Mugabe’s Black Victims

Original Post Date: 2001-08-29 Time: 13:26:33  Posted By: Jan

From: WWW.ZWNEWS.COM
author/source:C4 News (UK)
published:Tue 28-Aug-2001
posted on this site:Wed 29-Aug-2001

Our diplomatic correspondent Lindsay Hilsum has this special report on the
widespread campaign of violence being waged on the black farmers who have
dared to speak out.

President Robert Mugabe claims his quarrel is with those clinging to a
colonial era, with white farmers who refuse to agree to a more just
distribution of land. But while it’s the attacks on white farms that have
attracted the world’s condemnation, Channel Four News has discovered that
Mugabe’s regime is perfectly prepared to use the same tactics against the
black farming community.

Maxwell Taruvinga watched his friend Vusa Mkweli die in a police cell. “He
was bleeding a white substance from his nose and mouth,” he remembers. “I
reported to the cell guards, but they said we will take him to hospital
tomorrow. They said, just monitor him. So I monitored him until he died.” Mr
Taruvinga covered his friend with a blanket, and lay down next to his body on
the concrete floor. The two men were arrested on August 8th in the small town
of Gokwe, south-west of the Zimbabwean capital Harare, accused of political
violence. Mr Mkweli had been epileptic for a year, ever since youths loyal to
President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu PF party assaulted him during the
parliamentary election campaign.

But according to Mr Taruvinga, for two days the police would not let his
friend – a member of the local branch of the opposition Movement for
Democratic Change – retrieve his medicines from home. At first he fitted
every five minutes. Then every two. “Then he passed away,” said Mr Taruvinga.
I met Mr Taruvinga as he was carried into the offices of a human rights
organisation in Harare, a plaster on one leg, bandages on the other, his face
creased in pain. He feared that he too would die if he stayed in Gokwe. After
Mr Mkweli’s funeral, he and other MDC members went to their office. ZANU PF
militants followed them – and attacked. “I ran away but they caught me,” said
Mr Taruvinga. He was beaten with iron bars, rubber sticks and stones. “They
left me because they thought I died,” he said.

Far from the drama on Zimbabwe’s white-owned farms, an even more violent
campaign is unfolding. Determined to weaken the opposition MDC, Zanu PF has
embarked on a programme to intimidate MDC members so much that few will dare
vote against President Robert Mugabe in next year’s Presidential election. Mr
Taruvinga is not as badly injured as Anna Charukah, another member of the
funeral party. She is in hospital in Harare, in traction, her neck and hand
in plaster. A refugee in her own country, she is now dependent on charity for
her hospital bills, food and shelter. When she comes out of hospital, she
like Mr Taruvinga will go to one in a network of safe houses in Harare,
places where the victims of violence can hide, anonymous in the city, too
scared to go home, to villages where their houses have been destroyed and
their enemies are still pursuing them.

The Zimbabwean government says opposition activists like Mr Taruvinga and Mrs
Charukah are not victims but instigators of political violence. The Home
Affairs Minister, John Nkomo, denies that President Mugabe’s government has
embarked on a campaign of intimidation. In an interview with Channel Four
News, he said human rights groups were to blame. “The so-called human rights
groups are themselves violators of human rights. Some of them have been
sponsored by outsiders who would like to destabilise Zimbabwe, and they must
blame us for everything that goes on.”

He refuses to accept as a legitimate opposition party the MDC, which won
nearly half the seats in last year’s parliamentary elections. “They’re a
sponsored group – the result of efforts by white commercial farmers who
wanted to defeat our land reorganisation programme and sponsored, financed
and sustained that party.” The evening news on state television shows
President Mugabe presiding over the “Land Committee” whose job is to oversee
land reform. The idea is to redistribute to landless black people farms
stolen by white Rhodesian colonialists and passed onto their offspring. The
foot-soldiers in the campaign are “war veterans”, many of whom are too young
to have fought in Zimbabwe’s war of Independence which ended in 1980.

Imagine then, the feelings of Philemon Matibe, one of Zimbabwe’s most
successful black commercial farmers, the day in June when the District
Administrator, accompanied by Zanu PF militants, “war veterans” and villagers
arrived on his farm and ordered him and his family to leave. Philemon Matibe:
“They had a hat, so they put bottle-tops with numbers in the hat. The
villagers had to pick a number, and that was the plot they were allocated.”
Mr Matibe, his wife and two children gathered what they could of their
belongings and left. A week later their farm was burnt to the ground.

I wandered around the burnt-out shell of the farmhouse, the destroyed barns
and tobacco sheds, the blackened ashes of maize cobs, fields of charred
tobacco and wheat, and stalks of barley drying in the hot sun after the
irrigation pipes were ripped out. “I have lost everything. All my life
savings,” said Mr Matibe. The men from the government who took his farm made
him an offer. If he renounced the MDC – of which he is a leading member – he
would be given another farm of his choice, anywhere in the country. He
refused. “I was targeted specifically because of my membership of MDC, and I
sincerely believe if I were not a member of MDC I would still be farming
today,” he said. It was the local police who told Mr Matibe his farm had been
burnt. “They said they had done their investigations, and someone had been
playing with matches. It’s one of those unsolved mysteries,” he said. The
insurance company, however, says it’s a result of political violence so they
will not pay compensation.

Thandiwe Ncube went to the police after her husband, John Kamonera, was
dragged from their house at midnight on July 3rd. She had already fled,
knowing the gang was after her, because she’s a leading member of the MDC in
the Harare suburb of Epworth. Her husband, however, stayed behind because he
was not politically involved and could not imagine he might be a target. He
was wrong. Mrs Ncube waited until 3pm at the police station. “I went into a
small house and saw two bodies there,” she said. “I identified my husband. I
said, where did you find him? They said, “Ah, we were just called by war
veterans to come and take your husband because he was dead”. I said, why
didn’t you arrest him? They said, “we are not allowed to arrest them, and
even us we feel pain about it, but there is nothing we can do because we are
just workers.”

These are not the worst human rights violations in the world, nor even in
Africa. But Zimbabwe was never expected to be like this. After the war in the
seventies, there was cruel blood-letting in the province of Matebeleland, but
after that Zimbabwe became peaceful and relatively prosperous. Now it is on
the brink of economic ruin and its people live in fear. “I was a very proud
Zimbabwean,” says Philemon Matibe. “I used to brag that we are different
Africans. I was very proud of Robert Mugabe. I felt that we were a shining
example to the rest of Africa on how to run an economy and how to co-exist.
Now I’m embarrassed even to mention to people that I’m a Zimbabwean.”

I have asked all the people I have met in Zimbabwe if they would like to
testify anonymously. Every one has said they would prefer the show their
face, give their name and tell their story. Their only fear is that before
next year’s Presidential poll, thousands more Zimbabweans will suffer as they
have done.

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