Anti-Mugabe voters report retribution
Zimbabwe braces for election results
JOHANNESBURG - Evidence of widespread retribution against people who supported Zimbabwe's opposition party in last month's election has begun to stream out despite the government's efforts to restrict press access to the worst of the violence.
As Zimbabweans brace this week for the results of the March 29 presidential election to finally be released, this growing body of evidence - in the form of witness accounts, photographs, and other documentation, some compiled by an American diplomatic field team - has raised questions about whether a free and fair vote is possible if, as expected, a runoff is scheduled between President Robert Mugabe, in power for 28 years, and his challenger, Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change. Tsvangirai, who left the country April 7, has said he fears for his safety if he returns.
The questions have grown to the point that the top human rights official at the United Nations, Louise Arbour, publicly expressed worry yesterday that the violence could subvert any effort to resolve Zimbabwe's political crisis. "The information I have received suggests an emerging pattern of political violence inflicted mainly, but not exclusively, on rural supporters of the opposition MDC party," she said in a statement from her offices in Geneva.
Jendayi E. Frazer, the senior American diplomat for Africa, who has been touring the region, told the BBC in an interview published yesterday that the Security Council should consider sanctions on Zimbabwe if the post-election violence does not end.
Farmers from Masvingo, Mashonaland East, and Manicaland provinces who worked on behalf of the opposition and were interviewed by phone the past week described the same pattern of ruling-party gangs visiting under cover of darkness to beat and evict them.
Villagers from Manicaland said they were roused from sleep around midnight this month by young marauders who had had come to punish them for voting against Mugabe, pelting them with stones fired from slingshots and dragging some from their homes for thrashings.
The next day, instead of protecting the victims, police officers ordered them to empty their small huts of their meager possessions, witnesses said. Then the young thugs returned to their small settlement just north of Mutare, bashing down homes with iron bars or setting them ablaze.
"There was no chance to say anything, we were fearing for our lives," said Milton, a farm worker who watched from a corn patch as his house went up in flames, and who withheld his last name because he was frightened.
A three-person team from the American Embassy in Harare drove to Manicaland Province April 19-20 and captured images of the burned and demolished homes in the settlement where Milton lived. The photographs and videos focus on the more than 200 people made homeless in that campaign to terrorize those who voted for the opposition.
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