The Fear

by Peter Godwin

  Bed after bed, in ward after ward, on floor after floor, is filled with Mugabe’s victims. A hospital full of those he has injured, tortured, and burned out of their homes.

  As I shuttle between the torture victims, moving from bedside to bedside, long after Georgie has left, and on my return, to bedsides here and in other clinics, copiously noting down the details of their experiences, I feel helpless, frustrated and angry. I’m not sure what I can do to help. My role is unclear to me.

  I seem to be part chaplain (like my grandfather before me, ministering to wounded sailors in World War I), part scribe, part journalist, part therapist. Part lawyer (as I once was) taking testimony. And as these shattered people recount their full experiences in a complete narrative, many for the first time, they sometimes break down. It is as if, until now, these brave men and women have concentrated on staying alive, by taking each minute, each hour and day, at a time, and only now, as they join it all together for a stranger, into a complete narrative, do they see the enormity of the whole thing, of what they have been through. And their stoicism can sometimes suddenly dissolve, surprising even themselves, as they get a view of the trajectory of their own suffering. But it seems cathartic too.

  I wish there were a better word than “victims” to describe what these people are. It seems so inert, so passive, and weak. And that is not what they are at all. There is dignity to their suffering. Even as they tell me how they have fled, how they have hidden, how they have been humiliated and mocked, there is little self-pity here. “Survivors,” I suppose, defines them better. Again, and again, as I play stenographer to their suffering, I offer to conceal their names or geographical districts to prevent them being identified. But again, and again, they volunteer their names, and make sure I spell them correctly. They are proud of their roles in all of this, at the significance of their sacrifice. And they want it recorded.

  I shrink from generalizing what “they” have gone through, because it can feed into that sense that this is some un-differentiated, amorphous mass of Third World peasantry. Some generic, fungible frieze of suffering. One that animates briefly as you intersect with it, rubber-necking at it, a drive-by misery that disappears as you motor away over the horizon.

  And for the first time, in trying to work out why I am here, and whether it is constructive, doing what I am doing, I find myself settling on a phrase that I have always avoided, a description I had found pretentious, but that now seems oddly apt—bearing witness. I am bearing witness to what is happening here—to the sustained cruelty of it all. I have a responsibility to try to amplify this suffering, this sacrifice, so that it will not have happened in vain.

  I feel too like a prompt at a play. After dozens of hours of this, I often know now, before they speak, what they will say next. I didn’t write the words, nor can I change them. But I know what they’ll be because I have heard them before, because there are so many who have been through this torture factory, and that’s what it is—it is abuse on an industrial scale, with the torturers following a script handed to them from above. There’s no spontaneity to this evil; it is ordained from the top. It is hierarchical, planned, and plotted. Mugabe’s men have even given it a name. They call it Operation Ngatipedzenavo, “Let Us Finish Them Off.” And just as Operation Gukurahundi, which I witnessed in Matabeleland all those years ago, was an operation to shatter the structure of an opposition party, so this one has the same aim. Two operations separated by nearly twenty-five years, but apparently, nothing has changed. Beneath Mugabe’s spurious air of correctness, this is the bloody reality, these shattered limbs and broken lives. This, quite simply, is the base upon which the tyrant’s power ultimately rests—and it is one of fear.

  seventeen

  Alone, Unarmed, Afraid

  WITH NO FOREIGN JOURNALISTS allowed here, most of the opposition leadership having fled, and NGOs hamstrung by restrictions, there is a vacuum in which Mugabe can conduct his campaign of violence. It’s a vacuum that the diplomatic community now tries to fill.

  Leading the charge is the U.S. ambassador, James “Jim” McGee, an African-American career diplomat with four previous African postings, in Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Madagascar, and Swaziland. He is only five months into this highly antagonistic posting. Washington has named Zimbabwe one of its “outposts of tyranny,” just below a “rogue state” in an “axis of evil” in the U.S. demonology, and imposed a travel ban and bank-account freezes on about two hundred senior members of Mugabe’s regime. In the weapons of diplomatic disapproval, these so called “smart sanctions”—designed to punish the princes without hurting the paupers—seem to be the diplomatic equivalent of grounding. They have also provided Mugabe with a ready-made excuse for all his self-inflicted economic ills. Mugabe blames everything on “Western sanctions.”

  McGee is the latest in a long line of U.S. ambassadors viscerally disliked by Mugabe. His predecessor, Christopher Dell, proudly displayed on his office wall a framed headline from Mugabe’s town crier, the Herald. It read, Mugabe to Dell: Go to Hell. Into this already high-octane mix, Jim McGee deliberately detonated with all the diplomatic finesse of an IED. The Herald was given only momentary pause by his color before denouncing McGee as George Bush’s Uncle Tom, the American president’s house negro. It had already sharpened these racist barbs on Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, and would recast them in due course for Susan Rice. McGee didn’t care one jot. He was looking to elevate the profile of the Zimbabwe crisis, and get it onto the UN Security Council agenda.

  I MEET MCGEE at 6 a.m. inside the courtyard of the heavily guarded U.S. embassy in downtown Harare, for an improvised fact-finding mission to look into reports of widespread intimidation and violence. The trip is supposed to be surreptitious, so that we can get to areas without Mugabe’s men having advance notice. But it has been leaked. The chief suspect is the dean of the diplomatic corps, a post that accrues automatically to the longest-serving ambassador, in this case the Congolese—described by a Western diplomat, in somewhat undiplomatic terms, as a “little shit.” So McGee has decided to send a decoy convoy in a different direction, to throw our CIO tail off our scent. It includes, as the third car, the U.S. ambassador’s official armored limo, flying the gold-fringed U.S. pennant, to indicate he is on board, and several more SUVs with diplomatic license plates. Playing the role of Jim McGee, who stands six foot four and is north of two hundred pounds, in the dummy convoy, is the best body double McGee could find, his gardener.

  This morning the real McGee wears neatly pressed chinos and a dark-blue golf shirt with the emblem of his old air-force unit, 6994 Squadron, on its breast, and their nickname: Electronic Goons. Motto: Alone, Unarmed, Afraid. In my experience, Jim McGee is seldom any of these things. He served nearly six years in Vietnam, doing “air intercepts,” listening in on communications of the North Vietnamese military (he learned fluent Vietnamese) and triangulating their positions, on which to call down air strikes. He was awarded three Distinguished Flying Crosses, one for helping to rescue the crew of a downed American B-52 before the approaching Vietnamese forces could reach them, and the other two for surviving four hundred and seventy-one combat missions. After Vietnam he went back to college, and joined the Foreign Service in 1981.

  We are accompanied in the real convoy by eleven vehicles, which contain five other ambassadors or chargés, from the EU, UK, Japan, Holland, and, rather courageously, Tanzania, and by half a dozen of McGee’s staffers, several local journalists, and some black Zimbabwean Presbyterian pastors, who want to show the diplomats first-hand evidence of “Post-Election Violence” in their area, Rhimbick, near Mvurwi, about an hour northwest of the capital.

  The previous week they have alerted their church colleagues in America to the dire situation there. One pastor emailed to say that some of his parishioners have fled, “and are living in mountains and forests as I write. They can’t risk going back home; it’s suicidal.” Other parishioners had sought refuge in the church. “There are a couple of torture ce
nters set up by ZANU-PF thugs,” and the churchmen themselves had been targeted. One pastor (Andrew) “had to walk at night with his wife and two children to escape the promise of torture. He only managed to escape because they were watching for cars to come and pick him up, so thank God that he was advised to walk to safety. They had told him that he would be the first person to be killed in the area by the ZANU-PF leaders. The crime: all the practical service and help that the Church gives is believed to be from MDC, disguised as Church ministry.” There is the bitter scent of betrayal in the air too. A turncoat Evangelist is said to be “moving around with these people identifying those that are to be tortured. If this is true, one would not be surprised, because the Easter story now makes sense. Please pray for the Church in Rhimbick, and pray for us…”

  In our CD-plated convoy we are hardly inconspicuous, but theoretically, under the terms of the Vienna Convention, the diplomats have immunity from arrest, and the rest of us stand a better chance if we stick with them. Trying to get in to the battleground areas any other way is more or less impossible, with numerous roadblocks and roaming militia checks.

  I ride with McGee in the second vehicle, to Mvurwi—once a mostly white-owned commercial-farming district, now only sporadically cultivated. Rhimbick Farm, where the pastors have said there is a torture base, is our first destination. We park in a long line on the roadside. Inconspicuous we are not. The elderly white sawmill manager there peeps round the door, and is astonished to see this sudden convergence of diplomats. He intimates that bad things have been happening here, and points up the hill. “That’s their base,” he whispers and disappears back inside, terrified to say more. We walk up to the commandeered old farmhouse. Each evening, the pastors say, a hundred or more ZANU youths congregate here. Our delegation swarms over it and we find a small group of militia members.

  Ambushed like this and outnumbered, they don’t seem that frightening. They deny any wrongdoing, saying they have just been “campaigning.” But as the conversation continues, and several prisoners emerge to tell their stories, I walk ahead into the house itself—this is what the victims who’ve been through it describe as a torture base. It includes several “black rooms,” without windows, where political opponents are thrown, in between beatings.

  There is little furniture, just some rough wooden benches, and thick wooden sticks, which, the victims say, are used to beat up the many who have passed through here.

  In the old sitting room, now filthy and soot-filled, there is a folding table, on which I spot a backpack. I unzip it and inside it find four hardbacked school exercise books. Each is entitled “Rhimbick Commanding Center.” Some of the books are mostly administrative, listing personnel and pay. The commander here is “Comrade Taurai Muyambodza,” and his contingent consists of “War Vets, War Collaborators, Youth.” One book is sub-headed, ominously, “Interrogation Book.” In it, Comrade Muyambodza has systematically recorded their beatings and interrogations, in longhand. The book lists “Wanted” people, including Kelvin Chareka, whom they are looking for because “he is MDC.” It records communication with a network of other such interrogation centers.

  A letter falls from between the pages. It is from Umsengezi Command Center, sited at a nearby ex-farm, dated four days earlier, giving information about “wanted” people, including headman Mhandu. “We want to find him and interrogate him because he didn’t stop his people from voting for the MDC,” says the letter. Most damning is that the book makes quite unapologetic reference to the violence they have meted out during the questioning. “To be beaten or to confess, what do you want?” reads an account of a typical interrogation. Other pages list people “who are to be beaten.”

  Suddenly one of the militia members rushes in. “What are you doing? Stop that! Stop!” he yells, wild-eyed, and snatches the books away, shoves them in his backpack, and runs into the bush behind the house.

  From the interrogation center, we go to the nearby village. Initially it appears deserted, but as word spreads that the ambassadors are here, and there is no danger, the villagers start to appear. Soon they are gathered in nervous huddles telling how they have been interrogated and beaten at Rhimbick, and showing us their wounds. They are understandably scared of what will happen to them after we have gone, so McGee’s staff distributes business cards with the embassy’s emergency number, and then the diplomats’ road show reassembles and rolls out.

  It is about twelve miles to Mvurwi hospital, and on the way we pass a large World Food Program depot. Bags, plump with grain, are stacked up high. This is how Zimbabwe eats. The same Western powers that Mugabe routinely demonizes in his banal biopsy of blame are the principal donors of food to his people. These towers of grain bags are all that stands between Zimbabwe and full-scale famine.

  Our convoy coils into the dusty parking area of the small hospital, a government-run one, which is barely functioning. We overwhelm the nervous nursing staff, what few there are. The U.S. ambassador meets the matron in her office, where she tells him that they have been flooded with victims of the violence. Many are coming in two weeks after being injured, so their wounds, typically defense wounds, she says, are often horribly septic. And yet, most discharge themselves, prematurely, afraid that they will be targeted again if they stay in hospital.

  While he keeps her busy, the rest of us mob the wards. Here too we find graduates of the Rhimbick interrogation center, including one former ZANU-PF councillor, Carpenter Mwanza, thirty-seven, who tells us he was tortured after being accused of transferring his support to Simba Makoni. “I was taken to a room there called the ‘black room,’ with no windows,” he says. “And they beat me for five hours.”

  As we prepare to leave, a plain-clothes officer arrives. He is slim, in a dark leather jacket and wraparound sunglasses. He flashes his ID card at McGee, showing that he is from the Police Internal Security Intelligence Unit, PISI, and demands to see McGee’s credentials.

  “I am the American ambassador,” says McGee, showing him his card.

  The PISI officer is unimpressed. “Inspector Matamba has ordered us that you have to report to him at the police station,” he says. “It is just behind the hospital. You will come with me. We walk there.” It is a command. You can see it doesn’t occur to him that McGee might refuse to comply. PISI is as feared, in its own right, as the CIO.

  “No,” says McGee simply. “We’re leaving. Now. You have no jurisdiction over us, we are diplomats.” He brushes past him and climbs back into his vehicle and orders the driver to go. Behind us, the convoy is already mounted up, ready to roll.

  The officer is taken aback. You can see that this has never happened to him before. He beckons frantically, and more policemen arrive, these ones in uniform. They spill out of their gray Santana, breathless, armed with matt-black pump-action shotguns, and AK rifles, with their sickle-curved magazines. Quickly they heave shut the hospital gate, and secure it with a twist of barbed wire.

  One of the staffers tries to take some shots of the scene and the PISI officer, furious at being photographed, darts toward him. “Cameras are not allowed,” he screams and demands the camera. But the staffer hops into his CD vehicle, and disappears behind a tinted window. McGee interposes himself, and the officer walks away.

  Getting back into his own vehicle, McGee eases down his window. “Let us out,” he demands.

  The policemen refuse, standing silently in a line in front of the closed gate.

  We are at an impasse, and McGee is starting to lose it. His jaw tightens and he lets out a purposeful puff, like a rhino contemplating a charge. “Screw this,” he says, and clambers down from the vehicle again. He marches up to the PISI officer, towering over him. The two of them face off—the bear and the mamba. Then the officer eases his left shoulder back, so that his leather jacket creaks open, to reveal the dark brown honeycomb of his pistol handle, protruding from his shoulder holster.

  Jim McGee doesn’t notice, or if he does, he doesn’t care. “You,” he says, jabbing his f
orefinger at him. “Let us out now. Or I will report you at the very highest level.”

  The PISI officer shakes his head vigorously. “No,” he says firmly, standing his ground. “You have to come with me to the station. Those are the orders.”

  “This is bullshit!” says McGee, exasperated, and he turns away. I see what he has in mind and I draw breath to counsel caution, but Jim launches himself toward the gate. The policemen there finger their weapons, and the PISI officer comes running after him. “No, no,” he shouts, the pitch of his voice rising now, “you are not permitted to leave!”

  McGee barely breaks his stride. As he reaches the gate, the uniformed officer in front of it shouts, “Stop! Stop!”

  McGee stops. And behind him, I sigh. It’s all been bluff. Thank God. Then he draws himself up to his full height again, throws his shoulders back.

  “Or what?” he says. “What you gonna do? Shoot me? Go ahead.” And with that, he starts to walk toward them.

  The policemen are beset with confusion, chattering between themselves, fingering their weapons, while the PISI officer barks into his two-way radio, trying to raise his superiors.

  McGee keeps walking slowly, until he reaches the line, then he brushes straight through them, reaches down to untwist the wire from the latch, and starts hauling the gate. When it’s open wide enough, he booms at the posse to move on out. One by one, the vehicles drive out past him, as he waves them through, standing between them and the row of armed policemen, who look on, agitated and nonplussed.

  When they have all passed through, McGee hops up into his vehicle. “Let’s go!” he tells the driver, and we accelerate on through the open gate ourselves. As we drive away in a gratifying shower of dust, he turns to me, breaks into a huge grin, and whoops. It’s clear this is the most fun he’s had in years.

  HOWARD MISSION HOSPITAL, run by the Salvation Army in the heart of the Chiweshe tribal area, is our next stop. It has tidy grounds, with whitewashed stone borders around its flowerbeds, and a general air of orderliness. A sign outside acknowledges that it is a recipient of U.S. funds for its HIV work. “Ah, one of ours,” says McGee approvingly.