How one woman’s extraordinary bravery is a haunting rebuke

By PETER OBORNE in Zimbabwe
Robert Mugabe’s paid assassins came hunting for 22-year-old Memory, a married mother-of-two.
They burst into her home, seized her and her children, and took them to their temporary headquarters in the local village school.
Four men held down her arms and legs, while a fifth gripped her head, placing his hands over her mouth to prevent her screams being heard.
Two others, wielding heavy wooden poles, then took turns to thrash her on buttocks in a beating that lasted half an hour.
I saw Memory in her hospital bed after she had been brought in from the bush more dead than alive a week ago last Monday, several days after her beating. She was lying on her front: it was obvious why.
Where her buttocks should have been was just a mess of raw flesh.
I watched as a blue-suited nurse removed one of the bandages. Memory whimpered and moaned with pain. With me was a hardened welfare worker who had witnessed many terrible things.
She broke down in sobs. I must tell you that tears poured down my cheeks, too. Memory was in far too much pain and shock to answer any questions. I pressed her hand gently and left her.
The following day, I returned to the hospital. Memory told me how on arrival at the school (which she had attended as a child), she had been ordered to sit in the playground with a group of MDC supporters.
On the dot of 8am, the beatings started. Groups of eight people at a time were ordered out for treatment at the hands of a band of around 200 members of Robert Mugabe’s militia, each wearing Zanu (PF) T-shirts and green, red and yellow bandanas signifying the national flag.
Many of them were high on drink or drugs.
She watched as four of her close friends were beaten and kicked to death. A fifth friend later died, and others remain unaccounted for.
The militiamen chanted songs and spat insults at Morgan Tsvangirai as they did their work.
They told Memory, whose farmer husband was away: “You and your husband are MDC members so we must beat you.’ They said that she belonged ‘to a party of animals”. Memory told me how she could hear her children screaming “Mamma, Mamma, Mamma!” during her beating. Female members of Zanu (PF) held them back.
Later, Memory was ordered to sit for two hours on her wounds. Mugabe’s thugs told her she would be thrashed again if she moved a muscle.
“We spent the day without eating or water in the hot sun,” she told me. “If we asked for water, they said: ‘Get your water from Tsvangirai’.”
Believe it or not, just by being alive, Memory is one of the lucky ones.
She is just one of tens of thousands of victims of the campaign of violence launched by Robert Mugabe after he comprehensively lost the presidential elections on March 29.
Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has agreed to contest a new runoff against Mugabe, even though he knows he won outright in the first round and accuses Zanu (PF) of blatant vote-rigging.
Even by Mugabe’s standards, the scale of the brutality is horrifying.
It’s the worst seen since he ordered genocide in the west of Zimbabwe 25 years ago, when some 20,000 people were killed in an attempt to eradicate all political opposition.
The world turned a blind eye then. Tragically, it is doing so again now. – With permission from the Daily Mail