As the hated agents of Robert Mugabe's violence against his political opposition busy themselves cracking skulls, breaking limbs and drawing the blood of non-violent protesters, I bow my head in shame. Not a hair on my Zimbabwean head has been touched. I am far from the scene of these crimes. I feel an acute sense of guilt that I have escaped, physically unhurt from the consequences of political actions in which I took an active part for at least forty years.
When I made a committment to devote my waking hours to the pursuit of equality, liberty and democratic governance for my fellow citizens - having benefited from being born amongst the privileged white settlers of Rhodesia - I never dreamed that the sacrifices that are being demanded of my friends in the Movement for Democratic Change in today's Zimbabwe would be so great. As a founding member of the National Constitutional Assembly, from which the MDC branched in the late nineties, I believed that peaceful, evolutionary, regime change was possible. I had opted out of direct participation in the political fight several years earlier after the Forum for Democratic Reform, an opposition party I had helped to found, failed to make headway against the Mugabe regime; this in spite of, or even because of our gentle and gentlemanly leader, the late Enoch Dumbutshena, former Chief Justice of Zimbabwe. My support for the Young Turks - as well as a few older ones, male and female - who stepped forward into the MDC firing line (quite literally as it has turned out) never wavered and I used my contacts among fellow would-be democrats and their sponsors wherever and whenever they could be helpful. Writing has been my ongoing tool - an adversarial weapon only so long as Zimbabweans were allowed to read the words of encouragement offered to my fellow Zimbabweans in our pursuit of freedom.
Only now in a technological age that forbids shielding wrong-doing is the world beginning to hear the MDC's cries of protest. In Zimbabwe it is a time of deliberate killing and maiming and bludgeoning men and women of great courage by cowardly, armed police and military functionaries of a discredited ruling party and its vain, arrogant and tyrannical leader, the once admired Robert Mugabe. I am unbloodied but bowed by the shame of it all. I rise, however, and bow low in sincere homage to my suffering friends who are putting their lives on the line for the restoration of Zimbabwe to its long-delayed liberation from political oppression.
Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell
