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
Hello Diana
ReplyDeleteI have been thinking about you over the last few weeks. As a close friend of your Australian family I've been wondering how they would would felt about the the Mugabe irony. I have been watching the election events unfold almost hourly and have been holding my breathe this darkest of Greek tragedies will not end in the spilling of more blood.
Eileen Naseby