The day ZASM successfully got the UN and U.S. Congress to conduct impact assessments of Western sanctions on Zimbabwe, the U.S. Congress subcommittee on health and human rights was pressured to write a report on the impact of US sanctions on healthcare and human rights in Zimbabwe. The report asked Biden to remove sanctions on Zimbabwe because they were persecuting civilians.
It’s notable that the same Congress that called for sanctions on Zimbabwe through ZDERA in 2001 was now, in 2022, instructing the US President’s office to remove the sanctions that has been declare illegal by the UN in their 2021 report on the negative impact of sanctions on Zimbabwe, due to their impact on civilians and human rights.
In 2022, we then used the 2021 UN report on the negative impact of sanctions to launch a case against South African banks that were illegally implementing the sanctions and US institutions like US Presidency, OFAC and Congress that implemented the sanctions. This pressured the South African Department of International Relations and Cooperation, in line with Vienna Convention protocols, to read and deliver all our court papers to the US President and US government institutions each time legal papers were filed.
Over time, these papers convinced the South African government that we had a valid case against the Americans, and they began to pressure the US to answer in South African courts while championing the fight against sanctions on Zimbabwe on every international platform they got.
Our strategy of getting the UN to denounce the western sanctions as illegal alongside taking the report of the UN to court in South Africa to get a legal ruling that would create precedence and legal custom, was central in pushing the US to remove these illegal sanctions -out of embarrassment- on our country.
As a means to save face, the Americans removed their illegal sanctions on civilians and imposed Magnitsky sanctions on eleven leaders and politically connected businesspeople, attempting to portray them as βthe human rights violatorsβ they initially intended to sanction.
As a result of our efforts, the EU and UK have also followed suit and removed their sanctions on Zimbabwe, and now foreign corresponding banking relationships are returning to Zimbabwe after a 24-year hiatus during which Zimbabwe lost 108 such relationships.
The return of these relationships confirms that international financial institutions no longer face risk in doing business with Zimbabwe because the sanctions that prohibited them before are gone.
Consequently, Zimbabweans can now undertake Visa and Mastercard transactions anywhere in Zimbabwe, transferring foreign payments to import technology, machines, and tools from Zimbabwe to any country without prohibitions, while exporting duty-free to the EU without any funds being blocked. All this is thanks to ZASM’s very complicated but effective strategy against Western sanctions.
Written by Rutendo Matinyarare Chairman of ZASM.
