. Police apprehended another MDC official for several hours this week for playing an “anti Mugabe” song. Reports note that despite charges being dropped for both men, “Eight MDC MPs, seven members of the house of assembly and a senator, are facing charges carrying potential prison sentences of more than six months which would mean suspension from parliament.”

Furthermore, confusion abounds after the reported death of 86 year-old Zimbabwean Vice President Joseph Msika, a close ally of Mugabe. Reports indicated that officials within the government attempted to withhold news of his death from the media, and while the reasons behind the purposeful confusion remain unknown, it’s not far fetched to assume political infighting of some sort lies at the heart of the matter.

• Clinton goes to Africa
• Zimbabwe

A positive development in Zimbabwe this week when the government announced that after eight years, the BBC and CNN can now freely report from within the country. This breakthrough was the result of a series of meetings between the two broadcasting companies and senior government officials, including Zimbabwe’s Minister of Media, Information, and Publicity Webster Shamu.

This change in status is particularly significant for the BBC, which has had an especially tense relationship with the Zimbabwean government. Since its banning in 2001, BBC reporters have risked harassment and arrest by sneaking into Zimbabwe to report illegally. In a statement Minister Shamu noted that he and the BBC “acknowledged the need to put behind us the mutually ruinous relationship of the past.” Echoing those sentiments, the BBC world news editor, Jon Williams remarked, “we are pleased we have been able to reach an agreement and we look forward to being able to operate legally in Zimbabwe.”

Williams added that the government had placed no restrictions upon what the BBC could report on, and that it was considering whether or not it would open a full bureau in the country. In a post on a BBC blog, Williams concluded, “our presence in Zimbabwe this week, is a welcome, constructive, and important first step.” We would agree. In a country where the government has long sought to tightly control the world’s access to the ‘truth,’ this development is a positive sign that perhaps Zimbabwe is taking some tentative steps towards transparency and democracy.

Click here to read or here to watch the BBC’s Andrew Harding’s first official reports from Zimbabwe.

• Zimbabwe

Sourcing and tracing the movement of arms and munitions is difficult but crucial detail-oriented business. In a paper published last week by the Belgium-based International Peace Information Service, Brain Johnson-Thomas and Peter Danssaert argue in favor of ratifying the international Arms Trade Treaty, which would consolidate existing international law against arms trafficking and make it easier to prosecute people and organizations that funnel arms across borders. The paper highlights a series of illuminating case studies on Zimbabwean arms transfers from the past 18 months. The authors argue that these cases could be better combated if the treaty were ratified. The paper is short and to the point, its evidence is well-documented, and it makes a compelling argument in favor of an Arms Trade Treaty that would “require States to strictly regulate arms brokering, transport, and finance,” thus better enabling countries to combat the traffic in small arms.

The paper considers three case studies of arms movement in and out of Zimbabwe, including last April’s “ship of shame affair,” a deal brokered to allow weapons to flow from China to Zimbabwe. A second case study focuses on the movement of weapons and weapon parts from Zimbabwe to Montenegro and the United States this winter.

Danssaert and Johnson-Thomas also provide concrete evidence that entities within the Democratic Republic of the Congo provided Zimbabwe with several ammunitions shipments amounting to at least 53 tons during an eight-day period in 2008. The paper cites the most recent U.N. Group of Experts report, which called Congolese stockpile management “nonexistent” and noted, “The Government does not know how many of its arms are stored at which depots and with which units.” The case provides yet another stark reminder of the practical result of the Congolese government’s inability to control its army: a sizeable influx of weapons to a Zimbabwean regime willing to take drastic measures to maintain power and exploit its country’s resources for its own good.

• Zimbabwe