Imperialism in judicial robes.

The Sunday Mail

AFRICAN FOCUS By Tafataona P. Mahoso

Constitutional Amendment Number 17 of the Constitution of Zimbabwe is the only paragraph, the only recognition in our supreme law, which accepts (grudgingly) that the people of Zimbabwe did demand and did achieve a popular revolution overturning the 100-year-old regime of white racist land theft and colonial land tenure.

But the misnamed African Commission on Human and People’s Rights (ACHPR), a donor-funded and highly infiltrated outfit of the African Union — which harbours pretensions to become the supreme court for the whole of Africa — has just ruled it is competent to put the Zimbabwe land revolution on trial and to entertain the former white land thieves with their supporting clans of Tshombe and Judas as legitimate complainants against Amendment Number 17 for the purpose of forcing its repeal. The ACHPR has ruled that Communication 321 of 2006 is acceptable to it and will be heard, that is against Constitutional Amendment Number 17 of 2007. In other words, where the Parliament of Zimbabwe, the Government of Zimbabwe, the three parties in the inter-party agreement, and the overwhelming majority of the people of this land have all agreed that the indigenous land revolution should never be reversed, the ACHPR has ruled that it is willing to hear a case which is premised on the assumption that the white land thieves or white recipients of African stolen land over the last hundred years have the right to go to an “African court” and reverse the African land revolution.
For the purpose of agreeing to hear the white settlers’ challenge to Amendment 17, the ACHPR accepted the following allegations as sound:
l That the legal profession and their NGO supporters in and outside Zimbabwe publicly opposed Amend-ment Number 17 when it was still a Bill in July 2005;
l That it is wrong to allow the popular interests and demands by the African majority to reclaim their stolen land to produce an amendment which bars the courts from deciding land acquisition and resettlement;
l That Constitutional Amendment Number 17 “will and has been applied” to fix past imbalances, and that fixing past imbalances on behalf of Africans is against “the principles of international human rights law”;
l In Amendment Number 17, it is not popular demand and popular interests which barred the courts from dealing with land acquisition and resettlement; rather it is just the whim of the executive branch of Government and this amendment “permits the same executive” to indulge in legislative excesses which might lead to the breakdown of “the rule of law” in all areas and throughout the country;
l That the amendment discourages the former land thieves and the lawyers and NGOs supporting them from taking land grievances to the courts and that is a bad thing;
l That, although the amendment was made specifically to deal with land acquisition and resettlement, in future it could “lead to a complete removal of jurisdiction of the courts of Zimbabwe” which would precipitate a complete breakdown of the rule of law and the withdrawal of legal protection for all Zimbabweans.
Before dealing with the meaning of the allegations levelled against Zimbabwe and Amendment Number 17, let us look at the ACHPR’s reasons for agreeing to hear the case.
On face value the allegations show a genuine case of violations of the African Charter for Human and People’s Rights;
Although none of the NGOs and associations who brought the case to the ACHPR lost land, the commission has chosen to adopt the position of popular judicial activism “giving everyone with an interest to protect human rights in Africa the capacity to file a Communication for the” ACHPR to consider. In this case, the executives of the Law Society of Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, Sadc Lawyers Association, East African Law Society, Bar Council of South Africa, Swaziland Law Society, Law Association of Zambia, Law Society of Lesotho, Zanzibar Law Society and others — all enjoyed legitimate standing to bring this case before the ACHPR by virtue of their expression of interest in human rights in general and not because Amendment Number 17 prejudiced or injured them or their members in any way;
It is an established tradition of the ACHPR that human rights NGOs are global citizens without borders, so that in the case of Zimbabwe’s land resettlement, the complaining organisation “need not be a national or registered body within the borders of the accused country”. Therefore the rights of those who have been classified by the commission as human rights defenders, if they are defending white people, are considered to be borderless and superior to those of the African victims of colonial mass dispossession and displacement.
Finally, the commission gave as a reason for accepting the case the white settlers’ allegation that Amendment Number 17 deprived whites of all and any domestic remedy. This, of course, is a lie both in terms of the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of Zimbabwe over “human rights” and in terms of resettlement. A white farmer occupying land acquired for resettlement can apply to be resettled just like any other citizen. The real reason why the whites may not want to be resettled by the same State is that the programme makes whites equal with the once dispossessed Africans and that the resettled whites cannot get the same hectarage of land or multiple farms they once had before the revolution.
Africa’s Neo-colonial Shells Begging for Imperial Funding and White Racist Content
Readers may have watched ZTV’s Melting Pot programme on June 15 2010 which featured Mr Davidson Gomo of the Affirmative Action Group against Sydney Chisi of Crisis Coalition Zimbabwe. The subject was the struggle to certify Zimbabwe’s diamonds at Chiadzwa with the Kimberley Process.
One incident in that programme is relevant to the reader’s understanding of what is happening at the so-called African Commission and what is happening in Zimbabwe: Sydney Chisi confessed that in 2001 Crisis Coalition Zimbabwe was set up because of two developments: the remobilisation of war veterans and peasants in support of the popular indigenous land reclamation movement, and the success of Sadc forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo against the combined Ugandan-Rwandan invasion of that country, which had precipitated genocide and looting.
Chisi, in that June 15 programme, opposed the certification of the Chiadzwa diamonds allegedly on behalf of local human rights NGOs, but his remark about the creation of Crisis Coalition in 2001 revealed a foreign agenda which the host of the programme failed to unmask: Where did the funds come from to start a new NGO to be called Crisis Coalition Zimbabwe? What native Zimbabwean interests set up an NGO to oppose the popular indigenous land reclamation movement and to prevent Sadc from ending the foreign-sponsored genocide and looting of the DRC?
Since Chisi was once again opposing the certification and sale of Chiadzwa diamonds, what popular constituency in Zimbabwe was he and his NGO representing this time? What exactly was the strategic interest linking land reclamation, the repelling an invasion of DRC, and the indigenous exploitation of Chiadzwa diamonds?
It is no coincidence that the same donors who are funding Zimbabwe’s constitution-making process today are the same ones which are funding the NGOs seeking to repeal Amendment Number 17 and to deny Zimbabwe the certification of its Chiadzwa diamonds under Kimberly Process while at the same time using go-betweens to buy those very same diamonds which they condemn as “bold diamonds” through the Press. The ACHPR has never taken any interest in exposing this diabolic role of the donors because it is also donor-funded. The OAU passed the resolution to write a human rights charter for Africa in Monrovia, Liberia, in 1979. The draft African Charter on Human and People's Rights was adopted in Kenya in 1981. At that time the African Charter was praised for appearing to elevate the popular collective interest of the African majority above individual and procedural rights or at least to elevate popular and collective rights to the same status as individual rights.
But three factors soon overturned that apparent uniqueness of the African Charter:
l The idea of popular collective rights remained on paper but it was abandoned in setting up procedures which made individual rights superior to collective rights and NGOs superior to governments and whole societies.
l The OAU (now the AU) did not have a budget for its commission when the enabling protocol was adopted and opened for signature in Burkina Faso in June 1998. This opened the commission to external inducement, manipulation and infiltration by Western donors.
l The original intention of the OAU heads of state and government was to create a real African Charter and African Commission, but the content has become more and more Roman-Dutch and Anglo-American because of the initial entrenchment the legal traditions of the major powers and cultures that colonised Africa, the prior Euro-centric training of all the judges appointed to the commission, and the deliberate campaign by the same Western powers to make the European and the Inter-American Charters superior to the African Charter by using sponsorship to retrain most African lawyers and judges through various short courses, seminars and conferences.
A closer look at that system which has given us “activists” such as Sydney Chisi, Farai Muguwu and Jestina Mukoko reveals that foreign donors are free:
l To sponsor the super court or commission at the continental level of the AU;
l To train, retrain and sponsor the judges who sit in that super commission or court;
l To pay the lawyers who in each African country prepare, coach and defend the alleged victims of human rights abuses who will appeal at the right time to the same super commission or court sponsored by the same donor;
l To sponsor and pay for the coaching of the necessary witnesses who will write to the same sponsored super court or commission in support of the alleged victim who is also sponsored by the same donors;
l To sponsor, train, retrain and otherwise offer incentives to journalists who publicise the alleged victims’ case at home and abroad; and, finally,
l To sponsor and publicise the dubious international prizes and awards to be given periodically to the lawyers, journalists, complainants and others willing to participate in this grand corruption of Africa and African people. Younger readers may wonder about the reference to the clans of Tshombe. Tshombe was the disposable African stooge who together with Joseph Mobutu betrayed and deposed the first elected Prime Minister of Congo, Patrice Lumumba, and took part in his assassination. Tshombe pretended to set up a break-away Katanga Republic which divided Congo and its people and provided a cover for the Belgians to detach and retain the mineral-rich territory from the rest of the country. After the crime of overthrowing Lumumba's government, assassinating Lumumba and his ministers and covering up the roles of Europeans and North Americans in the crime, Tshombe received a letter from the King of Belgium which shows clearly why to this day the name Tshombe remains a Pan-African epithet against traitors. This is what the white king wrote to Tshombe on March 13 1961:
“Dear President,
I would like to tell you how moved I was . . . The whole of Belgium and I myself are particularly aware of the loyalty you have always shown my country (Belgium) and me. Rest assured that I very much appreciate the wisdom with which you have governed Katanga in extremely difficult and delicate circumstances . . . Please accept, my dear President, the expression of my highest esteem.”
However, the Belgians used Tshombe and his break-away regime only for the purpose of getting rid of Lumumba and his nationalist government.
Once that was achieved, they also got rid of Tshombe and his regime for lack of long-term viability and legitimacy in the eyes of Africa.
They and the US and UK preferred Joseph Mobutu, whom they installed through more violence and assassinations. The only way the Western powers could overthrow and kill Lumumba was by using both Tshombe and Mobutu and they could not install
Mobutu without first getting rid of Lumumba. Tshombe was only a tool, just as the ACHPR and its hordes of NGOs are also tools in a global war of ideas.