SADC members meet on Friday to approve a regional security initiative, but their action has been criticised by human rights organisations. Iden Wetherell reports
A SUMMIT of Southern African Development Community (SADC) heads of state meeting on Friday in Gaborone to launch a regional security partnership has provoked protests over the omission of earlier proposals for a human rights monitoring mechanism.
SADC leaders are meeting in a special session to approve long-mooted plans for an Organ on Politics, Defence and Security to co-ordinate security matters among member-states. Acceptance of the new structure had originally been scheduled for August in Maseru, where non-governmental organisations (NGOs) had planned to lobby for inclusion of machinery designed to protect human rights.
But concern about the deteriorating political situation in Zambia has led to Friday’s meeting — where NGOs fear adoption of the new organ is likely to be rushed through.
Amnesty International is leading a chorus of protests that SADC leaders, while paying lip service to human rights in the organ’s objectives, have at the same time excluded any concrete measures for human rights monitoring.
Amnesty research officer Casey Kelso has mobilised NGOs throughout the region to lobby heads of state and government officials ahead of Friday’s meeting.
“A unified NGO voice on the organ proposal might be able to make human rights a priority for SADC, even at this late stage,” Kelso said.
A joint statement by regional NGOs said instability in the region resulted not from the breakdown of law and order, inter-state conflict or external aggression as stated in the proposed organ’s objectives, but from the repression of human rights and freedoms by governments and armed opposition movements.
It also said: “We regret that recommendations for human rights institutions resulting from the 1994 workshop on democracy, peace and security, held in Windhoek, Namibia, appear to have been dropped from the organ proposal…
“We equally regret the lack of any consultation with Southern African civil society, including non- governmental organisations, in the discussions about the design, creation and implementation of this organ to be adopted at this week’s summit. In developing the proposed organ, SADC appears to have made a serious departure from the meaningful dialogue and genuine partnership with civil society which characterised the 1994 Windhoek resolutions.”
SADC’s Windhoek resolutions, endorsed by NGOs, proposed a SADC mechanism on democracy, peace and security that would have included a human rights commission with machinery to safeguard existing human rights.
This initiative was a response to Zimbabwe’s proposal for an Association of Southern African States (as an SADC “sector” where a single member state takes responsibility for its co-ordination).
Zimbabwe’s proposal was abandoned after SADC countries expressed concern about such a powerful agency being located in Harare under President Robert Mugabe’s exclusive jurisdiction. Attempts to revive Mugabe’s proposal at the SADC summit in Johannesburg last September were unsuccessful.
The current proposal for an organ, rather than a sector, means it would function independently of other SADC structures and have a chairmanship rotating among member countries on an annual basis. Mugabe, who is believed to have called today’s meeting, is likely to be a candidate for the first chairmanship.
The NGOs called on the heads of state meeting to “make sure that human rights considerations are a clear component of any intervention by a collective security capacity” and that sufficient resources — – both in financing and in human expertise — be afforded to the human rights component of the organ when established, “so that it can effectively carry out the human rights dimension of the organ’s objectives, that is monitoring human rights in an early warning system, promoting and protecting human rights among SADC member states and ensuring a human rights component in any SADC intervention”.