Human Rights Watch will on Tuesday morning launch a new report tilted, Perpetual Fear: Impunity and Cycles of Violence in Zimbabwe, which will be presented by Tiseke Kasambala, the organisations senior researcher and advocate.
The international human rights watchdog, which, like several other pro-democracy institutions, has been very critical of Mugabe and his heavy-handed rule in Zimbabwe, which has been punctuated by violence and killings, said in a statement that nothing has changed in Zimbabwe since the formation of the coalition government between Mugabe and the two MDC formations.
Two years since the formation of a power-sharing government, which was meant to end human rights violations and restore the rule of law, politically motivated violence and the lack of accountability for abuses remain serious problems in Zimbabwe, read the HRW statement.
Human Rights Watchs new report examines the impunity that prevails in Zimbabwe by providing illustrative cases of political killings, torture, and abductions by alleged government security forces and their allies.
The report details most abuses that took place during and after the botched presidential election run-off of 2008, which followed Mugabes and Zanu PFs defeat in the March 29 polls by mainstream MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai and his party.
In a bid to punish the electorate and force them vote him in what was supposed to be a subsequent run-off, Mugabe deployed soldiers, the police, war veterans and youth militias in most rural areas, where they unleashed a gory campaign of retribution, during which an estimated 500 civilians perceived to be MDC supporters were killed, while thousands others were displaced.
The unity government, according to HRW, has failed to give closure to the victims, while perpetrators continue to roam free and commit more crimes ahead of forthcoming elections, likely to be held later this or early next year.
There has been little or no accountability for these crimes. Cases of political violence that have been filed by victims or their relatives have largely gone ignored by the police or have stalled in the courts. The prospect of new elections in the coming year raises the specter of continued abuses without any form of justice.
Since assuming power in 1980, President Robert Mugabe and his Zanu PF party have unleashed an orgy of violence to quash the opposition and voices of dissent in the country, a method that became widespread all over the country since the formation of the MDC in 1999.
Thousands of perceived MDC supporters have been killed during the last decade, while tens of thousands others have been displaced both internally and externally, as they flee the state-sponsored violence, which has mostly been unleashed on the electorate by state security agents and paramilitary groups.
Despite the formation of a national unity government, which put in place the Ministry of reconciliation, there has been no compensation for victims of political violence, some of which dates back to the early 1980s, as the culture of impunity continues.
Post published in: Politics