The mother of three, who gives her name just as Beatrice, still doesn’t know who raped her all those months ago. They were three men with beer on their breath, iron bars in their hands and Robert Mugabe on their T-shirts.
But she has known all along who she holds responsible even though there was nothing she could do about it. Until now. ”They told me they raped me because this is war and I was the enemy. I was just a woman who wanted to vote. There is a Zanu-PF bigwig here in Epworth. I was raped by the militia at his house. There were other women and men they were beating. They were terrorising us because we were against Mugabe,” she said. ”They did this to us because they thought we couldn’t touch them. Now we will touch them. Things have changed in Zimbabwe. They will arrest that bigwig before too long because of what he did to me.”
It will take some time yet to address past wrongs, but a mix of relief and hope — along with a little wishful thinking — swept Zimbabwe this week as millions of people desperate for respite from hunger, an ever more difficult struggle to find the money to survive and the state’s terror machine watched Mugabe ”humiliated”, in his own words, into signing a power-sharing deal with his arch foe, Morgan Tsvangirai.
People said the deal was far from perfect. Many wanted Mugabe out altogether. There is still the grappling over who gets what in the Cabinet. But there was also a sense that when Mugabe signed the agreement he was consigning himself to history.
The new sense of freedom and expectation exerted itself in small but telling ways. A day after the political agreement a soldier was headed to the front of the long queue that ran out of a Harare bank of people waiting to withdraw their daily limit of banknotes worth just $1.
Soldiers and war veterans always pushed to the head of the line, and no one ever said anything. But this week voices piped up. ”Get to the back,” they told the soldier. And he went.
Others have reported a profound change in the attitude of the police who have started protecting Tsvangirai’s supporters from attack in some areas. Hope has even infected the black market with the Zimbabwe dollar strengthening, and falling prices for goods in short supply such as sugar. Senior civil servants have made it known to Tsvangirai that they await his ministers with enthusiasm.
The first exercise of this tentative freedom was led by Tsvangirai’s supporters outside the hall where the agreement was signed. Thousands pitched up in Movement for Democratic Change party T-shirts, giving the MDC’s open-handed salute, in the shadow of the Zanu-PF headquarters yards from where Mugabe’s militia broke up a Tsvangirai rally and beat supporters in June.
At the signing of the power-sharing deal, the MDC supporters far outnumbered those there to back Mugabe. Zanu-PF activists looked sullen, as though aware that somehow they had lost out but were not quite sure how. As the MDC activists revelled, Mugabe’s supporters grew more agitated and the rocks started flying.
The celebrations in the townships around Harare went on late into the night on Monday. In Chitungwiza, an opposition stronghold to the south of the capital, there was excited talk of an end to the misery of hyperinflation — running above 50-million percent — and the prospect of jobs returning along with Western aid.
Others, including thousands of people beaten so badly by Mugabe’s militia and soldiers they were left with permanent injuries and others whose homes were destroyed during the state-orchestrated terror against opposition voters, are looking for justice.
Beatrice lives in Epworth, a township near Harare terrorised by the Zanu-PF militia as a punishment for turfing out the party’s local MP in the parliamentary election and voting overwhelmingly against Mugabe. For weeks, men armed with knives and sling shots ruled the streets, forcing people to long political meetings where suspected opposition supporters were beaten and sometimes murdered. Known MDC activists were abducted and held prisoner at the house of the Zanu-PF district chairperson, Teddy Garakara, where they were tortured. Some of the women were raped, whipped and urinated on.
Others had their homes razed. Among those targeted was an MDC local councillor, William Mapfumo. The mob beat his wife, who was pregnant, and assaulted their four year-old son. Then they destroyed their home.
Zanu-PF’s militia bases are gone but it was not until this week that Epworth’s residents dared to hope that the terror is over. Among those they accuse of coordinating the violence is Amos Midzi, a former Cabinet minister and MP for the area who lost his seat in the March election, and a female Zanu-PF councillor, Joana Mawira, who was also at the scene of the attacks on the women.
”We know who all these people are,” said Beatrice.
”This is not what Zimbabwe is about. We are not Congo. They must be held to account so that this never happens to my daughter because she wants to exercise her right to vote.”
It remains to be seen if anyone is held to account for the state-orchestrated violence, but if they are, some of the witnesses against them may be the same policemen that Zanu-PF thought were serving its interests. One policeman from Epworth, who is afraid to give his name, said all of the regular officers in his station support the opposition. ”The police did not support this violence. We had to do what we were ordered. The war vets were in charge,” he said.
”The other day an officer came to us and told us that now we must treat everyone the same. No favours. We know who did what. We were there and saw who was beating and raping. Some of them live here. We have not forgotten.”
Mugabe’s opponents are not naive about Zanu-PF. They say that despite the agreement they do not expect tormentors to give up easily. Already negotiations on dividing up the Cabinet posts have run into problems because Zanu-PF is insisting on retaining control of all the key ministries with authority over the military, police and finance.
But ordinary Zimbabweans also saw something extraordinary this week; their ruler of 28 years, who just a few months ago vowed that only God would remove him from power, was forced into sharing power with a man he despises.
That was a tectonic shift and many Zimbabweans now see Mugabe as fatally wounded politically. The president only entered into the agreement because he had no other options. ”Mugabe is the past,” said Alfred Vava a shop owner in Epworth. ”He is still there but has been forced to recognise Tsvangirai is the future. These old men who have treated us so badly, they didn’t care about Zimbabweans. But they are finished.” – guardian.co.uk