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HARARE—President
Robert Mugabe summoned his top security officials to a
government training center near his rural home in
central Zimbabwe on the afternoon of March 30. In a
voice barely audible at first, he informed the leaders
of the state security apparatus that had enforced his
rule for 28 years that he had lost the presidential vote
held the previous day. Then Mugabe told the gathering
he planned to give up power in a televised speech to the
nation the next day, according to the written notes of
one participant that were corroborated by two other
people with direct knowledge of the meeting.
But
Zimbabwe’s military chief, Gen. Constantine Chiwenga,
responded that the choice was not Mugabe’s alone to
make. According to two firsthand accounts of the
meeting, Chiwenga told Mugabe his military would take
control of the country to keep him in office or the
president could contest a runoff election, directed in
the field by senior army officers supervising a
military-style campaign against the opposition.
Mugabe,
the only leader this country has known since its break
from white rule nearly three decades ago, agreed to
remain in the race and rely on the army to ensure his
victory. During an April 8 military planning meeting,
according to written notes and the accounts of
participants, the plan was given a code name: CIBD. The
acronym, which proved apt in the fevered campaign that
unfolded over the following weeks, stood for: Coercion.
Intimidation. Beating. Displacement.
In the
three months between the March 29 vote and the June 27
runoff election, ruling-party militias under the
guidance of 200 senior army officers battered the
Movement for Democratic Change, bringing the opposition
party’s network of activists to the verge of oblivion.
By election day, more than 80 opposition supporters were
dead, hundreds were missing, thousands were injured and
hundreds of thousands were homeless. Morgan Tsvangirai,
the party’s leader, dropped out of the contest and took
refuge in the Dutch Embassy.
This
account reveals previously undisclosed details of the
strategy behind the campaign as it was conceived and
executed by Mugabe and his top advisers, who from that
first meeting through the final vote appeared to hold
decisive influence over the president.
The
Washington Post was given access to the written record
by a participant of several private meetings attended by
Mugabe in the period between the first round of voting
and the runoff election. The notes were corroborated by
witnesses to the internal debates. Many of the people
interviewed, including members of Mugabe’s inner circle,
spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of
government retribution. Much of the reporting for this
article was conducted by a Zimbabwean reporter for The
Post whose name is being withheld for security reasons.
What
emerges from these accounts is a ruling inner circle
that debated only in passing the consequences of the
political violence on the country and on international
opinion. Mugabe and his advisers also showed little
concern in these meetings for the most basic rules of
democracy that have taken hold in some other African
nations born from anticolonial independence movements.
Mugabe’s
party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic
Front, took power in 1980 after a protracted guerrilla
war. The notes and interviews make clear that its
military supporters, who stood to lose wealth and
influence if Mugabe bowed out, were not prepared to
relinquish their authority simply because voters checked
Tsvangirai’s name on the ballots.
“The
small piece of paper cannot take the country,” Solomon
Mujuru, the former guerrilla commander who once headed
Zimbabwe’s military, told the party’s ruling politburo
on April 4, according to notes of the meeting and
interviews with some of those who attended.
The
plan’s first phase unfolded the week after the
high-level meeting, as Mugabe supporters began erecting
2,000 party compounds across the country that would
serve as bases for the party militias.
At
first, the beatings with whips, striking with sticks,
torture and other forms of intimidation appeared
consistent with the country’s past political violence.
Little of it was fatal.
That
changed May 5 in the remote farming village of Chaona,
65 miles north of the capital, Harare. The village of
dirt streets had voted for Tsvangirai in the election’s
first round after decades of supporting Mugabe.
On the
evening of May 5—three days after Mugabe’s government
finally released the official results of the March 29
election—200 Mugabe supporters rampaged through its
streets. By the time the militia finished, seven people
were dead and the injured bore the hallmarks of a new
kind of political violence.
Women
were stripped and beaten so viciously that whole
sections of flesh fell away from their buttocks. Many
had to lie facedown in hospital beds during weeks of
recovery. Men’s genitals became targets. The official
postmortem report on Chaona opposition activist Aleck
Chiriseri listed crushed genitals among the causes of
death. Other men died the same way.
At the
funerals for Chiriseri and the others, opposition
activists noted the gruesome condition of the corpses.
Some in the crowds believed soldiers trained in torture
were behind the killings, not the more improvisational
ruling-party youth or liberation war veterans who
traditionally served as Mugabe’s enforcers.
“This is
what alerted me that now we are dealing with
professional killers,” said Shepherd Mushonga, a top
opposition leader for Mashonaland Central province,
which includes Chaona.
Mushonga,
a lawyer whose unlined face makes him look much younger
than his 48 years, won a seat in parliament in the March
vote on the strength of a village-by-village
organization that Tsvangirai’s party had worked hard to
assemble in rural Mashonaland.
After
Chaona, Mushonga turned that organization into a defense
force for his own village, Kodzwa. Three dozen
opposition activists, mostly men in their 20s and 30s,
took shifts patrolling the village at night. The men
armed themselves with sticks, shovels and axes small
enough to slip into their pants’ pockets, Mushonga said.
The same
militias that attacked Chaona worked their way gradually
south through the rural district of Chiweshe, hitting
Jingamvura, Bobo and, in the predawn hours of May 28,
Kodzwa, where about 200 families live between two
rivers.
When
about 25 ruling-party militia members attempted to enter
the village along its two dirt roads, Mushonga said, his
patrols blew whistles, a prearranged signal for women,
children and the elderly to flee south across one of the
rivers to the relative safety of a neighboring village.
Over the
next few hours, the two rival groups moved through
Kodzwa’s dark streets. Shortly after dawn, Mushonga’s
46-year-old brother, Leonard, and about 10 other
opposition activists cornered five of the ruling-party
militia members. One of the militia members was armed
with a bayonet, another a traditional club known as a
knobkerrie.
In the
scuffle, Leonard Mushonga and his group prevailed,
beating the five intruders severely. But he said that
this small, rare victory revealed evidence that elements
of the army had been deployed against them.
One of
the ruling-party men, Leonard Mushonga said, carried a
military identification badge. In a police report on the
incident, which led to the arrest of 26 opposition
activists, the soldier was identified as Zacks
Kanhukamwe, 47, a member of the Zimbabwe National Army.
A second man, Petros Nyguwa, 45, was listed as a
sergeant in the army.
He was
also listed as a member of Mugabe’s presidential guard.
The
death toll mounted through May, and almost all of the
fatalities were opposition activists. Tsvangirai’s
personal advance man, Tonderai Ndira, 32, was abducted
and killed. Police in riot gear raided opposition
headquarters in Harare, arresting hundreds of families
that had taken refuge there.
Even
some of Mugabe’s stalwarts grew uneasy, records of the
meetings show.
Vice
President Joice Mujuru, wife of former guerrilla
commander Solomon Mujuru and a woman whose ferocity
during the guerrilla war of the 1970s earned her the
nickname Spill Blood, warned the ruling party’s
politburo in a May 14 meeting that the violence might
backfire. Notes from that and other meetings, as well as
interviews with participants, make clear that she was
overruled repeatedly by Chiwenga, the military head, and
by former security chief Emerson Mnangagwa.
Mnangagwa, 61, earned his nickname in the mid-1980s
overseeing the so-called Gukurahundi, when a North
Korea-trained army brigade slaughtered thousands of
people in a southwestern region where Mugabe was
unpopular. From then on, Mnangagwa was known as the
Butcher of Matabeleland.
The
ruling party turned to Mnangagwa to manage Mugabe’s
runoff campaign after first-round results, delayed for
five weeks, showed Tsvangirai winning but not with the
majority needed to avoid a second round.
The
opposition, however, had won a clear parliamentary
majority.
In
private briefings to Mugabe’s politburo, Mnangagwa
expressed growing confidence that the violence was doing
its job, according to records of the meetings. After
Joice Mujuru raised concerns about the brutality in the
May 14 meeting, Mnangagwa said only, “Next agenda item,”
according to written notes and a party official who
witnessed the exchange.
At a
June 12 politburo meeting at party headquarters,
Mnangagwa delivered another upbeat report.
According to one participant, he told the group that
growing numbers of opposition activists in Mashonaland
Central, Matabeleland North and parts of Masvingo
province had been coerced into publicly renouncing their
ties with Tsvangirai. Such events were usually held in
the middle of the night, and featured the burning of
opposition party cards and other regalia.
Talk
within the ruling party began predicting a landslide
victory in the runoff vote, less than three weeks away.
Mugabe’s
demeanor also brightened, said some of those who
attended the meeting. Before it began, he joked with
both Mnangagwa and Joice Mujuru.
It was
the first time since the March vote, one party official
recalled, that Mugabe laughed in public.
The
opposition’s resistance in Chiweshe gradually withered
under intensifying attacks by ruling-party militias.
After the stalemate in Kodzwa, the militias continued
moving south in June, finally reaching Manomano in the
region’s southwestern corner.
The
opposition leader in Manomano was Gibbs Chironga, 44,
who had won a seat in the local council as part of
Tsvangirai’s first-round landslide in the area. The
Chirongas were shopkeepers with a busy store in Manomano.
To defend that store, they kept a pair of shotguns on
hand.
On June
20, a week before the runoff election, Mugabe’s militias
arrived in Manomano with an arsenal that had grown
increasingly advanced as the vote approached.
Some
carried AK-47 assault rifles, which are standard issue
for Zimbabwe’s army. For the attack on Manomano,
witnesses counted six of the weapons.
About
150 militia members, some carrying the rifles, circled
the Chironga family home. Gibbs Chironga fired warning
shots from his shotgun, relatives and other witnesses
recalled. Yet the militiamen kept coming. They broke
open the ceiling with a barrage of rocks, then used
hammers to batter down the walls.
When
Gibbs Chironga emerged, a militia member shot him with
an AK-47, said Hilton Chironga, his 41-year-old brother,
who was wounded by gunfire. Gibbs died soon after.
His
brother, sister and mother were beaten, then handcuffed
and forced to drink a herbicide that burned their mouths
and faces, relatives said.
Both
Hilton Chironga and his 76-year-old mother, Nelia
Chironga, were taken to the hospital in Harare, barely
able to eat or speak. The whereabouts of Gibbs
Chironga’s sister remain unknown. The family home was
burned to the ground.
“There’s
nothing to go back to at home,” Hilton Chironga said
softly, a bandage covering the wounds on his face and a
pair of tubes snaking into his nostrils.
“Even if
I go back, they’ll finish me off. That is what they
want,” he said.
Two days
later, as Mugabe’s militias intensified their attacks,
Tsvangirai dropped out of the race.
Groups
of ruling-party youths took over a field on the western
edge of downtown Harare where he was attempting to have
a rally and soon after, he announced that the
government’s campaign of violence had made it impossible
for him to continue. Privately, opposition officials
said the party organization had been so damaged that
they had no hope of winning the runoff vote.
On
election day, Mugabe’s militias drove voters to the
polls and tracked through ballot serial numbers those
who refused to vote or who cast ballots for Tsvangirai
despite his boycott.
The
84-year-old leader took the oath of office two days
later, for a sixth time. He waved a Bible in the air and
exchanged congratulatory handshakes with Chiwenga, whose
reelection plan he had adopted more than two months
before, and the rest of his military leaders.
About
the same time, a 29-year-old survivor of the first
assault in Chaona, Patrick Mapondera, emerged from the
hospital. His wife, who had also been badly beaten, was
recovering from skin grafts to her buttocks. She could
sit again.
Mapondera had been the opposition chairman for Chaona
and several surrounding villages. If and when the couple
returns home, he said, he does not expect to take up his
job again.
“They’ve
destroyed everything,” he said. |
