Posted on 02/17/2003 12:31:58 AM PST by Clive
ALTHOUGH the government and the State media have always denied it, police brutality does exist in Zimbabwe and certainly appears to be getting worse.
Cases where opposition party members, journalists of the so-called opposition Press, as the government through the Minister of State for Information and Publicity in the President’s Office, Professor Jonathan Moyo, loves to call us, and even Members of Parliament have been beaten up, tortured, maimed and raped have been reported on numerous occasions by this newspaper.
The government has denied some of the allegations although recently in the case of Job Sikhala, the St Mary’s MP, they tried but failed to hide the truth from the public.
The opposition legislator was arrested and tortured in police custody for allegedly trying to remove the government unconstitutionally, a charge subsequently thrown out by the court after the non-appearance of his alleged police torturer.
Sikhala was subsequently admitted and detained in hospital following the torture. There was no way in which he could have inflicted such brutality on his person. It does not need a rocket scientist to know that the man was subjected to torture. He broke down and wept after being brought to court for his initial remand in the case.
Sikhala has been haunted by the police on several occasions. He has been arrested and detained numerous times on trumped-up charges. We say trumped-up charges because each time the cases went for trial, he was discharged. To us, that constitutes police harassment and brutality of the highest magnitude.
This makes us wonder how Presidents Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria could comfortably declare that Zimbabwe had made reasonable progress since February 2000, when the government- sponsored draft constitution was massively rejected by the populace, to warrant being re-admitted into the Commonwealth.
The unequivocal rejection of the draft constitution led to massive violence preceded by the war veterans-led chaotic land invasions which left more than 30 people dead, among them commercial farmers. The violence and harassment is still with us today in one form or another if the continued arrests, beatings and torture of opposition party MPs and their supporters is taken into consideration.
Zanu PF unleashed terror and mayhem with impunity and a few token arrests were made of the perpetrators to present a facade of order to the whole world.
With such brutality continuing, there can be no way that Mbeki and Obasanjo can say Zimbabwe is now relatively peaceful and orderly enough to be re-admitted to the Club. In our Saturday issue, we reported that three policemen had been arrested for allegedly fatally assaulting a security guard whom they had arrested at Chikwanha shopping centre in Chitungwiza after he was accused of stealing $500 000 from a bar at the shopping centre. Elsewhere today we report on a toddler who sustained permanent eye and forehead injuries after a policeman allegedly descended on her while she was strapped on her mother’s back in a sugar queue in Bindura.
The police have been ordered to disperse people from the queues because they create the “wrong impression” to the Mbekis and Obasanjos of this world. Zimbabwe has enough food to feed itself, so the government says, therefore there should be no queues.
The policeman responsible for that child’s injuries should be brought to book like those in the Chitungwiza case. People should be left to queue in peace. They are already angry and hungry, why add insult to injury by harassing them in queues?
So far the Bindura policeman has not even bothered to check on the child’s welfare. He had the audacity to give the child’s poor family $1,500 to buy drinks what cheek!
At the fictional exchange rate set by Zim, that would be US$27.00.
At the actual rate traded at the curb, that would be about US$1.00
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