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Early warning report on human rights and food related violations
Zimbabwe Peace Project
December 2008

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Executive summary

In this end of year Report, ZPP in line with its fundamental concern for a violence free nation, continues to identify human rights abuses and forewarn the nation of incidences that may erode the basis for national peace and stability.

Four months after the signing of the 15 September 2008 Global Political Agreement, prospects for an all inclusive Government remained a will-of-the wisp which the nation fervently chased but never caught. With each power-sharing talk, differences appeared to widen, scenarios that left the nation in a state of political anxiety and uncertainty.

This anxiety was indeed well founded given that the nation was currently facing a limping economy with a staggering inflation of around two hundred million percent and a severely stressed social sector. The health sector had to grapple with a ravaging cholera epidemic which by end of December 2008 had claimed around seven hundred lives while in the education sector, public examinations which were written under severely compromised conditions are yet to be marked and released, scenarios that are likely to place the future foundation of the nation up in smoke.

NGO efforts at monitoring politically motivated human rights violations in a bid to nurture and sustain a violent-free society are currently under siege, their programming activities in epileptic convulsions amid spates of office invasions and abductions of employees. On third December 2008, the nation awoke to the sad and agonizing news of the abduction of Jestina Mukoko, the national director of the Zimbabwe Peace Project and fiery defender of human rights, reportedly, by a group of yet-to-be-identified and yet-to-be arrested armed gang. Disaster struck again at the same organization when on the 8th December 2008 its two staffers [Brodreck Takawira and Pascal Gonzo] were abducted in broad daylight by another yet- to-be identified and yet-to-be arrested law-unto-itself group. Until December 24, 2008, the whereabouts of the triad was unknown with the police and state media maintaining a business-as-usual mum stance over these abductions.

Provincial reports strongly suggest that politically motivated human rights malpractices still maintain their earlier observed stubborn retreat trend, imprints of abuses still dotted in most constituencies, members of the public reportedly still being harassed, assaulted, abducted, and threatened with dire consequences for what passes as generally flimsy and petty reasons like publicly complaining of the hard times, wearing own party regalia, listening to Studio 7, reading independent press, belonging to a political party of one's choice, commenting on delays in the implementation of the 15 September 2008 Global Political Agreement, condemning abduction of human rights defenders, among others. In the wake of these spates of nightly and broad daylight abductions, a growing sense of vulnerability has once more gripped the nation.

With victims of violence allegedly disillusioned with the fact that most known perpetrators of yester violence still roam free with impunity, some communities and individuals are reportedly celebrating the deaths or misfortunes of people suspected to have been linked to the perpetration of violence. In the Nyanga South constituency of Manicaland people reportedly refused to attend the funeral of a man alleged to have perpetrated violence in the community while a Bikita East community reportedly celebrated after the home of an alleged perpetrator of violence was razed down by a fire, declaring it "well deserved punishment from God". ZPP deplores these developments and exhorts the state to take measures that can restore societal unity, social healing and transitional justice.

Incidents of revengeful violence remain thinly dotted across the ten provinces. In ward 13 of the Nyanga South constituency of Manicaland, four families alleged to have taken the lead in terrorising villagers in the area during the June 27 elections woke up on the 9th of December 2008 to find that their healthy crop of maize had been viciously slashed, a flier dangling in one corner of the field with the damning retaliatory message "this is just the beginning of our revenge, you know what you did to us". ZPP strongly abhors these developments and once more calls for timely social healing interventions to be put in place in the name of peace and justice.

With most rural shops now selling mealie-meal, seed maize and other basic food stuffs in foreign currency, villagers are reportedly at high risk of losing their hard earned livestock to unscrupulous politicians and business people who in some cases are reportedly exchanging a beast for as low as a 50 kg bag of mealie-meal. This unethical practice, if not urgently contained, is set to not only reduce the draught power of rural farmers but also decimate their future source of livelihood and food security.

Reports of widespread diversion of both state and NGO donated food and seed maize for selfish gains by those in strategic and influential positions, if also not urgently addressed, are set to further worsen the food plight of the rural farmers. Well into the rain season, most farmers were reportedly struggling to access seed maize, with one reported case of a group of villagers who were made to share bag of seed maize and ending up with a cup of seed maize each!

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