/ 15 June 2004

Couple beaten by mob

A Finnish woman and her white Zimbabwean husband, both in their fifties, narrowly escaped with their lives on Monday after a savage beating by President Robert Mugabe’s youth militia using iron bars and rocks to try and force them out of the village they live in.

Birgit Kidd said the mob of youths, led by secret police, attacked her and her husband, Shane, both active supporters of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, when they were trying to assert a court order allowing them to return to the party’s office on Monday in the picturesque tourist village of Chimanimani in Zimbabwe’s south-eastern districts.

Kidd said an attempt was made to burn down the MDC office, in a building which the couple own, three weeks ago.

Speaking from her hospital bed in the neighbouring town of Chipinge, she said she had a dislocated shoulder where she had been hit with an iron bar, 15 stitches to wounds in her head where the youths threw rocks at her and bruises all over her body.

Her husband was bleeding from the ears, mouth and lips and also suffered multiple bruises. ”I thought I was going to lose my life,” she said. ”Everything that was available they were throwing at us. They were trying to finish Shane off with a huge rock. They were shouting at us they were going to kill us.

”We have done nothing wrong. We [the MDC] don’t beat anyone, we don’t rape anyone, we don’t burn anyone’s houses.”

The incident was the latest in a five-year reign of violence and terror controlled by Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF party in the Chimanimani area.

The election of a popular white farmer, Roy Bennett, in 2000 triggered a backlash directed against MDC supporters. – Sapa-DPA