HUMAN rights lobby group, Zimbabweans Without Borders (ZWB), has reacted angrily to reports that Police Commissioner-General Augustine Chihuri at the weekend said Zimbabweans in the Diaspora had no right to comment on events back home because “they got a chance to go out of the country”.
BY STAFF REPORTER
Media reports claimed Chihuri told journalists following briefings with police officers returning from international duty that Zimbabweans who fled the economic and political meltdown had found the situation tougher, hence their continued interest in events back home.
“If the situation was greener in the Diaspora, people there wouldn’t be complaining, I am telling you. Why, if it is all that rosy, should they be talking about where they are not? You got a chance,” Chihuri reportedly said.
But ZWB hit back, saying President Robert Mugabe’s policies and repression had forced millions into exile.
“The Diaspora will never be green pastures because it is not home. We can drive the latest cars, we can send our children to well-provisioned schools, we can send money to help relatives back home, but when we say ‘home’, it will always be the Mugabe-ravaged country of Zimbabwe that we mean,” the group said in a statement.
Conservative figures were that at least three million Zimbabweans have fled the country due the to relentless economic and political crises.
ZWB said Mugabe had also persecuted Zimbabweans, mainly opposition-aligned citizens, into exile since the turn of the century.
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The group said Chihuri seemed to insinuate that Zimbabweans left the country by choice, which was “symptomatic of the hubris that has so afflicted our political class that they do not see what harm they have done to the country that we all love”.
ZWB said it would not copy Chihuri’s wartime capitulation at Mugabe’s hands after rebelling against his leadership under the VaShandi group.
“While Commissioner Chihuri suffered the ignominy of being incarcerated underground by the very person he now serves, he must not think that we are all going to make the choices he made then. He might have figured that if he could not defeat the forces of repression, then he should join them, but that is not a philosophy we share,” the statement read.
