A Predictable Tragedy. Daniel Compagnon

it all amounted to a political gimmick—more than anybody else they knew how difficult it was to become a successful farmer—and that the land illegally appropriated would end up in the hands of Mugabe’s cronies (as was the case from mid-2002 onward). In a few instances the workers sided with the invaders, becoming accomplices to acts of violence—sometimes exerting revenge for some unsettled labor dispute—taking advantage of farm looting or applying for plots on occupied land. All attempts to resist illegal farm invasions have resulted in savage punishment, since it did not follow the script written by ZANU-PF “chefs.” When farm workers defended themselves or tried to retaliate—as was the case with Stevens’s employees who tried to evict invaders from the farm after the militias had raped a worker’s daughter—War Vets would come back later with reinforcements and there would be more severe casualties. Violence or straight evictions—usually accompanied by the looting and the burning of workers’ houses—drove several thousands from their homes. But this was only the beginning.

       Parliamentary Elections

      It soon became obvious that the violence associated with the farm invasions also had a third and a more crucial purpose for the ruling party, namely, to win the 2000 parliamentary elections. Originally due in early April, they were conveniently postponed until June 2000 to allow the time for violence to produce the desired outcome. The big cities like Harare and Bulawayo, which massively rejected the constitutional draft—with 73.2 and 75.3 percent of the vote respectively—were written off by ZANU-PF strategists. However, CIO reports indicated that the MDC, though less than a year old, was also making significant progress in the rural areas, the traditional power base of ZANU-PF. The usual methods of election manipulation and inflammatory rhetoric, through which the ruling party had managed to dominate the political scene since independence, were not going to work this time: outright but controlled violence was crucial to cow the rural masses back into submission. The margins might be too narrow and with a still relatively independent judiciary, postelectoral litigation could be—and indeed was—used by the MDC. Successful legal challenges might then reverse an election victory obtained through rigging. In other words, the façade of legalism more or less maintained until February 2000 had to be dropped for a more offensive campaigning.

      Mugabe made his intentions clear in March 2000 when he declared at an official ceremony: “Those who try to cause disunity among our people must watch out because death will befall them.”²⁹ The Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum final report on the parliamentary elections is based on 1,000 statements from victims. Providing only a glimpse of the massive scale of political violence it stated:

      ZANU-PF supporters and many state organs were engaged in a systematic, premeditated campaign to terrorize local communities into voting for the party or not voting at all…. One independent report has estimated that there were well over 200,000 cases of political violence in the first half of 2000…. The evidence clearly supports the view that there was a systematic campaign of organised violence and torture perpetrated against all opposition political parties and their supporters. The physical acts of violence conform to the definition of torture contained in the UN Convention Against Torture.³⁰

      International observers from the Commonwealth and the European Union concurred with the NGOs on the role of violence that prevented the opposition from campaigning openly and the electorate from voting freely.³¹

      Intimidation followed a pattern: elements of the ZANU-PF militia called War Vets, armed mainly with knives, spears, axes, machetes, batons, and a few firearms, would round up the farmworkers—wives, the elderly, and children included—frog-march them to the militia’s nearby camp (usually an invaded farm), and beat them at random, force them to sing pro-ZANU-PF chants, keep them at all-night “political education” meetings reminiscent of wartime pungwes, while some MDC activists would be singled out to be tortured, beaten, and sometimes killed. Workers would be released only once they had pledged to vote for ZANU-PF and were threatened by War Vets with severe punishment if they did otherwise. The violent campaign moved from one farming district to another, probably because the party strategists lacked the resources (manpower and finances) to operate simultaneously in all areas. For many farmworkers with little education and no access to independent information, the threat was credible enough, given the fact that the police refused to act when violence was reported to them or often sided with the War Vets, who clearly enjoyed full government support. How could you believe your vote to be secret, as NCA, MDC, and election monitors had told voters, in circumstances where the whole state apparatus colluded with the perpetrators of violence? This terror campaign extended to some mining camps in the Bindura area and forest plantations in the Eastern Highlands.

      The same violence fell upon MDC activists in Harare’s high-density suburbs like Mbare, Mufakose, and Budiriro, this last being the locality of War Vets leader Chenjerai “Hitler” Hunzvi’s private surgery, which was used as a torture chamber and murder arena by ZANU-PF activists, with the complicity of elements of the police and the army.³² All around the country, MDC local officials were beaten and maimed and saw their houses and other properties destroyed as the campaign expanded from the commercial farming areas to the communal lands (the former tribal reserves where blacks peasants were confined prior to 1980) and small towns. Testimony gathered by human rights groups shows that victims were sometimes chosen haphazardly but more often were carefully identified on preestablished lists, suggesting that the War Vets benefited from intelligence sources—although one of the purposes of the torture sessions was to extract more inside information from alleged MDC members. In the rural areas, ZANU-PF militias were tipped off by headmen and traditional chiefs. Several opposition party members were abducted and subsequently killed, such as MDC candidate David Coltart’s electoral agent in Bulawayo and an MDC activist in Mberengwa. The June 2000 MDC candidate standing against Emmerson Mnangagwa in Kwekwe went into hiding after surviving an assassination attempt and seeing his house burned down by ZANU-PF thugs,³³ only to reappear when he won the election—to his own astonishment. MDC candidate for Bindura, Elliot Pfebve, narrowly escaped several attempts on his life but his look-alike brother was murdered. There were 40 deaths countrywide in the run-up period, 36 of them MDC supporters.³⁴

      Some constituencies were put under siege, with War Vets and other party militias manning roadblocks to prevent MDC activists from campaigning and creating “no-go areas,” not only for MDC but also for independent press reporters, church and NGO activists, and election observers—in particular in the three Mashonaland provinces. In the rural areas and small towns, various categories of people perceived as potential opposition supporters (like schoolteachers, council employees, doctors, and nurses) were systematically assaulted or driven away.³⁵ They took refuge in towns as dispossessed farm workers had done and were not able to vote in the elections. Although MDC, seen as the main political threat, was also the main target, other opposition parties were treated in the same fashion, such as UP in the Mudzi area. In May and early June 2000, most MDC candidates could not hold campaign meetings in the rural areas or townships without been physically attacked by the War Vets or brutally dispersed by the riot police. Several ZANU-PF candidates took an active part in the violence—some of them using firearms against their opponents—and were later rewarded by Mugabe for their zeal.

       State Sponsorship and Impunity for the Criminals

      That Mugabe condoned such deliberate and often carefully planned violence was made clear from the very beginning. In public speeches he downplayed the importance of the murders and other incidents of violence, claimed on several occasions that the farmers or the MDC activists had “provoked” the War Vets, stopped the police from acting against perpetrators of violence when they were linked to ZANU-PF, and threatened on various occasions, including formal party meetings or state functions, to crush the white farmers and all political opponents. Plans for the violent invasions had been drawn in advance and bore no resemblance to the spontaneous occupations that had taken place from time to time since independence and were always ended by a timely police intervention. The coordination of the farm invasions, in particular the choice of the first targets, bore the mark of the CIO.³⁶ The strategic planning at the highest level was entrusted to the JOC, which acted under direct instructions from Mugabe and involved minister of justice Emmerson Mnangagwa; the national security minister (Sydney Sekeramayi and from