Category: Bulletin 79

The following letter was sent out May 8, 2008 from an NGO worker living in Zimbabwe, who offers an eyewitness account from the capital city of Harare as news of political violence began to be heard from individuals, news sources, and rumor. The letter captures well the anger ex-patriates often feel as they hear from their Zimbabwean colleagues of political killings and torture and realize how implicated so many of the “big chefs” are in this violence, how the police and military along with their paramilitary “green bombers” and “war veterans” operate with impunity. Such a realization is jarring and disturbing, scary and depressing. Zimbabweans have no need to be told of this, but those of us outside the country may want to consider the costs such a state and society exact from its people. Zimbabweans have learned to cope with a now-familiar cycle of periods of calm followed by a brutal reaction from a state controlled by forces who know they have everything to lose should they be forced to concede power. — TS.

“Letter from Harare – 8 May 2008”

By Anonymous

Since the elections on 29 March, I have been trying, without success, to find suitable words with which to convey to those outside the country the experience of being here in this dreadful moment.

Some of my inability to construct a lucid account is surely attributable to the ever-changing rush of events that seems to shift the terrain of what is happening – or what I think may be happening, or what is reported to be happening, or what an army of experts believe to be happening, or what is rumoured to be happening – from hour to hour. The election results will be released tomorrow, or next week or not at all. The Chinese arms ship will dock in Durban, in Beira, in Luanda, or return to China and the weapons will be trucked, or flown to Harare or not. Sixty white-owned farms have just been seized, or 160 farms, or no farm invasion shave occurred. Morgan has won two-thirds of the vote, or a bare majority of the vote or a mere plurality of ballots. Bogus ballot boxes stuffed with phony ZANU-PF votes are seen delivered to the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission to steal the election, the ZEC has been seized by security forces, the police are arresting ZEC personnel. Mugabe and wife have flown to Malaysia or are happily relaxing in their Harare mansion. Mbeki has secretly arranged for Mugabe to step down, or share power or maintain control. There was almost a military coup, or there will be a coup or there has already been a coup and we are under military rule but don’t know it. There will or won’t be a run-off. It will happen in thee weeks, in three months, in a year, not at all. We will be saved by Jacob Zuma, by SADC, by the African Union, by the EU, by no one. On and on and on it goes, baffling, impossible, and we are left dazed, disheartened, flabbergasted.

The Government propaganda machine is in overdrive. “Farmers Attack War Veterans” was Tuesday’s headline. The story told the tale of a white farmer attacking with pepper spray, a band of war vets who happened to “visit” his farm and of three white farmers driving a truck with an improper licence plate. Such lawlessness by whites won’t be tolerated a police official is quoted. The ZBC radio news tells us that MDC thugs are attacking innocent villagers, that MDC leaders are trying forgo the proper legal process and to delay the run-off, that MDC agents have been aiding the return of deposed white farmers to retake the land and restore the old colonial master. I must confess that I find a certain morbid fascination in these ludicrous accounts, brazenly inverting reality, openly reversing victim and perpetrator, mobilizing the rhetoric of sovereignty, rule-of-law, racial-solidarity and patriotism to justify brutal oppression.

Make no mistake: at its core, the story of post-election Zimbabwe is all about violence. Overwhelming, intimidating, sadistic violence unleashed upon the rural black population; anyone – children and the elderly, women and men – perceived to have voted for the MDC, or to be a relative, friend or acquaintance of someone who may have voted for the MDC or to reside in an area that supported MDC. From our Harare island of relative calm and safety, we sit by, helplessly, as their stories trickle and then flood in from the countryside.

Here are some of the accounts that I have heard directly from local sources in the past few days:

• On Sunday evening, one of our local staff described his just-completed visit to his family in the rural Eastern Highlands. When he arrived the village Headman was in hiding, threatened by a roving gang of ZANU-PF youth led by the so-called war veterans. Many young people, he said, had been dragged from their homes, beaten and forced to chant ZANU-PF slogans. They were then told that they were now recruited into the ruling party and were forced to become part of the youth patrol terrorizing the district each night. If they refused they were beaten. The bus on which he traveled back to Harare on Sunday was stopped several times at impromptu ZANU-PF roadblocks. Youth and War Vets clambered on board beating those suspected of supporting the opposition and demanding that everyone chant ZANU-PF slogans and sing “patriotic songs.” Those who resisted were dragged out and beaten, as the police calmly watched from the sidelines.

• On Tuesday a colleague at work came into my office to show me a text message she had just received on her cell-phone. It announced that Monday night the younger brother of her recently diseased fiancé, suspected of being an MDC supporter, had been beaten to death by a group of naked ZANU-PF militants. Naked! Apparently, many others in the village had been beaten and terrorized.

• A friends’ daughter who broke her arm in a playground accident on Monday afternoon was scheduled to have a pin inserted and the bone set on early Tuesday. The parents told us that the operation had to be repeatedly delayed, as the medical staff rushed to attend to numerous seriously-injured victims of ZANU-PF violence who continuously streamed into the private clinic.

• Yesterday an NGO colleague reported seeing thousands of people on the Mazoe road – just north of Harare – carrying what possessions they could and apparently fleeing towards the city. Today VOA reported that eleven people had been murdered and at least twenty more seriously injured in Mazoe North, all victims of ruling-party assault.

• Here is a widely-published account from about two weeks ago, confirmed by several sources. While not directly reported to me, I have found particularly disheartening, as I have a professional link to the key perpetrator, David Parirenyatwa, M.D., the national Minister of Health and Child Welfare and a ZANU-PF Member of Parliament. Together with two other ruling-party politicians, the good doctor, brandishing an AK-47, is said to have invaded a peaceful MDC meeting, threatening and intimidating those in attendance and demanding that they attend a ZANU-PF rally instead. “There is no place in this district where MDC supports will be safe”, he reportedly told the crowd. This from the senior most Government official charged with safeguarding the public health and the well-being of Zimbabwe’s children.

Since my arrival in Zimbabwe fourteen months ago, numerous people here have referred to the apocryphal tale of the frog blissfully swimming in a pot of water as the temperature gradually increases to the boiling point, as perhaps a fit analogy descriptive of our own adaptability to an ever-worsening scene, an ever more menacing and manifest evil. We are well and still quite safe, but we can definitely detect the heat of the water.

Tonderai Ndira’s body was identified in the mortuary at Harare’s Parirenyatwa Hospital by a bangle around what had been his wrist.

He had been dead a long time, or at least a week as it was on May 14, in the early hours of the morning that this extraordinary activist, probably the most persecuted political personality in Zimbabwe, was snatched from his working class home in Mabvuku township, eastern Harare.

They came at night, about 10 of them, and in front of his children, Raphael 9 and Linette 6, and his wife Plaxedes, beat him up and then dragged him screaming into a white double cab.

Tonderai Ndira, 33, was certainly Zimbabwe’s most renowned street activist who had been arrested and beaten up and hospitalised scores of times since he began campaigning for democracy in late 1999.

His decomposing, naked body was found in the bush near the old commercial farming district Goromonzi, about 40 km south east of Harare, close to the torture centre run by the security forces, usually the Zimbabwe National Army, where so many Zimbabweans have been worked over since independence.

Hours after his brothers identified the body – it was so decomposed and mutilated that his own father was not sure whether the long, slender remains on the slab was his oldest son – the police began harrassing the family saying they could not have the body for burial.

His brother Cosmos Ndira said yesterday: “He was in the mortuary where they keep the unknown people, the street kids. He was naked. The bangle was given to him by his wife.

“I think Tonde was arrested 35 times, but maybe more, we lost count. We were all so happy after the elections, thinking that the eight years was now over and we could begin new lives.

“We often talked about dying, and Tonde often used to tell us that he would be killed by Zanu PF because he was arrested and beaten up so often.”

Ndira was head of the Movement for Democratic Change’s provincial security department in Harare.

He was detained for five months last year in the pitiful prison cells, unfit for human occupation, and was suing home affairs minister Kembo Mohadi and police commissioner Augustine Chihuri for wrongful arrest.

Despite all the arrests since the MDC was launched Ndira was never brought to trial. All charges, including a two year period when he was remanded every two months, were dropped for lack of evidence.

The police have failed to convict a single MDC activist among the tens of thousands detained in the last eight years.

Ndira was one of the activists who was, occasionally openly critical of the MDC when he believed it had gone wrong.

He didn’t believe in “my party right or wrong” but was a founding member of the party and destined for high office one day although he always saw himself as a background activist.

“I do this for my children. I want them to have a better life than me,” he told journalists who asked him why he kept on going.

His death came on a day when two more MDC activists were buried at the Warren Park cemetery west of Harare. One of their friends was buried last Sunday.

Those three were beaten to death in a rural area about 65 km north east of Harare where most, but certainly not all of the violence has taken place since the March 29 elections.

No one is sure how many people have died since Zanu PF and President Robert Mugabe were defeated in parliamentary and presidential elections. So far 42 victims have been identified by relatives, but many people believe the real toll is much higher especially in remote parts of northern Zimbabwe. If there are any Zanu PF victims, police and the party have failed to provide details.

At least 600 terrified people including dozens of nursing mothers and babies are sheltering at the MDC’S Harare headquarters, Harvest House.

They have no blankets nor food, and the ablution facilities are blocked, and the conditions are inhuman as the building is an office block.

So far neither the International Committee of the Red Cross nor the United Nations has even been to inspect or assist the internally displaced, “It is an appalling crisis,” said MDC lawyer Alec Muchadahama yesterday.

“The people are supposed to go to a neutral area so they can get international assistance. Where is a neutral area? Where should they go?” he said.

“This is Zimbabwe’s darkest hour. Will anything or anyone rescue us? Can there be an end to this? We can’t keep up with it,” he said, and admitted he was exhausted.

Scores are in detention including two recently elected MDC MP’s, Iain Kay, Amos Chibaya and Dr Alois Mudzingwa, MDC executive member and close friend of MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai.

Kay was one of the first white farmers to be assaulted by Mugabe’s “war veterans” in 2000, and he was later forced off his farm. He won his seat on March 29 with support from people from his old farming area, around Marondera, 70 km south east of Harare.

He and Chibaya are being charged with incitement to public violence, according to Muchadahama and were due to appear in their local magistrate’s court yesterday.

No one has been arrested in connection with any of the MDC murders, nor in connection with tens of thousands who have been assaulted. No one has been arrested for arson of village after village in the last three weeks either.

“We can’t really keep up with all the deaths and arrests. I have to go and attend to someone else from the national executive who has been arrested.” Mchadahama said.

__________
Peta Thornycroft, Harare, May 22, 2008