Iden Wetherell in Harare
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 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. The report also 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 the firing of teargas at striking nurses who were peaceably entering a court in November last year to hear a case against fellow strikers and the beating the same month of students fleeing disturbances at the University of Zimbabwe.
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, in-fighting, and lack of coherent platforms.
It says the government influenced the mainstream media through indirect ownership, editorial appointments, directives to editors, and the 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.
Although the independent press was increasingly critical of the government, there was a measure of self-censorship aggravated by strict anti-defamation laws, the report says.
Meanwhile, the state media has attacked the US, asking: “Is it fair for any country to sit in judgement over others, moralising and pontificating on how the world should be run?”