Amnesty International director says human rights in Zimbabwe still grim
HARARE, Zimbabwe - Amnesty International’s director said yesterday that the situation in Zimbabwe remains grim despite promises of reform and that some in President Robert Mugabe’s party still regard violence as a legitimate political tool.
Irene Khan, the first secretary general of the human rights watchdog to visit Zimbabwe, complained that the southern African country’s four-month-old unity government was not pursuing human rights abusers.
“Progress on human rights has been woefully slow. Although the level of political violence is significantly lower than last year, the human rights situation remains precarious,’’ Khan said.
Minutes after she spoke and just a few hundred yards away, police beat peaceful protesters from a local human rights group.
Khan had been promised a meeting with Mugabe during her visit but didn’t get one - even though the longtime, increasingly autocratic leader was championed as an Amnesty “prisoner of conscience’’ during his anticolonial campaign in the 1960s and 1970s.
Khan will meet Mugabe’s former rival and current governing partner, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, today in London.
Khan said her delegation found, after talks with officials in the coalition from both Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party and Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change, “no real sense of urgency to bring about human rights changes.’’
“Senior ministers confirmed that addressing impunity is not a priority for the government right now,’’ she said. 