A Predictable Tragedy. Daniel Compagnon

houses and other properties and harassing their families became permanent features of ZANU-PF’s modus operandi in 2001 and 2002. On several occasions, campaigning MDC convoys faced a coordinated assault of ZANU-PF youth, War Vets, and police, some of whom used firearms. This was the case during the Bindura parliamentary by-election campaign, on 22 July 2001, but also during the presidential campaign in Nkayi in an incident involving soldiers using AK47 rifles. MDC campaigners were routinely assaulted or abducted to be tortured and killed. Such was the fate of Ephraim Tapa, president of the Zimbabwe Civil Service Employees Association, a ZCTU member union, who, with his pregnant wife, was abducted on 16 February 2002 by ZANU-PF militias. He was held in the militia camps around Mutoko for almost a month, during which time he was severely beaten and tortured. The couple were rescued by the police, which for once implemented an urgent order from the High Court, when their captors were about to kill them.

      Violence intensified again in late 2001 when a new militia, the National Youth Service, was deployed in preparation for the presidential election. The categories of people already targeted in 2000 were once again assaulted on a larger scale between December 2001 and March 2002. According to the NGO Forum, 31 people were killed between 1 January and 1 March 2002, including one former MDC candidate in the 2000 parliamentary elections.⁵¹ However, on the eve of the ballot, violence focused on MDC polling agents, many of whom were abducted and severely tortured. Some others were caught after the presidential election in retribution for the MDC vote in a specific area. Month after month, women became increasingly the victims of sexual violence, including gang raping and tortures affecting the genitals, inflicted by ZANU-PF militias, policemen, and soldiers in retaliation for their political support of the MDC. Rapes involved girls as young as twelve and were sometimes performed in public to increase the humiliation and “teach a lesson” to the whole community.⁵² The pattern emerging from NGO interviews of rape victims suggests a deliberate and systematic policy of terror covertly promoted by the top echelons of the state, which went on long after the 2002 presidential election.

      What has taken place in Zimbabwe since 2000 has nothing to do with ordinary interparty violence as might be observed in hotly contested ballots the world over. The ANC official who compared Zimbabwe’s situation to the political violence in South Africa during the transition period, prior to the 1994 democratic election, was wrong. Indeed, the violence that engulfed Zimbabwe after February 2000 was deliberate (Hunzvi boasted that he led a revolution that required violence to succeed), state-sponsored, carefully planned, and perpetrated by party militias acting in concert with state security agencies.⁵³ It was a war of attrition against the opposition, and anyone in civil society expressing dissenting views was thus perceived as an enemy of the ruling party. It was a “revolutionary war” with tactics very similar to those used to erode ZAPU’s popular base in Matabeleland in the early 1980s.

      Violence became more sporadic after the presidential elections, surging again when there was a by-election or during the rural and urban council or mayoral elections in 2003–4.⁵⁴ For instance, MDC MP Job Sikhala and his lawyer Gabriel Shumba were detained during three days in January 2003 and tortured at the CIO underground torture chambers at Goromonzi—to force them to confess a plot to kill Mugabe.⁵⁵ During the 2004 parliamentary by-election in Zengeza, on the second day of polling, ZANU-PF Cabinet minister Elliot Manyika was accused of having killed MDC activist Francis Chinozvina in public with a gun. The minister was never prosecuted and the opposition candidate filed an electoral petition in vain.⁵⁶ The campaign for the March 2005 general election was less violent than the 2002 and 2000 ballots (as noted in Chapter 1), but there were still provinces like Mashonaland Central where the MDC candidates could hardly set foot in early 2005, let alone campaign normally. Moreover the ZANU-PF candidates—including several prominent Cabinet ministers—who had sponsored violence in 2000 in twenty constituencies, and had not been held accountable by the courts, were standing again in 2005.⁵⁷ The impunity they enjoyed sent a dreadful message to the electorate and was an effective deterrent to opposition sympathizers.

      Persecution against the MDC went on after 2002. Its leaders and MPs, including Morgan Tsvangirai and party treasurer Fletcher Dulini Ncube, were detained on spurious grounds. The incident most publicized outside Zimbabwe was the persecution of Roy Bennett, the popular (white) Chimanimani MP. In 2000 his farm was invaded and his workers assaulted. In April 2004 he was evicted from the property in spite of five court orders prohibiting the farm’s compulsory acquisition, and his cattle and farming equipment were confiscated. Following a brawl with Patrick Chinamasa in Parliament in May 2004 after the minister of justice had insulted him, Bennett was unfairly sentenced to fifteen months in jail, with a three-month suspension—an unusually harsh punishment for such a light offense—and was taken into custody on 28 October.⁵⁸ Detained in squalid conditions (now a common fate in Zimbabwe prisons) and denied food and proper clothing, Bennett was freed on 28 June 2005.

      In March 2006 an alleged plot—again to assassinate Mugabe—was fabricated by the CIO to implicate Giles Mutsekwa, MDC MP for Mutare North, whose contacts in the army were feared in a volatile political climate.⁵⁹ But the prosecution abandoned the case for lack of incriminating evidence after some of the accused claimed to have been tortured to extract their confession. In the meantime, Roy Bennett, who had been cited by the government press as one of the alleged plotters, fled to South Africa in fear for his life. There his application for political refugee status was first rejected by Pretoria on the grounds that the courts in Zimbabwe upheld the law (!) but eventually accepted after he went to court.

      After the parliamentary elections in 2005, the usual political retribution was unleashed on communities that had voted for MDC, its polling agents, and some of its candidates—some were arrested and tortured.⁶⁰ In addition, this time there was a concerted assault on the MDC’s primary constituency, the urban poor. On 25 May 2005 the police, supported by the army, embarked on Operation Murambatsvina (Restore Order)⁶¹ allegedly to clean up the cities, implement urban planning and curb the black market and other crimes.⁶² The massive destruction without due notice of makeshift houses and other “illegal structures” erected in the city suburbs countrywide left about 700,000 people homeless and destitute in the middle of the Southern Hemisphere’s winter. Thousands of informal traders were detained by the police, and an estimate of 2.4 million were affected in one way or another—including losing their only source of income. In addition, an estimated 500,000 children were forced out of school or had their education seriously disrupted. The operation, widely condemned (outside Africa) for the violence with which it was carried out, ended officially on 27 July 2005, although sporadic destruction and many arrests continued. Beyond its stated aim of “cleaning” the cities, Murambatsvina had a middle-term strategic dimension also: by destroying the homes and businesses of millions of people in the MDC strongholds, the government wanted to force them back into the ZANU-PF controlled rural areas where they would become dependent on government food aid. Sometimes the displaced persons were rounded up and bundled in police and army trucks to be dumped hundreds of kilometers away from their home.⁶³ Subsequently some of the victims were sent to rural “re-education camps” run by the security services and militias. It is possible that depopulating opposition enclaves was meant to weaken the opposition votes in the following parliamentary and presidential elections and in the meantime jeopardize the ability of the urban poor to stage organized protests against the government.

      In an attempt to legitimize Murambatsvina as an operation aimed at improving urban settlements and to counter the international outcry, in late June 2005 the government launched Operation Garikayi/Hlalani Kuhle (Live Well), and claimed that it would build 300,000 houses before the end of 2005, and a total of 1.2 million by the end of the program in 2008.⁶⁴ Despite a UN offer to assist, the achievements of this policy, riddled with mismanagement and corruption from the outset, were limited, and after a year most of the victims remained homeless, as a few thousand houses had been built countrywide.⁶⁵ In May 2006, a follow-up Operation “Round-Up” forcibly transferred about 10,000 homeless and street kids from Harare to country farms where they were dropped without food, water, sanitation, or proper equipment. They were held on the farms, destitute and frightened.

      Throughout 2006 there were renewed threats from Mugabe or his security