Back to Index

Zimbabwe police 'carried out torture on a massive scale'
Jan Raath, The Times (UK)
June 27, 2006

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2244236.html

There is "abundant evidence", from the records of Zimbabwe’s courts — which are widely dismissed as pro-government — that state agents have carried out torture "on a massive scale", the country’s leading human rights group said today.

The Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum, a coalition of human rights groups and legal organisations, has reported over 15,000 violations of human rights in the past eight years, but the report said only 300 have entered the initial phases of litigation. Only 51 of these went to their conclusion, with the state being held accountable in 89 per cent of cases.

Although the report deals with a relatively small number of cases, it is the first to be based on official records, with the names and ranks of perpetrators and the sites — mostly police stations — of torture.

"The Zimbabwe Government itself is conceding liability for the perpetration of gross human rights violations," it said.

The Forum said it would send its report to the United Nations to press for further action against President Mugabe’s Government.

The report said that the low number of court cases was attributable to the fact that merely reporting human rights violations to police carries a high risk of being arrested, beaten up and illegally detained. The country’s economic crisis has also cut the rate of court litigation because many ordinary people cannot afford the cost of transport to court or to see lawyers, it said.

Police were the most common perpetrators. "People in custody are likely to be beaten irrespective of their alleged crime", political or criminal, and are commonly subjected to falanga — the excruciatingly painful practice of beating the soles of the feet, which leaves little obvious bruising. Police had "adopted torture as a means to eliciting confessions on a widespread basis", it said.

The Army was less widely cited in litigation, but soldiers were "often very brutal".

The payment of damages is rare, according to the report, and it asks whether the delay is deliberate, as a way of decreasing the damages being paid". Only 20 cases since 1999 have resulted in compensation but, again, the economic crisis makes payments almost worthless. The report cites an award to a plaintiff of Zim $950,000 in November last year, when it was worth US $1,185. The defendants have still not been paid and the same amount is now worth about US $5.

Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.

TOP