One would have assumed that the tumultuous chorus that this week accompanied the proposed formation of a human rights commission in Zimbabwe was a response to a presidential decree that any person found without a Zanu-PF membership card would be flogged at two-hourly intervals in a public square.
All that Minister of Justice Patrick Chinamasa was announcing was the setting up of a body that would receive, investigate and redress any complaints that are human-rights related.
Instead of the universal applause Chinamasa was yearning for, he had to plug his ears as the divided opposition, Movement for Democratic Change, and civic group the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) threatened to engage in all-terrain warfare. Morgan Tsvangirai’s new secretary general, Tendai Biti, called the commission ”much ado about nothing” and railed against ”piecemeal amendments to the Constitution”.
The combative chairperson of the NCA, Lovemore Madhuku, said it would take the government ”head on over the matter, in the streets and in the courts”, if it is not consulted about setting up the commission.
”You can have a perfect human rights commission but as long as you have a watered-down Bill of Rights then it is of no use,” pointed out Biti, who is a practising lawyer.
”If you have a regime that does not have respect for human rights, that has a culture of impunity, you may have a million human rights commissions but that won’t ensure and guarantee human rights.”
South Africa-based human rights lawyer Daniel Molokele described the project as a ”welcome idea”, but stressed that ”it should not come as a government process”. He is nonetheless keen that it ”should be done under the broader framework of constitutional reform”.
The commission has not only attracted a feisty comeback, but also a stodgy response from the bureaucrats at the United Nations. Its Harare resident coordinator, Agostinho Zacarias, weighed in: ”The [United Nations Country Team] remains committed and has pledged that it would provide the need [sic] support it can, technical or otherwise, for the establishment of such an independent human rights body.”
But displeasure managed to filter through all the sieves of diplomatic speak. ”We are also confident that the government of Zimbabwe’s commitment to the establishment of a National Human Rights Commission will be carried out through a process of consultation with all relevant stakeholders,” Zacarias said in a statement.
The commission would be the custodian of human rights and would position Zimbabwe as a paragon of protecting rights and distinguish it from its hitherto soul mates such as Swaziland, North Korea, Belarus and Ethiopia.
But then again, the announcement of the body came hard on the heels of the introduction of legislation intended to legalise the interception of e-mails and bugging of telephones and in the same week that information filtered through of the Suppression of Foreign and International Terrorism Bill. If passed into law, the terrorism Bill would make one of Robert Mugabe’s arch-opponents, United States President George W Bush, chuckle in spite of himself. He would identify in the Southern African leader, ideological quarrels aside, a kindred spirit.