The Fear

by Peter Godwin

  The pace of violence picks up around the country as Operation Ngatipedzenavo—“Let Us Finish Them Off”—gets under way. Mugabe’s election strategy has been completely militarized. The securocrats have taken over the day-to-day running of the campaign. The team that Mugabe has put in charge of the operation is led by the Minister of Defense, Sydney Sekeremai, working with Air Marshal Perence Shiri and General Constantine Chiwenga, out of Joint Operations Command. It’s the same dream team that carried out the Matabeleland massacres twenty-five years before, when Perence “Black Jesus” Shiri commanded the North-Korean-trained Fifth Brigade, alongside Chiwenga, under the then Minister of Defense, Sydney Sekeremai. They are all architects of a previous genocide.

  MDC officials are besieged: arrested, beaten, and chased from their homes, murdered.

  In Zaka, near Masvingo, a dozen of Mugabe’s youth militia, now dressed in army fatigues, driving a pick-up with no plates, arrive before dawn at the rural home of Elias Mudzuri, a former Mayor of Harare, and now the MDC’s national organizing secretary, and an MP. He is an old friend of mine, whom I hosted in New York. The militiamen shoot his brother in the leg and savagely beat his eighty-year-old father, before looting his homestead.

  In Chipinge, the family of Lovemore Madhuku, another friend, who heads the National Constitutional Assembly, a group promoting a new constitution, is also in the line of fire. Addressing a pro-Mugabe rally there, a senior police officer, Deputy Commissioner Godwin Matanga, threatens to kill him. “We have dealt with Tendai Biti,” he warns. “Madhuku is next.”

  He’s as good as his word—soon afterward, Mugabe’s militiamen burn down Madhuku’s rural home, and those of twenty-two surrounding villagers, for good measure, and the police throw his brother into jail.

  In Chiredzi, CIO agents seize five prominent young MDC supporters, drive them into the bush, force them to lie face down, and shoot them in the back of their heads. Four of them die instantly. The fifth, Jacob Ngirivana, though grievously injured, survives to bear witness.

  In Harare, Mugabe’s men murder an MDC official’s wife, Pamela Pasvani, who is five months pregnant, burning her to death in her house, together with her six-year-old son.

  In Mhondoro, less than a mile from the home of “Notso” Bright Matonga, Mugabe’s spokesman, CIO agents arrive in their signature white pick-up trucks looking for Patson Chipiro, an MDC electoral organizer. Finding him absent, they grab his wife, Dadirai, forty-five, a former nursery-school teacher. They hack off her right hand and both her feet, drag her into her house, and set it alight with a petrol bomb. When Jan Raath, Rita Harvey’s brother-in-law, attends her funeral, he finds that Dadirai’s relatives have been unable to close the lid of the cheap wooden coffin. Her arm, charred, rigid, and handless, protrudes, as though imploring for the help that never arrived. The village women who swept away the cinders of her burned house have found her missing hand among the ashes, and placed it inside her coffin.

  “These youths are taught cruelty,” her grieving husband tells Jan. “They get used to murdering. They enjoy murdering.”

  The body count rises toward a hundred, with another five thousand missing. Bodies are being found bobbing at the spillway of dams; others are discovered in the bush, dumped by their murderers, miles and miles from where they were abducted. In some particularly gruesome cases, the victims have been castrated, their testicles stuffed in their mouths, or their eyes gouged out. Many will never be found. Some ten thousand people have been tortured. Twenty thousand have had their houses burned down—up to two hundred thousand are now displaced.

  Genocide Watch, the Washington DC–based monitoring organization that specializes in recognizing the signs that group killings are imminent, issues a chilling “politicide warning” on 19 June. Zimbabwe, they say, is now at a stage six, “the preparation stage immediately preceding political mass murder.”

  They recognize the growing instances of murder and torture victims having their ears, lips, and sexual organs cut off “as one of the surest signs of dehumanizing of target groups during genocide and politicide.” The killings of opposition leaders’ families is also a prelude, as is the phenomenon of “mirroring,” “a strange but common psychological mechanism of denial used by mass murderers,” whereby the perpetrators accuse the victims of doing what perpetrators themselves are doing.

  Tsvangirai is in despair, powerless to stop the killings of his aides and supporters. His party makes a last attempt to hold a rally, in Harare’s showgrounds, but it is invaded by over a thousand of Mugabe’s men, armed with iron bars, who break it up and beat opposition supporters. Harvest House, the opposition headquarters, is surrounded by a force of two hundred and fifteen policemen. They arrest over sixty people there, mostly women and children fleeing violence in the rural areas, and they seize documents and computers.

  Tsvangirai meets his party executive, and after reviewing the mayhem, they realize that they cannot go on. So a week before the 27 June election re-run Tsvangirai finally calls a halt, announcing his withdrawal as a presidential candidate. He cannot ask his supporters to come out and vote for him “when that vote would cost them their lives.” The bullet, he says, has replaced the ballot. He cannot participate in what has become a “violent, illegitimate sham.” And he makes a plea to the international community to “intervene and stop the genocide.” That night, just ahead of a raid on his house by General Chiwenga’s soldiers, he flees into the Dutch embassy, in fear for his life.

  MUGABE’S election slogan in the violent presidential run-off is “The Final Battle for Total Control”—a chillingly totalitarian clarion call, as Orwell might have imagined it. When fighting Rhodesia for universal suffrage, Mugabe had used the mantra “One Man, One Vote.” And now that Tsvangirai has been bludgeoned out of the running, and Mugabe is the only man left to vote for, he has finally achieved a grotesque version of just that—there is only one man left to vote for, the dictator himself.

  To make sure voters do just that, and turn out in support of their glorious leader, the Generals in Joint Operational Command launch one last operation. They call this one Operation Chigunwe Chitsvuku, “Red Finger.” To prevent multiple voting here, your little finger is coated in a special red dye, indelible for several weeks. So the red finger is a sign that you have voted. Now Mugabe’s men put out the word that they will be inspecting hands after the election. Those without a red little finger will have the finger cut off.

  LESS THAN an hour after the result is announced, Mugabe has himself sworn in as President at a hastily organized inauguration. It is boycotted by McGee, Pocock, and the rest of the Western diplomats. The African ambassadors stay away too.

  Even the observers from the fourteen nations of the Southern African Development Community, who have been pliant to Mugabe, finally balk at his terror tactics. The one-man election, they concede, “did not represent the will of the people,” and they condemn the “politically motivated violence, intimidation and displacement.” But crucially, they fail to back this with any action.

  Looking subdued and pensive, Mugabe holds a black Bible aloft and swears himself in for another term, his sixth. Around him at State House are only his family, his judges, and his generals. Most of all, his generals, with whom he shakes hands, one by one, Chiwenga and Shiri at the vanguard, the men who have bathed this path to prolonged power with the blood of their people.

  Later that same day, Mugabe jets off for the annual African Union summit, held this year in the Egyptian seaside resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. Mugabe continues to command residual respect from this audience, as Zimbabwe’s original liberator. And as the continent’s oldest head of state, he is still politically priapic. When the subject of his stolen, blood-soaked elections comes up, in closed-door session, he challenges the assembled African presidents, many of whom—thirty-two of fifty-three—preside over authoritarian regimes themselves. Those of you without electoral sin, he says, in effect, cast the first stone. I may have unclean hands, but most of yours are dirty
too.

  So they shrink from any direct action, handing off the Zimbabwe conflict once more to Thabo Mbeki as “facilitator,” though the South African remains Mugabe’s prime protector.

  One of the few African leaders—in addition to Botswana’s Ian Khama—bold enough to stand up to Mugabe’s harangue is Zambia’s president, Levy Mwanawasa, who is due to sit next to him, according to the alphabet of Africa. Mwanawasa has been preparing to mount a spirited attack on Mugabe. But his chair remains empty. The evening before the meeting is due to begin, in a bitter stroke of cosmic irony, Mwanawasa is felled by a massive heart attack. He falls into a coma and dies six weeks later.

  Attempts by the UN to impose sanctions against Mugabe for his bloody election crackdown fare just as badly. The proposal before the Security Council includes an arms embargo, and a travel ban and a financial freeze on Mugabe and a dirty dozen of his top officials who are considered to be the main architects of the violent campaign there, including Chiwenga and Shiri. But it is vetoed by two permanent members, China and Russia, together with Vietnam and Libya. South Africa, to its eternal shame, given the support that the ANC received from the UN in its struggle against apartheid, joins them in voting to protect Mugabe.

  twenty-three

  Where Do Tears Come From?

  BACK IN NEW YORK NOW, it seems to me that the palsied grip of Zimbabwe’s gerontocracy is unbreakable; the country’s transformation into a dystopia, complete. That Mugabe’s moral dementia is simply a reflection of the wider ideological dementia of African post-liberation movements. It is yet another mask for the exclusionary greed of a medieval patronage system, with its bloody barons arrayed around the autocrat, all of them locked into a ferociously fixed-frame world view, one in which fairground mirrors line the corridors of power, where giants are reflected back at strutting moral midgets.

  IN A SMALL WAY, I am trying to draw attention to the Zimbabwean tragedy. I sit at my study desk writing up the tales of torture for a Vanity Fair magazine article; I appear on cable news shows, and speak to the White House fellows in DC. I go on the public radio WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show with a Zimbabwean DJ, Chaka Ngwenya, who used to be a media personality back home with Georgina, but fled in 2000, and founded an Internet radio station, SARFM, “The Heartbeat of Africa,” which he broadcasts from a tiny room in a Salvation Army Church in Harlem.

  In a New York Times op-ed, I point out that South Africa could use its economic power to end Zimbabwe’s suffering in weeks, but instead, the vacillating, dithering, morally compromised figure of Thabo Mbeki has protected Mugabe. In order to nudge his cost-benefit calculus, I suggest that maybe Zimbabwe should become to the South Africa–hosted World Cup what Tibet has been to the Beijing Olympics—the pungent albatross that threatens to spoil every press conference with its insistent odor.

  The newspaper accompanies it with a woodcut of a football boot, which has skulls for cleats.

  The South African embassy releases a furious riposte. Unable, I suppose, to lose apartheid’s old obsession with racial categories, they quickly establish mine: “Mr. Godwin,” they write, “whose family immigrated from England to Zimbabwe in the early 1950s,” and they go on to call me rash, flippant, irrational, privileged, protected, emotional, subjective, and hypocritical. “It is highly unlikely,” they conclude, “that Mr. Godwin will be sharing in the pain of Zimbabweans or South Africans, for that matter, from his high-rise apartment in Manhattan.” I consider a one-line reply, which would read: “How dare you impugn me—I live on the ground floor…”

  But our efforts have little effect. My wife, Joanna, who edits a fashion magazine, suggests that this is because we lack a celebrity cheerleader, a Clooney, a Farrow, a Damon, Jolie, or Pitt. Indeed, the truth is that in the race of African moral outrages, Zimbabwe’s body count earns us a mere bronze to Darfur’s gold and Congo’s silver. They are both classified as civil wars, so have achieved international peace-keepers. Ours is not, because the opposition has not yet picked up weapons. Ours is a war with only one side.

  For as long as Zimbabwe’s victims stick to the pacifist path of MLK, rather than the AK, we cannot expect blue helmets in Harare. As Tsvangirai had rued to me: “If we took up AKs, the UN would rush in here, but we are penalized for being peaceful.”

  Perhaps now that democratic avenues have been exhausted, the moment has come, as Roy Bennett had suggested it might, for Zimbabwe’s frustrated democrats to fight back, to follow Thomas Jefferson’s exhortation that the tree of liberty must be watered from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

  Tsvangirai continues to insist, “I won’t have the blood of our young men on my hands.” But it seems to me that in the last ten years, the body count has been higher without a fully fledged uprising. Millions of Zimbabweans have perished from the repression, from AIDS, from starvation, and from the collapse of health care.

  We are also trying to help build pressure to prosecute Robert Mugabe and his colleagues. In what court could they be indicted? The craven courts in his own country are a charade. But there are other avenues. Under international law, torture, “when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack,” qualifies as a crime against humanity. It’s pretty obvious to me that Mugabe and his cohort clear this bar: the atrocities in Zimbabwe have been widespread, systematic, and committed on the express order of a central dictatorship through the Joint Operations Command. The hierarchy of terror is clear, with no smokescreen of anarchy to blur the blame. The fact that almost no one has been prosecuted shows that the abuses are centrally condoned. And they are probably the best-ever documented in Africa—gavel-ready.

  Under the new legal principle of “universal jurisdiction,” South African courts could prosecute any of the perpetrators that come onto its territory, but the National Director of Public Prosecutions there has so far resisted requests to investigate torture in Zimbabwe. The UN Security Council could task the International Criminal Court to investigate and prosecute the perpetrators of Zimbabwean crimes against humanity—but that’s unlikely because those two trusty human-rights champions, Russia and China, are bound to veto it, just as they vetoed previous action against Mugabe. But the International Criminal Court Prosecutor has the power to initiate proceedings on his own. Raising awareness of the horror of Mugabe’s crimes will help in both these efforts.

  As well as the torture itself, a case is being made by a Boston-based advocacy group, AIDS-Free World, that the mass rape in Zimbabwe also rises to the level of a crime against humanity. The extent of these gang rapes takes longer to emerge—the stigma so great, the victims so deeply ashamed, and in danger of being rejected by their husbands. AIDS-Free World is assisted by the international law firm DLA Piper, one of the few to have a dedicated international pro-bono department, New Perimeter. They have donated U.S.$1m of billable hours to work on the Zimbabwe rape cases, and sent lawyers to South Africa and Botswana to take detailed depositions from victims who have fled there. They cannot do it in Zimbabwe.

  Later I meet a group of them, young women in their thirties, in DLA Piper’s Washington DC offices, a smart new sandstone-clad building on 8th Street. The corridors are lined with blond wood and original art. In the sunny cafeteria, lawyers ladle muesli into little clay bowls and pump fair-trade coffee into gleaming white mugs before returning to their glass-walled offices overlooking an airy central atrium.

  Sara Andrews is the team leader for the Zimbabwe project. Like the other young lawyers who made the trip, she is haunted by the women they have met there, some of them refugees in Bishop Verryn’s church. The trip, she says, has changed them forever. “It’s very surreal afterward, to return to a comfortable world, where people complain about the trivial.”

  “At the end I didn’t want to leave,” says her colleague Kristen Abrams. “There was so much more to do, and people to talk to. I still think about it constantly, the stories, the women’s faces. I had a hard time coming
back and re-engaging with my life here, laundry, preparing dinner…”

  Syma Mirza tells me that “going in, you assume that the victims’ primary concern is the trauma of the rape—when in fact it’s just day-to-day survival. They don’t have the luxury of healing yet.”

  “I was okay for the first couple of days of interviews,” she says, “but after the third day of hearing it all first hand, I was just thinking how humans could be capable of all this deliberate violence and hurt.” The story tattooed on her mind is from a twenty-year-old woman who was raped while listening to her father screaming just outside the room as he was beaten to death. Before he died, they rubbed dirt in his eyes. “In the trade-offs involved in transitional justice,” says Mirza, “I used to be on the peace side, but after this, I want accountability more.”

  Another woman she deposed, who ran a small business selling vegetables, proved that Bishop Paul Verryn’s concerns for the Zimbabwean refugees sheltering in his Johannesburg church were valid. She intended to go back for only forty-eight hours, just to vote in the run-off, but she was abducted by Mugabe’s men. “We know you’re back to vote for the MDC, you are on our list as an activist,” they said before gang-raping her.

  Brenda Meister is haunted by the story of a woman who went out with one of her year-old twin boys to run errands, leaving the other baby at home with his father. When she returned, she found her husband dead on the floor next to her son, who had been decapitated. The Mugabe thugs who had done this then grabbed her and gang-raped her next to her headless baby and her husband’s corpse, while her other baby sat crying nearby.

  She was quite composed and matter of fact as she explained to Meister what had happened. While she talked, her surviving twin played quietly on the floor with the toy trucks and the plastic fruit provided by the lawyers.