Zimbabwe

Lord Avebury Excerpts

Thursday 10th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Avebury]

My Lords, we are all grateful to the noble Lord, Lord St John, for giving us an opportunity of hearing what the policies of the Government are on Zimbabwe. One point which the noble Lord, Lord Hughes, may have missed in the coalition programme is that:

“We want to strengthen the Commonwealth as a focus for promoting democratic values and development”,

and that the aid budget will be used,

“to support … local democratic institutions, civil society groups, the media and enterprise; and … efforts to tackle corruption”.

That sentence could have been written with Zimbabwe in mind and I hope that it gives some comfort to the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, who wants the Commonwealth to be more involved in solving these problems.

It remains to be shown what value could be added by the Commonwealth per se to the work of the Friends, which is an organisation that includes richer Commonwealth states and SADC, the body of neighbours led by South Africa. Surely they must continue to exert the main political influence needed to accelerate progress towards full implementation of the global political agreement. With all its flaws, if the GPA was honoured by ZANU-PF, it would be an enormous improvement on its present arbitrary exercise of power, with the active collaboration of the military.

As my right honourable friend the Member for Gordon said when introducing the report of the International Development Committee in another place recently,

“violence and intimidation, bad government and destruction of the economy have forced millions of people to leave Zimbabwe”.

We have heard about the 3 million who are refugees in South Africa. He continued:

“Many others have been displaced from their homes and are now refugees in their own country”.

The Zimbabwe Peace Project recorded an increase to nearly 1,000 incidents of politically motivated violence in April, many of them related to the constitution-making process, which had been stalled but should now move ahead as the EU has provided $6 million towards the funding of local consultations throughout the country on the details. What guarantee do we have that the people will be able to express their views freely and that ZANU-PF will not attempt to manipulate the outcome by threats and intimidation? Is there a timetable for the process, and will the referendum be monitored by the United Nations? If there are clear divisions of opinion on contentious issues, will people be offered choices in the referendum? The noble Lord, Lord St John, said that hardliners were already doing their best to frustrate the process. I look forward to hearing what the Minister says about the safeguards against that.

The Select Committee says that two models are being considered: the Kariba draft, which gives the President substantial executive powers and a more “people-driven” approach called for by civil society. The committee wants DfID to provide more information about the support that it is giving, jointly with other donors, to the constitution-drafting process. I presume that that would be via the multi-donor trust fund administered by the African Development Bank with support from the World Bank. The Friends’ meeting last week pledged to increase this fund, but reiterated its concern over the,

“lack of respect for the rule of law, protection of fundamental freedoms and the slow pace of progress in improving governance”.

What amount of additional funding is being made available? Do specific benchmarks have to be satisfied before the disbursements are approved? The referendum on the new constitution would be a possible trigger for releasing some of the purse-strings, particularly if the associated Bill of Rights addresses crimes committed by Mugabe such as the forcible eviction and internal displacement of 700,000 poor people in Operation Murambatsvina—“clean out the trash”—five years ago and the displacement of an additional 36,000 people at the time of the election in 2008. The African Union called on member states at a meeting in Addis Ababa last week to ratify the AU convention on internally displaced people. It would be useful to know whether there has been any response from Harare.

As has been said, we miss Lord Blaker from these debates, remembering that, as his obituary in the Times said,

“it was his clear conviction that the causes of peace and democracy required a muscular approach”.

That certainly applies to my late friend Lady Park as well. We miss both of them in these debates. If we soft-pedal on human rights—and if the donors fail to make aid to the Government, as opposed to aid to the Prime Minister’s office and to NGOs, conditional on rectifying the gross abuses of the Mugabe years—we would jeopardise even the few advances already achieved. They include, as has been mentioned, the licensing of free newspapers and the establishment of the Human Rights Commission, sworn in at the end of March. Let us remember also that Mugabe has failed to honour benchmarks in the past, such as those in the Cotonou agreement between the ACP Group of States and the European Union. So there needs to be a period of compliance, not just a signature, to test the good faith of ZANU-PF. We certainly should not trust an Administration who are as susceptible to influence of the military as are the current regime, and the talks between the MDC and ZANU-PF should be expanded to cover this problem.

The Friends urged Zimbabwe to,

“adopt IMF policy recommendations and move towards establishment of an IMF staff-monitored program as a step toward forgiveness or rescheduling of US $7.2 billion external debt”.

Does this mean full budgetary transparency and therefore an end to shady ventures such as the exploitation of the lucrative diamond fields at Marange, which were operated originally by a UK-registered company, African Consolidated Resources, until its lease was arbitrarily cancelled in 2006? They are now controlled by the military and high-ups in ZANU-PF, at enormous cost to human rights in the region, as the noble Lord, Lord St John, said. ACR won a court case to recover possession, but it has been unable to enforce the judgment. The Supreme Court ordered that mining activities cease and that diamonds in the possession of the state entity that annexed the mine in 2006 be handed over to the Reserve Bank pending its judgment on the claim. Has that happened and, if not, what measures can be taken to enforce the Supreme Court’s judgment? Meanwhile, the Kimberley process monitor, Abbey Chikane, paid a further visit to Zimbabwe at the end of May, and has reported his findings in quick time. He sees only what ZANU-PF and the army want him to see, and one would never guess from his report that uncertified diamonds are flooding across into Mozambique. However, he confirms that enormous diamond resources are at stake.

As an aside, I ask the noble Lord, Lord Howell, whether the Government have taken note of the allegations by the arrested Zimbabwe diamond researcher, Farai Maguwu, who alleged on SW Radio Africa that he was set up by the Kimberley process monitor. He has now abandoned his post as director of the Centre for Research and Development, which had been investigating human rights abuses at the Chiadzwa diamond field. What steps can we take to investigate these allegations and, if possible, to get Mr Farai Maguwu restored to his important post so he can continue his investigations of the abuses in the diamond fields?

The Finance Minister, Tendai Biti, acknowledged in a Reuters interview on 25 May that, while the dispute with ACR remained unresolved, it cast a shadow over diamond mining, the one immediate prospect of rescuing Zimbabwe's fragile economy from bankruptcy. Yet he added that the legal process would be a long one. It has been estimated that if Marange was regularised, it could generate as much as $200 million a month in revenue, so why do the Government not settle? The answer is that, as the Times reported, this is one of the last cash lifelines of Mugabe and his cohorts and they are determined to amass as big a fortune as possible before the boss dies. But that is all the more reason for donors to insist that the High Court's ruling be upheld, and that the ZANU-PF criminals who committed 200 murders, and beat and tortured locals, including children, to act as their slave labour in the Marange fields, are brought to justice.

When the Secretary of State visited Zimbabwe last September he said that,

“once Zimbabwe is on a clear path to democracy and the rule of law, then a Conservative government will lead the Commonwealth and the international community in a development programme to galvanise Zimbabwe’s private sector to rebuild and rehabilitate that beleaguered country”.

He went on to promise that the UK would help refurbish and redevelop Zimbabwe's 7,000 schools, employing local plumbers, builders and electricians. We are not quite there yet, but the people of Zimbabwe can see that in the UK they have a staunch and generous friend. It was so under the previous Government and the coalition is equally determined that, whatever our own economic difficulties may be here at home, we shall never let them down.