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Violence in Zimbabwe disrupts schools and aid
Celia W. Dugger, The New York Times
May 08, 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/08/world/africa/08zimbabwe.html?ref=world

Johannesburg - Zimbabwe's ruling party, bent on retaining control after 28 years in power, has broadened its campaign of intimidation and violence to include teachers and even aid workers, disrupting education and basic care for tens of thousands of children across the country, according to humanitarian groups, union officials and the teachers themselves. Teachers have been upbraided by the ruling party for allegedly siding with the opposition during the nation's disputed March elections, in which they served as poll monitors. More than 2,700 of them have fled or been evicted from classrooms, the teachers' union says. Dozens of schools have closed, the union says, and 121 are being used as bases for the ruling party's youth militias as they harass and beat opponents in the countryside. Beyond that, the United Nations Children's Fund says that more than half the 55 nonprofit groups it recently surveyed have partly or fully suspended aid for orphans in Zimbabwe.

After more than a month's delay, Zimbabwe's election authorities on Friday finally announced the outcome of the presidential election, giving the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, 56, a significant lead over President Robert Mugabe, the octogenarian leader of the ruling party, Zanu PF. Still, election officials said Mr. Tsvangirai did not win an outright majority, forcing the two into a runoff. Human rights groups and diplomats contend that, despite its pronouncements to the contrary, the governing party is trying to win a runoff through intimidation, and there were indications on Wednesday that it planned to hold on to power at all costs. A member of Zanu PF's Politburo, speaking anonymously about its secret deliberations, said in an interview that the party had no intention of giving up power through the ballot box. "We're giving the people of Zimbabwe another opportunity to mend their ways, to vote properly," the Politburo member said. "This is their last chance."

If voters fail to return Mr. Mugabe to office, the Politburo member told a Zimbabwean journalist working with The New York Times, "Prepare to be a war correspondent." The political impasse seems likely to persist for months. Zanu PF and the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, have challenged the election results in more than 50 parliamentary districts, the state-owned newspaper, The Herald, reported Wednesday. Those challenges, which are supposed to be resolved in six months, could overturn the opposition's newly won control of the lower house of Parliament. The ruling party, the military and their irregular forces - youth militias and veterans of the liberation struggle against white rule - have for weeks been threatening, arresting and beating those they see as threats, including journalists, election monitors and even people who had simply voted for the opposition.

But the widening net of intimidation now appears to be taking a toll on children too, further fraying a society enduring a precipitous economic collapse. Services that would normally help tens of thousands of orphans each month - including health care, clean water, sports and social clubs - are now being restricted because of the political violence in large areas of the country. "Zimbabwe's children are already suffering on multiple fronts," said James Elder, a spokesman for Unicef. "To see their situation further deteriorate through violence or intimidation that prevents people reaching them is unacceptable." Other aid workers say they have been warned by government officials to suspend their operations, lest they be seen as meddling in the nation's affairs. Teachers, who served as nonpartisan supervisors at polling stations, have been systematically singled out, with 496 questioned by the police, 133 assaulted by thugs and 123 charged with election fraud, according to the Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe. Teachers who worked for the opposition also said they had been attacked.

An unsigned editorial in Saturday's issue of The Herald singled out teachers as part of an elaborate British- and American-financed plot to rig the election and get rid of Mr. Mugabe. The editorial described the teachers as having been trained in South Africa and by the National Democratic Institute, a nonprofit group based in Washington whose chairman is Madeleine K. Albright, the former American secretary of state. It said the teachers were fleeing "to avoid the long arm of the law." The Herald reported Wednesday that five teachers had been convicted on election fraud charges. Four of the five had failed to account for 11 to 16 votes at their polling stations and were fined 12 billion to 20 billion Zimbabwe dollars - less than $200 - or given two to three months in jail. A fifth teacher miscounted 163 votes and faced six months or a fine of 30 billion Zimbabwe dollars.

Raymond Majongwe, who heads the teachers' union, said he believed that the ruling party wanted to ensure that teachers did not supervise polling stations in the runoff so they could be replaced with party loyalists. The teachers give harrowing accounts of their ordeals, most begging that their names not be used. "I'll be hunted and killed," said a high school math teacher from the rural Guruve District in Mashonaland Central Province. He and five other teachers were hauled from their homes on April 26 by about 30 members of the ruling party's youth militia, who beat them with iron bars, bicycle chains and thick tree branches. All are now in hiding. The math teacher said he tried to explain that the teachers were not active in politics, but the young men insisted that they were all members of the opposition who had conspired to rig the election against Mr. Mugabe. A first grade teacher said she escaped through a window in her house, carrying her 11-month-old daughter, but the youths chased her down and beat her on her back and head as she shielded her screaming baby with her body. They shouted vulgar words at her. Civic leaders and lawyers have also been sought out. Fambai Ngirande, a critic of the ruling party who works for the National Association of Nongovernmental Organizations, said a plainclothes security agent picked him up last week outside his office in Harare, drove him around the capital and warned him he was being watched.

On Wednesday the police arrested Harrison Nkomo, a human rights lawyer who has represented journalists arrested in recent weeks, including a New York Times correspondent cleared on charges of violating the country's restrictive media laws. Mr. Nkomo's law partner, Beatrice Mtetwa, said Mr. Nkomo had been charged with undermining Mr. Mugabe's authority by making a critical comment about the president to a law officer at a bail hearing on Friday for a Zimbabwean journalist he was representing. The law officer, who apparently was related to President Mugabe and shared his last name, said Mr. Nkomo had told him to tell Mr. Mugabe to quit because Zimbabwe's people were suffering. "Harrison said he didn't say anything of the sort," Ms. Mtetwa retorted.

With Zimbabwe caught in a destructive limbo, senior diplomats from the Southern African Development Community, a regional bloc of 14 nations, have met with Mr. Mugabe in Harare and with Levy Mwanawasa, the Zambian president who heads the bloc, in Lusaka. On Thursday, they are to see South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki, whose role as mediator has been rejected by Zimbabwe's opposition, which says it has lost faith in his impartiality. Tomaz A. Salomao, executive secretary of the regional body, said it had also this week sent five experts to look into allegations of violence in Zimbabwe. The opposition party has sent a team to investigate the killings of its supporters on Monday night in the rural Chiweshe area of Bindura District in Mashonaland Central Province. Health officials at Howard Hospital there said the police had brought in five people who were dead on arrival Tuesday morning and a sixth who died that afternoon.

Most of the victims suffered from head and chest injuries sustained during beatings by war veterans and Zanu PF youth militias, they said. A mortuary attendant confirmed that there were six bodies. On a visit Wednesday to three elementary schools in Mashonaland East Province, officials at each said teachers had run in terror after war veterans roughed them up and paraded them at public meetings. "I was manhandled in front of everybody and ordered to denounce" the opposition, said a headmaster, whose crime, he said, was supervising a polling station where Mr. Tsvangirai had beaten Mr. Mugabe. As children in tattered uniforms chased one another across the playground, a father complained that his fifth grader's teacher was among those who had fled, leaving no one to educate his son. He also mourned the decline of what was once one of Africa's finest education systems. "We are not only destroying the education system," he said, "but the future of our children. President Mugabe must call off this violence."

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