Mon séjour en Afrique du Sud (Cape Town)

In 1992, an American civil society activist with the name Richard Holbrook witnessed the beginnings of a slaughter on a large scale of the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina by Serb soldiers and militia. He used every trick in the book to get the US and European governments to intervene, but that didn’t happen until late 1995.

By the time Holbrook eventually brokered a peace agreement in 1996, tens of thousands of people were dead and many thousands raped and brutalised.

In 1994 the head of the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda, General Romeo Dallaire, requested reinforcements and permission to be more pro-active when he received information that Hutu militants were preparing for a genocide of Tutsis. Both requests were denied, and instead his force was made smaller and eventually told to withdraw. He refused, but he could not prevent the slaughter of nearly a million people in just 100 days.

I was reminded of these events when I watched an excellent CNN documentary on the weekend, called Scream Bloody Murder.

Immediately after the documentary I switched to a disturbing special report by Sky News of the unfolding cholera tragedy in Zimbabwe. I knew the children I saw being laid out on makeshift beds would probably be dead before the day was out.

We are doing it again. We are again watching a people suffer and die in great numbers and we’re doing nothing. This time the shame is more on us South Africans than on anyone else.

By last night some 600 Zimbabweans were already died and about 14 000 infected with cholera. The World Health organisation says 30 000 people are likely to be infected in the next few days. The opposition politician David Coltart told a seminar on Zimbabwe in Cape Town on Tuesday night that he was told by doctors of Medicins Sans Frontieres that up to 1,4-million people could die if nothing drastic was done.

With the very high HIV-infection rate in Zimbabwe and severe food shortages and malnutrition, many people have little resistance to the cholera and die quickly. It is feared that the crisis could become a full-blown catastrophe once the rainy season starts, which could be any day now.

The failure is that of our former president, Thabo Mbeki; of his successor, Kgalema Motlanthe; of our minister of Foreign Affairs, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma; of the new leader of the ANC, Jacob Zuma; and of their counterparts in the governments of the other countries neighbouring Zimbabwe.

These are the people who have aided and abetted Robert Mugabe and reinstalled him as president of his country after he lost the elections almost 10 months ago. These are the people who are trying to force the man and party who won the elections, Morgan Tsvangirai and his Movement for Democratic Change, into an inferior position in a joint government with Mugabe as head of state.

The two men who spoke at this week’s Zimbabwe seminar organised by the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, Professor John Makumbe and Coltart, agreed with Tsvangirai’s often-stated position that any effort to effect regime change should be peaceful. This should be a sobering shot of cold water in the faces of those South African hotheads who are talking about uprisings and military solutions.

Both men said the chances of an uprising inside the country was highly unlikely, as the men who should be in the forefront of such an uprising are mostly living in Johannesburg and elsewhere in South Africa or Botswana.

Makumbe made it clear that the Zanu-PF army was utterly ruthless and would kill 50 000 people without blinking an eye. There are elements in the army, he said, who would easily turn Zimbabwe into the state that lawless Somalia is in today.

The solution is clearly that South Africa and SADC should adjust the agreement between Zanu-PF and the MDC to a workable solution reflecting the election results, and for that government to then govern with the full support of every state in the region – perhaps under the watchful eye of a permanent SADC or AU representative in Harare. If the ANC can develop the political will to act decisively in Zimbabwe, the rest of the SADC will follow.

But that debate is for tomorrow and next week. Today we have to do what we humanly can to stop more people from dying.

If South Africa had acted correctly during its liaison with Mugabe over the last decade, these people would not be dying. Their deaths are on our consciences.

I cannot see any other solution right now than to throw open our borders and to help anyone who wants to flee from hunger, disease and oppression to come to South Africa. Botswana, Mozambique and Zambia should do the same. There will be enough medical volunteers to help state and SANDF doctors to set up emergency field hospitals.

Desperate Zimbabweans are coming here anyway; we might as well decriminalise their migration and make a real difference to thousands of lives.