/ 18 February 2003

Warning of genocide in Zim

Zimbabwe’s ruling Zanu-PF has instituted a wide-ranging campaign of torture and may be about to commit genocide against its opponents, say church organisations and Zimbabwean and international human rights groups.

Zanu-PF members, the party’s youth militia and police are torturing ever more members of the opposition and the country is primed for a genocide similar to that in Rwanda in 1994, they say.

Reports released by the groups claim that the use of torture is ”unparalleled” and is intensifying as government supporters try to ”rid Zimbabwe of opposition members”.

The groups include the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference, Amnesty International, Genocide Watch, the Zimbabwe Crisis Committee and Danish Physicians for Human Rights.

Some say that if the international community fails to intervene, Zimbabwe is likely to face a genocide similar to Rwanda’s.

”This may seem a ridiculous claim when there have been comparatively few deaths so far from the conflict of the past three years, but it is less the deaths than the insidious pattern of organised violence and torture that leads to the concern about a potential genocide,” says Gregory Stanton, president of Genocide Watch in Washington.

Rape; detention in torture chambers; beatings with iron poles, stones and sjamboks; severe electrical shocks to genitals; and assaults with axes and barbed wire are among measures the ruling party’s supporters are using to ”punish the supporters of the opposition party,” said Brian Kagoro, coordinator of the Zimbabwean Crisis Committee (CCZ), which represents 250 civil society organisations in Zimbabwe.

”Since the elections, there has been little international media attention to human rights abuses in Zimbabwe, which leads to the misperception that the situation has improved.”

The motive for all the attacks has been the victim’s real or supposed affiliation to the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Torture is widespread, but the most severe cases have been recorded in Matabeleland.

”All the torture victims have been attacked for political reasons or as part of a general repression of their community,” said Kagoro. ”It remains their [Zanu-PF’s] intention to repress the people of Zimbabwe, to incite violence against those perceived not to support the government, and to offer impunity to those who commit political crimes that are in the government’s interests.”

Some of the most recent torture victims include Job Sikhala, an MDC MP, Gabriel Shumba, a human rights lawyer, Barnabas Mangodza, a director of the Combined Harare Residents Association, and an eight-day-old baby who was dropped on his head after being held upside down by his ankles when war veterans stormed his mother’s home.

”They slapped him on the face and all over the body and said that he should die because he was MDC property,” said the child’s mother in a report released by a Danish human rights group, Physicians for Human Rights.

The mother was kicked in her abdomen until she bled profusely from her vagina. The report says she was denied access to medical facilities because she was ”among those blacklisted as an MDC supporter”. Clinics are reported to have lists of people they may treat who are approved by the local headman. The lists exclude suspected MDC supporters.

Physicians for Human Rights recently released a report that lists 49 reported cases of torture over three months. It documents 13 of the cases, including that of a 32-year-old man who was abducted in Bulawayo, blindfolded and taken to a militia camp in the north of the city. He recognised his attackers as Zanu-PF war veterans.

He died last week from his injuries. In all 13 cases the victims were associated with the MDC.

”The fact that perpetrators continue not to care whether they torture people who can identify them, or whether their acts of torture or ill-treatment leave marks that can easily be recognised as caused by torture, underlines a clear assumption on their part of impunity,” said a member of the Danish physicians group.

Members of the police force are reported to have abducted Sikhala, the MDC MP, last month. He was detained in a torture chamber where the policemen beat him on the soles of his feet with sticks, demanding to know ”how the MDC works and what plans it had for the coming months”. Sikhala said they tied an electric wire around his toes, penis, testicles and tongue.

”They shouted the same questions over and over. What was the MDC doing? Who were its supporters? Why was I with them?” he said.

He was released after being charged at the Harare police station with ”plotting against the state”.

Despite numerous attempts this week, Minister of Information Jonathan Moyo could not be contacted for a reaction to the allegations.

Genocide Watch’s Stanton said the most worrying element of the torture campaign was the wider use of the youth militia, the Green Bombers.

”An alarmingly high proportion of the human rights violations have been perpetrated by the youth militia, while the pattern of torture clearly supports the notion that torture techniques are being taught,” he said.

Formed last year, the youth training programme was the brainchild of the late Border Gezi, then Zanu-PF’s national commissar and minister of gender, youth development and employment creation.

The programme was purported to promote discipline among youths, but most people believe it was introduced to boost political terror. Five main training camps have been established, through which 9 000 militiamen have passed in the past 10 months.

”Combined with a distinctly skewed version of recent history that is determinedly taught them throughout the training process, these young party stalwarts have been turned into a potential instrument of terror,” said Stanton.

The Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference released a statement this week warning that the Green Bombers were ”the greatest concern in Zimbabwe … [they are] potential instruments of greater terror”.

Stanton said that Zimbabwe had abrogated the international law on genocide adopted by the United Nations as part of the Genocide Convention in 1948.

”There seems to be a reluctance to accept that people can really be slaughtering one another without provocation and that civilians are being subjected to a steady and relentless elimination process,” said Stanton.

Archbishop Buti Tlhagale of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference said: ”There are deeply disturbing signs that Zimbabwe is on the brink of total breakdown into civil war and increasing levels of organised state terror.

”The Zimbabwean crisis requires urgent and direct intervention by the South African government.”

Kagoro, of the Zimbabwe Crisis Committee, also wants immediate international intervention: ”The situation has deteriorated considerably since February 2002 and it is imperative that the international community now take notice of this appeal.

”The Mugabe regime has already proved that it is capable of [an ethnic cleansing operation] through the Matabeleland massacre in the 1980s where thousands were slaughtered.”