LETTER: Aziz Pahad’s bitter legacy in Zimbabwe

Since his unfortunate death a short while ago, I have read many column inches praising Aziz Pahad (“Aziz Pahad, SA’s best deputy foreign minister who never got the top job”, September 27).

Apart from the overwrought purple paean of homage by hacks and various government officials, all of these fulsome tributes omitted to mention that Pahad, under then president Thabo Mbeki, was single-handedly responsible for the shambolic disaster that is the current state of Zimbabwe.

Pahad’s pathetic policy of “silent diplomacy” — underwritten and fully supported by Mbeki — was welcomed wholeheartedly by the malevolent Robert Mugabe, who recognised it as the open invitation it was to carry on his brutal and rapacious pillaging of Zimbabwe and its people.

These policies are, of course, now entrenched by his equally malevolent and rapacious successor, Emmerson Mnangagwa, whose jackbooted heel on the throat of Zimbabwe owes everything to Pahad and Mbeki.

When this non-policy was queried by the media, the hand-fluttering Pahad querulously demanded to know what the media thought SA could do. I responded to this invitation in detail in a letter published in the media. A stunning silence emanated from Pahad and the president’s office. Truly silent diplomacy.

For evil to triumph it is enough for good men to remain silent.

Ian Hughes
Orchards

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