It was a trip that had become almost routine. As a lawyer, Gugulethu Moyo was accustomed to visiting Harare police stations, but last Tuesday she walked into a nightmare when she attempted to secure the release of a photographer arrested while covering Zimbabwe’s two-day national strike.
A well-known legal practitioner and a director of the company that owns the Daily News, Zimbabwe’s largest-selling newspaper, Gugu, as she is known, is well liked in media circles and has a reputation as a sharp dresser with an even sharper mind.
But last week she became a high-profile symbol of how Zimbabwe’s rule of law is being subverted by President Robert Mugabe and his cronies in the ruling Zanu-PF party. The 28-year-old lawyer endured vicious beatings and two nights behind bars on the whim of the wife of Zimbabwe’s army commander.
‘It was the first day of the national strike. I went into the police station and saw scores of prisoners lying on the ground and being forced to roll in the mud while police officers beat their feet,’ Moyo told The Observer.
‘Police said they did not have our photographer, Philimon Bulawayo, but I saw him in the cells, so I waited to see what charges would be pressed.’ Two trucks drove up with riot police and an army Range Rover pulled up.
‘A woman came in speaking on a cellphone. She said, ”We must deploy more forces and beat them up!” My cellphone rang and I began speaking and she shouted: ”Who is that woman on the phone?”
‘I said I worked for Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe and she went wild. She shouted at me: ”So what if you are a lawyer? Your paper wants to encourage anarchy in this country. You want to represent our enemies”.
‘A man with her grabbed me and hit me. She twisted my arm and started slapping me on the face. It is hard to remember the sequence, but they kept hitting and shouting at me. She said: ”I am Jocelyn Chiwenga, the wife of the army commander. Your paper says there is no rule of law in Zimbabwe. Well, I will show you the rule of law”.’
Moyo said she was dragged outside and pushed so hard she fell, hitting her head on a rock. They beat her feet as they interrogated her, accusing her of working for the British Government.
‘She said ”You must be scared of me” and, foolishly, I said no. This enraged her. She said that since I am Ndebele, they would do to me what the army did in Matabeleland in the 1980s.’ That reference to the massacres, when the army was blamed for 20 000 civilian deaths, terrified Moyo.
‘She said she was powerful and would kill me. She said she would shoot me. She said she was very rich with lots of cars. The man punched me in the eye and she kept hitting me. Policemen folded their arms and watched.’
Moyo was held in the cells. ‘There were more than 100 people there who were arrested,’ she said. ‘A 13-year-old boy sat with me. He was very frightened.’
After some hours Moyo was sent to Harare Central jail. ‘As I got on the truck with about 30 other prisoners, Mrs Chiwenga shouted to the police: ”That woman is trouble, beat her!” Five men beat my back, my legs, everywhere with their truncheons. It was so painful I started screaming.’
At Harare Central, officers knew Moyo from her professional work but they kept her imprisoned for two nights, refusing her access to legal or medical help.
‘The cells were full so I had to stand, which was okay because my backside was so bruised I could not lie down. There were so many people who were arrested. Most were under 18 and most had been beaten. Many had serious injuries.’
Eventually, Moyo was released without charges. The bruises on her face have gone down, but she still has trouble walking. A graduate of the University of Zimbabwe who did a post-graduate degree at Oxford, she is normally unflappable, but she was clearly shaken by the ordeal.
‘What kept me going throughout all of that was the thought that on Monday morning Mrs Chiwenga will have charges of assault on her desk,’ said Moyo from her Harare office. ‘It is galling that a civilian can command the entire police force. My family is frightened that she will come after me again.’
Jocelyn Chiwenga is well known in Zimbabwe. Aided by soldiers, she seized a white-owned farm last year. ‘I have not tasted white blood since Zimbabwe’s independence, and I miss it,’ she allegedly said as soldiers aimed guns at the farmer.
Sam Sipepa Nkomo, chairman of the Daily News group, said the company would sue police for the assault and wrongful detention of Moyo and the photographer, who was also beaten.
Moyo’s ordeal is one of hundreds of arrests and beatings following the national strike called by the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) which shut down Zimbabwe last Tuesday and Wednesday.
The past few days have seen scores of Zimbabweans taken to hospital with injuries inflicted by soldiers and police. The MDC, galvanised by the success of the strike, issued an ultimatum to the Mugabe government: restore democratic rights and freedoms by 31 March or face a popular uprising that will force the government out.
The situation alarmed Amnesty International, which said this weekend: ‘This is an explosive situation where there seem to be no limits to how far the government will go to suppress opposition and maintain its hold on power.’
On 18 March soldiers tortured three workers on the farm of Roy Bennett, MDC MP for Chimanimani. The three men were forced to lie on their stomachs on the ground and were hit with batons, sjamboks (whips) and wire, according to survivors. Their fingers and toes were broken. One of the workers, Steven Tonera, died, said Bennett.The three men were accused of being MDC supporters.
On Thursday and again on Friday, truckloads of soldiers came back to the farm and severely assaulted up to 70 people, said Bennett. Human rights workers were busy yesterday providing medical treatment to the injured.
These latest accounts of human rights abuses should make it more difficult for the Commonwealth to lift its suspension of Zimbabwe. It is to be maintained until December, when it will be considered by the heads of government meeting in Nigeria. But now South Africa and Nigeria are understood to be lobbying other Commonwealth members to lift the suspension, asserting that the situation in Zimbabwe is improving, that the rule of law has been restored, that repression of the press has been lifted, and political life has returned to normal.
Moyo’s experience would suggest otherwise. – Guardian Unlimited Â