Monday, August 26, 2002

I thought only colonial racists could hate Mugabe.

Maugabe's men are apparently raping the children of the opposition.

In a detailed report from Zimbabwe, London's Sunday Telegraph yesterday published claims that hundreds of girls as young as 12 were being raped or kept as sex slaves in rural Zimbabwe by Mr Mugabe's youth militia. The Sunday Telegraph report quoted human rights lawyers branding the rape and mistreatment of the girls as "systematic political cleansing". The girls are said to be from families that opposed Mr Mugabe's recent re-election.

"They are raping on a massive scale," Frances Lovemore, a counsellor at the Amani Trust that monitors torture in the Zimbabwean capital of Harare told the newspaper. "Girls as young as 12 and 13 are being systematically taken and used and abused because of their families' political views."

Correspondent Christina Lamb, who apparently defied Zimbabwe bans on foreign press to get the report, wrote that Amani had "compelling video evidence" to help to bring Mr Mugabe to trial at the international court of human rights. Lamb quoted victims now living in hiding as saying they were pack-raped by police and the so-called "war veterans" who are at the heart of Mr Mugabe's state seizure of white-owned farms and his terror-tactics militia. Girls had their genitals burned with iron rods and other Mugabe opponents were badly beaten. Mr Mugabe's thugs ruined food in opponents' homes in the starving countryside by urinating on it, victims have said. One victim, 12, told Lamb she was raped for four hours by a gang of pro-Mugabe thugs while her mother and sisters were forced to watch and made to sing pro-Mugabe songs of praise.

Another story about the use of rape in Zimbabwe as a political tool.

The report told of one 12-year-old girl, in the Vumba mountains in eastern Zimbabwe, who was gang-raped by war veterans and policemen while her mother and younger sisters were forced to chant Mugabe's praises and watch the ordeal.

She was raped because her father supported the country's main opposition group, the Movement for Democratic Change.

Other victims were severely beaten, and some claimed brigade members urinated on their food supplies - a terrible indignity in a land where millions were close to starvation, the report said.

"We found a population living in terror, some towns completely "cleansed" of all opposition," a Sunday Telegraph reporter said.

Zimbabwean officials were speaking in chilling terms about the need to take the country back to zero, the report said.

Last week, Didymus Mutasa, the organisation secretary of Mugabe's ruling Zanu-PF Party said: "We would be better off with only six million people (out of a total 12 million), with our own people who support the liberation struggle.

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