by Christopher Makaza
Citizens have expressed concern over human rights abuse, excessive and inhumane use of force by a white United States of America`s Minneapolis police officer who pinned to death a black American,George Floyd.
Floyd`s incident was as similar to many incidents in America including that of Eric Garner, an unarmed Black man who died in 2014 after being placed in a chokehold by New York City police while pleading ‘I can't breathe’ an incident which sparked nationwide protests.
A video clip of the horrific death of Floyd has since gone viral on social media as witnesses in the background begged to no avail, for the police officer to remove his knee from Floyd’s neck.
People have questioned why the so called local and international human rights organisations and self claimed MDC-A leader Nelson Chamisa are mum over the issue yet they view America as the godfather of democracy and human rights defender.
Former MDC-T Secretary General, Obert Gutu on his twitter handle said if the incident had happened in Zimbabwe, there was going to be an outcry with the opposition and its Western funders calling for more sanctions against Zimbabwe,
“Just imagine if this had happened in Zimbabwe. Already, some 'human rights defenders' would be passionately advocating for the imposition of sanctions against Zimbabwe because of human rights abuses,” said Gutu.
Citizen Tawanda Mzila responded that, “This unfair, racial discriminatory treatment of blacks in USA has reached unprecedented levels and can`t go unchallenged. Donald Trump and the USA think they are super gods, they should taste their own medicine.”
According to the Washington Post's Fatal Force database, at least 689 people have been killed by police in the US in 2019. At least 992 people were killed by the police in 2018 and more than 980 people were killed by police the previous year, most of them black people.
A white police officer once shot and killed an African American woman in her Fort Worth, Texas home in the presence of her eight-year-old nephew. In Georgia, a former white police officer once fatally shot an unarmed, naked, black man and was surprisingly found not guilty of murder. These are just a few examples among many others which show how cruel the American racist are towards black African Americans.
According to a watchdog group ‘The Sentencing Project’ African American men are six times more likely to be arrested than white men.
This disparity, particularly the killing of African Americans by police, has prompted the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, a popular civil rights campaign aimed at ending police violence and dismantling structural racism.
