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Mugabe's partisans begin the witch-hunt
Stephanie Nolen, The Globe and Mail (Canada)
April 16, 2008

View article on the Globe and Mail website

Johannesburg - Their first target is Nelia Gomba, a tall, frail woman in her late 40s. She is visibly shivering when a young woman in military fatigues drags her out of the crowd. "This is Nelia and she is here to make a confession," the young woman shouts to the four dozen people packed into the community hall. Then she pins Ms. Gomba to the ground. But the older woman, her face on the floor, says nothing. And so two more youths step forward carrying leather whips. In the crowd, Ms. Gomba's daughter, Synodia, begins to scream, but is quickly silenced with a cracking slap from another youth in fatigues. At the front of the room, the youth kicks Ms. Gomba in the face and blood starts to ooze from her nose. "That is what you get for trying to sneak the MDC through the backdoor," she snarls. Then they begin to use the whips. At first Ms. Gomba cries out; in response, the youths hit her harder. Eventually she stops screaming, and the noise as the whips hit her body is the only sound in the room. The crowd sits silent in the light of flickering paraffin lamps. Ms. Gomba loses consciousness after 15 minutes of this, and her family is ordered to carry her away. In Zimbabwe's national election on March 29, Nelia Gomba volunteered as a polling agent for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.

For the past 28 years, the people of this small farming village 100 kilometres southeast of the capital Harare have voted, in election after election, for Robert Mugabe and his Zanu PF party. They were driven by a combination of loyalty for the party's role in the liberation struggle and fear of retribution if they voted otherwise. A bit more than two weeks ago, the people of Chiduku said, "Enough." Driven to desperation by an economy that has contracted faster than any in history, by inflation of more than 150,000 per cent annually and by recurring food shortages, they voted overwhelmingly for the MDC, and its presidential candidate Morgan Tsvangirai. Now they are being made to pay for that act of electoral bravery. On April 1, Zimbabwe's electoral commission announced that this and many other constituencies had gone to the MDC, enough to give the party control of Parliament for the first time in Zimbabwe's history. Five days later, the youth militia arrived. There are about 25 of them and they have established a rough camp in the hills above the village. They wear the rough green fatigues that gave the infamous militia its nickname, the Green Bombers. Shortly after they arrived, a few of them came down to meet with the chief of this and each of the four nearby villages, and gave each a message: They expected to be regularly supplied with food and water.

And that first night, around 8 o'clock, they moved through the villages, carrying sticks and whips, and ordered everyone to attend a meeting. People were told that if their relatives and neighbours were not there, they would be held accountable. The meetings are called pungwe, the chiShona word for "a night vigil." They originated in the war of liberation, when resistance fighters would stealthily gather rural people together to indoctrinate them politically on the need to end colonial rule. The militias created by Mr. Mugabe four years ago have now been deployed around the country to take measures to ensure that none of the constituencies that voted for the MDC would do it again in a run-off election. Outsiders are never allowed to witness these meetings; a Globe contributor sneaked in to the Chiduku gathering last Saturday night to provide a rare first-hand account. At the opening of the meeting, the crowd was ordered to join in singing liberation war-era songs urging people to take their guns and fight for their country: "sell-outs must be killed," the lyrics go. Then there were speeches, denunciations from militia members who appeared to be high on drugs of "traitors," "rabid dogs of the west" and "puppets." After midnight, the demonstrations of the cost of voting MDC began, with the whipping of Ms. Gomba. When she had been carried, bloodied, from the room, the youth dragged up Naison Ngwerume, an MDC activist from the area; the youth told the crowd that they found posters in his bedroom showing Mr. Tsvangirai. "These are the rotten apples in this district," said the youth leader, a short, hardened man with a bald head. "We shall not allow them to contaminate the whole lot of you."

Mocking youths ordered Mr. Ngwerume, a farmer in his early 30s, to stand on his head for 20 minutes. He battled to maintain his balance and struggled in obvious pain. The youth laughed hysterically. And when he at last collapsed, they moved in and whipped him. The meeting went on like this four hours: four more people who were accused of supporting the MDC were pulled from the crowd and beaten while everyone else, including their families, was forced to watch. At dawn, the villagers were released, told to go home - and return that night for another session. The pungwe continue to be held every night. Teresa Shito, a 54-year-old farmer and a mother of three, knew the terror had begun before the pungwe. She awoke last Thursday, before dawn to the sound of voices outside her straw-roofed home. Outside the door, she found a knot of the youth militia who now run the village. And they had a message for her. "They said I was an MDC prostitute because I attended their rally here," Ms. Shito said. "Then one of the youth flicked a lit matchstick on to the roof of my thatched hut." Neighbours rushed to help her put out the flames before they could spread to other houses. The youth disappeared. But she lost everything she owned, she said, including the clay pots her mother made for her when she was married - she had used them each day for more than 20 years. Squads of Green Bombers like those in Chiduku, and other groups of paramilitaries including "war veterans," have been deployed in every district across the country, using similar tactics. In Mutoko, 160 kilometres to the north of Harare, 20 houses were burned last weekend. Five were torched in Murehwa, 80 kilometres north, on Sunday night.

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