More on Mugabe

I sit here in the comfort of my living room with a coffee and having read the newspaper and being grateful for the good fortune to have been born in a peaceful country and to be living comfortably in another. I read the morning paper online to the news that Mugabe receives welcomes and hugs at an African Summit after the sham of the latest election.

I have met several people from Zimbabwe who have come to New Zealand having lost pretty much everything, who constantly live in fear for friends and family that didn’t have the wherewithall to leave or refused to leave their homes that they spent their lives building. It is impossible to imagine what it is like in Zim right now. Mugabe has engineered another election and is of course the victor. South Africa which fought for the rights of coloured and black people seems to be torn with the fact that Mugabe kicked out white people and that he is now having people beaten, tortured and killed for trying to use their free will.

President Bush and others including our Prime Minister Helen Clark are calling for sanctions. The problem is that weapons supplied to Mugabe’s regime come from China and other countries such as South Africa and they are unlikely to cease this lucratuive trade, although how he manages to pay for them in a country that is essentially bankrupt, beats me. The people of Zimbabwe are worried that they will now be tomorrow’s news and will be forgotten. China has also refused to deny Zimbabwe’s attendance at the Olympic Games, which is understandable having been the subject of boycotts and ‘political intereference’ themselves in the past and they don’t have a great track record when it comes to human rights.

Many people painted their fingers red or deliberately invalidated their votes to avoid voting for Mugabe. There are stories that the Zanu PF were out in force with a project they called ‘Show Me Your Thumb‘ and beating those who hadn’t voted. There are now rumours that voting lists have been obtained by the Zanu PF thugs which will be used to punish those who did not vote for Mugabe.

So what happens next? In my humble opinion, the result of boycotts and sanctions will simply make the situation in ZImbabwe more desperate. More people will die and the country will be washed in rivers of blood followed by disease and starvation while Mugabe languishes in his oppulence. There won’t be much to save before long.

I’ve asked the question before, why do people rush into Iraq to ‘save the people’ and not into Zimbabwe. I know the answer is oil. Come on world, lets not sit back and watch this continue. I challenge the people of the United States, the most powerful country in the world. You, who managed to leave your countries for a better world, who said, “we must not forget” after World War ll. New Zealand, as always will play our part, but we don’t have the might to do more than condemn and send in a few supporting Peace Keepers. We are after all a country smaller than many of your cities. We played our part to bring down Apartheid but this needs worldwide support. This sort of despot should not continue to play his games with the lives of human beings.

Final question. How does he manage to travel the world with impunity? Why is it that an ‘accident’ doesn’t happen to him? Is there a reason that his presence is tolerated? Am I missing something?

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The Zimbabwe Election Result

Is it just me? Why is it that when there is a perversion of democracy in some countries, the US and other nations march in and take over to protect the people, for example Iraq, and in other cases such as Zimbabwe, nothing is going to happen until it is a total disaster. In my blog last month, I was largely focussing on the technology angle, where people were using technology such as SMS to get information out of the country. The exercise raised my awareness of the problems over there and this morning a story in the NZ Herald told of a South African Jounalist who was arrested and spent 3 days in jail for being in Zimbabwe without accreditation.

I was pleased to see that Condoleezza Rice came out on Friday criticising South Africa for not taking a more positive stand and it is fair that they should start looking there. Could it be that ZA is taking a soft position because the black people have thrown the white people out? I did see on TV recently that there were many black refugees who had crossed the border and were biding their time in South Africa hoping that eventually the tide would turn and it would once again be safe to return to their homes, or what is left of them.

Of course my bent is on technology and oe of the things I love about the modern Internet environment is that it makes it very difficult to totally censor information. There are countless ways to get information out of a country despite political interference. In the old days journalists had to smuggle film and other documents over the border at great personal risk. Today there are mobile phones, satellite phones and many other ways of getting information out.

There are also great ways to use technology to show information and one of these is the Google Mash Up. The Zimbabwe Civic Action Support Group have devised a web site which shows information spatially information about ‘election conditions’ where you can see the sites of incidents and through pop up windows read information about them. Even for someone who has never been there, this gives a much more real perspective of what is happening over there.

There are also countless blogs coming out of the country, giving details from organisations as well as heart wrenching diaries from individuals.

SMS continues to play a major part and a recent article in CIO Magazine shows an innovative way that an SMS Hib has been used to not only help share information with the people through subscription phone lists, but also to help promote democracy and political participation by encouraging people to say what they would like the country to be like after the election.

Something that also stands out in the human psyche of oppressed people is their ability to laugh and joke about their position. I think this performs a number of functions, one it is a passive form of protest, but it is also a coping mechanism. It appears that SMS is frequently used in Zimbabwe to share these jokes. An example is a text message passed from one person to the next like:

“We would like to apologise to the nation for the late release of the presidential results. This is due to the rigging process, which is proving to be more difficult that we had anticipated.”

This interesting concept is explored by Mobile Active a global network focussed on the use of mobile technology for positive purposes.

The mobile phone continues to have an amazing impact on society that was never envisaged when it was first developed as a business tool. They are enabling knowledge sharing in ways that are providing freedom of expression and information sharing and making the world a much smaller place. There was a time that people could enforce their wishes on minorities in less developed countries with impunity and noone would be any the wiser. Today it is all but impossible to censor people and something uttered from a hidden room in Harare can be heard all over the world microseconds later. If only we could get the powers who profess to support democracy and freedom for all people, regardless of race, creed or gender, to act before any more innocent people are injured and killed and people’s lives and livelihoods are destroyed forever.