Mercedes Sayagues
Kariba, Tuesday mid-morning: A gang of 35 men kidnaps four supporters of the Zimbabwe opposition party, Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), from their homes, and one from his office at the public power utility. They are paraded through town and beaten up so badly that one dies on the spot and one aEwhile later. Three are in hospital, two of them in critical condition.
Bulawayo, Good Friday evening: Six men brandishing iron bars and axes storms Togo Khupe’s home in Nketa 9 township in Bulawayo. She is out but her children, twins aged 16 and a six-year-old girl, are at home. “Where is your mother? We are going to kill her.” Khupe, an MDC candidate for Parliament, had addressed a rally in Pumula three days earlier. The men identified themselves as war veterans, ransacked the bedroom, smashed some plates and left.
Shamva: Last week, in this mining town 90km from Harare, a dozen schoolteachers and two headmasters of primary schools known to be pro-MDC were severely beaten up and chased out of their staff houses. “These are for Zanu-PF!” shout the assailants, a gang of 30-odd men.
The teachers are homeless and afraid to return to Shamva.
The minister of education says it is a police matter.
Wedza: Hospital staff refuse to treat people beaten up by Zanu-PF youth. “Why?” inquires an NGO worker who brought his bleeding relative. Because the local war vet leader said so, he is told.
Murewa: As a teacher, Wilbert Musava earns Z$5E000 ($100) a month. For years he saved and borrowed to buy a second- hand car, his most prized possession. It was burnt last Saturday by a gang of youth while parked at the school. Musava campaigned for the MDC.
Chipinge: On Easter Monday, a crowd mounts a roadblock with their cars at the entrance of town. They stop a group of MDC supporters returning from a rally and tear off their T-shirts in a skirmish. Leading the group is Zanu-PF’s provincial political commissar for Manicaland.
Violence against the opposition engulfs Zimbabwe. Not one senior government figure has condemned it. It appears the government has given its thugs a licence to intimidate, destroy, burn, torture and kill with impunity. Zimbabwe is being ruled by mobs.
The Kariba police was alerted. Khupe and Musava reported the attacks to police. So did the school staff in Shamva. The police did nothing.
“We have hundreds of countrywide reports of wholesale intimidation,” says David Coltart, lawyer, human rights activist and MDC director for elections.
On Wednesday, MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai reported 11 supporters killed, more than half of them in the last week. So far, the MDC has advised restraint. Now, said Tsvangirai, “we are advising our members to use reasonable force within the limits of law to protect their lives and property”.
Coltart tells of thugs attacking villages and farm compounds in a style reminiscent of Mao’s Red Guards in China. Farm workers are beaten, forced to insult the MDC, praise Zanu-PF and to move with the gangs on to the next farm for another terrorising session.
In Matatabeleland, the gangs warn fearful peasants that the Fifth Brigade is ready to repeat the Gukurahundi massacres of the mid-1980s, when at least 10E000 people were tortured and killed.
Black-owned businesses are petrol- bombed. Black-owned homes are torched, cars burnt, household goods stolen. MDC candidates have stopped counting the death threats by phone and mail.
With six reports over the Easter weekend of rapes and indecent assault of farm labourers’ wives and daughters, a group of MDC women want to set up a rape crisis centre and obtain AZT for survivors. The Musasa project for women victims of violence would like to send its mobile units to attacked farms but fears for its counsellors. Police will not protect them.
The violence has stepped up sharply since last Friday’s summit at Victoria Falls, when South African President Thabo Mbeki extracted a promise from President Robert Mugabe to stop farm invasions.
War vet leader Chenjerai Hitler Hunzvi is touring the country telling white farmers they have nothing to fear – as long as they live peacefully with the invaders on their property.
The handful of new farm invasions that took place over Easter are on farms near Harare – a crude attempt to woo urban voters, the opposition’s power base. Ruling party candidates Irene Zindi and Stalin Maumau told Mbare residents to carve out residential stands. Thousands followed. Plots are sold for less than Z$50 ($1). Somebody is making money.
Meanwhile, government strategy has changed. Mugabe, ever the cunning politician, realised the attacks against white farmers were attracting too much negative international attention. Repression of blacks perhaps would not elicit that interest. As violence spreads, Mugabe has a good excuse to declare a state of emergency.
So, in a repeat of the pre-Gukurahundi days, state terror is unleashed against the most vulnerable people – those without an association to speak on their behalf, without economic clout. Those who cannot afford to send their wives and children to South Africa or New Zealand, even to another township or village.
True, Gukurahundi could not happen again today. Mugabe does not have the unequivocal support of the army, not even of his party. Civil society is stronger. The world’s media is here. There would be international condemnation.
But there are similarities in the approach. One is the general use of violence to attain a political objective (to crush Zapu then, MDC today). Another is not to go for the leadership (Joshua Nkomo then, Tsvangirai today) but to undermine their support by terrorising the rural and urban poor.
“South Africa must realise how blacks are suffering,” says Coltart. “This violence will undermine the region just as much as attacks on white farmers. Obviously Mugabe does not want peaceful elections.”
On Tuesday, a daily paper quoted Vice- President Simon Muzenda at a rally, saying he did not regret the brutal murders of two white farmers. His remarks were published on the day when 1E000 people attended a moving memorial in Harare for slain farmer David Stevens.
Regularly, Mugabe and his Cabinet insult the opposition, calling them dogs, sell- outs, even unprintable terms. Such hate speech from national leaders has not been heard in Africa since Radio Mille Collines preached ethnic cleansing before the genocide in Rwanda in 1994.
The climate of intimidation makes it increasingly difficult to conduct free and fair elections – a condition laid by Mbeki – in this climate. The MDC is in a Catch-22 situation. If it campaigns, it endangers its members.
At the memorial, MDC candidate Trudy Stevenson privately dwelt on the moral dilemma the party faces. “I was in Marondera three weeks ago, urging people to support the MDC, and now Stevens is dead,” she said. The farmer was taken from a police station and killed near Marondera.
Stevenson says the party will have to rethink its campaign strategy to protect supporters but will not be cowed.
Togo Khupe’s children told her not to give up. “They said, ‘Mommy, we are behind you. Things have to change,'” says a proud Khupe.
The violence will make villagers fearful of voting and poll monitors reluctant to work; a low turnout may result. This is just what Mugabe wants to ensure the survival of Zanu-PF and his cronies.
Despite Mbeki’s reassurances at Victoria Falls last week, Zimbabwe is engulfed by savage state-sponsored violence. At the press conference following the meeting of the Southern African heads of state, Mbeki, Mozambique’s President Joaquim Chissano and Namibia’s President Sam Nujoma took turns in exalting Mugabe as a champion of the rule of law.
How many more people have to lose their lives and livelihoods before the international community – the Organisation of African Unity, the Commonwealth, the European Union, the United Nation – realise the real issue is not land reform or black-on-white violence, but state terrorism against the people of Zimbabwe?
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