I am glad to have the opportunity to raise this important matter, the treatment of the minority gay community in the Republic of Zimbabwe. The wording of my motion was raised in a contentious manner on the Order of Business today. I am grateful to my colleague, Senator Ryan, for using one of his sporadic visits to the House to draw attention to my interest in the continuing controversies in this area. However, his sympathy for Mr. Mugabe, whom I described as a dictator, is misplaced. Any such sympathy is of the same nature as the ill advised visit of the late President de Valera to the German Embassy to express his condolences on the death of Adolf Hitler. I refuse to withdraw the statement.
Mr. Mugabe is a dictator by any internationally applicable standards and I intend to outline information to the House which indicates that this is so. He is currently in a difficult situation both economically and politically. I wish to refer to a number of responsible articles in The Irish Times. On Friday, 5 April 1996, it published a significant article under the heading “Behind the Model Facade, Democracy is Hard to Find”. It stated:
Zimbabwe is a de facto one-party state, they say, with no democratic remedy against a growing corruption and disregard for individual rights. If this does not change, they fear it could go the way of other former British colonies such as Nigeria and Kenya, which have degenerated since independence into corrupt and sometimes brutal dictatorships.
Dr. Reginald Matshaba-Hove, chairman of the country's largest human right group, Zim Rights, blames the dearth of democracy on the 14 amendments Zanu has added to the constitution it inherited from the Lancaster House agreement in 1979.
One of the first amendments abolished the upper house of parliament, so that all laws — even constitutional amendments — can be easily pushed through parliament. Another allows the president to personally nominate 30 of the 150 MPs. Other constitutional and legal changes give the president the power to rule by decree and to annul elections. The government can even ban voluntary organisations.
As a Member of this House I could not regard the destroyer of an upper house in the Zimbabwe parliament as a good person. The article continued:
Broadcasting is monopolised by the state and news centres sycophantically on the doings and sayings of Dr. Mugabe. The country's daily newspapers have also fallen under the control of Zanu.
The main independent newpaper, the weekly Financial Gazette, has been gagged by other means. Last year, the paper's editor and proprietor were accused of “criminal defamation” under colonial era laws and imprisoned for 48 hours after reporting on the secret remarriage of the 72 year old Dr. Mugabe.
This year, the paper found itself under fresh attack for publishing a Reuters report from Lesotho which said Dr. Mugabe had thrown a tantrum when his aircraft was asked to land behind President Nelson Mandela's as both leaders arrived for King Moshoeshoe's funeral. The editor, Trevor Ncube, was sacked and the owner ordered the staff to cease publishing articles that might offend Dr. Mugabe.
A former political columnist, Iden Wetherell, who also lost his job over the Lesotho affair, believes it is no coincidence that the Gazette's holding company is heavily in debt to a state owned bank. The Lesotho story must have touched a particularly raw nerve with Dr. Mugabe, he said.
On Saturday, 7 February 1998, an article in the world news section of The Irish Times stated:
"Mugabe is in bad shape today. What he needs is a miracle, or some kind of political gymnastics," says Dr. Ibbo Mandaza, director of the Southern Africa Regional Institute for Political Studies.
He also arrested a strong political opponent, the Rev. Ndabaningi Sithole, whom he has accused on trumped up charges of attempting to assassinate him. These charges have now been dismissed.
His actions are part of the pattern of somebody in a dictatorial frame of mind who is in a delicate situation and he might choose to turn against an easy target group which, in Zimbabwe, is the gay community. Dr. Mugabe is on record as saying that gay people were "less than and worse than dogs", a sentiment he repeated in Ireland on 10 March 1997, when he was the distinguished speaker and The Irish Times/Harvard University Colloquium in UCD. He was asked by a courageous student at that college to apologise for these comments. Instead of doing so he referred to his Irish education by the Christian Brothers. He refused to withdraw the comments and, indeed, repeated them. Shamefully, he drew applause from certain sections of the audience.
I am a member of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission and I regularly receive e-mails from that organisation. I recently received a worrying one about Dr. Mugabe's concentrated focus on gay people. I believe he is getting ready, if he is not stopped, to incite a pogrom against gay people, the like of which has not been seen since the Hitler era in Germany.
Keith Goddard, programs manager of Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe — GALZ — and one of the country's most prominent gay activists, has been arrested under that country's sodomy law. Goddard faces up to seven years' imprisonment. The arrest represents a culmination of a mounting campaign of repression against lesbians and gays, a campaign led by the regime of President Mugabe.
According to Zimbabwean activists, Goddard's arrest occurred after a year of blackmail attempts. This is similar to Mugabe's attempts to frame the Rev. Ndabaningi Sithole. In May 1997, Goddard began to receive letters from a man named Siphephele Vuma. The letters at first expressed affection but later letters turned to threats against Goddard for allegedly having had sexual relations with Vuma. Goddard categorically denies that such relations ever occurred and states that he only met the man one when Vuma briefly visited the offices of GALZ. In a letter in January 1998, Vuma raised the ante, demanding goods and cash to the value of US$2,000. At this point, Goddard reported the threat to the police in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe.
Their response was curious. No action was taken until 1 May when Goddard was visited by police from the Central Intelligence Department, an undercover division dealing with vice offences. Ultimately called to the police station, Goddard was told he would be charged with having sodomised Vuma at gunpoint. On 12 June, Goddard and Vuma were both arraigned — Vuma charged with extortion and Goddard with sodomy. Vuma initially admitted the charge of extortion. The judiciary are clearly not independent in Zimbabwe and we have a long record demonstrating President Mugabe's interference with the judiciary. In one case he called on the chief justice to resign his position because he disagreed with chief justice's judgment. In this case the presiding judge changed the plea to not guilty and encouraged Vuma to state that he had demanded $2,000 as compensation for the "crime" of which he was a "victim". That is prejudging a situation in a most extraordinary manner, that is, prejudice.
Vuma faces trial on 27 July. Goddard is free pending trial; no trial date has yet been set. Zimbabwean law criminalises "unlawful and intentional sexual relations per anum between human males". The charge that Goddard committed the act forcibly could raise the sentence to as much as seven years in prison. According to GALZ, the case against Goddard is clearly part of an overall strategy to discredit GALZ and its members. It comes after GALZ was accepted by the World Council of Churches as a participant in consultations surrounding the WCC's General Assembly to take place in Harare later this year. Since then, President Mugabe has renewed attacks on gays and lesbians, calling them "beasts,""perverts," and "worse than dogs and pigs."
Mugabe's professed repugnance toward homosexuality first became a political issue in 1995, when his government barred GALZ from maintaining an information booth at the Zimbabwe International Book Fair — another echo of Hitler. Mugabe proclaimed that homosexuals "have absolutely no rights whatever". He has since used the issue to shore up declining support for his party, the Zimbabwean African National Union-Popular Front, which maintains a stranglehold on the country's political life. In speeches he has urged members of the party's Women's League to tie up homosexuals and take them forcibly to the police.
Recently, the state run media have also joined the campaign against GALZ. An article in The Harare Sunday Mail on 24 May — citing, among other items, a lesbian only party which GALZ had organised — accused the organisation of running a “brothel” and of promoting sex with minors. GALZ restricts membership to adults over 18. According to GALZ members, one reporter from The Sunday Mail made sexual advances toward female members of the organisation. Another reporter obtained an interview with GALZ members by pretending to be a representative of Amnesty International. Goddard's arrest, according to members of international human rights groups, is “a flagrant assault on political freedom in Zimbabwe. It is not an isolated incident but part of a state orchestrated campaign to eradicate the organisation and intimidate any dissident political expression.”
I make no apology for describing Dr. Mugabe as a dictator. It pains me to have to raise this issue. As the Minister and Members know, I work very widely for human rights issues throughout the world. I do not concentrate exclusively on issues for gay people but when there is a danger that they will be targeted for political and expedient reasons, perhaps murdered, arrested unjustly, sentenced by courts that are vitiated by presidential interference, then it is time for me to speak out in this august Chamber which no doubt President Mugabe, had he the opportunity, would also abolish.
