Iden Wetherell
ZIMBABWE’s human rights record has taken a hammering with a United States official report detailing violations ranging from police brutality to interference in the media.
The US State Department’s 1996 Country Report on Zimbabwe criticises the Harare government for failing to pursue past allegations of torture and refusing to prosecute police and intelligence officers responsible for such abuses.
It cites the refusal of the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) to pay court-ordered damages to a 1990 torture victim belonging to an opposition party, noting that the attorney general’s office was unable to ensure CIO compliance with the judgment.
The report refers to appeals from the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace (CCJP) for an inquiry into the fate of victims of the army’s North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade which conducted counter- insurgency operations in Matabeleland in the 1980s.
“Despite calls by the CCJP for an investigation, the government took no action on the bodies discovered at Antelope Mine in Kezi in 1992; the bodies have not been identified or properly buried,” the report says.
Examples of police brutality documented include police firing teargas at striking nurses who were peaceably entering a magistrate’s court in November to hear a case against fellow strikers and the beating the same month of students fleeing disturbances at the University of Zimbabwe campus. Referring to recent elections, the report observes there were “credible reports of continued CIO harassment of independent and opposition candidates and their supporters”.
The political process continued to be tilted in favour of the ruling Zanu-PF party, the report says although it also ascribes the opposition’s poor showing to weak leadership, infighting, and lack of coherent platforms.
The report says the government influenced the mainstream media through indirect ownership, editorial appointments, directives to editors, and removal of wayward editors. Despite a supreme court ruling that the government’s monopoly of communications was unconstitutional, the government had repeatedly refused to license independent radio and television stations, the report notes.
Although the independent press was increasingly open and critical of the government, there was a measure of self- censorship aggravated by strict anti- defamation laws that made no distinction between private and public persons, the report says, mentioning the award of substantial damages to the former head of the army beacuse an independent monthly had pondered how his “goings on” would be reported.
While citizens had a constitutional right to privacy, “it is widely known”, the report says “that the government sometimes monitors private correspondence and telephones, particularly international communications”.
On Tuesday the supreme court overturned provisions of the Private Voluntary Organisations Act which allowed the minister of labour and social welfare to intervene in appointments of non- governmental organisation (NGO) officials. The court ordered the reinstatement of 12 members of the executive of the Association of Women’s Clubs who the minister had suspended on unspecified grounds in 1995.
The US report cites the Act as curtailing freedom of association and it has been widely criticised by civil society activists.