The United States Department of State has listed Zimbabwe among the worst dictatorships in the world that trample on human rights and whose rulers are accountable to no one.
In its 2005 Human Rights Country Report, made available to ZimOnline on Thursday, the department grouped Zimbabwe among some of the world’s most notorious dictatorships, such as the reclusive communist state of North Korea, Burma, Iran, Cuba, Belarus and China.
“In Zimbabwe, the government maintained a steady assault on human dignity and basic freedoms, tightening its hold on civil society and human-rights NGOs, and manipulating the March parliamentary elections,” the department said.
But officials in Harare rejected criticism from the US, saying the world’s sole superpower was itself guilty of trampling on the rights of weaker nations and of the black section of its population.
Zimbabwe State Security Minister Didymus Mutasa said Washington had caused an illegal war in Iraq and continued unlawfully occupying that country. The Zimbabwean official also accused President George Bush of having “looked aside while blacks were being swept to death by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans “.
Zimbabwe rejects criticism of its controversial policies by the US and other Western nations, who it accuses of mounting a global campaign to demonise it as punishment for seizing land from white farmers for redistribution to landless blacks.
The US, European Union, Switzerland, Australia and New Zealand have imposed targeted sanctions against President Robert Mugabe and his officials for allegedly stealing elections, failure to uphold human rights and the rule of law, and also seizing privately white-owned farms without paying compensation.
The state department said the Harare government has continued to defy pressure on it to embrace democracy and has instead continued persecuting political opponents and forcibly shutting down critical newspapers.
It said: “The Zimbabwean government arrested persons who criticised President Mugabe, harassed and arbitrarily detained journalists, closed independent newspapers, forcibly dispersed demonstrators, and arrested and detained opposition leaders and their supporters.”
The department also criticised Mugabe’s government for amending Zimbabwe’s constitution to virtually nationalise all farmland by banning citizens from contesting in court the seizure of their property by the state.
Washington said Harare’s controversial urban clean-up campaign last year had further weakened and strained Zimbabwe’s limping economy.
At least 700 000 people were left without homes and means of livelihood after the government demolished shantytowns and informal business kiosks in an urban-renewal drive that Mugabe said was necessary to smash crime and restore the beauty of Zimbabwe’s cities and towns.
Another 2,4-million people were said to have been indirectly affected by the slum-clearing exercise, according to a report by the United Nations.
Zimbabwe is in the grip of a severe economic crisis that has spawned shortages of food, fuel, electricity, essential medical drugs and just about every basic survival commodity.
Critics blame the crisis on repression and incorrect policies by Mugabe, especially his farm-seizure programme that destabilised the mainstay agricultural sector, causing a 60% drop in food production.
Mugabe, in power since Zimbabwe’s independence from Britain 25 years ago, denies ruining the country’s economy, and instead blames its problems on sabotage by Western nations opposed to his seizure of land from whites for redistribution to landless blacks. — ZimOnline