Claire Moore (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The presidential election in Zimbabwe is due on 27 June. The presidential election that is coming up in that country bears no resemblance to the information and knowledge we have in this country of what a democratic election is supposed to be. Many people in this place have spoken on the issues in Zimbabwe and I know that many people, both in this place and in the House of Representatives, have had the opportunity in the past to visit Zimbabwe, to talk with people and to look at previous election campaigns. What we know about what is going to happen in Zimbabwe on 27 June is that it purports to be a democratic process. That statement has been made across the world. Increasingly, over the last few weeks, people in the international community have become aware that the process in Zimbabwe is flawed and that the level of violence and intimidation that is going on in that country does not allow an effective democratic process to happen in less than two weeks time.

The world watched as the first round of Zimbabwean elections continued. No observers from outside the African continent and some selected countries in the world were allowed to attend the first round of Zimbabwean elections this year. That is different to previous years when I know there had been invitations to people to attend and watch. There were concerns raised about the past, but that process continued. In the elections earlier this year we were led to believe that processes were fulfilled and that efforts were made to ensure that the results were fair. We watched as the votes were counted. We waited for the results to be put on the international scene. As each day passed, the fear and the worry increased, which was actually a result of the fact that there were results in Zimbabwe that gave a change of power within the elected process. What we were told did not occur was an election of an effective president for that period and the decision was made to have a run-off election further down the track. In a similar way to what we see in other countries such as East Timor, there was an acknowledgement that there would be a run-off down the way.

From the time that was done and that announcement was made, there were outcries about how this process was going to operate. There were cries to see whether there could be international involvement in this process because it is a threshold time for the people of Zimbabwe. We know the violence. We know the starvation. We know the inflation. We know the intimidation of anyone who has been prepared to stand up with an alternative view. We hoped as an international community, in solidarity with the people in Zimbabwe, that after the years of hope and expectation there would be an opportunity for some change in power in that country this time.

However, we have the international press reporting as of Tuesday, 17 June, that the leader of Zimbabwe, Mr Mugabe, said:

We fought for this country and a lot of blood was shed. We are not going to give up our country because of a mere X.

I take it that is an X on a ballot paper. It said further:

How can a ballpoint pen fight with a gun?

This warning came a day after he declared in another public meeting: ‘We are ready to go to war. We will not give up our power.’ All the meetings that we see in the very controlled media that is coming out of the country show Mugabe surrounded by hundreds and thousands of people who are shouting his name and dressed in his colours, talking about the brave new world that this man is going to continue to lead Zimbabwe into.

This naturally creates a sense of fear about what is going on. It is abhorrent that, in terms of international press coverage of what is happening in Zimbabwe, there is no allowance for the international press to be there. When you see those grainy photographs that come across from The World Today and the BBC, their journalists are taking their lives in their hands by being there. They do not have approval to be there or have filming rights. They do not have approval to be taking interviews. They are trying to get out information about what is happening in that country.

To their credit, many Zimbabweans have had the strength to stand up and say what they are expecting to happen in their country. They have been forcibly moved from their land. We are not just talking about the ongoing stealing of land from people who have owned land in that country for many years. Now we are talking about farm labourers, about people who over the past 18 to 25 years supported the Mugabe-led government in Zimbabwe, being moved forcibly in groups, taken away from their land, taken away from their schools, taken away from their farms and actually becoming homeless to a great extent. This is on top of the ongoing systematic starvation of people in this country. It still beggars belief that a country with the quality of land and the quality of husbandry and agriculture that existed in Zimbabwe could now be in the grips of a monumental starvation. It is not caused by drought. In other parts of the African mainland, we do have cases where natural disaster has caused very significant problems with food and food distribution. That is not the issue in Zimbabwe. The issue in Zimbabwe, amongst others—and there is no single, particular problem—is that skilled and trained farm labourers and workers have not been allowed to ply their trade. Grain has not been produced and animals have not been reared. This country is now in desperate need of support from all of us for simple things like food. That should not occur in a place like Zimbabwe.

People have been moved away from their land. In fact, that is effective disenfranchisement of those people, because the country’s voting process determines that voters can only vote in their own area. If you are registered to vote in a particular area, that is the only voting place where you can vote in the run-off election. If because of violence you have been moved away from the area where you had lived, you effectively do not have a vote. This has been carried out by the army and by supporters of Mugabe’s regime, and it has been done with overt violence. The process is being used to cause fear and division and to punish those areas that voted against the Mugabe regime in the first round of elections. In the past, if you look at the figures that came out of previous elections, the country areas of Zimbabwe tended to vote—to make their X on the ballot paper—for the government.

This did not occur in the last round of elections. When you look at and compare the voting patterns, you find that whole regions of Zimbabwe stood up and said: ‘We want change. We want to move into the 21st century with a different government. We think the time has come for us to entrench democracy in the country.’ That was a very brave action by those people. Sadly, many of them have suffered as a result. The small amount of international press that we have been able to get—some through formal media, which is done in a clandestine way, but increasingly and in a continual way by Zimbabweans who are using the internet, email and blogs; it is wonderful technology that was not available in past times—has been able to interact with the outside world to say what is happening. They are telling us of horror. We hear of murder. We hear of people being kidnapped. We hear of systematic rape in regional areas. All of those things are done with one intent: to intimidate, to cause fear and to stop the free process of the election that is coming up on 27 June.

Increasingly, people outside of Zimbabwe—and not just people who have immediate links with the country, though there are many people now living in Australia who have family and friends in Zimbabwe—are gathering together to see what they can do to offer support. There is very little that they can do by way of sending anything back to the country, because of the laws precluding any outside financing and any outside support. The efforts to get external aid into the country have been limited by direct intervention of the Zimbabwean government to stop the distribution of what aid is coming in. What people have been able to do is give each other support. They can tell other people about what is going on. They can try to maintain some form of a link with family in order to know where they are. People who have come to Australia feel very vulnerable because they cannot have that interaction, so we have been having a number of meetings. We had one quite recently in Brisbane where a number of young people, both black and white, who are studying in this country came together to state publicly that they come from Zimbabwe, are proud of their heritage and want to offer support to those people who are still living there.

These people have no vote. There is no attempt to allow people who are no longer living in the area to be able to access the voting system. Not only can you not vote if you are living in Australia, but also you cannot vote if you are living in Kenya, South Africa or many of the other African states to which many Zimbabwean citizens have moved in order to earn a living and raise money to help feed their families back home. Once again, the votes are not representative. I believe the system that is going to be put in place for 27 June does not represent the views, the feelings and the hopes of the people who should be looking at the future of Zimbabwe.

What the international press, other countries and the UN have been saying is that there is an expectation that the other African countries, the pan-African group—the neighbours of Zimbabwe, who have shared some of the political trials of gaining independence and working through those processes, which have often been very fraught—should be the ones leading the opposition to the intimidation and violence that is going on and should be speaking out. Sadly, that has not really been the case in many ways. We have been looking to the government of South Africa to take the lead in this area, and we have been disappointed. However, only as recently as last night, the Kenyan Prime Minister made international comment. He is one of the first of the pan-African leaders to come out and make comment about what is going on in Zimbabwe. He was quoted as saying:

The question is: do we have conditions for free and fair elections right now? The answer is no.

He also called Zimbabwe ‘an eyesore, an embarrassment to the African continent’. They are strong words. I think he went on further in that discussion. Nonetheless, it shows that there now is a splintering of the support for Mugabe’s regime at home in Africa.

That has been reinforced by the trade union movement. The African trade union movements have been very active over the last 50 years in trying to bring independence and freedom to various countries in southern Africa. Their role in the freedom movement in South Africa was very well documented. At the annual conference of the International Labour Organisation, which is taking place in Geneva at the moment, South African trade unions spoke out about the need for freedom and effective democracy in Zimbabwe. Mr Sithole, who is there from the Tanzanian group, said that the group was speaking on behalf of the Zimbabwean union leaders who were not able to attend the meeting. He said that they know that the elections are rigged and that efforts have to be made to move forward. He also said that the quiet diplomacy championed by South Africa’s President Mbeki is not working; there needs to be a stronger voice.

The Australian government—the previous Australian government did as well—has been working with the UN and the international community to look at diplomatic ways to address what is happening in Zimbabwe. This is something on which we have no disagreement. There needs to be strong action. I know Mr Smith and Mr Rudd have been talking about these issues with their counterparts internationally. We have some sanctions against Zimbabwe at the moment. We have visa restrictions for people with links to the Mugabe regime moving into our country. However, there need to be many more public statements about what we know of the horror of that country, where people are being killed and attacked simply because of their right to make a democratic statement. I do not make comment about what the result of the 27 June election should or will be. What we should be saying is that we expect that they will be open and fair and that people will have the right to have their vote in a fair way. We cannot stand by and let a government openly say that a gun is more important than the ballpoint. That can only be said for one reason: to intimidate people, to endanger people and to stop people from exercising their rights.

I hope that the international community will continue to speak out against the outrage which is happening in Zimbabwe. There is the problem, of course, that as soon as people who are not from the African mainland make these comments the Zimbabwean government then says that this is a remnant of colonial intervention in what is going on. We are better than that. We know that we are not speaking from any history of colonialism or intimidation. What we are saying is that we support democracy. We support people like my friend Sekai Holland, who just for being an elected member of parliament has been imprisoned and bashed, and her family has been disrupted and forced into hiding. That is not what we expect from a democratic country. We can do better and we must insist that we, the international community, continue to say: what is happening in Zimbabwe is wrong. There must be free and fair elections and there must be openness to allow people to watch what is going on so that this election, like so many others in the past, will not be stolen from the people.