Mugabe’s uneasy ally pleads for Kiwi cricket tour

Dominion Post

15 June 2010

By Nick Venter

DAVID COLTART, Zimbabwe’s minister of education, sports and culture, has no reason to love Robert Mugabe. As a lawyer he’s represented women widowed by Mr Mugabe’s troops, defended the president’s political foes against trumped-up charges and catalogued the government-ordered atrocities that claimed tens of thousands of lives in the Matabeleland region in the 1980s.

He has also been threatened with imprisonment, falsely accused of trying to shoot at youth militia barricading his home, survived an assassination attempt and had to console the family of a supporter who “disappeared” a week before Mr Coltart was first elected to Parliament as a member of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change in 2000.

“He was one of my polling agents. It got very nasty. He was abducted from his home at 4 o’clock in the afternoon in the presence of his wife and children by known people.” The supporter, Patrick Nabanyama, has not been seen since.

Mr Mugabe and his party are responsible for “terrible things”, Mr Coltart says. But, strange as it may seem, he is now pleading Mr Mugabe’s case. He is in New Zealand to ask Cricket New Zealand and the Government to send a team to Zimbabwe.

Zimbabwe’s leading human rights lawyer has become an ally of its worst human rights abuser. It’s an uneasy alliance forced by the 2008 election that delivered Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC a majority of the votes but not the means to persuade Mr Mugabe’s Zanu PF Party to surrender power.

Mr Coltart, the only white member of Zimbabwe’s cabinet and a member of a breakaway MDC faction, says opposition members of the “transitional inclusive government” were forced to choose between justice and the future.

“It’s been very difficult for us in the human rights community to accept this, but in 2008 many of us came to the position that, unless we reached this agreement, Zimbabwe would be taken down to the level of Somalia or Liberia.

“The agreement provided a non- violent evolutionary means of achieving a transition to democracy.

“Inevitably that meant that some of our goals of holding people to account for terrible crimes would not be achieved, certainly not in the short term. The calculation I made was that, by reaching this agreement, we would save lives, potentially hundreds of thousand of lives. And that was a price worth paying.”

THE first 15 months of the new government show the calculation was right, he says. “There are still huge problems. There is still rampant corruption in some areas. There are still ongoing human rights abuses. Zanu PF is still in control of the military.”

But there are also positive signs. The human rights situation in Zimbabwe has improved dramatically in the past 15 months, there have been far fewer reports of torture, few reports of disappearances, and a big reduction in the number of political prosecutions. “Whilst it’s by no means perfect, from a human rights perspective, the country is now unrecognisable from 2008.”

There have also been other improvements.

Government-controlled television and radio stations have opened up “slightly” to alternative views; an independent daily newspaper began publishing last week, the first in five or six years; inflation has been brought under control; the cholera epidemic has ended; health clinics have reopened and hospitals have been stabilised.

“Once again the state of healthcare isn’t too great, but it is unrecognisably better than it was 15, 16 months ago,” he says.

In his own portfolio of education, 80,000 striking teachers have returned to work and almost 7000 schools have reopened.

“They are not functioning very well because they are terribly underfunded, but kids are at least going to school. We are just about to deliver the largest order of primary school textbooks – 13 million – that the country has ever known. At present in most classrooms the only textbook is the one that the teacher has.”

There is no guarantee the transitional arrangements will result in a new constitution or free and fair elections, but progress is being made, he says. A New Zealand cricket tour would help the process.

“Sport can be a very positive and effective method of uniting a country, of stabilising a country, of rebuilding national pride as opposed to partisan pride, and we are already seeing that in Zimbabwean cricket.”

A tour would also strengthen the hand of the moderates in Mr Mugabe’s Zanu PF Party, who “didn’t really like the torture and the disappearances” by demonstrating that there are benefits to opening up Zimbabawean society to the world.

“The message to the New Zealand Government and the New Zealand people is that, if you don’t support the moderates within Zanu PF and the MDC, you play into the hands of the hardliners [in Zanu PF] who were prepared to destroy Zimbabwe in 2008 and are still prepared to take it back to that.

“They recognise that Zimbabwe has sufficient wealth in the form of diamonds and platinum to keep a tiny economy going that supports a core of the military, but will not keep schools and hospitals and clinics open.”

David Coltart On:

Relations between Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai: “There is, in Cabinet, a functional relationship which on occasion is even cordial. It is very difficult to go back to the antagonism of the past once you have actually realised that your opponent is not the devil.”

The security issues given as grounds for postponing the Black Caps’ scheduled tour of Zimbabwe this month: “There was never any substance to that fear. Zimbabwe, even at the height of its political turmoil, was always a safer place to visit than South Africa.”

The popularity of cricket in Zimbabwe: “It was a huge disappointment to Zimbabwe when New Zealand said they would not come because it obviously undermined out ability to play good opposition and so rebuild our team.”

The benefits of political stability: “The rank and file of the military have got a taste of what it is like to be readmitted to the international community, what it is like to have a salary paid in hard currency, what it is like not to have exchange controls, and they like it.”

The factions within Robert Mugabe’s Zanu PF Party: “There are a group of moderates who have embraced the [transitional] agreement. They are seeking to implement it in its full letter and spirit, but they are a minority.

“The second group, headed by Mugabe himself, don’t particularly like the agreement but are pragmatic enough to recognise that it does offer them a political soft landing. They are not going to end up in the Hague or in exile. But, because they don’t like the agreement, they push the envelope as far as they can. They seek to bend it, but they don’t actually want to break it.

“Then there’s the third group of hardliners. They tend to be 20 years younger than Mugabe, they tend to be corrupt, they tend to be those responsible for crimes against humanity. They hate the agreement. They don’t like where it’s headed. They recognise that, whilst it provides Robert Mugabe with a way out, it doesn’t necessarily proved them with a way out.”