Hidden Dimensions of Operation Murambatsvina, The

12 - Reading the 2005 Tibaijuka Report on Zimbabwe in a GLobal Context

159 Reading the 2005 Tibaijuka Report on Zimbabwe ... The UN-sanctioned report by Anna Kajimulo Tibaijuka (Tibaijuka 2005), remains the most well-known document about Operation Murambatsvina. Both the critics and admirers of the Operation Murambatsvina make references to the report’s ‘authoritative’ status when they make their judgements and arguments, especially in scholarly journals and in the public sphere where the report is also circulating. This means that in some important way, the report has become a discursive space through its constructions and representations of the facts of Operation Murambatsvina. However, the ‘facts’ in the report are discursively not beyond contest. This chapter suggests that some hidden dimensions of Operation Murambatsvina , its antecedents, precedents and consequences for the future of democracy in Zimbabwe, can actually be revealed after critically analysing the facticity of the issues raised in the Tibaijuka report. A critical application of the linear perspective and its window; of framing theory and its frames; and of cognitive dissonance and its suppression of discrepant ‘fact’ can help scholars and ordinary readers to explain how so many ‘reports’ of ‘factfinding ’ missions have been predetermined by those who own the processes of report-making. In order to unravel the power discourses informing the Tibaijuka report and to underscore its constructedness and arbitrariness, it is important to foreground the ‘international politics’ that influenced the content of the report. This approach is useful because it helps the reader to situate the report in the discourses of globalisation of the human rights doctrine and see these as a pretext for intervention in international relations. Tibaijuka’s report is striking in at least three ways. First, the report raises the question why something treated in most of the world as a routine event, namely slum clearance, should be turned into a ‘global’ incident, with the writer or writers wondering aloud how the event could qualify for UN Security Council attention and even for the International Criminal Court. Reading the 2005 Tibaijuka Report on Zimbabwe in a Global Context Tafataona Mahoso 12 160 TAFATAONA MAHOSO Second, the report contains a big gap, or contradiction, between its stated purpose and what it actually achieves. The stated purpose is to assess the magnitude of UN-organised assistance required by 700,000 to 2,400,000 people allegedly displaced or affected by the operation. This assistance is supposed to come from ‘the international community’ and ‘the humanitarian community.’ But no such assistance was sourced or received; the report in fact did not focus on the alleged assessment of the needs of the displaced people. Rather, it focused on, and achieved, the moral condemnation of the state to the extent of going beyond the terms of reference of the mission in order to achieve that condemnation. It went beyond the mission’s terms of reference by bringing in the African land reclamation movement which is rural and has little to do with urban slum clearance; by introducing the question of how and when the Government of Zimbabwe talks or does not talk to its opposition; and by extensively exploring ways in which the state’s actions could be criminalised on a global scale and brought before the UN Security Council. Third, the report is striking as a form of communication: it is a piece of activist journalism rather than a technical, professional or diplomatic communication. Theory Linear perspective theory reveals that the cascading veto power of the UN Security Council has turned the UN mission into a closed imperial window for the occasional surveillance and scanning of a world that is now rarely expected to speak for itself. In Robert Romanyshyn’s (1988, 37–43) words: [O]pen windows are, so to speak, halfway between doorways and windows that are closed. With a doorway one can follow one’s eyes into the world. One can walk through a doorway. With a window that is closed one can only look at a world which is for that reason primarily a spectacle, an object of vision. The condition of the window implies a boundary between the perceiver and the perceived. Framing is the process by which events may be converted into images and symbols ; and likewise images and symbols may be converted into events. Put another way, framing is the process by which the communicator deploys events and signs selectively in order to evoke meaning(s) beyond denotative or objective meaning , making these assume precise connotative significance in a specific context. When framing theory is applied to a reading of the...