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Reporter's notebook: Witnessing the genocide in Zimbabwe
Peta Thornycroft, Harare Tribune
June 21, 2008

http://www.hararetribune.com/Articles08/Articles06/Articles20_22/news201.php

Peta Thornycroft has spent more than 25 years reporting on Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe's increasingly despotic rule. In a dispatch ahead of Friday's election, she reveals why she has never felt more despairing about the country's future . . . yet hopes that the courage of her fellow Zimbabweans will prevail,

Sitting outside the Harare magistrates' court last week, an idle conversation sprang up among some of us waiting for Tendai Biti to be charged with high treason.

Mr Biti is the secretary-general of the Movement for Democratic Change, and was arrested 10 days ago, accused of calling for Robert Mugabe to face war crimes charges and of "projecting the president as an evil man".

In fact he never did any such thing, and the "evidence" produced against him is a shabby document thought to have been forged by the state security services.

Yet the sentiment it contains is shared by much of the world; only in Zimbabwe could the accusation that you had expressed it land you in the dock yourself.

I was waiting for Mr Biti's court appearance in my capacity as a reporter, a job I've been doing in Zimbabwe ever since Mr Mugabe took power in 1982. Sitting next to me on the steps, meanwhile, was a man in his early
20s, whose neat but threadbare clothes marked him out as a resident of one of Harare's many ghetto areas.

We had never met before, and in the tensions of present-day Zimbabwe, one is careful with whom one strikes up conversation, yet one thing about him gave me the signal that it was safe to chat away to him away like an old friend.

Under his arm he carried a carefully rolled up copy of the Zimbabwe Herald, a weekly newspaper which carefully documents the victims of state-sponsored violence here, and names the guilty in a column called Roll of Shame.

It is printed in South Africa, and these days the trucks that bring it in are occasionally fire bombed, but I know that anybody who goes to the trouble of buying it shares my concern about the brutality that has engulfed our country, and is therefore well worth talking to.

Such is the way that humanity prevails here: just as belonging to the wrong organisation can get you killed on the spot, carrying the right newspaper can make you immediate friends. There was no need to sound each other out beforehand: just an unspoken kinship, an understanding that we are all in this together.

Our conversation was sparked by the arrival of a smart 4x4 utility vehicle, chrome add-ons glinting in the warm winter sun, which pulled into the parking area set aside for court officials.

As a tall man in a tight suit stepped out and walked purposefully towards the court building, we glanced at each other and started playing a game to pass the time. It has no name, but you might call it "Guess the Goon", or "I Spy a Spy with my little eye".

After a quarter of a century under an increasingly autocratic government, there are very few Zimbabweans who haven't learnt its rules. Here is how we play it.

The one sure-fire clue we had was the man's smart suit and smart car: these days, the only people prospering tend to be regime officials, usually those associated in some way with the security apparatus and the corrupted justice system.

Could he be a magistrate, we wondered? No: most magistrates are still quite poor because they have not been bribed as much as the judges.

Could he be a prosecutor? Perhaps - they have become increasingly crooked in the past few months. But something else marked him out to us as more sinister altogether - he was clearly out of shape and had well-kept hands.

That is the look of the well-paid bureaucrat, but it is also the look of torture chiefs, who usually hire unemployed people to do their dirty work for them: first, because they are not physically fit enough to dish out beatings themselves, and second, because like most bullies they are often cowards at heart.

It may sound as if my new friend and I were suffering from paranoia, but we were not. I have met several torture chiefs over the years, and know the breed far better than I ever wanted to. For the sake of those who were in court last Monday, though, I sincerely hope I am wrong.

The occasional trust and friendship I can find in complete strangers is one of the few things that gives me hope for Zimbabwe right now. It cuts across the race divide: Mr Mugabe always reminds me that I am white, but on the streets, nobody cares about my colour.

Otherwise, though, I find it hard to find any grounds for optimism, given the endless slew of increasingly grim stories I have covered here over the past decade: the attacks against white farmers in the late 1990s, the 165,000 per cent hyperinflation from the resulting destruction of the economy, the interference in March's disputed election results, and - most terrifyingly of all - the recent blatant onslaught against opposition supporters, which has claimed more than 80 lives so far.

It is, right now, impossible to imagine a day when Mr Mugabe will not be in power, or to imagine waking up in Zimbabwe one morning without feeling angry. It is so painful that I have to shut out warm memories of childhood in the mountains of eastern Zimbabwe because there are too many gaps, too many gone, too much decay, too much misery.

In recent days South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki, has again suggested that Friday's run-off election in Zimbabwe should be halted for talks on a unity government, in which the MDC and Mr Mugabe would share power. But those of us of with long memories know just how that might end up.

One of the first major stories I covered here was in 1982, when more than 20,000 members of the Ndebele tribe were killed by Mr Mugabe's troops, their main crime being opposition to his rule.

Five years later the then opposition leader, Joshua Nkomo, accepted a unity accord under which he and his Zapu party would rule alongside Mr Mugabe's Zanu PF party. But Nkomo loyalists now admit that they only backed the accord because it stopped their families being slaughtered, and the price they paid was their own party being completely swallowed up by Zanu PF.

It is still possible that the MDC might be tempted, under the current duress, to accept joining a similar unity government - but if they do, let us just hope that this time things turn out rather differently.

There are, despite everything, some reasons to hope. At least this time the world is watching Mr Mugabe closely - even neighbouring African nations have shaken off their anti-colonial hang-ups and are prepared to voice disapproval. And the president is unlikely to have another 20 years ahead of him.

Moreover, the turbulence of recent years has amply tested the mettle of the MDC's leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, who has undergone beatings, death threats and treason charges yet still remains credible and unbowed as a leader and statesman.

He doesn't feel the need to talk about the liberation struggle, beyond paying his respects. He doesn't need a never-ending war as Mr Mugabe does. And his party, the MDC, has broken the autocratic mould of the old post-independence political machines, which demanded gratitude and eternal support from the population they abused. If any government of national unity takes shape, the one abiding condition for it should be that Mr Tsvangirai is the dominant player.

And what of Mr Mugabe and his murderous bands of torturers and murderers? Will it be they who end up in the dock one day, rather than the likes of Mr Biti? I asked my new friend sitting on the court house steps for his opinion. "They will not end up in a war crimes court, I don't think," he said. "But God will certainly punish them."?

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