While the government of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe is taking steps to protect women from domestic violence, its security forces are raining down baton blows on women activists, one female victim said this week.
Grace Kwinjeh (33), a mother of three, was one of four women in a group of opposition supporters, including Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who were badly beaten by Zimbabwean police on March 11 for trying to attend a prayer rally. Sekai Holland (64) was another.
Images of the two women’s battered legs, arms and buttocks were circulated widely in the aftermath of the attack, fuelling the international outcry over the state’s crackdown on the opposition.
”We just had the Domestic Violence Bill enacted [passed by Parliament at the end of 2006] but at the same time state violence against women is increasing,” quietly spoken journalist-turned-activist Kwinjeh said in an interview in Johannesburg.
After being beaten about the head and body by police using batons and iron bars — first together with other detainees and then later in a police cell — Kwinjeh suffered dizzy spells, vomiting, heavy bruising and could ”hardly walk”.
Four months later, after a month in hospital in South Africa, stitches on her knuckles and her ear lobe and dark welts on her forearms bear witness to the attack. She still suffers from headaches and has trouble sleeping.
”It’s all meant to humiliate you so that you lose your self-confidence. It sort of diminishes you as a person. But when you’re a leader you have to keep pushing on,” the MDC’s former representative in Brussels said, swallowing hard.
Report
Dozens of female activists, including several members of the rights group Women of Zimbabwe Arise (Woza), have reported being subjected to beatings and other ill-treatment while in police custody, global rights watchdog Amnesty International said in a report on Wednesday. In some
cases the abuse amounted to torture, Amnesty added.
Researchers from the London-based rights watchdog spent three weeks in the Southern African country, interviewing dozens of women in both urban areas and the countryside.
Women are often left shouldering the responsibility for feeding the family as able-bodied men flee abroad in search of work, but are badly treated if they protest against government policies, the report finds.
Women are also subjected to sexist verbal abuse by male law enforcement as ”evidence of the police’s endorsement of negative gender stereotypes and gender discrimination”, the report says. ”They insinuate that women human rights defenders have no business becoming active in the public sphere in defence of human rights.”
The report further notes a prejudice in food-relief programmes, where individuals are discriminated against if they are suspected of having anti-Zanu-PF political affiliations. They are even barred from buying the staple maize grain from the state-run Grain Marketing Board (GMB), the country’s sole grain seller, it said.
Costa* (63), a grandmother from Matabeleland South province, was one of the 59 women interviewed for the report. Caring for her six orphaned grandchildren and working in the fields, she has since 2002 been denied access to GMB food by local politicians who claim she is a supporter of the MDC. Despite appealing against the ban, she is repeatedly told that she cannot be registered as a buyer because she criticises the government.
Costa then decided to join the activist organisation Woza to protest her victimisation.
”The Zimbabwean government needs to address the underlying economic and social problems that are motivating women to protest — rather than attacking them and criminalising their legitimate activities in defence of human rights,” Irene Khan, the secretary general of Amnesty, said in a statement.
Hard life
The ”economic violence” of living with hyperinflation of more than 4 500%, unemployment of about 80% and, now, food shortages, all blamed on the state’s disastrous policies, have robbed women of their dignity, Kwinjeh added.
Sanitary towels are now a luxury, even for middle-class women. A box of tampons would cost her almost as much as the rent on her apartment in Harare, she said.
In its latest figures, the Consumer Council of Zimbabwe said an average family of six now needs Z$8,2-million a month to survive — at least five times the average Zimbabwean worker’s salary.
The Amnesty reported adds that most farm workers in the country are routinely denied a wage that could help them secure a decent way of life, often earning less than the minimum amount of Z$32 000 per month.
Iris*, a farmworker from Mashonaland West province, is one such laborer. She is a mother of two school-going children and earns just Z$4 000 a month. Her monthly rental alone comes to Z$30 000.
”Such low incomes often force women to engage in commercial sex work to supplement their incomes, thereby exposing them to HIV infection,” the report warns.
Women who try to put food on the table by partaking in the lucrative cross-border trade in goods such as soap, cooking oil and rice are in for harder times from August 1 when all but small-scale food imports will be banned by law.
Government
”The government of Zimbabwe has failed in its obligations to respect and protect the right to food and the right to protection from discrimination,” the Amnesty report says.
”Zimbabwean women human rights defenders were motivated to become activists in order to demand changes to government laws and policies that cause and exacerbate their daily hardship in obtaining food, and gaining access to healthcare and education for their families,” it continues, saying that the women interviewed all relayed similar harsh experiences.
As they run out of options for survival, more and more women are joining men in trying to jump the three-deep border fence into South Africa, leaving their children behind with family members.
But protesting with one’s feet is as dangerous as protesting on Zimbabwe’s streets. A farmer in Musina on the South African side of the border told of finding a woman naked, nearly dead, after she was raped when crossing the border.
Amnesty called on members of the Southern African Development Community, and South African President Thabo Mbeki in particular, to put pressure on Mugabe’s government to stop its oppression of women activists and to work towards addressing the human rights and political crisis in the country.
The report adds that Zimbabwe’s government needs to address the daily violations that motivate women to turn to activism instead of increasing repression and intolerance against them.
It also urges the international community to support publicly human rights defenders in Zimbabwe and express concern over their ill-treatment by government officials.
* Not their real names