Spotlight on Zimbabwe
2002-08-25 21:27
London - Hundreds of women and girls are being raped in rural Zimbabwe by President Robert Mugabe's youth brigades, a British newspaper reported on Sunday.
Girls as young as 12 are being raped, tortured and forcibly kept
as concubines in camps in what human rights lawyers have branded
"systematic political cleansing" of the population, The Sunday
Telegraph reported.
A former militia member interviewed by the newspaper claimed he
and others received orders to attack the wives and daughters of
opposition sympathisers, the report said.
Human rights activists say the use of rape is part of a drive to
terrify all opposition into submission.
"They are raping on a mass scale," Frances Lovemore, member of
the Harare-based Amani Trust which monitors torture, told the
paper.
Lovemore claimed girls were being systematically taken and used
and abused because of their families' political views.
Political tool
"We're seeing an enormous prevalence of rape and enough cases to
say it's being used by the state as a political tool," said Tony
Reeler, a director of the Amani Trust.
The Sunday Telegraph said the Amani Trust was compiling video
evidence of rape camps set up for youth brigades and riot police in rural areas and hopes to bring Mugabe to trial at the international court of human rights.
Victims living in hiding told the newspaper how they had been
gang-raped by police and war veterans and had their genitals burnt with iron rods.
They said the abuse was punishment for their parents not
supporting Mugabe in the March presidential poll which returned him to power amid widespread allegations of fraud and voter
intimidation.
In a country where some 40 percent of the population is HIV
positive, rape can amount to a death sentence, the report said.
The report told of one 12-year old girl, in the Vumba mountains
in eastern Zimbabwe, who was gang-raped by war veterans and
policemen while her mother and younger sisters were forced to chant Mugabe's praises and watch the ordeal.
She was raped because her father supports the country's main
opposition group, the Movement for Democratic Change.
Other victims were severely beaten, and some claimed brigade
members urinated on their food supplies - a terrible indignity in
a land where millions are close to starvation, the report said.
Living in terror
"We found a population living in terror, some towns completely
"cleansed" of all opposition," a Sunday Telegraph reporter said.
Zimbabwean officials are speaking in chilling terms about the
need to take the country back to zero, the report said.
Last week, Didymus Mutasa, the organisation secretary of
Mugabe's ruling Zanu-PF Party said: "We would be better off with
only six million people (out of a total 12 million), with our own
people who support the liberation struggle."
The report emerged as world attention focuses on Mugabe's
efforts to evict white farmers while famine threatens the country.
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw on Sunday attacked Mugabe's
Zimbabwe as a "pariah state" amid reports that Britain is to step
up pressure on the president's regime at the UN Earth Summit in
Johannesburg that starts on Monday.
According to UN figures, six million people, making up half the
country's population, are facing starvation.
Police and Zanu-PF supporters have arrested some 200 white
farmers for ignoring eviction notices to quit their land served on some 2 900 white farmers. - Sapa/AFP
- SAPA