Earl Moxam, Senior Gleaner Writer
LEWIS
PROFESSOR RUPERT Lewis, a leading regional Pan-Africanist, is calling for Jamaica and other Caribbean Community (CARICOM) states to take a stand against the regime of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.
Mugabe, who in the late 1970s and '80s, stood as an icon of the anti-colonialist struggle in Africa, has, in recent years, earned the wrath and scorn of many Western governments, over his land reform policies, questionable elections, and treatment of his political opponents.
Now the United Nations has condemned the regime's slum clearance programme, declaring it a violation of international law.
According to the U.N. report, about 700,000 people have lost their homes or livelihoods and another 2.4 million have been affected, by the initiative to clear the cities of their slum dwellers, without alternative provisions for those displaced.
CATASTROPHIC INJUSTICE
"The scale of suffering is immense," the U.N. said, with Secretary General Kofi Annan charging that a "catastrophic injustice" had been done to Zimbabwe's poorest.
With Mugabe's regime fast becoming a pariah, Lewis, a professor of political thought at the University of the West Indies, Mona, is urging CARICOM to be critical of Mugabe and side with "the ordinary people who remain defenceless".
Mugabe, he told The Gleaner, had become a dictator, undeserving of the continued loyalty of principled African governments or of the Caribbean.
Instead, he is calling for a new position in support of "a democratic transition in Zimbabwe which will show that it is not only when white people are oppressing us that we stand up but when our own black people are oppressing us that we need to take a stand on principle".
The slum clearance programme, which started in May, has reportedly been carried out with brutal efficiency, the bulldozers often moving in at nights and without warning. Thousands of families have had to stand by and watch helplessly as their shacks are demolished before they are carted off to the countryside, many with only the clothes on their backs.
