/ 1 January 2002

Beware, Mugabe

On the day talks between Mugabe’s Zanu-PF and the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) opened, National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) chairman and vocal human rights lawyer Lovemore Madhuku and 20 other activists were hauled before a Harare magistrate?s court.

They were arrested on Saturday during an NCA demonstration pressing for a new Constitution. The charge is that they contravened Section 26 of the Public Order and Security Act that prohibits the holding of demonstrations without police authority. Madhuku was granted bail, but his colleagues remain in jail without access to lawyers.

Breaches of both property rights and the rule of law also intensified in the farmlands of Mashonaland East and West, where Mugabe?s shock troops distributed ultimatums to farmers to vacate their homes.

According to the Commercial Farmers? Union, 19 farmers, one of whom was killed, have been illegally evicted from their homes since the March poll, while 13 cases of looting have been reported. The union put the value of the looted goods at about Zim$150-million and the number of displaced farmworkers at 2 000.

Human rights groups lamented the government?s plans to seize farmers’ immovable property, as announced by Agriculture Minister Joseph Made. NGOs estimated that the post-election period had seen the displacement of about 50 000 people.

The Zimbabwe Human Rights Forum, a coalition of 10 civic groups, said in its last report that between March 1 and 15 four people were killed, 50 kidnapped, 187 tortured and 46 unlawfully detained. This brings to 35 the number of known political murders since the beginning of the year. In the hinterland, the headman of the village of Nkayi was disembowelled and burnt.

Analysts said these developments would reinforce and shape the case against Mugabe. ?Mugabe’s behaviour and the recent developments in New York will assist us,? said Godern Moyo, director of the Bulawayo-based Policy Reasearch Institute of Zimbabwe. ?The world is becoming a small and dangerous place for him.?

The institute has set itself the goal of exposing Mugabe?s past and present crimes. It is working with Imbovane Yamahlabezulu, a pressure group that has been lobbying for Mugabe?s prosecution for the killing of more than 20 000 civilians in Matabeleland during the anti- dissident war between 1980 and 1987.

George Mkhwananzi, a spokesman for the Imbovane, said his organisation had been ?frustrated for many years because the Zimbabwean Constitution protects the incumbent president from prosecution. The launch of the International Criminal Court is a new opportunity for us.?

Agitation for the prosecution of Mugabe began in 1997 after the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace and the Legal Resources Foundation released a damning report on government atrocities.

According to Moyo, the two pressure groups have finished documenting state-sponsored crimes in the west of the country and are collecting legal information with a view to presenting it to the international court.

Formed under the 1998 Rome Statute, of which Zimbabwe is a signatory, the court is expected to be fully operational by the end of the year when the elections of the prosecutor and judges will be finalised. It will be located in The Hague.

Moyo said the institute has begun investigating the continuing activities of the dreaded National Youth Service in the western provinces. Discussions are under way with the group Mass Public Opinion to undertake similar investigations in other provinces with a view to producing a consolidated national report.

Preliminary investigations have shown that many members joined the youth service in the hope of receiving skills and employment, only to receive military training.

Since its launch last year the National Youth Service programme has been widely condemned as a breeding ground for political thugs.

The government insists that the training of the youths at the Border Gezi Training Institute in Mount Darwin is a national effort to instil a revolutionary spirit and a sense of patriotism in the young.