Kubatana recently received the following press statement from Voice of Democracy on the subject of the (alleged) forthcoming New Zealand cricket tour to Zimbabwe:

There is a fine line, as the international community knows full well, between supporting democratic change in Zimbabwe and collaborating with a dictator. Zimbabwe’s Minister of Sport, David Coltart, seems to believe that New Zealand has an obligation to play cricket in Zimbabwe (New Zealand Herald, 23 March 2010). We disagree. New Zealand should stick to its principles, ignore Coltart, and shun Zimbabwe’s dictatorship.

In his article, David Coltart repeats a claim he made in December 2008 that going into government with Robert Mugabe was the ‘only viable non-violent option’. This was untrue then – as it is now. As one commentator wrote, the MDC had a ‘fistful of options’ for peaceful democratic change which were squandered when they reinstalled Mugabe to the fullness of his abusive powers.

Coltart then adds insult to injury by making such disingenuous claims that Zimbabwe’s Inclusive Government has “made remarkable progress in the last year” and that the political agreement “is gradually being implemented in its entirety.” This is not remotely true, which is why the European Union renewed its targeted sanctions against those members of Zimbabwe’s government accused of gross human rights abuses.

Indeed, if Coltart listened to himself he would be hard-pressed to recognise the lawyer who opposed human rights abuses in Zimbabwe for the last 27 years. It seems incredible that he now claims that there has been a “massive downturn in the number of human rights abuses” when ZANU(PF) is busy reestablishing the very bases in rural areas that unleashed such horrific violence during the June 2008 presidential elections.

He claims that maladministration and racism in cricket is being addressed, when the same top officials who were responsible for that corruption, racism and abuse of power remain firmly in place. It is all the more painful when he lauds cricket’s collaborator-in-chief, Heath Streak. Our heroes are Andy Flower and Henry Olonga who forfeited their cricket careers because they took a principled stand against the dictatorship.

Coltart is right in one respect: if the New Zealand team decides to come to Zimbabwe they will be welcomed with remarkable warmth and friendliness by our patron of Cricket Zimbabwe – Robert Mugabe! Dictator 1: New Zealand 0.

Below is a comment from The Guardian Weekly (12/3/10). It reminded me of Delta Ndou’s blog about Zuma being called a buffoon by the British media.

“How do Zulus explain polygamy?” the BBC website asked in a piece at the end of last week’s coverage of the South African president’s state visit to Britain. There are many more serious concerns about Jacob Zuma’s rule beside his domestic arrangements, and many more important issues for the British and South African governments to discuss. He has said deeply unpleasant things about women and Aids. It is right to criticize him for this. But that does not wholly explain last week’s media fascination with polygamy. There is an undertone of imperial snobbishness about it as well, the mockery of a visiting president exposing a British national weakness for thinking of foreign leaders in the most simplistic, comic-book terms.

African leaders seem particularly prone to this stereotyping. Nelson Mandela can do no wrong in British eyes, just as President Zuma can now do no good – South Africa’s saint giving way to its sinner. Idi Amin, who got his own state visit in the 1970s, was thought a buffoon by the press before he was declared a butcher. Robert Mugabe experienced a similar slide. Britain’s closer neighbours suffer too. President Sarkozy’s state visit in 2008 was dominated by excitement over the tight outfits worn by his wife Carla Bruni. Silvio Berlusconi is routinely laughed at in the press as an ageing Italian lothario, which takes away from the much more serious harm his rule does to his country. Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is seen as a tough guy. Most other world leaders, even Germany’s Angela Merkel, lacking any easy definition, are largely ignored.

What Zuma makes of the reporting of his several marriages is unknown. A tough politician, he has doled out as many insults as he has taken. Before leaving for Britain he told a South African paper that “when the British came to our country they said everything we did was barbaric, was wrong, inferior in what-ever way”. That is a reasonable point about an empire whose relics linger on in the imperial coaches and plumed hats dusted off before state visits. The absurdity runs both ways in this affair.

The death threats? Too numerous to count. The serious attempts on his life ranged from make-believe doctors offering potentially fatal “medicine” to a traffic accident that was no accident at all. In his native Zimbabwe, Chenjerai Hove has been ranked as high as No. 17 on the government’s Enemies of the State list. Read more

PlusNews Global, an arm of IRIN, reports on HIV/AIDS news and analysis. Here’s one of their recent articles on Zimbabwe:

Moses Mataka, 49, diagnosed with the HIV virus seven years ago, was one of the first male home-based caregivers working in the mining district of Mberengwa, in Midlands Province, Zimbabwe, and perhaps he was one of the first in the country, but his road has not been easy.

“I tested HIV positive in 2003. I had been very ill for a very long time … One day I had a dream that God asked me to get up and do his work. Before I could ask, ‘What kind of work?’ I woke up from the dream and I was feeling stronger. My wife was making porridge for me when I walked into the kitchen. She almost fainted with disbelief.

“From that day I have never been ill to the extent of lying in bed for days. When I thought hard about the dream, I knew that the work I needed to do was to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS in my community and save people’s lives. This was very difficult because I also did not have much knowledge about it.

“That was the starting point. I joined a support group and trained as a peer educator; after that I joined a home-based care programme [which closed down in 2005].

“After its closure we didn’t know what to do and our patients were stranded. Although we had no support we continued visiting our clients, giving them moral support.

“After that I joined the Betseranai Home Based Care programme … where we use male caregivers to encourage other men to get tested and support their wives in the Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission (PMTCT).

“Most women are afraid to go on this programme, because when the husbands find out they [the wives] are HIV positive they are chased away from the family home – they are blamed for bringing the disease into the home.

“This is the work I do as a “Male Champion”. We go and talk to men so that they understand what the benefits of PMTCT are, but it’s not an easy thing. Sometimes we are chased away from people’s homes; sometimes they close their doors in our faces, but we continue visiting them and trying to convince them.

“We men are just thick-headed – I know that for a fact. We take time to accept issues because we want to live in denial most of the time, but in Mberengwa, I tell you, we are changing mindsets. People are seeing the benefits of the PMTCT programme.”

I was more interested in reading the comments on an article about the postponed New Zealand cricket tour to Zimbabwe on NewZimbabwe.com, than the actual article itself. The assertion by David Coltart that Zimbabwe is safer than the UK and other countries is resoundingly accurate. That is if you’re a member of a visiting sports team. But if you’re a human rights defender, an information activist, or a member of the general public who wants to wear an MDC t-shirt, you’re in big trouble. One of the readers who commented on the Coltart article likened Zanu PF to a terrorist organisation. How right, or wrong is this suggestion? Another reader berates Coltart for flip-flopping because until fairly recently, Coltart would have grabbed with two hands, any excuse for a sports boycott whether the grounds for the boycott were defendable, or spurious. Then again, I’d be interested to know whether this same reader who thinks Coltart has flip-flopped would praise Coltart for calling for a boycott of any international soccer team that wanted to play in Zimbabwe? I think not. New Zealand is using security as an excuse. They don’t want to tour Zimbabwe because of the Mugabe regime. And perhaps they have issues with Mugabe being the patron of Zimbabwe cricket. In which case they might well have to stand to attention on the green grass of Harare Sports Club and shake Mr M’s hand. And of course, Coltart, in a bid to woo the Kiwis, like many other politicians, suggests that the GNU has replaced a dictatorship when it clearly hasn’t.

Check out the blogs on New Internationalist if you want to access some refreshing reading. Blogger Jo Lateu recently shared some words of wisdom on homophobia from Desmond Tutu. Of course, the hysterical homophobic elements of society are likely to be as reactive as ever, but more fool them. If there are any pearly gates, the haters among us are certainly going to struggle to gain entry when they pop their sandaks.

Hate has no place in the house of God. No one should be excluded from our love, our compassion or our concern because of race or gender, faith or ethnicity – or because of their sexual orientation. Nor should anyone be excluded from health care on any of these grounds. In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied many of them fundamental human rights. We knew this was wrong. Thankfully, the world supported us in our struggle for freedom and dignity.

It is time to stand up against another wrong.

Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people are part of so many families. They are part of the human family. They are part of God’s family. And of course they are part of the African family. But a wave of hate is spreading across my beloved continent. People are again being denied their fundamental rights and freedoms. Men have been falsely charged and imprisoned in Senegal, and health services for these men and their community have suffered. In Malawi, men have been jailed and humiliated for expressing their partnerships with other men. Just this month, mobs in Mtwapa Township, Kenya, attacked men they suspected of being gay. Kenyan religious leaders, I am ashamed to say, threatened an HIV clinic there for providing counselling services to all members of that community, because the clerics wanted gay men excluded.

Uganda’s parliament is debating legislation that would make homosexuality punishable by life imprisonment, and more discriminatory legislation has been debated in Rwanda and Burundi.

These are terrible backward steps for human rights in Africa.

Our lesbian and gay brothers and sisters across Africa are living in fear.

And they are living in hiding – away from care, away from the protection the state should offer to every citizen and away from health care in the AIDS era, when all of us, especially Africans, need access to essential HIV services. That this pandering to intolerance is being done by politicians looking for scapegoats for their failures is not surprising. But it is a great wrong. An even larger offence is that it is being done in the name of God. Show me where Christ said ‘love thy fellow man, except for the gay ones’. Gay people, too, are made in my God’s image. I would never worship a homophobic God.

‘But they are sinners,’ I can hear the preachers and politicians say. ‘They are choosing a life of sin for which they must be punished.’ My scientist and medical friends have shared with me a reality that so many gay people have confirmed, I now know it in my heart to be true. No one chooses to be gay. Sexual orientation, like skin colour, is another feature of our diversity as a human family. Isn’t it amazing that we are all made in God’s image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people? Does God love his dark- or his light-skinned children less? The brave more than the timid? And does any of us know the mind of God so well that we can decide for him who is included, and who is excluded, from the circle of his love?

The wave of hate must stop. Politicians who profit from exploiting this hate, from fanning it, must not be tempted by this easy way to profit from fear and misunderstanding. And my fellow clerics, of all faiths, must stand up for the principles of universal dignity and fellowship. Exclusion is never the way forward on our shared paths to freedom and justice.

The writer is archbishop emeritus of Cape Town, South Africa. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.

The article first appeared in the Washington Post.