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Tales of terror in Zimbabwe
The Washington Post
April 23, 2008

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/23/AR2008042300757.html?nav=rss_world

The beaten, the battered and the bruised have straggled in from Zimbabwe's terrified countryside over the past two weeks. And they have set up camp in Harvest House, a dingy downtown office block that has long been the headquarters of opposition politics. Now it has the grim, grimy look of a refugee camp in a war zone.

There are children screaming. There are adults starving, or stinking for lack of running water. There are broken bones and bullet wounds and stories of how an election that millions of Zimbabweans thought might be the end of President Robert Mugabe's rule has instead produced violent reprisals against those bold enough to work openly for his ouster.

Martin Mandava, 29, a farmer from Mutoko, one of many Mugabe rural strongholds that supported the opposition in the March 29 presidential election, told of how last week a gang of youths from the ruling ZANU-PF party stoned him, tied his arms and legs, then beat him with sticks. They gashed his head with an ax, he said, and threatened to stab his pregnant wife through the womb. Then the gang leader pulled down Mandava's pants, grabbed his genitals and held out a knife.

The leader asked the gang what should be done to an opposition supporter, Mandava recalled. The answer: His genitals should be cut off, to keep opposition party babies from being born there.

Mandava's wife screamed and covered the face of their 5-year-old child, he said. Then the leader offered to put his weapon away if Mandava could sing a song from Zimbabwe's liberation struggle, the guerrilla war led in the 1970s by Mugabe. Mandava sang the song.

After four hours of abuse, he said, the youths burned down a thatch-roofed hut the family used as a kitchen and left.

"They said my wife should not try to raise alarm or they will kill her," Mandava said. "They also bragged that this is what they had done to other traitors in the area."

Such accounts have become increasingly common in the 25 days since the historic national vote, whose results have yet to be released by an electoral commission run by Mugabe allies.

About 300 opposition activists are living in Harvest House now. Hundreds of other members of the Movement for Democratic Change have been beaten, tortured, falsely arrested or chased from their homes, according to human rights groups. The MDC says 10 of its members have been killed.

Many usual occupants of the headquarters, including opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, are traveling elsewhere in Africa to seek support for their cause on a continent that traditionally has avoided interventions against human rights abuses.

An opinion article in the state-owned Herald newspaper stirred widespread speculation Wednesday that elements of Mugabe's ZANU-PF are angling for a political deal with the opposition, which asserts that Tsvangirai won the election outright. In the piece, an academic with ties to Mugabe's party suggested that both sides agree to a government of national unity led by the president. It would be charged with introducing a new constitution and organizing new elections.

"The details in the story do mirror the feeling by some key members in the party," said a top government official close to Mugabe, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "There is a belief that even a runoff will not help things at all."

There are few visible signs of an impending deal to break Zimbabwe's political stalemate. Instead there is abundant and growing evidence that Mugabe, who has been in power for 28 years, has let loose his army, secret police and feared youth militias to brutalize the opposition in advance of a runoff that could be scheduled as early as May.

Some victims are fleeing into the countryside with their families. Their broken bodies are filling hospital wards. And some are coming here, to the party's national headquarters, because they can think of nowhere else to go.

Most are sleeping in two large conference rooms, about 40 feet by 40 feet. Crammed into these squalid spaces are young children, babies being breast-fed and dozens upon dozens of adults dressed in the only tattered clothes they have left.

"The number of people is increasing every day," said MDC deputy leader Thokozani Khupe, who is attempting to manage the tumult at Harvest House. "I have received reports that more are on their way to this place. I don't know what we will do."

Mavis Mavhunga, 65, a widow, said four ruling party youths came to her hut before dawn last week to punish her for attending opposition meetings before the election.

"They said at my age I must be old enough to know that this country came through the barrel of the gun. They said I should therefore be grateful" to the ruling party, Mavhunga recalled.

The youths hit her with sticks and fists, then pulled up her dress to lash her across the buttocks. When she fainted, one of the youths poured a bucket of water on her head to revive her so the beating could continue, Mavhunga said, weeping as she recalled the pain.

One of the youths then kicked her arm, breaking it. Two hours into the assault, the youths burned down her hut and left. Mavhunga said she was so weak that neighbors had to carry her to the hospital in a wheelbarrow. Her entire village, she said, is now empty.

Moreblessing Chigadza, 35, said she was working in her field in another village last week, with her 3-month-old tied to her back, when she saw smoke rising from her family's compound. Rushing back, she saw her hut on fire and eight ruling party youths shoving her husband into a white truck with no license plate.

After the truck sped away, Chigadza said, the remaining youths ordered her to set the child aside, then beat her with a motorbike chain. As she tried to run, she said, one of the men tripped her, breaking her leg. She has not seen her husband again.

Another party activist, Takawira Mandere, 34, said he was returning from a political meeting in a rural town April 12 and wearing an MDC T-shirt when he and several friends stopped at a store owned by an officer of the secret police. When the officer demanded that they leave, he said, they refused.

"He said he was going to teach us a lesson," Mandere said. "He said the only way to get order in the area was to kill at least one MDC member so that the sellouts in the opposition know that ZANU-PF means business."

The officer shot Mandere in the right leg, then the left. When the officer went to get more bullets, Mandere crawled away and hid, he said. After treatment at a Harare hospital, he moved into opposition party headquarters, where he has been living ever since.

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