Speech by Senator David Coltart
Cambridge University
4 November 2009
It’s a rare honour for me to be able to address you tonight, and I’m very grateful to those who have made this possible. There are a few people and organisations I need to thank. Firstly, to the Cambridge Law Students Society because you have been the drivers of this and in particular Shantano Kampley who has been corresponding with me and has played a major role in pulling this off; to Becky Taylor, who initiated this and has done so much work behind the scenes; to the Taylor family, my old friends, who also made this possible; and to the other societies mentioned: POLIS, Amnesty International, The Geography Society and the Commonwealth Society. Thank you.
Zimbabwe, as we all know, has attracted an enormous amount of international publicity in the last decade for all the wrong reasons. It has become a negative brand. The brand Zimbabwe is associated with trauma, violence, corruption, rule by law rather than of law, and a variety of other negative connotations. And I think that – and those of you who know Zimbabwe will endorse what I say now – it is because it is a country that is so beautiful and with so much potential that its degeneration has been so much more poignant.
However, I think it is often the case that the complexities of a country’s political environment are often reduced by the international media to a very simple discourse that bears little relation to what is actually taking place in the country. This is particularly so regarding Zimbabwe and regarding an understanding of the human rights situation in Zimbabwe. If we look at the way the press in Britain has written about Zimbabwe in the last decade it has often simplified the issues down to land and race, and whilst those issues are indeed part of the Zimbabwean story, and are definitely relevant to this subject tonight, they are only part of the story. Unfortunately, this near obsession with land and race continues even today. I don’t know if any of you saw the recent interview conducted by Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s chief correspondent, with Robert Mugabe at the recent UN Summit. Those of you who saw it will understand what I mean when I say that she completely missed the point. CNN’s most experienced correspondent and commentator focused on the land issue and largely ignored what, in my mind at least, are the more fundamental human rights issues at play in Zimbabwe.
So what then are the issues? What is the current state of human rights in Zimbabwe? I cannot adequately answer that question without placing the current human rights abuses in their historical context. The obvious historical context is about land and race. It is a fact that Rhodesia was a fundamentally unjust and racist society; perhaps not as well defined as South Africa because the Rhodesian equivalent of Apartheid legislation wasn’t as ideologically pure as it was in South Africa, but it was there. Rhodesia was a racist nation and that legacy continues to haunt Zimbabwe. But I believe that Zimbabwe’s human rights problems have two other important strands that we can’t ignore.
The first is the culture of violence that pervades Zimbabwean Society. Zimbabwe’s history is dominated by violence. British settlers invaded in 1890 and used violence to subdue the indigenous population. There was out-right war against Lobengula which caused his subjugation and either violence or the threat of violence was then used by successive white minority governments to maintain white minority rule over a period of ninety years.
Zimbabwe, or rather what was then Southern Rhodesia, in the 1950s started to move towards a more democratic path, and the mid 1950s saw the advent of a more liberal government under Sir Garfield Todd. But unfortunately the opportunity of a gradualist approach towards majority rule was thrown out in 1958. We had a further opportunity in 1961 when consensus was reached regarding a new Constitution in Zimbabwe. Ironically, had the provisions of that Constitution been observed, Zimbabwe would have attained majority rule at about the same time that it was ultimately achieved through the barrel of a gun. Tragically for Zimbabwe the 1961 Constitution, although endorsed by moderates including Joshua Nkomo, was derailed by hardliners on both the left and the right. Ian Douglas Smith and the Rhodesian Front didn’t like its provisions because ultimately it entailed a transition to majority rule, and hardliners on the left under ZANU-PF rejected it because their view it didn’t bring about majority rule soon enough. This intransigence, primarily of the Rhodesian Front in the 1960s, resulted in the liberation struggle which started in earnest in 1973 and culminated in what I describe as a civil war which engulfed the entire nation and rooted this culture of violence deeply in the psyche of our nation.
Tragically, in 1980 that culture of violence didn’t end. We had a short honeymoon, and in January 1983 the south-west of the country was beset with violence once again. The so-called Gukurahundi, “the spring rain which cleans out the chaff of winterâ€, started at the hands of ZANU-PF using the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade to undermine Joshua Nkomo and his ZAPU Party. And that left the country with a further terrible legacy: A legacy of genocide – because that’s the only way that one can describe what happened between 1982 and 1987. A certain element of the population was targeted. If you were Ndebele and aged between 16 and 40 and had any connection to ZAPU, you were systematically identified and eliminated.
Tragically, when that period ended in 1987 with the signing of a Unity Accord between Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF Party and Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU Party, the hope of a new beginning was almost immediately frustrated by the passage of a Constitutional amendment which further entrenched the rule of ZANU-PF and ensured that the second theme that I will talk about in a moment, namely a culture of impunity, became even more deeply embedded in our society.
We had a period in the 1990s of a false honeymoon, a false dawn of democracy and transparency, when ZANU-PF had achieved its goal of establishing a de facto one-party state and started to tinker with democracy and open up a bit of political space. The business community bought it; swallowed it hook, line and sinker. Many of us in the human rights community had on-going concerns and were not happy even in the early 1990s of economic liberalisation. Our concern was that the foundations of our Constitution and our society had not changed and because of that there was the on-going chance that the violence that had beset the country in the 1970s and 1980s could come back. And that is what happened, as we all know, as has now been well documented, in 2000 when ZANU-PF suddenly realised that it was in deep trouble and when it turned on the new opposition, the MDC.
Since 2000, over 400 opposition activists have been murdered. Some of the worst abuses took place last year between March and June when we saw in many respects the same methods being used as had been employed in the 1980s: individuals being targeted for their political associations and assassinated in cold blood. In many respects the abuses of last year were some of the worst because they were so calculated. That period of human rights abuses ended with the signing of the GPA (the Global Political Agreement) in September, but that gives some of the history of the human rights abuses that have taken place.
So what is the current position regarding this culture of violence and the human rights situation? Well, since the signing of the Agreement in September last year there has  been a vast improvement in the human rights situation. There are still abuses but the incidences of disappearances and torture have dramatically reduced. There are of course ongoing human rights violations: the undertakings to open up the media have not been fully complied with, there are still breaches of the right to freedom of expression and the law is still being selectively applied. I have spoken about 400 murders that have taken place in the last 10 years, including the murder of one of my own campaigners, who was abducted at 4 o’clock in the afternoon in front of his wife and children by people we  know. His abductors have never been brought to justice. And that is but one case of hundreds. There has not been a single prosecution, and yet we see the selective application of law to this day where MDC and civic activists are routinely targeted by the Attorney General and are prosecuted with the full vigour of the law. We see further human rights abuses taking place to this day in the agricultural sector where white farmers have been targeted and their homes have been burnt down, where their workers have been abused, and where compensation hasn’t been paid to those who have been deprived of their property. And of course there are a variety of lesser human rights abuses. But most of them are rooted in violence. So that is the one theme: a culture of violence, which is deeply rooted in history and, whilst it has lessened in the last year, continues to this day, where we have a default in our political system of reverting to violence to achieve political objectives.
The second broad theme is Zimbabwe’s the culture of impunity. And once again it is deep-rooted. It goes back to the unique way in which the modern geographically defined nation-state of Zimbabwe was formed, between the Zambezi in the north and the Limpopo River to the south. As you know, it was formed on the initiative of one man, Cecil John Rhodes. It wasn’t, to that extent, an imperialistic exercise. Whilst the actions of British settlers were supported by Britain, it was driven by one person and a company was used to set up a nation, and of course the nations was named after Cecil John Rhodes.  Rhodes died in 1902 but he became a demigod in Rhodesian society. If you study Rhodes’ history you will see whilst he was a very talented individual he certainly had his flaws. Those flaws were disregarded in Rhodesian history, and that culture of impunity granted to political leaders has become deeply rooted in our society. Rhodes became a white demigod.  Ian Douglas Smith also became a demigod in white politics and Robert Mugabe has become exactly the same for many. In other words, we have developed in our country a culture of unquestioning loyalty to political leaders irrespective of what they have done, and that has fostered a culture of impunity.
That culture was exacerbated y the outcome of the Lancaster House Conference which took place in late 1979 because, despite the fact that we had endured as a nation a horrific civil war which saw very grave human rights abuses perpetrated against often innocent civilians, there was no effort taken by either side to address those human rights abuses. In the transition from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe we never had a Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission, as implemented by many other countries in transition, and so as a result there was never any attempt to account for what had happened. None of the leaders on either side of the political spectrum were ever held to account, not even the military commanders, and so people who had perpetrated or directed grave human rights abuses and crimes against humanity, far from being held to account, were actually promoted. Thus, many of the methods that were used during the Civil War were then carried forward into this new independent state. And that resulted in Gukurahundi. The people on both sides, both former Rhodesian forces and the Nationalist Liberation forces, who had committed acts of torture in the 1970s, were the same people who committed acts of torture in the 1980s.
But this culture of impunity is not just the making of Zimbabweans; it has been fostered by the international community. The West in particular looked the other way in the 1980s. Britain, the United States, the United Nations and European countries knew what was taking place in Matabeleland in 1983, 1984 and 1985. They couldn’t ignore what had happened: newspapers here wrote extensively about the killings; the BBC on Panorama had detailed documentaries on what was going on. But the West looked the other way, because at the time the West was focused on trying to resolve Apartheid and was, of course, absolutely engrossed by the Cold War. Robert Mugabe and ZANU-PF were key players in the resolution of both of those issues. The West believed that if white South Africans could see that there could be life after Apartheid, as was demonstrated in newly independent Zimbabwe that would ensure a peaceful transition. That was more important to the West, understandably in some respects, than dealing with very grave human rights abuses within Zimbabwe.
The Cold War was also a factor. Despite Robert Mugabe and ZANU-PF’s Marxist-Leninist rhetoric in the early 1980s, he was remarkably pragmatic: he had enunciated a policy of reconciliation and was also stuck in the middle between the Chinese and Soviets, and to that extent the West felt that he was someone who would actually act as a stop-gap in terms of a Communist advance down through Southern Africa. Because of that, the West simply looked the other way and in that way entrenched even further a culture of impunity in our country. So the military commanders responsible for human rights violations in the 1970s, and responsible for genocide in the 1980s, far from being held to account were in fact promoted to very senior positions – positions they hold to this day. And the same people responsible for the human rights abuses in the 1980s are the people responsible for the abuses that have taken place in Zimbabwe in the last ten years.
That situation has been further compounded by what I term the West’s inconsistency in the last decade. We see evidence of it even this week if you look at the endorsement of Hamid Karzai’s election in Afghanistan. If there is an interest that has to be protected, relatively fraudulent elections in Afghanistan are viewed as acceptable and yet, in the Zimbabwean context, if Robert Mugabe is guilty of electoral fraud he is condemned. Now we in the MDC have been on the receiving end of that fraud so I’m not for a moment suggesting that there shouldn’t be condemnation of electoral fraud, but what undermines our position and what enhances this culture of impunity is the inconsistency in Western foreign policy in this regard.
This is very clearly demonstrated if one studies what has happened in Zimbabwe in the last ten years. In 2000 and 2001, ZANU-PF was responsible for the murder of, I think, between 7 and 8 white commercial farmers, and at that time was also responsible for the murder of perhaps 40 to 50 political activists. The West’s response to that was to impose sanctions, and yet when ZANU-PF was guilty of the genocidal massacre of at least 20,000 Ndebele people in the 1980s nothing was done. In fact, on the contrary, Robert Mugabe and other leaders were granted honorary degrees and given fellowships in leading universities. As a result, it is reinforced in the minds of ZANU-PF leaders that there is a racist agenda pursued by the West. Sanctions are imposed when eight white farmers are murdered and yet honorary degrees and knighthoods are conferred when 20,000 black people are massacred in the 1980s. That is the mindset, and in the minds of many people within ZANU-PF it has been a justification for their actions. That situation is further compounded by the deep distrust within the Southern African Development Community of the West’s intentions. When they see that type of inconsistency there is a feeling that the sanctions imposed on Robert Mugabe and ZANU-PF are motivated with a regime change agenda in mind, and not motivated from a deep-rooted aversion to human rights abuses.
Robert Mugabe, over the last ten years, has exploited those inconsistencies in his dealings with Africa. He himself is a person who has enormous political capital in Africa because he is viewed by most Africans as a liberator; as a person who ended white minority rule in Rhodesia and who did so in a very courageous fashion. This has caused him to build up enormous political capital throughout Africa, and he has employed that political capital in a very deft propaganda campaign throughout Africa the last 10 years. He has portrayed the crisis in Zimbabwe as about land, imperialism and race. This has resonated throughout Africa, and has also resonated in Southern Africa, in particular in the Southern Africa Development Community. And so whilst many Southern African leaders have been personally deeply concerned about the human rights abuses which have taken place in Zimbabwe in the last 10 years, they themselves have looked the other way, as perhaps a necessary evil;  at best an evil that they can’t confront. Some of them have not been prepared to condemn it lest they in that way associate themselves with a Western regime-change agenda.
The net result of all of this is that despite the very grave human rights abuses, despite this culture of violence, despite this culture of impunity and the need to address these human rights issues, in 2008 it was clear to many of us in the MDC and elsewhere that Africa was simply not going to hold ZANU-PF accountable for the human rights abuses they had perpetrated. What was also very clear to us was that the West was incapable of doing anything about those human rights abuses, partly because of physical distance, partly because of the huge political problems that they would have in Africa if they tackled the situation more aggressively, but also of course because Zimbabwe has never been a country that has been a strategic interest for Western countries. That situation of course has been compounded by the financial crisis of the last year or so which has distracted the West.
Let me say one other point regarding impunity and its relationship to the prosecution of those responsible for crimes against humanity. It is a fact that the only people that have been indicted before the International Criminal Court are those whose arrest and prosecution was supported by the region from where those people came; from the neighbours of the criminals. For example, Charles Taylor’s arrest and prosecution only happened because Nigeria, Ghana and other West African countries supported the prosecution. It has been very clear to us that there is no way that Africa, and certainly Southern Africa, would ever allow Robert Mugabe, an icon of the struggle against white minority rule, to be indicted. To that extent it is simply naive for any person to think that that is a political possibility. So this was the human rights environment which those of us had to confront in deciding how we could get our country out of the morass it found itself in. Many of us have been criticised for going the route of this Global Political Agreement which was signed in September last year. I need to say that, as a human rights lawyer, I find it very difficult to reconcile myself to some of the provisions within the Global Political Agreement. Aside from the human rights issues, as a political document of transition it is very weak and it has created this very fragile transition. But its human rights provisions are even weaker. The provision which seeks to deal with the human rights abuses of the past is so vague as to be almost unenforceable. It talks about a healing process which may be undertaken at some vague time in the future.
So why did we enter into it? Well it seems to me that we face this paradox: that to bring to an end this cycle of violence which has pervaded our nation for over a hundred years we have had to grant de facto immunity. It seems to me that whilst there is clearly no amnesty agreed to on the face of the agreement, the de facto position is that there is an amnesty. Certainly in the short term those responsible for grave human rights abuses in the past will not be held accountable. So how do we justify that from a human rights perspective? Well the justification I give is the need to break this cycle of violence. This is the first time that Zimbabwe has ever used non-violent means to resolve conflict in our society. Of course this experiment is not over, it is an ongoing process. The challenge for us is to ensure that having used non-violent means to resolve conflict in our society the culture of impunity which is fostered by this method being used does not give rise to further violence in future. As I see it, the only way that we can prevent that is if we use this process to build institutions that will ultimately hold people to account. To that extent we must hold to the goal of establishing a Truth Commission. Even if there’s going to be no justice, no reconciliation at the very least we need a truth telling.
Key to this process and something that now affects me as Minister of Education is to use this window of opportunity to develop a new generation of young Zimbabweans who are taught in the practices of tolerance and democracy and in the use of non-violent methods to resolve conflict. Tied to that of course is reformation of the media to expose human rights violations, and of course reaffirmation of the independence of the judiciary and the police. Some may ask, well is this going to work? Isn’t this just a brief moment of peace and relative sanity as we had in the 1990s and aren’t we going to revert to where we were before? In response to that I use an argument that I describe as the Gorbachev factor. If one considers the difference between China on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other, you will see what I mean. The Chinese were intelligent enough, and had the foresight, not to let their economy crumble prior to liberalising their society. They ensured that their economy was strong so that their people were relatively happy before they instituted any reforms. The Soviets didn’t do that. The Soviets allowed their economy to collapse and Mikhail Gorbachev instituted perestroika and glasnost in the context of, and in reaction to, a collapsed economy. Although Mikhail Gorbachev was obviously in Soviet terms a democrat, I don’t believe that his intention was ever to see the demise of the Soviet Union or the collapse of the Communist Party. I think that he felt that if he could tinker with political reforms ultimately he would be able to keep the Soviet Union together and the Communist Party in power. But as we know, having allowed the economy to collapse, once he started to tinker with political reforms the process ran away from him and he couldn’t control that process. If one looks at the Zimbabwean situation you will see that it follows the Soviet example much closer than it does the Chinese example. Robert Mugabe and ZANU-PF allowed the Zimbabwean economy to collapse. They have now been forced into a political compromise. I think that their intention is just the same as the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. Their intention is to use this window to consolidate their power with the ultimate goal of never losing power. But as we have already seen in the last 18 months, even minor changes to our electoral laws and to our media laws, whilst not satisfactory from a purist position, have further undermined ZANU-PF’s grip on power. And I believe even in the fraught 8 months of this Transitional Government, we’ve seen a steady transfer of power away from ZANU-PF to the MDC. I don’t have time to give examples of that, but I can tell you, speaking from within the cabinet, that is my view.
But all of this leaves a terrible dilemma for human rights activists internationally and domestically, and it leaves a terrible dilemma for the West as it tries to redefine its foreign policy as it relates to Zimbabwe. What I say to governments is that they must understand the political reality of Zimbabwe; that despite the obvious flaws in the Global Political Agreement, despite the failure to implement that Agreement in its true spirit, the fact remains that this fragile arrangement is the only viable non-violent option open to Zimbabwe. And to that extent the message has to go out to the international community that despite the flaws of this arrangement it has to be supported. The Global Political Agreement must be viewed holistically.
Let me explain what I mean. There are two key political elements to this agreement. On the one hand, and this is the issue that ZANU-PF focuses on, sanctions need to be lifted. On the other hand, and this is the MDC’s focus of attention, the country needs to be liberalised. Both parties argue flat out for their particular positions. The position of the West is that both need to be taken into account, and it will reward the process by lifting sanctions when it sees the democracy provisions contained in the Agreement systematically implemented. Therefore whilst the West’s human rights concerns are justified, this is the only option open to us, and we have to make it work. Accordingly at the very least so long as we see a positive progression towards respecting human rights, through, for example, a moratorium on land invasions, and an end to the selective application of the law, those actions should be reciprocated by the West through a progressive lifting of sanctions.
Let me draw to an end by speaking about the current problems. Those of you who follow Zimbabwe will know that in the last three weeks the major faction of the MDC under the leadership of Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai has withdrawn because of the failure by ZANU-PF to implement certain aspects of the Agreement, and because of its failure to implement the Agreement in its true spirit. My own response to that is that I am surprised that this impasse didn’t happen earlier, that in many ways it was inevitable. This is a flawed Agreement involving protagonists who haven’t changed their methods or views, and that situation is made worse by the fact that SADC and the African Union, which are meant to be guarantors of the process, have not given due attention to simmering conflicts within the Transitional Government that have been there the entire eight months since it was inaugurated in February. But I remain confident that these problems will be resolved. I often refer people to the process of transition in South Africa between 1990 and 1994. There were then some  terrible days in South Africa. When Chris Hani, for example, was assassinated, the process of transition in South Africa could have been derailed. It took statesmanship from Nelson Mandela and others to keep it on track, and I believe that, for all my historical criticisms of Robert Mugabe, he is in fact committed to this arrangement. He may want to interpret the Global Political Agreement subjectively, he may want to bend the interpretation of it to suit his whims,  but I believe ultimately he wants it to work because, amongst other reasons, I think he sees it as a soft landing for himself; an insurance policy. I think he recognises that through it he can avoid the threat of prosecution by the ICC, can avoid the prospect of going into exile. And so whilst we have this current impasse, I believe that what is taking place is really a national game of poker, of brinkmanship, and I suspect that even tomorrow in the meeting in Maputo there will be progress, and that Morgan Tsvangirai will come back into the process fairly soon. In fact, for me one of the ironies of what has happened in the last month or so is that these breaches of the Agreement have, in my view, been caused because the Agreement is working; because there are elements, hardliners, within ZANU-PF who can see that their power is evaporating, and so, in acts of desperation, they have employed measures designed to actually break the Agreement and end it. It is important that we don’t succumb to that and play into the hands of hardliners whose intention is to break the Agreement.
In conclusion, let me put the question: Will we ever get justice in Zimbabwe? Will we ever be able to address the very serious human rights abuses that have taken place? In answering that question I think it is important that we go back to 1965, to the illegal Declaration of Independence by Ian Douglas Smith’s Rhodesian Front Government, because the danger is that in asking that question we only focus on the last 10 years, or we only focus on the last 20 or 30 years. The fact of the matter is that our human rights abuses are rooted at least five decades back. The human rights abuses even of the last year are part of the legacy of what happened in 1965 and beyond. In addressing this question, and this is the challenge that I put out to Law students here today, prospective lawyers: I think the danger is that lawyers, and all of us are guilty of this, sometimes view law and human rights conventions in an absolutist fashion, in some respects in a positivistic fashion. When we address this question it is critically important that we consider the question not so much from a perspective of being law students or lawyers but from the perspective of the victims; those who have suffered human rights abuses themselves.
In that regard I am in a relatively unique position. Between 1987 and 1997 I was director of the Bulawayo Legal Project Centre, which is a human rights organisation in Zimbabwe. I initiated with the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace a human rights investigation into the Gukurahundi which culminated in a report published in 1997 called Breaking the Silence: Building True Peace. That report focused on the genocide which occurred in Matebeleland between 1982 and 1987. We conducted over 2000 interviews to prepare that report. People were asked many questions – not just the nature of the human rights abuses they had suffered, but also, importantly, what they wanted to redress the wrongs done to them. I was taken aback at the time in the mid-1990s by the responses of those people. An overwhelming majority of those 2000 victims wanted three things: firstly, an acknowledgment that what had happened had indeed happened; secondly, they wanted an apology by those responsible; and thirdly, they wanted collective reparations – not even individual reparations – they wanted their communities to be uplifted. So that is one body of evidence that has informed my thinking.
Another body of evidence comes from some of my personal dealings with people who suffered tremendously in the 1980s as a class, and that was politicians who were in Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU Party. In 1985, as a very young lawyer, I was given instructions to conduct the defence of what was then the major political trial. A man called Sydney Malunga, who was then chief whip of ZAPU, was accused by ZANU-PF of assisting dissidents. He was charged, he was detained, and I lead the defence in a trial that lasted some seven months. Sydney Malunga went through sheer hell. When I first interviewed him in prison in a small town in central Zimbabwe he came to me hobbling because falanga had been administered to the soles of his feet. He had been severely tortured. He was detained, in my view, illegally for over a year. I ultimately secured his acquittal in May 1986. I  expected him to have a vast reservoir of bitterness and I can remember being utterly surprised towards the late 1980s by his spirit of forgiveness, forgiveness that I couldn’t find in my heart, but which was very evident in his. It may of course be that in the 1980s and 1990s, those victims of the genocide and people like Sydney Malunga were influenced by the knowledge that at that time, in the 1990s, ZANU-PF was at the zenith of its power. Robert Mugabe had just been given a knighthood by Britain in 1994 and people saw that there was little prospect of him losing power. I think that many may well have assumed that there was no prospect of justice and perhaps they lowered their expectations as a result. But the point I’m making is that the sentiments expressed by those victims then cannot just be ignored, and so in addressing human rights abuses of the past and the human rights abuses that have taken place in the last decade, we simply cannot ignore the voice of victims.
That is why what I and my party advocate for is a victim orientated Truth Commission, which will give an opportunity to victims to do two things: firstly, to give them an opportunity to tell the truth; to tell their story or the story of their loved ones; and secondly, for them to tell us, the lawyers, the politicians, what they want to happen regarding they need to achieve justice and reconciliation. The danger is that we as lawyers or politicians, be we Zimbabwean or British lawyers or politicians, treat human rights issues in academic and absolutist terms. We need to be reminded that human rights issues are in essence personal issues, and lawyers and governments must always strive take into account the views of victims in formulating policies. And that applies especially to Zimbabwe today. It is my view,  gained from numerous  discussions with constituents and common people throughout  Zimbabwe, despite the grave human rights abuses of the past it seems to me that today, in November 2009, the vast majority of Zimbabweans, including victims, want this fragile arrangement to work, despite its obvious flaws. To that extent the international community has an obligation to do all in its power to help it succeed despite its understandable misgivings about the process.
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