RESPONSE TO ATM ASKING SA PARLIAMENT TO INVESTIGATE “HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS” IN ZIMBABWE.

7 August 2020

Dear Mr. Zungula Member of South African Parliament,

We have noted with grave concern your letter asking the South African parliament to paternalistically investigate allegations of human rights abuses in Zimbabwe based on images from various previous incidents of crowd management being shared by a hostile media, that is promoting the anarchy being instigated by the opposition party for whom the US and EU imposed sanctions on Zimbabweans to force Zimbabweans to vote for this party in line with a western forced-regime-change agenda.

Zimbabwe is a sovereign nation that has every right to enforce its laws and stop anarchy or Arab Spring style protests tailored to remove a democratically elected government by force. Now, considering that South African police use firearms and bullets to enforce law and order, why is it wrong for Zimbabwean law enforcement to use batons instead of guns to enforce law and order and to stop illegal regime change protests?

We find it absurd and hypocritical for you as a South African legislator to purport to teach other countries human rights, when you are a member of an African parliament:

• that leases premises from a colonial Freemason Lodge in the ultimate manifestation of state capture by western interests,

• capture which resulted in the same parliament capitulating to western pressure to maintain the crime against humanity of apartheid by allowing white South Africans to keep stolen property, proceeds of crime and unjust enrichment from the crime of apartheid to remain masters of black people,

• in the process relegating black people to the status of landless pariahs, second class citizens and slaves in their own country, through legislation of the maintenance of their dispossession and deprivation of property rights,

• yet, you the legislators of the same parliament, politicians and the politically connected, share the spoils of apartheid loot as BEE partners to the apartheid capitalists you have allowed to keep the loot.

South Africa cannot teach any other nation about human rights, while its leaders maintain the inhumane system of apartheid for their own unjust enrichment.

Let us also remind you that the same South African parliament you sit in, presides over a legacy of:

• A police force that kills people regularly during service level protests as illustrated by the 2011 murder of Andries Tatane in a protest for clean water in Ficksburg,

• In 2012, the same police force called for mortuary vans in preparation for the premeditated, extrajudicial execution of 34 workers, striking for a living wage in Marikana. These police officers murdered black workers in the same manner as black workers were murder for decades by the apartheid government, to protect the interests of the enslaving apartheid charter companies.

• The law enforcement system sees on average 150 women reporting that they were raped in police custody by police officers every year,

• Over 100 people are murdered in police custody through torture and police brutality as witnessed by the 2013 death of Mozambican Mido Marcia, who was beaten to death by police officers.

• This year, 11 black people were murdered in the racially segregated COVID lockdown enforcement by police officers who disproportionately targeted black and colored people.

• In just the last 4yrs, over 93 politicians have been murdered in one province [KwaZulu Natal] in political assassinations that implicate police officers and ruling party politicians.

Which other country on the continent has the same level of political repression, criminal impunity and human rights violations outside a war zone? It certainly is not Zimbabwe because in that country all urban municipalities are run by the same opposition party [MDC], which called for the collective punishment of Zimbabwean civilians by US sanctions, to terrorize Zimbabweans into voting them into power, for them to return land to whites.

The same group of people who are now instigating illegal, violent protests, in an attempt to remove a democratically elected government by force and you are now assisting them by hindering our government from enforcing the law.

Unlike KwaZulu Natal, none of these treacherous politicians have been murdered for treason or imprisoned as was done to PAC members who are still languishing in prisons for apartheid era activities, for which your state forgave the perpetrators of apartheid.

South Africa has the highest rape rate in Africa, with a woman raped every 3mins. Interpol calls it the rape capital of the world. It has one of the highest murder rates in the world, coming in the top 15. Albeit, these heinous crimes generally go unsolved because of a corrupt, racist and incompetent law enforcement and judiciary that is indifferent to black South African lives.

The same police force has been implicated in facilitating politically connected global drug trafficking and assassinations, but we have never heard your party asking the South African parliament to investigate that organized crime which violates human rights across the world.

Over the years, the Zulu king and politicians have instigated xenophobia against foreigners. SABC occasionally gives platforms for politicians and personalities to spread hate against foreigners, to incite xenophobia, while the apartheid media machinery leads the subliminal Nazi style mass indoctrination of black self-hate.

Local politicians are on record for mobilizing their constituents to attack foreign owned shops and of late, we have heard the Finance Minister Tito Mboweni standing in that very same Freemason enclave [parliament], calling for segregation and discrimination against foreign workers and businesses in a manner reminiscent of Nazi segregation against the Jews. No South African political party condemned this proposal of segregation, which contravenes the SA constitution, international human rights conventions and immigration customs. How can you now stand up to talk about human rights in Zimbabwe, after turning a blind eye to all the above violations in your own country? Since when did Zimbabwean [foreign] lives start mattering to South Africans?

More importantly, no African parliament or civil society organization ever asked for the investigation or criminalization of the South African government for these human rights abuses. They all gave South Africa space to mature its democracy and address its internal issues, without driving the racist stereotyical narrative that South Africans abuse human rights in a world were Europeans have perpetrated all major barbaric crimes against humanity but are never labeled as human rights abusers.

For years South African apartheid era mercenaries have caused and continue to cause havoc on the African continent under the watch of your democratic parliament.

In 2004, an entire team of South African mercenaries sponsored by Margret Thatcher’s son, to effect the Wonga Coup in Equatorial Guinea, was intercepted in Zimbabwe on its way to remove a sitting president, in a violation of the UN Charter and many other international conventions.

Numerous South African mercenaries are known to be in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan working as private contractors for US soldiers who have murdered over 3.1mil Arabs through wars and sanctions for oil and geopolitical hegemony.

Late last year, the wife of former minister and relative of the president: Judith Radebe, was caught orchestrating the overthrow of the Botswana government in Victoriafalls, by Zimbabwean intelligence agents. The event and the ones above were followed by silence from your parliament and government, even though a politically connected South African was working on destabilizing another African country, in violation of international law and human rights.

South Africa destabilizing other African countries is a recurring theme in South Africa’s relationship with Africa since apartheid. In 1998 your parliament took sides with the west when it refused to send troops as part of the SADC ORGAN, after Rwandan and Ugandan western backed rebels invaded Congo to try and remove Laurent Kabila from power because he chose to limit foreign companies’ (including white South African companies) access to Congolese resources.

Then, when Zimbabwe was placed under US sanctions (Note: Not UN sanctions) in 2001 for going on this mission to defend Congo from hegemony with Namibia, Angola, Chad, Sudan and Libya, over and above taking land. Your parliament, stood on the sidelines as 17mil innocent Zimbabwean human rights were violated by the collective punishment of illegal sanctions that have since killed thousands, depriving many of clean water, social services and sanitation, which has displaced 3mil people into being refugees in SADC and dividing our people over the past 19yrs.

Since Congo, South Africa has been instrumental in the demise of leading Pan Africanist nations like Libya, which joined Zimbabwe in Congo. Libya was brought down after South Africa voted with the west to approve Resolution 1973 that enabled NATO to murder Gadaffi on the same false western stereotype that African governments abuse human rights. Since the murder of Gadaffi, the US took over Libyan oil, slavery was reinstituted and the once most prosperous African nation has been reduced to a failed state with the complicity of South African hypocrisy.

Now, we hear you and the EFF singing the same tune of human rights abuses in Zimbabwe in an attempt to prevent our government from enforcing our laws, yet in your own country police shoot over 550 people every year, enforcing the law and suppressing violent protests against the continuation of apartheid.

As we speak, your government continues to permit foreign special forces from Israel, France, UK and the US to come in, arm and selectively train racist Broederbond aligned white militia, to counter black South African cries for land restitution.

How is it that with such a lousy human rights record in your own country, you want to drive the US propaganda [used on Libya] that the Zimbabwean government violates human rights when enforcing law and order, yet, no Zimbabwean government institution or official has ever been investigated, tired or found guilty of human rights violations by any human rights court or tribunal anywhere in the world?

You are promoting disinformation that is driven by white sponsored media in pursuit of the US push for regime change through the sanctions (that you have ignored for over 19yrs) induced protests.

May I also point out that you and the EFF condemning the Zimbabwean government for human rights violations, based on biased media reports, without investigations or due process (as the west did to impose sanctions on Zimbabwe), you are in violation of the Bill Of Human Rights, ICESCR and ICCPR treaties which your government is signatory.

Notwithstanding, we have never heard any of you calling the US government human rights abusers for their well-documented human rights abuses across the world. Even though the US government has been found guilty of human rights violations by a number of international courts in cases that include Panama 1982 and the condemnation of illegal sanctions in Iran by the ICJ in 2018.

Just this year, they imposed sanctions on the ICC for investigating their war crimes in Afghanistan, after 700 complaints of war crimes came on the back of their endless wars in the Middle East (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen) that have killed over 3.1mil people (from war and sanctions) since 2001, according to the Brown University Cost of War Study.

You have never asked for investigations against the US, UK and EU for their violations of 17mil Zimbabwean human rights by illegal sanctions and sponsored terrorism against civilians on the continent, clear violations the Geneva Convention in war time, the UN Charter, International Human Rights conventions and GATT in peace time.

In fact, while Zimbabwe has been under sanctions, your parliament, media and government have been complicit with these gross human rights violations upon the Zimbabwean people by these illegal western sanctions, through their silence and veiled insinuations that misgovernance and not the crime against humanity of economic warfare are responsible for the suffering of the Zimbabwean people, because you are complicit with the regime change agenda of the west.

You have never cared about the Zimbabwean lives because if you cared you would have stood with the millions of innocent Zimbabweans being brutalized by illegal sanctions over the past 19yrs.

You would have stood with Zimbabweans when your apartheid era companies continued their apartheid era sabotage and looting of our economy. You would have stood with Zimbabweans when the SARB (South African Reserve Bank) allowed money to be illegally externalized and laundered from Zimbabwe into the South African banking system by white capitalists in continuation of the apartheid government’s economic destabilization of SADC.

You would have investigated your mining companies that have continued to transfer price and loot our resources through exporting unprocessed ore containing undeclared minerals into South Africa. People in the know say over 30 tons of gold, uranium and other rare earths are pilfered from Zimbabwe every year in the raw ore exported by Implats and Anglo America into South Africa.

In Congo, Glencore and other South African companies also illegally smuggle undeclared minerals, sponsor rebels and private armies, while bribing local officials as they pollute Congolese rivers, soil and air under the guard of the SANDF.

All these are clear human rights violations that harm neighboring economies, resulting in refugees being pushed into South Africa, where they will inevitably be victimized by your police, exclusion and xenophobic attacks. These are gross human rights violations, which your parliament does not address and instead wants to focus on demonizing a neighboring government for enforcing its laws, in an attempt to foment anarchy in that country.

You might not realize it now but your country is on a collision course with the same British, US and western interests that you are currently serving by erroneously weaponizing human rights to destabilize Zimbabwe. Only then will you understand this human rights rhetoric you are abusing, as western countries that have murdered over 200 million people the world over (in the last 200yrs) for their resources, impose sanctions on you, using the mantra of human rights for taking back your land.

This should be your most pressing worry as the South African parliament, instead of you and the EFF abusing South Africa’s position to advance imperialism on the continent.

I hope you are competent enough to also know that the action you and EFF have undertaken to push South Africa to interfere in the internal workings of a sovereign nation, based on propaganda, is a contravention of the UN Charter clause on the sovereignty and equality of nations.

If South Africa has issues with Zimbabwe it must use diplomatic channels to first investigate and speak with its neighbor. Otherwise, any action by your party or any others seeking to demonize our government based on the disinformation campaign of the same political party that the US imposed sanctions to force the Zimbabwean people to elect, is complicity in the western regime change agenda.

Many of us Zimbabweans are beginning to wonder if some sections of South Africa have began to once again play the role of destabilizing SADC and Africa on behalf of the west, as the National Party and Broederbond did. We are also wondering why the ANC has not denounced these unneighbhorly comments, considering their collusion with the west in the murder of Gadaffi and destruction of Libya.

Maybe the time has come for Africa to come together again to fight apartheid because apartheid is clearly still alive and South Africa is using xenophobia, its white owned former apartheid companies, hostile white media, surrogate political parties and mercenaries to destroy Africa from within, for their western allies.

We are a civil society organization fighting imperialism in Zimbabwe and Africa, and in as much as we are not in agreement with the Zimbabwean government on compensating white farmers because of the precedence it sets for future land restitution on the continent and for all non-white people across the world. We do not believe that South African political parties have any business trying to stop the Zimbabwean government from enforcing its laws during times of emergency or anarchy.

This letter is written to challenge the injustice of South African political parties interfering in the affairs of sovereign African nations, to drive western interests on the continent in the same manner it was done by the National Party and Broederbond during apartheid. It is these actions that continue to destabilize smaller African countries, leading to the displacement of refugees into South Africa where the same politicians then blame the incompetence of African leaders for displacing the refugees, yet South African neo-colonialism is destroying these countries and their economies.

This hegemony must stop.

Thank You.

Rutendo Matinyarare

Zimbabweans Unite Against US War Sanctions