Revelations that South Africa attempted to stop a Southern African Development Community (SADC) judicial delegation, declaring the mission ‘unnecessary”, have resulted in confusion about the country’s approach to the upcoming election in Zimbabwe.
The legal team was meant to precede and inform a broader SADC observer mission. On Sunday President Thabo Mbeki told the SABC that Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe had assured him the team would be welcome.
‘I’ve discussed the matter with President Mugabe, I am quite sure that the SADC delegation can go to Zimbabwe,” he said. ‘I think that we should send in a SADC delegation as quickly as is possible — not to go there and observe, but to be able to intervene to help to create the situation for free and fair elections.”
But Beeld on Thursday revealed that a Foreign Affairs director, Jessie Duarte, had written to the SADC secretariat to stop the lawyers’ mission, which was supposed to visit Zimbabwe to inspect access to the body’s electoral protocols.
The letter asked that ‘the issue of the legal experts’ visit should not be followed up” and stated that the matter had been discussed ‘at the highest level” in South Africa.
The protocols agreed to by all member states last August were held up as a benchmark to ensure free and fair elections across the region, but especially in Zimbabwe.
The delegation was meant to ensure that Zimbabwe was keeping to its pledge that there would be independent electoral institutions, freedom of assembly and association, and freedom of the media in the run-up to the March 31 poll.
In January the African National Congress criticised the absence of freedom of assembly when it complained publicly that the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) was not able to hold meetings. Secretary General Kgalema Motlanthe’s statement was read as a U-turn in South Africa’s policy of quiet diplomacy towards Zimbabwe, but Duarte’s letter to the SADC secretariat has sown confusion.
This week Minister of Foreign Affairs Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said she was cautiously optimistic about changes in Zimbabwe. Her optimism was fuelled by the fact that the Zimbabwean government had passed a set of laws to set up independent electoral institutions; and that MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai had said that political violence was abating.
But, on Wednesday, police arrested MDC elections director Ian Makone and ordered the party’s 120 constituency candidates, who had gathered for a briefing, to disband or face arrest.
The attempt to forestall the legal mission may be an effort to ensure that Zimbabwe allows in the official SADC election observer mission to oversee the poll. While SADC protocols recommend that this observer mission is accredited 90 days prior to the election, Zimbabwe has not, as yet, invited the mission. ‘If we are not invited we will be very concerned,” said Dlamini-Zuma this week. ‘We were hoping the invitation would materialise by the end of last week. We have not been told we couldn’t come.”
South Africa will not send a separate team to observe the election but will form part of the larger regional observer team, providing it is invited.
Zimbabwe also cancelled a scheduled visit in January by Mbeki, Lesotho Prime Minister Phakalitha Mosisili and former Namibian president Sam Nujoma, ostensibly because Mugabe was preparing for the elections.
Meanwhile, Wisani wa ka Ngobeni reports that South Africa’s National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) may have been quietly assisting the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague to probe human rights abuses in Zimbabwe. The Mail & Guardian has ascertained key aspects of the ICC’s probe from documents and sources.
The NPA’s 2003/04 annual report said that: ‘Requests have been received from the chief prosecutor [of the ICC] to look into possible human rights abuses in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zimbabwe”.
The report says that former national director of public prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka and Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the ICC chief prosecutor met in January 2004 to discuss the probe.
It also says Moreno-Ocampo met members of the NPA priority crimes litigation unit, set up by the government two years ago, to ensure compliance with the Rome Statute established by the ICC.
As a signatory to the Rome Statute, South Africa is obliged to cooperate with the ICC, which was set up in 1998, to prosecute people accused of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity (such as torture and rape) that were committed after July 2002.
The ICC this week said it has “no jurisdiction in Zimbabwe”, which has not ratified the Rome Statute.