Grace Mutandwa

Rights and Wrongs

ZANU (PF) has marked World Human Rights Day by kidnapping the country's leading Human Rights Defender, Jestina Mukoko. No one can know if she is alive or dead but many fear the worst at this stage. It would not be beyond ZANU to murder such a prominent and brave activist.

We don’t know much about the attack on Jestina: a dozen men came to her house in the night a week ago and dragged her away from her family in her nightdress. Since then she has not been seen.

I know Jestina well. She is Director of the Zimbabwe Peace Project, which reports human rights abuses. It is obviously a busy project, given the scale of abuse here, and Jestina is both its beating heart and figurehead: a clever, lucid woman who can turn statistics into compelling stories of the suffering that Zimbabweans are going through. Before the elections this year she accurately predicted where the hotspots of violence would be. She has also exposed the way that ZANU-PF denies food aid to opposition supporters. More recently she has told the world that ZANU-PF has resumed its normal practices of torture and murder, despite renouncing violence in the unity agreement signed in September.

Jestina’s sharp analysis of gruesome violence is joined by an engaging charisma; she has a little gap between her front teeth, which makes her ready smile all the more charming.   

My heart fears the very worst for Jestina. Some abducted people are abused, beaten, stripped, driven to the far side of the country and left to make their way home. They turn up in a day or two. They are the lucky ones. For when people disappear for several days like Jestina, they most often turn up dead, or not at all. When the bodies of missing people are found, like Tonderai Ndira a few months back, it is apparent that murder came soon after abduction.

Nor can we draw many positives from the fact that Jestina’s body has not been found. In its malice ZANU-PF often denies its victims’ families the comfort and finality of a body to bury. Unidentifiable corpses sometimes bob up in Lake Kariba; hyenas sometimes chew on strange bones.

I try to imagine the combination of courage and sadness Jestina mustered to face her abductors. How her heart must have gone to her family, pitying the bottomless grief they may have to carry for the rest of their lives.

What should we do? The Police shrug – this is extra judicial violence by senior people – nothing can be done. The Government laughs its head off at the condemnations from ‘colonial’ governments, like my own, and their ‘puppet NGOs’ such as Amnesty International.

Perhaps we ought to pray, but Zimbabwe’s God died a long time ago. This is the land where fear defeats hope; cruelty trumps kindness; death consumes life. I will willingly do a deal with God if it will help. I will pray for the rest of my life if Jestina just comes back, her gappy smile intact, somehow miraculously unscathed. But this is Zimbabwe. There are no happy endings.

Posted at 14:39 10 December 2008 by Philip Barclay  |  Comments[5]