Stephanie Nolen
Gaborone - Former United Nations ambassador Stephen Lewis is spearheading an effort to bring to justice perpetrators of politically motivated sexual violence in Zimbabwe, a powerful addition to existing attempts to hold Robert Mugabe's regime accountable for gross human-rights violations. AIDS-Free World, an advocacy group founded last year by Mr. Lewis, is quietly collecting the testimony of women who survived gang rapes by leaders in Mr. Mugabe's Zanu PF party, after the Zimbabwean President lost the first round of presidential elections in March. Over the past week, international human-rights lawyers enlisted by Mr. Lewis collected sworn affidavits from eight women, all of them supporters or organizers for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change who were raped and brutally beaten after elections this past spring.
Each of the women described how her attackers, who openly identified themselves with Mr. Mugabe's Zanu PF party, made clear that she was to be the victim of a systematic policy of punishment because she dared to challenge Mr. Mugabe's rule. The stories the women tell are harrowing. "When they were finished with me, I could no longer stand," said Carol, 39, an MDC supporter from the southwest of Zimbabwe. (The identities of the women have been confirmed by The Globe and Mail but pseudonyms have been used here for their protection.) The Zanu militia men who had detained her made her crawl on her belly to the bored bureaucrat holding a list and sitting nearby, and tick off her name to acknowledge that she had had her punishment. "Mine was the fourth name on the list for that day." Her name crossed off, they moved on.
This is not the first effort to collect evidence of crimes against humanity committed by the Mugabe regime: Several Zimbabwean human-rights organizations are also working to gather and preserve evidence of state-sponsored human-rights abuses, which have typified the recent years of Mr. Mugabe's rule but exploded after the Zimbabwean leader lost the first round of the presidential election to the MDC's Morgan Tsvangirai, the first open challenge to his authority in 28 years. But Mr. Lewis's organization has some advantages. The AIDS-Free World team, which is US-based, can operate much more freely than Zimbabwean lawyers and activists. Plus they have, through Mr. Lewis's long years as a politician and diplomat, access to resources and to influential people. The lawyers involved are experts in the field, some of whom have prosecuted war crimes and are donating their time.
"We're in a position to collect durable sworn affidavits that would hold up in any proceeding, so that if we end up somewhere like the International Criminal Court, a defence lawyer will not be able to throw it out," Mr. Lewis said in a telephone interview from Canada. "The affidavits bear out that these attacks were directed at the political opposition in a very methodical way - the women chosen were chosen because they were part of the political opposition and the links made to Zanu PF are unassailable." Long concerned about the implosion of Zimbabwe, Mr. Lewis, the former UN special envoy for AIDS in Africa, was horrified to learn last summer from Betty Makoni, a firebrand Zimbabwean human-rights activist with whom he has worked on AIDS issues, about the systematic campaign of gang rape that accompanied the first election and the runoff vote in late June.
Mr. Lewis and his co-director and long-time colleague Paula Donovan were soon making calls to try to figure out what they could do - to help victims, but equally important, to try to end the gross impunity with which Mr. Mugabe and Zanu PF have operated. Mr. Mugabe and Mr. Tsvangirai signed a power-sharing deal in September but Mr. Mugabe has refused to relinquish any control of the state. A third of Zimbabweans now face famine, and inflation has spiralled into the billions per cent. The two leaders left another round of power-sharing talks in Johannesburg this weekend without a workable agreement. AIDS-Free World works with women's groups in Zimbabwe to identify rape survivors who would take the risky step of giving testimony, and in some cases has helped get them across borders to do so. The group finds doctors to provide them medical care - many of the women still have unhealed wounds five months later, since Zimbabwe's medical system has entirely ceased to function, and all need HIV tests - and also brings the lawyers who record the testimonies.
A first group of nine women produced affidavits in September with the help of pro bono lawyers from the Toronto firm Blakes; eight more gave their testimony this week. Shonali Shome, an AIDS-Free World lawyer collecting the evidence, said it is "chilling." "We're hearing the same thing over and over, we're seeing the same patterns in different parts of Zimbabwe: the women tell us about the same words coming out of the perpetrators mouths," she said. "The language that's used, the pattern of how they were abducted, it speaks to a hierarchical level of command." It shows the rapes were both systematic and widespread (Ms. Makoni said she knows of 700 cases), the two criteria for crimes against humanity, Ms. Shome said. Carol, for example, said she was told repeatedly by the Zanu PF leader who raped her: "You deserve this, this is your punishment for daring to support the MDC. We have a list and everyone on it like you will get a punishment."
The AIDS-Free World team is also researching the best route for a prosecution: Zimbabwe has crimes-against-humanity legislation, but its judicial system has been entirely hijacked by the Mugabe regime. The next choice, Ms. Shome said, is prosecution in a neighbouring state, all of which are signatories to the Rome Statute that says crimes against humanity can be prosecuted in another nation when a state cannot or will not take action domestically. Mr. Lewis and his colleagues are also considering bodies such as the African Court (the judicial wing of the African Union) or the AU's human-rights commission (although this would not be a criminal prosecution). A final option is the International Criminal Court, although this is unlikely for political reasons.
The women who gathered to give testimony this past week are adamant that they want their individual attackers prosecuted - most can name at least some of those who raped and beat them - but also wish to see senior people in the Zanu PF leadership, starting with Mr. Mugabe, held accountable. The challenge in such a prosecution, Ms. Donovan acknowledged, is how to prove that the rapes and beatings were not criminal acts, carried out by individuals or rogue Zanu PF members, but rather part of an orchestrated campaign for which responsibility originated with Mr. Mugabe and a handful of his close advisers. Yet this may not be impossible to prove: many organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have documented the state-sponsored nature of the electoral violence. Mr. Mugabe, in campaign speeches, spoke bluntly about what punishment would await those who challenged his right to rule.
And most of the women who have given affidavits repeatedly reported their attacks to the police, as have hundreds of others, but not a single election-related rape has been investigated or prosecuted, which suggests state sanction. Ms. Donovan said the affidavits will serve a function besides prosecution. AIDS-Free World will use them to remind the world "that Zimbabwe is on the verge of being a failed state and the world is not intervening." "We are exposing the fact that this is a terrorist state and the government is a terrorist regime and the entire country is either living in a culture of complete impunity or a culture of complete terror. We are not just going to take these affidavits and lock them up somewhere." The collection of the evidence has also had a second, unintended consequence: The women have found a great cathartic comfort in being together, Ms. Makoni said.
The first group began the week so traumatized that they were terrified to leave the room to go to the toilet themselves; none could speak more than a few words of her story without breaking down; most had not slept for more than two hours at a time since the rape. Five days later, she said, the women were talking freely, articulating great anger at their attackers, and had banded together to form the Zimbabwe Rape Survivors' Network. "I knew this was coming," said Rose, 51, whose was gang-raped and then had to watch her young daughter suffer the same assault. "I knew joining the MDC and working for the opposition could be my death sentence." Rose furiously blinked back tears when she spoke - but like the other women, she is also angry, ferociously, inspiringly angry. They demanded, as a group, to know why the world stands by and lets Mr. Mugabe continue his rule unchecked. "People have been tortured and maimed," said Shirley, who was stripped in public and raped by eight Zanu PF militia members. "You are beaten but the hospital can't help, they have nothing. So what does the United Nations want to see? What do they need to see before they intervene in the Zimbabwe situation?"
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