Peter Tatchell speaks in Oxford on Friday 20th July 2007

The human rights campaigner and Green Party parliamentary candidate for Oxford East asks:

”Where is the international solidarity in support of the freedom struggles in Iran, Zimbabwe and Darfur? What can the international community do to challenge dictatorship, genocide, war crimes and torture?”

Oxford Humanists

Friday 20 July 2007
Pauling Centre, 58 Banbury Road, Oxford
7.30pm for 8.00pm

Free admission. Open to the public. All visitors welcome.

In his speech, Peter Tatchell will, among other issues, criticise double-standards over the oppression of black Zimbabweans by the Mugabe regime:

“President Robert Mugabe has murdered more black Africans than the South African apartheid regime. In just one region of Zimbabwe, in just one decade – in Matabeleland in the 1980s – his army slaughtered 20,000 civilians. This is the equivalent of a Sharpeville massacre every day for more than nine months.

“The world was outraged by Sharpeville but not by Matabeleland. There were international sanctions against PW Botha’s tyranny, but barely a murmur of disapproval against Muagbe’s far worse excesses. Why the double standards?

“A black state murdering black citizens does not, apparently, merit the same outrage as a white state murdering black citizens. Responding to black murderers differently from white ones is a de facto form of racism. It judges black human rights abusers by a lower ethical criterion. That is patronising and infantalising; treating black Africans as incapable of moral behaviour.

“South Africa’s ANC-led government has betrayed black Zimbabwe. During the apartheid era, the ANC urged the international community to exert economic pressure against the governments of PW Botha and FW de Klerk. The demise of apartheid was, according to the ANC, aided by international boycotts.

“Zimbabwean activists now argue that President Thabo Mbeki’s government in Pretoria should use its economic leverage to support the struggle for democracy and human rights, in the same way that other countries pressured the apartheid state to dismantle white supremacism.

“Ironically, when he was a leader of the ANC’s liberation struggle two decades ago, Mbeki argued that the world had a moral duty to impose economic sanctions to undermine the apartheid government. Why is there a moral duty to challenge a white tyranny, but not a black one? Are black Zimbabwean lives less worthy of saving than the lives of their South African counterparts?,” asked Mr Tatchell.

Further information:

John White

Chair, Oxford Humanists
01865 891876

Peter Tatchell

020 7403 1790

Ends