“I was arrested a dozen times,” notes Tapera Kapuya, a student leader at the University of Zimbabwe between 2001 and 2002 who says he was the target of both police and the Southern African country’s intelligence agents.
“In November 2001 I was abducted from my room in the university by state agents and tortured for three days,” he told Inter Press Service in South Africa, where he lives in exile.
Kapuya is now helping Zimbabwe’s National Constitutional Assembly (NCA), a pressure group based in the capital, Harare, to set up an office in the South African commercial hub of Johannesburg.
“The situation in Zimbabwe hasn’t improved. It’s deteriorating,” he said. “And the NCA leadership is finding it difficult to work because of state repression. The office in Johannesburg will highlight the abuses in Zimbabwe and mobilise the 2,5-million Zimbabweans living in South Africa.”
The difficulties faced by activists like Kapuya are highlighted in a new Human Rights Watch (HRW) report issued on Wednesday, titled “You Will Be Thoroughly Beaten”: The Brutal Suppression of Dissent in Zimbabwe.
Rights abuses in the country have escalated since 2000, when the ruling Zanu-PF faced its first real challenge at the polls, from the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). This grouping became the country’s main opposition party, but has since splintered into two factions.
“Since 2000, the authorities in Zimbabwe have routinely resorted to violent tactics to silence criticism of their poor human rights record and to prevent human rights activists from exposing abuses in the country; repression of political activity and dissent has been particularly noticeable prior to election periods,” notes HRW, in the 28-page report.
“Whereas in the beginning of Zimbabwe’s political crisis it was war veterans, youth militia and ruling-party supporters who chiefly dealt out violence and intimidation to opposition supporters and civil society activists, in the past three years such abuses have increasingly been carried out by army, police and state security personnel,” the New York-based grouping adds.
“The government has turned to more violent and repressive tactics as economic and political conditions continue to deteriorate and people increasingly express their discontent.”
Abuses
The document lists alleged abuses against members of civil society groups, trade unionists and other activists by police and intelligence officials.
These include a police assault on 15 officials from the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), and on about 500 activists from the NCA in Harare on September 13 and 25 respectively.
The report also describes a student activist being detained for four days and beaten by police in the north-eastern town of Bindura, in May. “During interrogation they beat me with baton sticks, clenched fists and kept kicking me,” the student is quoted as saying.
“Every night they would threaten me and say, ‘We will kill you tonight.’ Each night they would come and they would strip me naked and then handcuff me with my hands between my legs so that I would not be able to move while they beat me.
“Sometimes they would be three people beating me, then two, or at times four. I was being accused of trying to facilitate regime change and working for the opposition.”
Efforts by Inter Press Service to get comment on the HRW report from the Zimbabwean embassy in South Africa’s capital, Pretoria, were fruitless.
However, Nicholas Dube, a representative of one of the MDC factions, dismisses Harare’s claim that demonstrations by the NCA and ZCTU were aimed at toppling the government of President Robert Mugabe.
“The ZCTU protest wasn’t about regime change. It was about bread-and-butter issues, and it was about access to ARVs [antiretrovirals],” he says. ARVs prolong the lives of people who have contracted HIV. According to the United Nations Joint Programme on HIV/Aids, Zimbabwe has an adult HIV prevalence rate of 20,1%.
“The leadership of the ZCTU was attacked and brutally beaten up by the police,” Dube adds. “To make matters worst, President Mugabe congratulated the police for doing a good job. It clearly demonstrates that the government of Zimbabwe is giving orders to police to crack down on perceived opponents.”
World pressure
Dube believes Zanu-PF — in power since independence in 1980 — will only recognise the opposition if further international pressure is brought to bear on Zimbabwean authorities.
“Internally there’s nothing people can do. The opposition has been weakened by police brutality, backed by the ruling party,” he says.
Dube, who is also in self-imposed exile in South Africa, says these interventions should come from organisations such as the African Union and the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Zimbabwe is a member of both groupings.
“It’s critical that the AU Commission on Human Rights and SADC look at this problem and come up with a solution,” he noted. “Their silence is not helping the people of Zimbabwe.”
Critics say South Africa’s policy of so-called “quiet diplomacy” has failed to persuade Mugabe to resolve Zimbabwe’s crisis.
Instead, the president blames former colonial power Britain for his country’s woes. He says Zimbabwe , under sanctions from the United States and European Union, is being vilified for seizing land from several thousand white farmers to resettle landless blacks.
For its part, HRW has made various recommendations for improving the situation in Zimbabwe. These include having the government ensure that all police, security and military forces adhere to the country’s international legal obligation to respect individuals’ rights to freedom from arbitrary arrest and torture.
The rights group has also called, among others, for all people who are detained to be brought before a judge within 48 hours of arrest — and for an independent body to be established for probing complaints against the police service.
Civil society and human rights groups believe that about five million Zimbabweans have left their country for greener pastures since 2000.
“We have more than 3 000 [Zimbabwean] teachers … in South Africa. It’s sad to see a country losing its brains just like that,” says Selvan Chetty, deputy director of the Solidarity Peace Trust, a church-backed human rights organisation.
The group, which monitors and highlights abuses in Zimbabwe, is based in Port Shepstone: a town in South Africa’s coastal province of KwaZulu-Natal. — IPS