Grace Mutandwa

Killing with Kindness

Good manners and repression go hand-in-hand in Zimbabwe. The officers who arrest, abuse and detain peaceful demonstrators, do their immoral work with a cheery smile.

It was like that on Friday when I turned up at Harare Magistrates’ Court. An amiable chat about the weather with some cops with enormous assault rifles; a wave and a joke with a dozen prison officers, sitting round waiting for somebody innocent to lock up; and a friendly chat with the court clerk, who asks me (half seriously) for a visa to go to the UK, as she can’t live on her Government salary any longer. After some banter she waves me into the building.

Into court six, where 15 women belonging to an organisation called “Women of Zimbabwe Arise!” are sitting tensely waiting for the lawyers and magistrates to carve up their fate. I have a chat with the women. They have been locked up at Harare Central Police Station for two nights already and are worried that their detention may be extended further. They are cold – Harare is at altitude and this is winter; nights are really chilly. They are developing coughs. Three of them have been beaten, but these women are tough and shrug the injuries off as ‘not too bad’.  They are trying to keep their spirits up, but are dreading a weekend, or more, in the grim and unsanitary cells.

 The women have, of course, not been found guilty of anything. Their offence is holding a peaceful demonstration without permission. Under the terms of Zimbabwe’s Public Order and Security Act – remarkably similar to Apartheid legislation – this innocuous act of civic expression is a criminal offence. A few women calling for no more than ‘bread and peace’ therefore experience violent arrest and detention with no ready prospect of release. Meanwhile forty miles from Harare, ZANU-PF militias are killing, beating and burning, while the police sit on their hands, deaf to the cries of those being tortured.

The magistrate finally comes in. It’s late afternoon and he wants to go home. Praise be! He accepts the application from the women’s lawyer that they be given bail. But the prosecutor – his smile warmed by the power of tyranny – has an ace up his sleeve. He immediately appeals against the Magistrate’s decision. Under Zimbabwe’s prosecution-happy legal code, he is given a week to prepare this appeal. The women are devastated as they realise the consequences. They will have to spend another week away from their families, in squalor, despite the triviality of their charges and despite not having been convicted of anything.

We at the Embassy see these things happening, and far worse. We see the corpse of murdered MDC activist Tonderai Ndira. We see evidence of the torments he was put through before he died. And we wonder what we can do. We worry that we are not doing enough.

Certainly we show our sympathy for the repressed and the beaten - we go to their trials and their hospital beds. We catalogue abuses, hoping for eventual justice, and tell our Ministers what is happening so that they can condemn and instigate international action. But it never seems like enough.

This impotence in the face of cruel abuse stings, but is not ours alone. Zimbabwe’s government is increasingly deaf even to its former friends - neighbouring African states - which have finally realised that the violence, electoral fraud and the economic decline have to end. The violence in South Africa has shown the region the ghost of SADC future, a region haunted by Zimbabwe’s political sickness and economic failure; the ghost of Tonderai Ndira, the Steve Biko of Zimbabwe, which will haunt the region until something is done. This Government of old men, basking in isolation and basting in the hatred which the people now feel for them, has few friends.

Posted at 09:52 05 June 2008 by Philip Barclay  |  Comments[8]