A human-rights group on Thursday announced it was collecting legal evidence of politically motivated mass rape by Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s youth militia to build a case for prosecuting the men responsible.
AIDS-Free World, set up by the former UN special envoy for AIDS in Africa, Stephen Lewis, said it would shortly dispatch lawyers to southern Africa to collect testimony for prosecutions that could take place domestically or in an international tribunal after Mugabe leaves power.
“The legal definition of a crime against humanity is a widespread and systematic attack against a civilian population,” the group’s legal director, Noah Novogrodsky, said on the sidelines of the International AIDS
Conference in Mexico City.
“We believe members of Mugabe’s inner circle who turned [ruling party] ZANU-PF’s youth militia into rapists and killers are responsible for crimes against humanity.”
Betty Makoni, founder of a Zimbabwean grassroots groups for girls called Girl Child Network, said that her organisation had collected evidence from 53 women who had been raped by the youth militia, and private doctors had accumulated evidence for many more.
The tally of known cases “may be up to over 700 now,” said Makoni. “No single perpetrator has been arrested.”
Makoni said that the mass rapes occurred after the stalemated March 29 election in Zimbabwe, when many male members of the opposition went into hiding.
Militiamen in rural areas toured villages demanding that women identify brothers, husbands and fathers who were members of the opposition, and beat, tortured or raped them to get the information, she said.
“If you don’t tell the youth militia where the suspected opposition members are, they insert pesticides in your vagina,” Makoni told a press conference hosted by AIDS-free World.
“A lot of them had sticks inserted into their vagina… pushed in there in order for you to tell them ‘I will never never support the opposition’.”
Victims included a 13-year-old girl who was abducted and traded to a youth militiaman in exchange for goat, and a 60-year-old woman raped by 18 militiamen.
“I’m talking about an old granny, whom I saw in the morning, with the power to look after her grandchildren, but in the evening, she’s in the bush, with the semen dribbling from 18 men,” said Makoni.
After one gang rape, a woman was told, “we are coming again until you give birth to a ZANU-PF child,” Makoni said.
Police turned away women who sought to file a complaint for rape, and many women, suffering vaginal bleeding and other serious injuries, who asked for help at state hospitals were told by doctors “‘I don’t want to cause trouble for myself. I don’t have a choice but to turn you away’,” said Makoni.
“They are co-perpetrators and accomplices in crimes against humanity,” she said.
“Rape is still taking place,” she said, adding that the latest case she had received occurred on July 24.
One of the biggest worries of the rape victims was that they may have become infected by the AIDS virus. Zimbabwe has one of the highest rates of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in the world, with 15.3 percent of the adult population infected.
But getting an HIV test was difficult and expensive, and many women were too afraid to find out, she said.
Novogrodsky said the legal mission was “to record the names of the perpetrators. We want to take the statements of the witnesses while the memories are still fresh. We don’t want to allow a culture of denial or legal erasure.”
He admitted that there was scant hope of prosecuting rapists or those who may have ordered the assaults while Mugabe remained in power.
But, he said, there were excellent chances of prosecution domestically or in an international trial, in the same way that Liberian warlord Charles Taylor and Serbian Radovan Karadzic had been put in the dock.
The evidence could also be used in any future Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Zimbabwe, an idea modelled on the experience of post-apartheid Africa, he added. Harare Tribune
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