Military control over diamond mining in Zimbabwe’s eastern Marange district has resulted in a brutal mix of massacres, forced labour, beatings and rape.

This is according to a comprehensive report released last week by Human Rights Watch (HRW), the New York-based rights NGO, which interviewed over 100 people in the region in February 2009.

Mining in Marange began in 2006. Initially the government allowed anybody to prospect in the area. Then it started clamping down. Recognizing the mines as an important revenue opportunity, the Zanu PF-controlled army invaded the mines in October 2008, massacring over 200 miners in the process.

Helicopters swooped down over illegal miners, shooting live ammunition and teargas. 800 soldiers were sent in to secure the area. Illegal miners were forced to dig mass graves for their murdered comrades. The report says:

A local headman told Human Rights Watch that in the three weeks of the military operation, Chiadzwa resembled “a war zone in which soldiers killed people like flies.” Another headman was forced to bury five bodies of miners; all five bodies had what appeared to be bullet wounds. None of the bodies were identifiable.

With the army in control of the area, the violence has continued and illegal mining – which the police and military were ostensibly supposed to shut down – has continued to flourish, this time in the hands of soldiers.

The army is forcing at least 300 children to work without pay in the mines. A woman forced to work on the mines told an HRW researcher: ‘We worked together with about 30 children of ages between 10 and 17 years. The children worked the same 11 hours each day as adults did. The soldiers had a duty roster for all villagers in Chiadzwa to take turns to work in the fields, irrespective of age.’ The woman explained how men did the digging, while children and women carried the ore, then sieved it before sorting the diamonds. The women and children were forced to work without breaks, with soldiers not even providing food and water, and beating those working too slowly.

Soldiers have also been plundering impoverished villages, stealing items like cellphones, maize and blankets. In addition to this, the report reveals that:

Several witnesses and victims told Human Rights Watch that soldiers continue to assault, harass, and subject the local community to torture…

Two such incidences occurred in February 2009 when:

[F]ive soldiers beat three Muchena villagers for over five hours using a rubber hose without stating any reasons for the assault. The same night, eight soldiers assaulted a family in Muedzengwa village using open palms, clenched fists, rifle butts, and booted feet. The soldiers then allegedly stole several items of personal property. During the beatings, the soldiers demanded information on local miners, which the villagers did not have.

Zanu PF party apparatchiks have also threatened to forcibly remove those who live in the area, estimated by HRW to be about 7000 families. The reign of terror and military oppression continues, with the illicit profits from smuggling (diamonds are sent illegally to Mozambique and Johannesburg, South Africa) benefiting soldiers and senior Zanu PF officials.

HRW has called on Zimbabwe’s power-sharing government to intervene and place police control over the area, ensuring ‘that the police abide by internationally recognized standards of law enforcement and use of lethal force.’ It also calls for the government to launch an investigation into the rampant human rights abuses in the area.

Unfortunately, the unity government is unlikely to do anything. While Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai is eager to claim that Zimbabwe has made great strides in governance reform, and that his nemesis President Robert Mugabe is accepting this process, nothing could be further from the truth.

As I have discussed in the past, Zanu PF is doing its utmost to stall reforms proposed in the unity agreement. Furthermore, human rights activists, lawyers and opposition MDC politicos continue to be unlawfully harassed and detained. Hundreds of prisoners die of starvation in jail. And land grabs and persecution of farmers occur with impunity.

Zanu PF’s undemocratic participation in government is only further aiding Zimbabwe’s disintegration and prolonging the suffering of our ordinary Zimbabweans. The world cannot look away from the horrifying abuses and continuing tyranny in the Marange diamond fields and elsewhere. It is no use pretending that Zanu PF is prepared to surrender its illegitimate and strangulating hold on power. Zimbabwe will continue its agonizing implosion if the West decides to prop up this sham unity government.

Regional powerhouse South Africa as well as Europe, Britain and the US need to act in the best interests of all Zimbabweans and force Zanu PF to accept the rule of law and ensure that the obligations in the unity agreement are adhered to. The suffering citizens of Marange, and of Zimbabwe as a whole, deserve nothing less.

Alex Matthews is editor of The Soapbox. He writes this in his personal capacity.

The state of civil unrest in Iran and how many of us have been responding to it has got me rather bothered. On several occasions, I’ve been accused of “polarising the issue” or making hot-headed judgments about the situation when I don’t have a real understanding of the political climate in Iran.
This note is something of a response to those accusations, but more importantly, a call for us to acknowledge that the rights of Iranian people are being unreasonably and grossly limited and actually speak out against it.

First of all, I will concede that I do not have an integral understanding of what the two prominent camps represent and the extent of the impact it has on the day-to-day lives of Iranians, but I do understand that scores of Iranians are dissatisfied by corruption and deceit to the extent that they are willing to risk their liberty and lives to see that change.

I think it would be arrogant for me or anyone to pick a side and advocate for why theirs should be the government because that is for the people of Iran to decide. South Africans picked Zuma, for god’s sake, so I think I already have enough to deal with there. What upsets me about the situation is not so much who won but, rather, they appear to have won and the treatment of thousands of civilians speaking out against what they believe to have been an unfair and corrupted election that was fixed by biased authorities.

While no government should be expected to announce a re-election every time a group voices its unhappiness about the results not being in their favour, when so massive a wave of dissatisfaction sweeps across the country, carrying with it evidence of ballot-rigging amounting to an excess of 3million votes than there were registered voters – not to mention a Guardian Council that clearly favours Ahmadinejad as the preferred candidate, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for anyone to demand that the government take notice and make concerted efforts to allay the people’s fears and prove its legitimacy.

What we have been seeing instead, is a consistently hard-lined and disproportional response to the series of peaceful protests undertaken by concerned Iranians. International communications about the extent of civil unrest and how it’s being dealt with by government has been censored. Political dissidents including online bloggers are being traced and detained. Over 400 people have been arrested, and the death toll is at 19 – Neda Soltan’s being most illustrative of just how unnecessary the means used by the Basiji have been to disperse the protesters. All of this under Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Khomeini’s watch.

How can such a gross violation of the constitutional and civil-political rights of the Iranian people be allowed to continue? What can this mean for their other fundamental human rights which, under highly conservative theocratic rule, have been already been severely restricted? What kind of real engagement can Iranians have with their domestic political affairs when criticism against the government results in detention for sedition? Was it precisely not this kind of oppression that catalysed the 1979 revolution? What Iranians want is a legitimate democratic government that respects protects and promotes its people’s civil liberties of all and that’s precisely what the green revolution has come to represent!

I take a moment to remind us all that what’s happening in Iran is not at all new or unusual to us at all. When it happened in Zimbabwe, we weren’t ‘polarising issues’. We called it gross human rights violations and we all of us demanded re-elections in order to free Zimbabwe. When it happened in Sharpeville, we weren’t ‘polarising issues’ there either. Instead, we called it a massacre and demanded the international community to assist the liberation movement in freeing South Africa. Why is it then that, when the same course of events is running in Iran, we are not demanding that we free Iran?

Jake is reminded every day how banal the gays are.

It seems to me that the ruling elite within ZANU-PF are nothing but a gang of mafiosa who, starting before 2000, managed to carry out the ultimate criminal act which is to hijack the government of a country. This enables the elite to use  all the levers of state power to serve only their own narrow interests rather than the interests of the rest of the population.

As a consequence of this understanding of the situation in Zimbabwe I have always been sceptical of the prospects of the so-called Unity government. At  core the ZANU-PF elite is without any scruples whatsoever thus any unity with  such people, except on their own corrupt terms, is a practical impossibility as the  MDC is finding.

In my opinion it would have been far better for the MDC to have called on the  people of Zimbabwe to actively refuse, whilst ZANU-PF illegitimately clings onto power, to recognise any aspect of government as legitimate. The consequences of  the people’s actions springing from this position would have been certain  suffering as ZANU-PF used its illegitimate access to state institutions to clamp  down on the peoples’ response. There would however have been a major difference between this suffering and the suffering that the people of Zimbabwe are presently
undergoing anyway. This suffering would have been consciously accepted as a consequence
of the moral stand being taken against the illegitimate government of ZANU-PF and would as a result have had immense power to transform the situation for  the better. The current suffering because it is not consciously chosen to serve a  higher purpose does not have that transformative power.

Rory Short is a Quaker, Yogi and Buddhist.

Let’s face it: more than three months since its inception, Zimbabwe’s so-called government of national unity is a failure.

This is a unity government in all but name. Oppression and coercion is embedded within its architecture, with the impotent opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) serving as little more than a legitimising mechanism for ruling party Zanu PF’s totalitarian agenda. Little wonder that the country is still falling apart when Zanu PF shamelessly grips onto power. Stalling reforms proposed in the GNU agreement and having unilaterally appointed ambassadors, it’s sent a clear message that it remains the party calling the shots.

Furthermore, human rights activists, lawyers and MDC politicos continue to be unlawfully harassed and detained. Hundreds of prisoners die of starvation in jail. And land grabs and persecution of farmers occur with impunity.

The MDC has shown itself powerless to prevent all this and unable to ensure that the rule of law is respected. Instead, it pleads for smart sanctions against Mugabe’s cronies be lifted, naively assuming this will kickstart the very economy that these vile specimens actively destroyed through their avarice and tyranny.

It is clear that Zanu PF’s undemocratic participation in government is only further aiding Zimbabwe’s disintegration and prolonging the suffering of our beleaguered neighbours. Yet Pretoria remains silent about the continuing subjugation of the Zimbabwean people, preferring, rather, to silently condone the brutality of a fellow “liberation” movement.

Instead of propping up Zanu PF, South Africa’s ruling party, the ANC, needs to act in the best interests of all Zimbabweans and force the party to accept the rule of law and ensure that the obligations in the unity agreement are adhered to. Otherwise one can only assume that our ruling party’s endorsement of Zimbabwe’s dictatorship is an indication that it too believes that rapacious oppression is justified to maintain an increasingly slippery hold on perpetual rule.

Alex Matthews is editor of The Soapbox. He writes this in his personal capacity.