Looting, Brutality marks Zanu-PF ‘Referendum’ campaign

Posted by ZDN on March 12, 2010

MDC party officials received calls in the early hours of this morning from their representatives in Mudzi North to report violence and state-sponsored livestock rustling in Chimkoko village.

A distraught MDC official reported that Zanu PF thugs were raiding the homes of MDC supporters and taking their livestock – goats, cattle and chickens – while threatening to come back and “fight you, because you want to support the new Constitution”. On behalf of the villagers, he begged for protection from the government.

Villagers are struggling to survive in this area, where scant rainfall has caused crops to fail. The families now face the terrible prospect of starvation. In the past, when the MDC-supporting householders attempt to protect themselves or their property by fighting back, armed forces are sent in to arrest the “perpetrators of unrest”, who always turn out to be the MDC plaintiffs. This has been the Zanu-PF regime’s modus operandi since the first violent land invasions on commercial farms in 2000. Every report made to Police either resulted in the complainant becoming the accused, or complete inaction – the response being “we cannot get involved, because it is political”. Police officers who ‘interfere’ in these cases lose their jobs and pensions.

Mudzi, in Mashonaland East province, suffered greatly from intensive Zanu-PF perpetrated violence in 2008-09. In Mashonaland East from Jan 2008 to Dec 2009, 60 men and 11 women were brutally murdered for being MDC supporters or officials. Two Zanu-PF Members of Parliament from this province, who can be identified by hundreds of witnesses, are known to have been involved in at least three of the most brutal and sadistic of these murders.

Escalating political terrorism is the very reason that SADC and or AU Peacekeepers should be deployed here immediately in Zimbabwe, to pre-empt and possibly prevent the nationwide spread violence that is imminent. Both Genocide Watch and Amnesty International have raised the level of their ‘genocide warning’ index for Zimbabwe in the past few months.

This does not bode well for for South Africa, which is hoping to stage a successful and peaceful Soccer World Cup in just three months’ time.