Unimaginable event – Al Jazeera. These words were the news anchor used when reporting the fact that Hosni Mubarak was standing trial in Egypt.
A people’s revolution has toppled a dictator and put him on trial in a first for Arab countries.
From having been a solid partner and friend of the US in helping to keep the peace in the Middle East to being wheeled into a court room on a stretcher in front of your two sons, also on trial, must have been more humiliating than hiding in dirty hole for Iraq’s Sadaam Hussein.
Mubarak faces charges that include the alleged ordering of the killing of demonstrators in Tahrir Square.
Contrast this with this quote from Robert D Kaplan’s Warrior Politics: “In 1988, during the Palestinian Intifada, Israel’s Defence minister, Yitzhak Rabin, reportedly told Israeli soldiers to ‘go in and break their bones’,” referring to the Palestinian protesters.
Rabin’s standing in Israeli opinion polls began suddenly to rise and he was elected Prime Minister. Assassinated by a right wing extremist in 1995, he is now a hero for liberal humanists the world over.
How does the one they called the Pharaoh — because he was so powerful — end up in a cage in a court of law before the very subjects that feared him? Those of you who followed the Nile Revolution will remember the defiant speeches he made while he tried to stay in power. The jury is out and historians will debate this for long.
Was he contemptuous of his people? Closer to home, we have a character who is certainly treating his people with contempt and disdain. Malawian President BinguWaMutharika has been reported as mocking his people on the demonstrations they held against his increasingly autocratic rule according to some commentators.
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He asked them whether their rioting had resulted in increased fuel supplies, whose shortage was cited as one of the reasons for the street action.
Worse, and clearly completely out of touch with the prevailing mood, he threatened to “smoke out” anyone who would continue with demonstrations.
How does a leader use such language against the people who put him in power? Malawians should take advantage of this scornful behaviour to smoke him out of his palace and bring him before a court of law for having presided over the deaths of almost 18 people through the actions of his forces.
Someone sent me an email the other day asking me to contribute to a fund for the Somali famine relief. Great idea and good to see Zimbabweans are thinking of other people while we, too are in the throes of an economic crisis.
How much better it would have been to have helped the Somalis stand against dictatorship and anarchy instead! For, while nature has its cyclical devastations, a large portion of the problem is man-made. When you are busy fighting or fleeing fighting between rebels exploited by a ruthless and greedy minority, food security is not top of mind. Hundreds of thousands across the world marched against the Iraq war.
There is no reason why Zimbabweans cannot march, in their hundreds of thousands to the Malawian high commission, to demonstrate their concern in solidarity with the Malawian people to let them know that they are not alone. August 17, the Malawians are planning to go back to the streets.
Show your solidarity with them and march to go and present a petition to the Malawian government representatives and say: “We bear witness to your actions and we disapprove, very strongly.”
I quoted Tom Friedmann on the Hama massacres a few months ago in my piece, The World As it Really Is, and as I type this, the UN Security Council is condemning the pounding of the same town 29 years later. No one stood up for them during the first round of massacres in which twenty thousand people were murdered in the space of two months!
As I have stated before, one death is one death too many and Zimbabweans must communicate their revulsion of what the Malawi government is doing. In that way, we will be “lighting a candle” instead of “merely cursing the darkness” that threatens a fellow SADC country.
Perhaps, we will give the authorities there, and elsewhere, pause for thought. Latin America has turned a corner because people have realised that their common future is best served by solidarity and a break with the past. Africa is changing too but perhaps a tad slowly.
With inspiration and discipline, the hall marks of Innerzela, we can change the continent. Stand with Malawi, not because so many of them have been our neighbours in Zimbabwe for ages, but because it is the right thing to do.
Like paying your TV licence. Victor Hugo in closing: “Nothing, not all the armies in the world can stop an idea whose time has come!”
By the way, I am amused that certain news channels now refer to Mubarak as a dictator when not so long ago he was hailed as a moderate leader, but that is a subject for another time.
We were supposed to close on Victor Hugo. A young Mubarak, on the other hand, was a celebrated hero for his role in the 1973 war against Israel.
