A recent news report said dossier would be handed over soon in the hope that world attention will zoom in on Zimbabwe where AIDS-Free World believes Mugabe and his militias are planning rape on a massive scale in order to win the next election expected next year. Witness statements by rape victims, vetted by a team of international lawyers, suggest Zanu (PF) unleashed sexual terror against women who supported the MDC.
What we are calling for collectively is serious intervention in every level, said Stephen Lewis, the UNs former special envoy for AIDS in Africa. Lewis urged the UN Security Council, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the African Union (AU) to end their criminally delinquent silence over the worsening state of affairs in Zimbabwe.
We know as we are sitting here that its going to happen again, he said. Theres not the slightest question that Mugabe has his youth corps and his war veterans and they are ready to do it again and the world is silent. How is it possible that hes allowed to get away with it?
The probe by AIDS-Free World is called Electing to Rape: Sexual Terror in Mugabes Zimbabwe. It was released in Johannesburg last December. The report, it was drawn up by a team of respected international lawyers, detected a surge in rape cases ahead of the first round in Zimbabwes blood-stained presidential elections that reached a crescendo before the second round.
In 300 hours of testimony, victims identified 241 men who raped them, and estimated the total acts of rape to be over 300.
The AFP report asserted this was just the tip of the iceberg because so many rape victims were too frightened to give evidence collected by AIDS-Free World. The report took 18 months to complete. Every victim it said, supported the MDC and in every attack the perpetrators were clearly identifiable as Zanu (PF) youth militia or wear veterans.
Activists against a continuation of Mugabes 30-year rule were raped in front of their families or abducted by Zanu (PF) youths who marched them to militia bases or camps in the countryside, where they were repeatedly assaulted, sometimes over days, the document said. Many women were forced to watch their husbands, children and parents killed or tortured before they were raped.
These tactics were used on a massively wide scale in Matabeleland and the Midlands between 1982-1987 when Mugabe set about wiping out political opposition Gukuruhundi. The dictator never faced a world court and he was, in fact, praised by the Commonwealth as one of its most enlightened leaders, knighted by Queen Elizabeth 11 and hailed as one of the finest leaders of the Non-Aligned World since the days of Nasser and Tito.
The call by AIDS-Free World to see Mugabe appear in the dock at the ICC comes at a time when world media attention is focused on the trial of Charles Taylor (special media attention on this one because of the presence of models and film stars). Meantime, the Foreign Minister of Rwanda, Louise Mushikiwabo, has reiterated that her country will never sign up to the ICC until politics is separated from justice.
She was speaking at the Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House) on 4 August when she said: The experience we have is that the international legal mechanisms are very much tainted by international politics and that is not going to serve us as a country and certainly we believe that Africa as a continent tends to be the offending party. Until we see some changes happening globally we do not intend to put our signature to the ICC.
She added: There seems to be two levels of justice. The justice reserved for Africa and the justice reserved for the rest of the world, so this is something we take extremely seriously. We would like to see international law and international justice really giving us a level of comfort in terms of fairness to all countries in a very equal way before we join the ICC.
In a separate interview with The Zimbabwean, Dr Gebriel I.M. Fediel, Secretary for Foreign Affairs and International Co-operation of the Justice and Equality Movement Susan (JEM) said: If the Africans are the ones who are killing their people then its very natural that they are the ones who will be picked. In democratic countries, no president, no prime minister, can kill his people the way he likes. But in Africa its very natural that those who are committing genocide and war crimes are to be picked for trial at The Hague.
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