”For the first three days they cut your buttocks with a razor. You lie down and they slice you. They slice your buttocks and tell you to talk.”
At first it appears as though the seriously ill and fearful 34-year-old Zimbabwean is speaking about someone else’s ordeal at the hands of officers from President Robert Mugabe’s notorious Central Intelligence Organisation.
Propped up in a hospital bed in South Africa two weeks after her release from Chikurubi Maximum Prison in Harare, it becomes apparent that the woman who wants to be known only as ”Itaai” is expressing her own traumatic experience.
The side of her frail hand traces the path of the razor making neat parallel lines on the blanket covering her as she speaks of what is widely reported to be a standard form of torture sanctioned by an increasingly paranoid ruling party against its enemies, real and perceived, in the ailing country.
At the very least, her experience is remarkably similar to that which many opposition political activists and supporters of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) who have dared to question Zanu-PF party policies and laws have had to endure.
But Itaai insists she is just an ordinary woman with no political affiliation, who had been trying to make a living in an increasingly unbearable economic climate blamed largely on Mugabe’s mismanagement of the country.
Illegal currency
Last November she was caught trying to convert Z$11-million into South African rand (R1 000 or about $160) in order to travel to neighbouring South Africa to buy supplies.
Mugabe had long outlawed the possession of foreign currency by individuals in the country with an increasingly worthless domestic currency and serious and chronic fuel and food shortages.
”The CIOs approached me and said I was a money dealer,” she said in an interview with Deutsche Presse-Agentur, DPA.
Her fate was sealed, she says, when they discovered she had refugee status in South Africa where she has lived on and off since 1998.
”They saw my papers and said: ‘On what grounds are you a refugee in South Africa? What is wrong with the life in Zimbabwe? You must be supporting the MDC,’ and I was arrested.” The mother of one was put in isolation at the prison. ”For November and December they beat me and raped me every day. There were four of them — officers from the CIO,” she said.
”They send people from the government who pretend that they are from the opposition to see you. When they offer to help you and you say okay, they beat you. They beat you so badly because you ‘support the opposition’,” she said.
”They would pour water on the floor and tell me to sleep there. I started to be sick in prison. When they released me, I could not eat and I could not walk. I used to be 65 kilograms, now I am 45 kilograms,” she said.
Fearing for the safety of her family, Itaai fled to neighbouring South Africa, boarding a bus with little more than the clothes on her back and desperately in need of medical treatment for tuberculosis.
She believes members of the ruling Zanu-PF’s youth brigade in her home town of Masvingo sold her out to the CIO. ”If they suspect you of doing anything against Zanu or of being an MDC member, or even that you don’t like Zanu, you are in for it. They can kill you.”
”My parents found me in prison a week before my release and said ‘don’t come home’,” she said, adding ”the youths will know when I return home and they may come looking for me or attack my family.” Itaai made contact with the Johannesburg-based Zimbabwe Tortured Victims (ZTV) program — a civil society body that offers help to victims of the Mugabe regime — shortly after she arrived.
”They are trying their level best to help me. I am getting counselling. I need to stay here. I won’t go back home. I feel safe here, I even wish to take my daughter with me,” she said.
Zimbabwe’s biggest export
It is said that since 2000, Zimbabwe’s biggest export has been its people. Most end up in South Africa, where they live illegally or as refugees. The violence and intimidation in the run-up to the presidential elections of 2002 brought another wave of exiles.
”We believe there are about 3 to 3,7 million Zimbabweans in South Africa now,” says ZTV official and a campaigner for the MDC, Mbiko Moyo. ”It escalates all the time. Very few are likely to go back unless there are constitutional changes. Most find a way to survive here.”
Moyo estimates that ”a quarter or half of the numbers here” are in exile in Botswana. Like Itaai, many flee into exile for fear of being tortured or killed. In the two months that it has been operating, the ZTV programme has been helping 43 victims of what is described as ”severe torture”.
”The cases that we see range from cases where you find that people have been detained and severely tortured to cases where victims have been driven to redundancy and are dependent on psychiatric drugs.”
”They are primary victims of torture from Zimbabwe’s working class and youth, most of whom supported the opposition. A few are from the military and from the police, though,” added Moyo, a lawyer
who himself fled Zimbabwe in 2001.
Exile
Among them are a 19-year-old woman who was gang-raped by ruling party thugs and a teenage boy who was badly beaten and sodomised who have found shelter in the densely-populated suburb of Yeoville.
The program is funded and supported to a degree by the churches and non-governmental agencies from the southern African region and the MDC under former Zimbabwean labour leader Morgan Tsvangirai.
MDC national director of intelligence Chikohwero Sox has lived in South Africa since 2003.
”I am in exile now, but I don’t want to be here,” said the former airforce office who is wanted in Zimbabwe on false allegations by the state of having recruited soldiers into the opposition party, overseeing military training on farms for MDC ”soldiers” and the assassination of a Zanu-PF ”warlord”.
After being arrested four times in two years, tortured but never convicted of any of crimes, the 40-year-old was forced to flee his home country.
”They were using electrical systems to torture, dumping heads in buckets of water. My doctor warned that my heart would not stand any more electric shocks and I had to leave. They confiscated my passport so I had to do a border jump to get here,” he said.
”Life is a risk here. It is very close to home,” he explained.
Apathy
What makes life in South Africa even more ”difficult”, he notes is that South African President Thabo Mbeki who has been accused of turning a blind eye to Mugabe’s jackboot approach, appears oblivious to developments in the country across his northern border.
”Mbeki does not believe there is a crisis in Zimbabwe,” he suggests.
Zimbabweans who find themselves trying to pick up the pieces in South Africa have little assistance from Pretoria. Local church and civil society bodies do however make a contribution to their efforts away from home.
Human rights activist and former Amnesty International official Heather van Niekerk was one of five civil society activists from South Africa who toured Zimbabwe ahead of the elections earlier this month.
The delegation were left with a sense that little or no voter education had been undertaken, that the fear of a return of the ruling party-backed violence and intimidation that characterised the pre-election period of 2002 was a reality for many there.
Strong perceptions that the poll outcome was pre-determined might lead to a high level of apathy come March 31, van Niekerk told DPA.
”With the violence in 2000 and 2002 having been so bad, people there do not need to be convinced that it can happen. The ruling party militias won’t need to be seen walking and beating anyone up
this time,” she said. — Sapa/DPA