Dora, 12, gang-raped by Mugabe's men for four hours...

In the rape camps of Zimbabwe, young girls are horrifically abused - often to punish Mugabe's political opponents. Foreign Correspondent of the Year Christina Lamb meets the victims and reveals their anguish

"The game we are about to play needs music," the Zimbabwean police constable said to the 12-year old girl. But as he tossed a mattress on to the ground it was clear that it was no game that he was planning. For the next four hours the girl's mother and younger sisters, aged nine and seven, were forced to chant praises to Robert Mugabe and watch Dora being gang-raped by five "war veterans" and the policeman. "Every time they stopped singing the policeman and war vets beat them with shamboks and sticks," said Dora, crying and clenching her hands repeatedly as she recalled the ordeal which took place behind her family hut in a village in the dark shadow of the Vumba mountains of Manicaland, in eastern Zimbabwe. "They kept thrusting themselves into me over and over again saying: 'This is the punishment for those of you who want to sell this country to Tony Blair and the whites'. When they had finished it hurt so much I couldn't walk."

Now in hiding, spending most of her nights in frightened wakefulness, she remembers feeling the rough breath on her face, the hands forcing apart her thighs, and "that animal thing" as she calls it slamming into her underfed body. Dora was raped because her father is a supporter of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. He is not a candidate, not a party official, just a simple carpenter who had mistakenly believed that he lived in a country where he could vote for whom he liked. Dora's story, as she tells it, started with a Land Rover full of war veterans drawing up at the door around 10pm one evening in June, while her father was away, and ended with her left bruised and bleeding at 2.30am. "There had been a bad luck owl in the msasa tree that day," she said, recalling hearing it in between passing out. But the real beginning of the horror can be traced back to March when her village voted against Mugabe in the presidential elections. For rape has become the latest weapon in Mugabe's war on his own population. Dora's echoing screams on the African night was a warning to all the other villagers as to what might happen to those who even think of defying the president again.

Dora is one of hundreds of young girls who are being raped in the fields and mountains of rural Zimbabwe every month as part of what human rights workers are calling a "systematic political cleansing of the population". Many of the girls are taken to camps run by Mugabe's youth militia, the Green Bombers, a sinister parallel to the rape camps of Bosnian Muslim women established by Serb forces in the early 1990s. And with half the country facing starvation, more and more youths are being lured to join the militia by the prospect of food. In Zimbabwe, though, there is an extra, fatal dimension to the ordeals that the women endure: with 38 per cent of the population HIV positive, the rape is often the start of a death sentence. "We're seeing an enormous prevalence of rape and enough cases to say it's being used by the state as a political tool with women and girls being raped because they are wives, girlfriends or daughters of political activists," said Tony Reeler, the clinical director of the Amani Trust, a Harare-based organisation that monitors and treats torture victims. "There are also horrific cases of girls as young as 12 or 13 being taken off to militia camps, used and abused and kept in forced concubinage. But I suspect, as with Bosnia, the real extent of what is happening is going to take a hell of a long time to come out."

Rape goes unreported in many countries but more so in Africa, particularly in rural areas where a raped daughter is seen as bringing shame on the family and afterwards becomes hard to marry. The pressure to remain silent is even stronger in a repressive police state where the police are often the perpetrators. Dora's family did go to the police station only to be laughed at with the words: "We're not fools to arrest one of our colleagues." Nor do many rape victims receive medical treatment. In Dora's case the local clinic had no drugs and the family did not have the money to take her to hospital, so she is being treated with traditional herbs. Her own dreams of becoming a nurse are in tatters as she is terrified that she may have been infected with the Aids virus.

In a month-long investigation, one of the most disturbing I have ever conducted in 15 years of foreign reporting, I and The Sunday Telegraph's photographer Justin Sutcliffe visited villages in the Zambezi valley, Matabeleland and Manicaland, interviewing rape victims and their families in secret locations. We talked to a teacher beaten so badly that she had lost her baby, and a former militia member who had participated in the raping and pillaging intended to pacify the countryside. We found a population living in terror, some towns completely "cleansed" of all opposition. We spent a night in terror ourselves when our car broke down in a village in the Zambezi valley, 40 miles from the nearest telephone, leaving us to listen to chants of "Pasi ne murungu" ("Down with the white man") and other slogans of Mugabe's ruling Zanu PF party coming from a group of men around a fire.

Fear and hunger are what passes for life in much of Mugabe's Zimbabwe. In the capital Harare there is a facade of normality - workmen repaint the blue trolley shelter in the gleaming new airport terminal, the traffic lights work, and pavement cafes serve the best cappuccino in Africa. The roads are full of gleaming new BMWs, known as "Girlfriends of Ministers' cars", bought by government officials profiting from black market money speculation. The only signs of anything amiss are the long snaking queues for bread, sugar and fuel, the absence of maize (previously the country's staple food) from all shops, and the number of people simply hanging around. Unemployment has now reached 70 per cent of the working population.

In the rural areas that Zimbabwe's Marxist president regards as his stronghold it is a different story. Furious that so many of "his" people voted against him in elections - which he knows very well he did not really win - and incensed by calls such as that last week from the Bush administration demanding a rerun, he has unleashed his forces to wreak revenge in the most horrible manner. At his inauguration in April, the 78-year-old who has ruled the country since independence in 1980, warned the opposition: "We'll make them run if they haven't run before." Imagining his declaration of victory would bring an end to the violence which had dogged the campaign, no one then realised the lengths to which he was prepared to go. Officials now speak of "taking the system back to zero" and of reducing the country's 12 million population in a chilling echo of what the Khmer Rouge did in Cambodia in the 1970s and seem to even be employing similar tactics of emptying cities and targeting teachers.

Last week Didymus Mutasa, the organisation secretary of Zanu PF, said: "We would be better off with only six million people, with our own people who support the liberation struggle." With rural council elections due next month which the president has no intention of losing, the violence has re-started. What has changed is the focus on women and the blatant use of police along with youth militia who are supposed to be doing national service and call themselves "taliban". The situation is particularly bad in Manicaland, or Eastern Highlands as the settlers called it, apparently reminded of Scotland by its misty mountains. In the town of Buhera, anyone who is against Mugabe has been forced to flee. Many have been served with court orders not allowing them back into the area until October 2, three days after the elections. In Chiminga, the court officials have fled because they had been beaten by Zanu PF militia for granting bail to MDC members. "Mugabe has no intention of being challenged again," said Roy Bennett, the opposition MP for Chimanimani in Manicaland. "He looks at anyone who doesn't support Zanu PF as an enemy of the state who must be crushed using any means, and he has completely politicised the police."

The outside world has played into Mugabe's hands by focusing on the plight of the 4,300 white farmers and the bizarre attempts to destroy commercial agriculture at a time when half his population is threatened with starvation. Hundreds of white farmers have been arrested over the past 10 days for defying a government order to move off their land. The other evil that he is perpetrating in the countryside is not easy to investigate. Mugabe has stationed two officers from his feared Central Intelligence Organisation in every village; merely talking to a murungu, or white man, can lead to interrogation or beatings. Driving around remote eastern and northern areas, not knowing who might be watching or what side they might be on is an eerie experience.

In areas such as Hwedza, where most of the farmers have been evicted, the war veterans who have taken over are setting fire to the fields to prepare them for traditional subsistence farming. Plumes of smoke dot the horizon and flames lick the side of the road - at times it seems as if the whole country is burning. Every so often a white homestead surrounded by red bougainvillea and jacaranda trees comes into view, a strange island amid the blackened land. In almost every village where people were known to have voted against Mugabe, we pieced together the same story of beatings of teachers and wanton destruction of property. Everywhere we saw the charred skeletons of burnt bicycles, the main mode of transport of rural MDC workers. "The Black Boots [police] burnt my house," said 47-year-old George, an MDC campaigner forced to flee Buhera two weeks ago. "We don't own much but they smashed all we had in front of my children, then urinated in the small amounts of sugar and flour we had left."

The villagers' greatest fear is being taken to one of the camps. They were set up before the elections to train the youth militia to harass the MDC and many remain in existence. Apparently funded from the Food to Work programme, under which youths are supposed to receive food aid for work such as road building, they form the centres for Mugabe's terror campaign. We visited one of the most notorious at Bazeley River in Manicaland. On the main road outside the camp was a police roadblock, clearly designed to stop anyone getting near. With The Corrs blaring from our car stereo, however, they believed our story of being tourists lost in search of a particular mountain and incredibly let us through. We reached the camp by crossing a narrow bridge and driving up a dirt track. The series of tents around a trestle table at which young men were helping themselves to breakfast looked unnervingly like a scout camp apart from the "Do Not Enter" sign painted angrily on the gate, the surly red-eyed men hanging around wearing T-shirts bearing the legend "The Third Chimurenga", after the liberation war, and pictures of Osama bin Laden.

It was here that 15-year-old Priscilla, whom I had interviewed in a safe house in Harare, was raped repeatedly for three days then had her genitals burnt with a poker. It was here, too, that Benjamin, a 32-year-old teacher, was badly beaten after having his house burnt down. "They accused me of repeating the word chinja [change - the opposition MDC election slogan] in lessons. They took me in to one of the tents and forced me to lie on my stomach and said they would keep beating me until I defecated. I told them I had already defecated in my pants but they said: 'No, you must defecate your whole intestines.' Finally they stopped and made me crawl in the mud. When they let me go, they said this is only a taste of what will happen to you."

A former member of the youth militia, who fled because he was so appalled at what he was being ordered to do and is now in hiding, agreed to talk to The Sunday Telegraph about what went on in the camp. "I was desperate," he said. "I had lost my job in a fried chicken takeaway last November and have a wife and 13-month-old baby girl to support. So when Zanu PF people came around our houses I joined. They said we would get Z$50,000 [about £600] but we didn't get any money, just food and beer. There were about 200 of us in the camp and we called ourselves 'the taliban'. Our doctrine was to be against the white man, he was our worst enemy, and our hero was bin Laden because of the way he stood up against the West. We were trained to be vigilant, always looking for opposition supporters, and were told if we saw anyone with an MDC T-shirt we must assault them with whips, catapults, steel bars. The idea was to instil fear in people so they would be frightened to vote and to take revenge against those who had. Then a couple of months ago they said it is the women who are behind this campaign to bring back white rule. They told us to take them to the bush, that they are daughters of dogs and coconuts, and to bring young ones back to the camp to service us. When I said we can't do this, that these are our sisters, they accused me of being a 'sell-out' and beat me."

Few of the victims are prepared to talk about their experiences. One who did agree to be interviewed in a safe house in Mutare was a girl called Sara who looks younger than her 16 years. Sara had been left with her 12-year-old brother and orphaned seven-year-old twin cousins when her parents fled their village after numerous beatings and threats, believing that the children would be safer on their own. "One night around midnight we were woken by banging on the door," she recalled. "There were about 25 men. They demanded to know where my parents were. I told them that they were away at a funeral but they refused to believe me. They took everything out of the cupboards, all our pots and plates, and started breaking them with iron bars. I begged them to stop but they said: 'You must pay the price for what your parents have done.' One of them asked me if I'd ever slept with a man. I said no, and he said: 'Today you start, come and show us the white in you.' He stuck his hand in my mouth to stop me screaming. When he had finished he peed on me." In tears, she added: "I told my brother. We didn't know what to do, we were just children."

When Sara's father discovered what had happened he was outraged. "I went to the police and they said: 'You people voted for a nonsense party, why didn't you vote for Zanu PF?' "Shaking his head, Sara's father insists: "This is not a local thing, it's from the top, from the president himself. This is a monster government doing monstrous things."

The names of the rape victims have been changed for their protection

Source:Sunday Telegraph (UK)
Published:Sun 25-Aug-2002
URL:  http://www.zwnews.com/issuefull.cfm?ArticleID=5021