The trauma of being invaded by a violent, marauding militia is stamped on the faces of those who did not run from the Zimbabwean leader’s special brand of political intimidation.
They sit listlessly on the dusty ground, staring at the few cracked plates and burnt mattresses that remain in front of their charred huts.
“I threw a birthday party here and they came for me saying I was celebrating the MDC’s victory in elections,” said CM, the son of a former Zanu (PF) in the area, who declined to have his name published. “They burnt my home and then tried to burn me alive. Now I have nothing.”
CM was sitting in his house when the youths struck last Sunday afternoon.
“I know they were Zanu,” he says, referring to the pro-Mugabe party. “I saw their T-shirts and hats.”
He ran to the bush and watched as they poured three gallons of petrol and paraffin over the thatched hut he has lived in for years.
But the most important thing CM lost – as did most of the villagers – was his ID card, making it impossible for him to vote in the June 27 presidential election run off.
It is a frequent ploy of Zanu (PF) thugs.
“In the run-up to the election, IDs are deliberately stolen,” says Jacob Mafume of Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition, a human rights organisation in Harare. “In Zimbabwe, to steal an ID is to steal a vote.”
such intimidation is not new in this part of Midlands: in the 1980s 20,000 died at the hands of Mugabe thugs. It worked then and it has worked again. Although most people are too frightened to talk about their political affiliation – the goal of the pro-Mugabe militias – the village was believed to sympathise with the MDC.
Before the attack 2,600 people lived here, most of whom would have voted MDC.
Now, there are a handful of brave ones left, the rest are cowering in an empty school down the dirt road, plastered with posters of Robert Mugabe’s face.
“War veterans were commanding the militias,” says Almon Moyo, a local grassroots MDC district official. “One of them pointed out the houses where the strongest opposition leaders lived.”
The destruction of CM’s home happened quickly. The people heard the militias before they saw them: crashing through the bush, chanting and singing Zanu (PF) songs.
By the time they saw them, wearing caps and T-shirts emblazoned with Mugabe’s face and raised fists, it was too late. The attackers were carrying whips and small axes.
The villagers who could run did so, quickly, into the bushes and hid, holding their children. The old or sick or handicapped were left behind to fend for themselves: a mentally ill man was hit with an axe, an older woman had her skull gashed. Another man was tortured for three hours for not producing an ID card.
The militias, according to witnesses, were mainly composed of “Green Bombers”, the Zanu (PF) youth wing, who are training in 150 camps throughout the country.
desperate teenagers who have been promised jobs if Mugabe wins, they are schooled in Zanu (PF) propaganda and the techniques of how
to intimidate and torture opponents.
Witnesses say nearly 100 militia men who came out of the bushes in two groups. As they descended on the village, they began to smash and burn everything in their path.
The police say there had been a “clash” in the village. Five youths were later picked up in connection with the burnings, but all were MDC youth members who claimed they were nowhere in the area. They were later released on bail.
“After the police picked them up, they came here and accused the villagers of burning down their own people,” said Michael, a local MDC official. “How could we burn our own?”
the MDC, to many of these farmers and menial workers, signalled a change, a release from the oppression of life under Robert Mugabe which offered them virtually nothing.
Maggie Moyo does not know why the militias came, “other than to kill”, but she still raises her arm in the open-hand MDC victory sign and tries to smile.
They burned my ID card and my birth certificate,” she says,”so how can I vote? But I still love the MDC. If we don’t have them in the government, how will my children ever work? Without them, all they will do is herd donkeys.”
According to human rights group, Zimbabwe Peace Project, the violence in Mvuma was sparked by a Zanu (PF) meeting held in the area on May 25 where war veterans called for “the flushing out of enemy infiltrators.”
Post published in: News