On January 4, the Program on Human Rights at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law launched the inaugural Sanela Diana Jenkins International Human Rights Speaker Series featuring activist leader Jenni Williams of the Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA) organization. Williams captivated an audience of 70 with her harrowing account of the persecution and violence non-violent activists face at the hands of the repressive Mugabe regime.

Jenni Williams, a Zimbabwean activist, spoke Tuesday as part of the Sanela Diana Jenkins International Human Rights Speaker Series. Williams is national coordinator of Women of Zimbabwe, Arise!, or WOZA, a nonviolent organization that protests against human rights abuses in Zimbabwe.

“We are human-rights defenders to the nation, mothers to the nation…we defy unjust laws and take our issues to the streets to find a nonviolent way of protesting,” Williams said after showing her audience a slideshow titled “Zimbabwe’s Elections: 30 Years of Torment, Torture & Death,” which depicted images of torture under Robert Mugabe’s regime in her homeland.

Following the slideshow and a video showing members of WOZA protesting for proper electricity, Williams started her speech on a somber note.

“2011 is going to be a year of hell in Zimbabwe, so excuse me for not saying, ‘Happy New Year,’” she said.

“If my grandchildren cannot get a better Zimbabwe, they will think of me badly. We have to correct the past wrongs and re-establish the social dignity of our people.”
-Jenni Williams

In a country where the average life expectancy for women is 37 years, the unemployment rate is 94 percent and Mugabe has been in charge for 30 years, leading a regime accused of corruption, nepotism, bribery and human rights abuse, WOZA seeks to bring democracy and justice to Zimbabwe, she said.

“We aim to mobilize through civic education,” she said. “We capacitate ordinary people with skills for community leadership…we’re creating a society where no new Robert Mugabe can flourish.”

WOZA has carried out 35 street demonstrations in the last 18 months. The grassroots organization relies on ordinary Zimbabweans. Both women and men have swelled its ranks to 75,000 members.

“Our activists are not the employed or the ones who go to university,” Williams said. “They are ordinary people struggling for ordinary everyday things that the politicians needs to be focused on.”

After choosing to remain in Zimbabwe despite mass exodus and the migration of her husband and children to the UK, she has been arrested 33 times, including after the electricity protest. She was held in prison for six days, then returned to her activism once she was freed.

Williams also moves between safe houses in Zimbabwe every six months and was at one time under risk of assassination, she said.

Nonetheless, Williams said, she believes fully in nonviolence, quoting Gandhi and saying, “We love anyone, even our enemies.”

“She’s a pioneer for protecting human rights,” said Davis Albohm, a graduate student in African studies. “She’s doing incredible work that I think a lot of people would not be brave enough to undertake.”

Williams credited her fellow WOZA members for their achievements.

“A shared burden is a burden lightened,” she said. “Our organization has empowered people. We’ve trained them to be human-rights defenders…we see the Zimbabwe we want in our mind’s eye, and we feel it in our hearts.”

Williams said Zimbabwe’s political environment “remains highly violent, uncertain and tense,” speaking of the very real possibility that President Mugabe, now 86, will die in power before opposition defeats him.

Williams said her group’s goals went beyond simply deposing Mugabe.

“Robert Mugabe is only the face of a political system…we want to put the democratic yeast within the society so the loaf will rise,” she said.

Victoria Alvarado ’14 said the talk was “very, very emotionally striking.”

“I found myself in tears at points. She came here to show us that we can help,” Alvarado said.

Williams’ suggestion to the audience was to “appreciate what you have and protect your own rights and freedoms. We need a model to copy.”

And on why she continued to fight a dangerous struggle, Williams cited the future, not only of her nation but of her family.

“If my grandchildren cannot get a better Zimbabwe, they will think of me badly,” she said. “We have to correct the past wrongs and re-establish the social dignity of our people.”

Allegra McLeod, Post Doctoral Fellow for the Program on Global Justice, and Kieran Oberman, Post Doctoral Fellow for the Program on Global Justice and the Center for Ethics in Society, are seen preparing for a session of Introduction to Global Justice. Each year the program's Post Doctoral Fellows have the opportunity, as part of their appointment, to teach the Stanford course which includes recent work in political theory on global justice. The course is designed to encourage students to think critically about some of the important questions regarding such issues as global poverty, human rights, fair trade, immigration and climate change. Questions include: Do developed countries have a duty to aid developing countries? When is humanitarian intervention justified? and Is torture ever justified? Readings include Charles Beitz, Thomas Pogge and John Rawls.

Bush gave democracy promotion a bad name, Larry Diamond writes in Newsweek. The new administration needs to get it right.

Beginning this fall, I have initiated a Program on Global Justice at FSI. We are just getting started, so it strikes me as a good time to explain the fundamental ideas.

I am a philosopher by training and sensibility, and as a philosopher, I take my orientation from Immanuel Kant. Kant said that philosophy addresses three basic questions: What can we know? What should we do? And what may we hope for?

The question about hope is the most important. Philosophy is not about what will be, but about what could be: It is an exploration of possibilities guided by the hope that our world can be made more just by our common efforts.

In our world, 1 billion people are destitute. They live on less than a dollar a day. They are not imprisoned in destitution because of their crimes; they are imprisoned in destitution despite their innocence.

Another 1.5 billion people live only slightly better, on $1–2 a day. They are able to meet their basic needs, but they lack fundamental goods. They, too, are not in poverty because of their crimes. They are in poverty despite their innocence.

That is how 40 percent of our world lives now.

For some of the poor and destitute, things are improving. But the extraordinary global distance between wealthy and poor is growing. The richest 5 percent in the world make 114 times as much as the bottom 5 percent; 1 percent of the world’s people make as much as the poorest 57 percent. So the gap grows and many are left behind. That is morally unacceptable.

The problem of global injustice is not only economic. Billions of people are deprived of basic human rights.

And new forms of global governance, through organizations like the World Trade Organization (WTO), are making decisions with large consequences for human welfare. Whether their decisions are good or bad, they remain largely unaccountable. That, too, is unacceptable.

Some people say that we should not worry so much because there is no such thing as global justice. Some of these skeptics say that justice is an issue only inside a state. Until there is a global state, they say, there is no global justice.

Other skeptics are communitarians. They say that justice only makes sense among people who share a culture. They say that our diverse global society lacks the common culture needed to sustain a commitment to justice.

These statist and communitarian views are misguided in a world of globalization.

Economically, globalization has made the global economy a substantial presence in the economic lives of virtually everyone in the world.

Politically, there are new forms of governance that operate outside the state. These new forms are especially important in the arena of economic regulation, but also have a role in areas of security, labor and product standards, the environment, and human rights. So we have new forms of global politics, with important consequences for human well-being.

Moreover, these new settings of global governance are the focus of an emerging global civil society of movements and nongovernmental organizations. In areas ranging from human rights, to labor standards, to environmental protection these groups contest the activities of states and global rule-making bodies.

The skeptical views may have made sense in a world with more national economic independence, less governance beyond the state, and more self-contained national communities. But that is not our world.

What, then, does the project of global justice mean? In general, it has three elements.

First, we need to ensure the protection of human rights, and we need a generous understanding of the scope of human rights. Human rights are about torture and arbitrary imprisonment, but also about health, education, and political participation. The point of human rights is not simply to protect against threats, but to ensure social membership, to ensure that all people count for something.

Second, new global rule-making bodies operating beyond the state raise questions of justice. These bodies, like the WTO, make rules with important consequences for human welfare. Global justice is about ensuring that governance by such bodies is accountable, that people who are affected are represented, that rulemaking is transparent. When an organization makes policies with large consequences for human welfare, it needs to be held accountable through a fair process.

Third, global justice is about ensuring that everyone has access to the basic goods—food, health care, education, clean water, shelter—required for a decent human life and that when the global economy is moving forward, no one is left behind.

These three elements of global justice all start from the idea that each person matters. In short, global justice is about inclusion: about making sure that no one is left out.

Some people will say that global justice is a nice idea, but that it has no real practical importance. They say that globalization leaves no room for political choices, that it requires every country to follow the same path. We must reject this false assertion of necessity.

Some people say that the right choice for global justice is to increase levels of foreign assistance; some people say that the right choice is to provide credit for poor farmers; some people say that right choice is to empower poor women; some people say that right choice is to reduce disgusting levels of overconsumption and agricultural subsidies in rich countries; some people say that the right choice is to promote a more vibrant civil society so that people can become agents in creating their history rather than its victims and supplicants.

Many things are possible. And once we accept that global justice is a fundamental imperative, and that political choices are possible, then we come back to the political tasks in more developed countries. Many citizens in the advanced economies now experience globalization as a threat. Many fear that a better life for billions who are now destitute may mean a worse life for them.

So global justice is not simply an abstract moral imperative. Global justice is connected to greater justice at home. If we leave everything to the market at home, if we don’t fight for social insurance, education and health, employment and income, then we can be sure of an economic nationalist resurgence with all of its terrible consequences. So the political project of global justice requires a political project of a more just society at home.

This unity of justice—this unity of the national and the global: That is our answer to Kant’s question. That is what we may hope for. That is what we should strive to achieve.

Zvisinei Sandi is a Scholar Rescue Fellow at CDDRL. She lectures on the human rights situation in Southern Africa, especially in Zimbabwe and South Africa, and also collaborates with Stanford Law School's Human Rights Clinic on its ongoing project in Southern Africa. She has worked as a journalist and political activist in Zimbabwe, but her writing and activism have brought her hostile attention from the Zimbabwean government, resulting in threats and physical attacks. Here she shares some of her observations about Zimbabwe's March 19 elections and how the "seemingly impossible happened. Mugabe and his party lost control of the parliament and lost the presidential elections to Morgan Tsvangirai."

Zimbabwe's March 29 elections were held in an atmosphere that everybody saw as impossible for the opposition. There was virtually no media freedom, no campaign time for the opposition, and so much violence that being merely associated with the opposition MDC could very well mean death, and the Zimbabwe electoral commission, run by the fanatical Mugabe loyalist, Tobaiwa Mudede, was handpicked by the ZANU PF administration and is heavily in favor of ZANU and Mugabe. In addition, it can easily be argued that much of the election was rigged long before the election itself took place. Election observers found that the numbers on the voter's roll were far greater than the numbers of the voters on the ground. Many of the names were simply created to inflate the numbers in the constituencies that supported Mugabe, while another big number was comprised of the deceased. Plucky Zimbabwean humor suggested in the run up to the election that Mugabe had recruited the dead since the living had no more time for him.

To make matters even worse, in the period before the election, the military generals got together and announced that they would never serve under, or submit to being led by, a person without anti-colonial war credentials. In other words, they were saying that if Mugabe did lose to Tsvangirai they would just hold on to power through the use of force and ensure that Mugabe, the man they have served unquestioningly through several decades, stayed on. In real terms, this was a threatened coup: if Tsvangirai won, there would be a coup, Mugabe would stay on, and life would go on as usual.

In spite of all of these factors, the seemingly impossible happened. Mugabe and his party lost control of the parliament and lost the presidential elections to Morgan Tsvangirai. At this point, the question became whether the generals would carry out their threatened coup. Events, and reports from the inside, suggest that they have done it, and in such a smooth fashion that, of all the screams that have been heard from Zimbabwe recently, none of them has been "Coup!"

Reports in the independent newspapers suggested that Robert Mugabe had directed the ZEC to delay the announcement of the presidential election results in order to manage a political crisis triggered by his defeat and that of his ZANU PF party. It was reported that the service chiefs had approached Mugabe with results that showed his defeat and they advised him to buy time. The Zimbabwe Independent (April 4–10) reported that ZEC's delay was part of the government's crisis management plan following clear indications that Mugabe had lost the presidential election to Morgan Tsvangirai of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. Mugabe is reported to have ordered the withholding of results by ZEC to buy time to manage his defeat and allow the three weeks for the run-off to elapse, thereby creating circumstances for him to try to survive politically. It was reported in the same issue of the Zimbabwe Independent that part of the government's strategy was to force ZEC to delay announcing the result until Mugabe had found a way to deal with the problem.

Zimbabwe's electoral law provides for a run-off in the event that none of the presidential candidates wins 50% plus one vote in the election. The run-off was therefore supposed to be held on or before April 19. The Zimbabwe Independent revealed that Mugabe and his close advisors from the country's state security agencies wanted Mugabe to use his temporary presidential powers to amend the Electoral Act to have the run-off after ninety days, ruling by decree in the meantime. They advised Mugabe that this would give them time to regroup and strategize.

Soon after the election, it was reported that Mugabe had offered a transitional government that would run the country for six months. Mugabe proposed to head the transitional government. According to the proposal, tabled to the MDC, was one of the many options that Mugabe was considering to manage his departure from office. Weeks later, Tsvangirai confirmed that his party had held secret talks with Mugabe's ZANU PF about forming a government of national unity. Tsvangirai revealed in a BBC interview that ZANU PF had approached the MDC to talk of a transition. The situation reportedly changed after ZANU PF hardliners asserted themselves. Word in the streets was that the service chiefs, Constantine Chiwenga of the Zimbabwe National Army, Perence Shiri of the Air Force, Augustine Chihuri of the Zimbabwe Republic Police, Happyton Bonyongwe of the Central Intelligence Organization, and Paul Zimondi of Zimbabwe Prison Service were demanding assurances that they would not face prosecution for crimes they had committed during their service. It was then that reports suggested that the military had taken over.

The South African Sunday Independent of April 20 reported that the military was waging a systematic war of terror on rural people while the vote was being "faultlessly" rigged, ahead a contrived presidential run-off. The paper reported that central to the plot were hundreds of "command centers" led by war veterans and youths in police uniform, which were established across Zimbabwe to wage a national terror campaign. According to the paper, Zimbabwe's top military authority, the Joint Command, made up of service chiefs, has established a chain of command to ensure that Robert Mugabe and ZANU PF remain in office even though they both lost in elections on March 29. The network will be concentrated in the rural areas where 70 percent of the Zimbabwean population lives.

A senior army officer and a police chief described the president's re-election plan to the Sunday Independent. They said each command center would consist of three policemen, a soldier, and a war veteran who would be in charge. They would dispatch militias, comprised of war veterans and members of the ZANU PF Youth militia, to assault and torture known opposition supporters. They would also control the local police to ensure that the militia was immune from arrest. The generals have called on the four security services—army, police, intelligence, and prisons—to ensure that people are terrorized into voting for Mugabe in the expected presidential run-off. Generals who report directly to the Joint Command have explained in a series of closed meetings how people will be terrorized and beaten into voting for Mugabe in the run-off. Human rights groups verified reports of the terror campaign, saying that ZANU PF was using a network of informal detention centers to beat, torture, and intimidate opposition activists and ordinary Zimbabweans. A statement by Human Rights Watch provided a chilling account of systematic intimidation and violence, including the abduction and savage beating of opposition supporters in several areas. Detention centers are said to have been set up in Mutoko North, Mutoko South, Mudzi in Mashonaland East province, and in Bikita West in Masvingo province. Opposition supporters are being tortured at these camps in what ZANU PF terms "Operation Makavhoterapapi?" ("Where did you put your vote?") The aim in all this is threefold: to assert his power over the cowed population, to punish the people for having voted for the MDC, and to intimidate them to vote for ZANU PF in the event of a presidential run-off.

Playing a pivotal role in the current drama is the country's intelligence unit, the CIO (Central Intelligence Organization). Headed by one the most brutal figures in Zimbabwe's recent history, Happyton Bonyongwe, the CIO is responsible for collecting data and information about opposition party activists and leading the attacks on the targeted activists. Hundreds of villagers have reportedly fled their homes in the countryside after ZANU PF militia, war veterans, the notorious "Green Bombers" and the army attacked them.

War veterans went on fresh farm invasions similar to the ones in February of 2000, threatening the few remaining white commercial farmers and their farm workers. In Masvingo, they invaded Crest Farm owned by Graham Goddard and they gave him a 10-hour notice to pack his belongings and vacate. The Masvingo Mirror, a provincial weekly, reported that soldiers were wreaking havoc in rural areas in the province. The Mirror said that members of the Zimbabwe National Army and ZANU PF militia were deployed in some rural areas in the province, where they were beating up civilians suspected to be members of the MDC. The Zimbabwean on Sunday (April 20, 2008) reported that the CIO has a file on "each MDC activist detailed to the level of the football club he or she supports together with family members' details etc." The paper reported of a complex web of deception, coercion, and violent intimidation to ensure that another electoral defeat for Robert Mugabe in the presidential run-off is not remotely possible. The same issue of the Zimbabwean on Sunday carried a photograph of a battered and stoned body of MDC Hurungwe East Organizing Secretary, Tapiwa Mbawanda. The Standard of April 13, 2008, told stories of war veterans and ZANU PF militia on the rampage in Mashonaland Central. War veterans and ZANU PF militia reportedly burnt down more than 30 farm workers' huts, accusing them of voting against Robert Mugabe. The defenseless farm workers fled and watched from a distance as the war veterans and militia helped themselves to property before setting the huts on fire. The workers lost all of their belongings. Eighteen families now shelter temporarily in tobacco barns, exposed to the cold and diseases.

In Bulawayo, some businesspeople reported that from April 16, 2008, their environment was growing more and more scary by the day as they had began receiving threats from some war veterans and supporters of ZANU PF in the city. The war veterans were said to be visiting business premises regularly, threatening to close them down as Mugabe's retribution campaign against opposition activists and supporters spreads to all sectors of society. One business owner complained that they had visited him three times the same day accusing him of sponsoring the MDC. They threatened to loot everything in his shop and close it down after Mugabe wins the run-off.

The Zimbabwe Independent (April 11–17, 2008) carried a story that said ZANU PF members were moving around Mutoko East constituency waving guns of different sizes and types, and telling people that the run-off was the last chance for them to vote for ZANU PF.

At the moment, no one knows what will happen. The opposition and its leader Morgan Tsvangirai, live in fear for their lives. Ordinary voters have been brutalized for simply having voted their choice. Simple election officers have been arrested, tortured, and imprisoned just because the constituents voted for the opposition. Hundreds of them are still in jail. And the world has watched. Independent observers and journalists have been arrested, beaten, and tortured, and no one has acted. The electoral commission, run by the fanatical and totally unscrupulous Tobaiwa Mudede, steadfastly refused to release the results of the presidential elections for five whole weeks, and when they were finally released, they differed from those of the independent and opposition observers, whose offices had, incidentally, been raided to remove all the materials pertaining to the presidential election.

The Mugabe government then announced the need for a run-off election, which under Zimbabwe law is necessary in the event that none of the winners got fifty percent of the vote. In the meantime the violence is escalating, and there are all indications that, in the event of the run-off taking place, more violence is going to occur. There is no chance of a free and fair run-off election taking place in the present circumstances, and to attempt it without first of all tackling Mugabe would be a sheer waste of time and of Zimbabwe lives. Mugabe would win, out of the sheer terror he has managed to instill in the minds and lives of the Zimbabwean people while the whole world watched.

Now it does seem that while everybody watched, Mugabe's generals have gone ahead and staged a very bloody coup. All the time that everybody has been begging, negotiating, and lobbying for the release of the March 29 election, Mugabe has moved a step ahead—he has gone ahead and asserted his power. The violence being witnessed is simply his way of telling the Zimbabwean people that nothing has changed and that he is the one in charge, no matter what everybody else wants. His coup is complete, and he is staying on because his supporters, the commanders of the Armed Forces, the ones with the guns, have said so. The coup is complete, and almost perfect, unless somebody from the outside decides to do something about it.