Repudiating the silence on Zimbabwe

Respect to Kader Asmal, former cabinet minister and senior ANC national executive council member. He has stood up and spoken out, publicly and strongly, against the Zimbabwean tyrant, Robert Mugabe, saying that he should have done so sooner. He also disputed the view that Zimbabweans must solve the crisis for themselves.

Our government has often asked, when defending its policy of “quiet diplomacy” towards Zimbabwe, what exactly critics expect it to do, as if the only alternative to “quiet diplomacy” is a full-scale invasion and regime change. There are many alternatives, and the least it can do to appear honourable on the subject is send a vocal message of condemnation of Mugabe’s depradations.

That said, the issue is a little more complex than it appears, since South Africa is hoping, as the last remaining bridge to Mugabe, to act as mediator in the Zimbabwean crisis. A mediator cannot be seen by either side to be favouring the other. So perhaps “quiet diplomacy” is justified in that sense.

But that shouldn’t prevent others from speaking out, as Kader Asmal has done.

The article, first published in the Cape Times, recounts the candid speech:

…it was Asmal’s mea culpa, that struck a chord with an audience that clearly appreciated the significance of a former South African Cabinet minister admitting in public that he had erred by remaining silent and had joined the campaign to assist the people of Zimbabwe. ….

“Why did I not speak before? I should have, I should have spoken as an internationalist who invoked international campaigning for apartheid South Africa” and was now speaking as a “proud citizen of a free South Africa who should have spoken out and campaigned against a regime which has brought Zimbabwe to its knees”.

The Martin Niemöller poem [pictured above] about the silence of German intellectuals following the Nazi rise to power, appeared to have influenced Asmal’s speech.

“Why do I speak now? I should have done so in the 1980s, when thousands of people were murdered by the infamous Fifth Brigade in Matabeleland. The Catholic Church did … I did not do so.

“Neither did I do so during Operation Murambatsvina, when those who want to retain power refer to their hapless fellow citizens as ’sh**s who have to be removed’.”

The so-called clean up campaign, which involved the Pol-potian destruction of houses, clinics, and businesses, left hundreds of thousands of Zimbabwean’s homeless, destitute and starving, Asmal said, referring to the murderous Cambodian regime of Pol Pot.

Asmal went on to say that “Pol Pot’s main henchmen are now being tried for crimes against humanity.”

I recently wrote about South Africa’s vote against a United Nations Security Council resolution to censure the Burmese military junta, which is now engaged in a bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protestors. I wondered what had happened to the conscience that drove South Africans to fight and conquer injustice in their own country. The heritage of the South African miracle appears to be weak, eroded, in the face of brutal state oppression elsewhere in the world.

So well done, Mr Asmal. May your courage to speak out signal a revival of a sense of liberty and justice among our leaders. May it encourage us all to speak out. May it be a catalyst for change. Lest a new poet has cause to write a tormented requiem on the cold granite of a memorial for Zimbabwe: a lament that when Niemöller finally did speak out, nobody heard him.