Zimbabwe

Lord Avebury Excerpts

Thursday 10th March 2011 Lords Chamber

Moved By

[Lord Avebury]

To call attention to the situation in Zimbabwe; and to move for Papers.

[Lord Avebury]

My Lords, the last time we had a full-scale debate on Zimbabwe was in June 2010 at the instigation of the noble Lord, Lord St John of Bletso, who I am glad to see in his place. I am looking forward very much to hearing what he has to say. The debate before that was two years ago, just before the global political agreement was signed, and yet the global political agreement is still very largely unimplemented, and progress towards its most essential objectives has been painfully slow. The Constitution Parliamentary Select Committee has told President Zuma, the SADC facilitator, that it aims to have a draft of the constitution ready for approval by 30 September, but at the same time it complained that lack of resources has been hampering its work. The chairman of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission—ZEC—says that it cannot begin to work on the electoral register until it is provided with $20 million needed to carry out the operation. He estimates that another $200 million is required for the referendum on the new constitution and that the same amount is required for the national elections to be conducted on the cleaned-up register.

The backdrop to the looming election is the crescendo of political violence by ZANU-PF and the security forces against the opposition coupled with total impunity for the perpetrators, as detailed in a hard-hitting report from Human Rights Watch that was published earlier this week. Here, the coalition Government have announced that we are increasing our aid to Zimbabwe to £100 million a year to encourage fair elections and other reforms. The EU is spending €90 million on humanitarian aid in support of the key reforms of the GPA to promote an environment conducive to a general election. Presumably, the depoliticisation of the ZEC secretariat and staff must precede the collection of names for the electoral roll, but is that built in to the rules for the disbursement of aid? Will my noble friend say what we in the European Union are doing to combat the false allegation by the Justice Minister, Patrick Chinamasa, that sanctions are to blame for the underfunding of the electoral commission? This is being echoed in newspaper advertisements in Zimbabwe carrying ZANU-PF and government logos that claim:

“Sanctions are an attack on our health, on the education of our children, on our social services and our infrastructure”.

This message gets picked up elsewhere in Africa. Have our embassies been instructed to explain to their host countries the truth that humanitarian aid is not affected by sanctions and that they bite on only 163 individuals and 31 businesses that are involved in human rights abuses and anti-democratic activities?

On 15 February, the second anniversary of the GPA, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai listed, not for the first time, his requirements for free and fair elections. He wants a new biometric voters’ roll, a stable and secure environment, a credible electoral body with a non-partisan secretariat, a non-partisan public media, security sector reform and a new constitution approved by a referendum. The need for a new list of electors was underlined just now by the ZEC finding that 27 per cent of the names on the existing list are of dead people.

There cannot be a free and fair election before these key milestones are achieved, the Prime Minister said, because, under the GPA, ZANU-PF has no power to hold an election without the consent of the other political parties. Obviously, they will agree only when the provisions of the GPA have been implemented. That position has been reiterated just now by SADC. They will also not allow elections to be held under the conditions that exist at the moment and without the substantial reforms that we expect from the GPA.

The three party leaders have just reiterated their commitment to the 24 principles of the GPA but that was exactly what they did last August, with ZANU-PF insisting that implementation should be concurrent with the lifting of sanctions. Is that still the position and what has been done to try and persuade ZANU-PF to lift that condition so that we can get on with the implementation of the entire GPA? Will my noble friend confirm that the US, EU and UK have no intention of lifting sanctions until substantial progress has been made towards full implementation? Will he also say that none of our $100 million-worth of aid will be dispersed until the sections of the agreement that were due in the first month are set in motion?

The Prime Minister wants a timetable based on the attainment of specific objectives with no dates attached. That seems to be the view of President Zuma, the SADC facilitator. Mr Zuma’s immediate concern is for an end to the politically motivated violence, as he demanded on a visit to Harare last month. The response since then has been more arrests, the torture of detainees and the denial of access to more than 50 political activists in custody by their lawyers and doctors. Nine of them, including MDC MP Munyaradzi Gwisai, face trumped-up charges of treason, which of course attracts the death penalty. Their lawyer reports that they have been severely tortured and are held incommunicado on charges of watching a video of the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Only yesterday, police disrupted a human rights workshop being held in a church and arrested the two co-chairs of the session. This morning, Elton Mangoma, the MDC Deputy Treasurer-General and Minister of Energy and Power Development, was picked up by three plainclothes police officers at his government offices, the Chaminuka building. Is SADC keeping a record of these events and reporting them to the African Union? Mr Mangoma is a member of the MDC negotiating team on the GPA and also co-chairman of the Joint Monitoring and Implementation Committee for the GPA, so this could be a particularly serious development.

Remembering the extreme violence at the 2008 election run-off, which led to the withdrawal of the MDC after they had been solidly ahead on the first round, do President Zuma and SADC have a fallback plan if their warnings about the urgent need to curb the ZANU-PF armed gangs and security forces are ignored? Without security sector reform, there is no chance that they would refrain from manipulating the electoral register and intimidating opposition candidates and voters. Has SADC considered enlisting the AU, its co-guarantors of the GPA, to bring extra pressure on ZANU-PF on this objective?

In our previous debate, there was some discussion about how the Commonwealth might be enlisted. Even though Zimbabwe is no longer a member of the Commonwealth, there might be an agreement to welcome it back into the fold if it performs on the GPA. Would my noble friend consider whether the Commonwealth might have that important role, of course with the consent of SADC?

Mugabe and his party want a polling day this summer, no doubt fearful that at any moment his failing health will mean that he has to step aside. In between visits to Singapore for surgery, he finally met the other party leaders on 25 February and agreed to start implementing the GPA in accordance with the implementation matrix they had already adopted in August 2010. Have we any reason to assume that that agreement will go ahead this time when the August one was in fact a dead letter?

I turn now to the prodigiously lucrative Marange diamond fields, said to be the largest in the world and of which some 97 per cent are under the direct control of the military. The remaining 3 per cent was assigned to two companies granted their concessions without a tender process, both closely associated with ZANU-PF and military commanders. Senior executives of one of the companies, Canadile, are being prosecuted for obtaining their concession by fraud and smuggling $100 million-worth of diamonds into Mozambique so that they were not taxed. The frontier with Mozambique is still wide open to illegal exports sponsored by the military, as people at Global Witness told me when I spoke to them last week. We have some leverage with Mozambique, a major recipient of aid. Could we help it put an end to this traffic?

Leakage of revenue also seems to occur at ministerial level. Finance Minister Tendai Biti said a month ago that more than $100 million generated from recent diamond sales had not been accounted for. His ministry had been given a schedule from the office of President Mugabe listing a total of $170 million said to have been transferred to the Treasury by the Minerals Marketing Corporation of Zimbabwe, but in fact it received only $64 million. Mr Biti said he had asked the Accountant-General to investigate the destination of the missing millions, to which the Minister for Mines immediately said that he had no right or power to hold such an inquiry. If there has to be an alternative, one obvious choice would have been the KP monitor, Mr Abbey Chikane, but his betrayal of confidential discussions with Farai Maguwu, head of the Centre for Research and Development, the most effective human rights campaigner in Marange, ruled him out. Ironically, Mr Maguwu has now been chosen by the civil society organisations to head the technical team of the local focal point for the Kimberley process. Could SADC be asked to suggest an independent accountant to resolve the difference between Mines Minister Mpofu and Finance Minister Tendai Biti, and to recommend measures that will fully identify the amounts of money received and by whom they are now held?

This Kimberley process mechanism is responsible for overseeing the certification of rough diamonds as produced in an area free from conflict or human rights abuses. Even though the military is now firmly in control of the region, ITN reports that extrajudicial killings and major human rights abuses are continuing. That is confirmed by the recent Human Rights Watch report that I have already mentioned. There is an even greater likelihood that money from the three auctions held last year was siphoned off by the generals. Two of the auctions were held under the supervision of the Kimberley process but a third was not. It came to light only when Mugabe announced that $250 million from that sale would be used to pay the arrears of civil servants’ salaries. Last week, Mr Tsvangirai said that diamond sales had generated $300 million revenue so far and that the money would be used to reduce foreign debt. As Mr Biti said, there is no accountability for the moneys being generated by these operations. Zimbabweans are not allowed to know what sums were raised in each of the three auctions. Does the lack of transparency not make it easier for the crooks in government to dip not just their fingers but their whole arms in the till?

The EU still occupies the chair of the Kimberley process Working Group on Monitoring, which is supposed to assess the effectiveness of monitoring. Yet when the KP plenary in November 2010 broke up without reaching agreement on what to do about the Marange diamonds, the KP monitor, Abbey Chikane, made a quick dash to Zimbabwe where he certified the whole stockpile of 3.9 million carats, worth some $160 million.

The KP chair issued a notice to members not to trade in Marange diamonds pending consultations on how Zimbabwe could bring its operations into compliance with KP rules. But amendments were agreed that would make it harder to secure investigation of human rights in the area, and it was to be no longer required that individual parcels of diamonds be certified. Even with those concessions, the Mines Minister said last Friday that Zimbabwe had not agreed to the light-touch KP guidelines that would allow Marange diamonds to be sold on the world market. The Mines Minister defiantly told Voice of America that the Government objected to any reference to human rights and that they would continue to sell diamonds regardless of whether the sales were authorised by the KP. It is as if they had decided to withdraw altogether from the KP, to avoid oversight that would reveal official theft of the proceeds that belong to the people. What does that mean for Zimbabwe diamond sales? Will lower prices have to be accepted because the sales will not be KP-authorised?

This is a make or break moment for the people of Zimbabwe. SADC and the AU, as guarantors of the GPA, could “do the right thing”, as Mr Tsvangirai puts it, and tell Mugabe that if elections are held without any of the reforms that were agreed two years ago, they would not be endorsed as free and fair, and any Government who came into office through such a process would not be accepted as the legitimate voice of the people. If on the other hand the elections are postponed until after the promised reforms are implemented, there will be a brilliant future ahead for Zimbabwe and its people. Like the Prime Minister, we have confidence in President Zuma and his team, and the EU should stand by to offer them any help we can provide.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Avebury]

My Lords, it only remains for me to congratulate, as all your Lordships have done, the noble Lord, Lord Dannatt, on his brilliant maiden speech based on 40 years of experience, much of which was concerned with the rights of people and how they obtain them. He gave several examples from Northern Ireland and more came from East Timor where, ultimately, the people were successful. The same can happen in Zimbabwe. We hope to hear from the noble Lord again, not only on this subject but on the many other conflicts that plague the world.

I also thank my noble friend the Minister for giving his usual thorough and careful reply to the many speeches that your Lordships have made. I endorse the picture that has been presented almost unanimously of a state of affairs where there is an increasing degree of violence, which stems from the top. It comes from ZANU-PF, and not only from the militias but from the security forces of the state which they control. If one message comes out from this debate, it is that we must insist on security sector reform as one of the earliest things that you do before you get to the rest of the conditions that are laid down in the GPA, such as the rights to freedom of expression and assembly mentioned by my noble friend Lady Bonham-Carter.

It is horrifying to think—as my noble friend Lord Chidgey and the noble Baroness, Lady Kinnock, said—that they are already deploying tens of thousands of militia all over the country in preparation for attacks on the MDC and disruption of the preparations that the opposition are making for the election. Once this process is on site and working, we can never expect people to be able to cast their vote in a free and fair election. I, too, join the Minister in hoping that what your Lordships have said this afternoon will gain a wider audience.

I make the more general point that we as a country need to ensure that the people of Zimbabwe know that we are definitely committed to a much higher level of aid over the years—the Minister mentioned this—which is conditional on the performance of the undertakings which the parties have already agreed. All they have to do is to go forward on that basis and large amounts of help will come, certainly from Britain, and from the European Union and the United States. Zimbabwe can look forward to a rosy future not only with the aid that she will get from the rest of the world but with the regularisation of the sale of Marange diamonds. I am not so sure that I share my noble friend’s optimism on this because the Minister of Mines has ruled out any commitment by Zimbabwe to taking part in the KP. That is a separate issue which will have to be tackled very seriously by those who are in charge, including the EU chair of the monitoring process.

However, faint signs of hope have been identified. The parties have agreed to enter the timed programme for implementation of the GPA. We shall know in a few weeks whether it is possible for progress to be made that will enable the European Union and other friends of Zimbabwe to play a much larger role in promoting and arriving at the democratic elections that they all want to see. I beg leave to withdraw the Motion.

Motion withdrawn.