Events in Zimbabwe took an ominous turn today as Robert Mugabe’s regime claimed that the air force commander, Air Marshal Perence Shiri, had been the victim of an assassination attempt. With the collapse of mediation talks, the always-fragile power-sharing agreement is effectively dead and indications suggest the regime is preparing an all-out offensive against the democratic opposition.
Tendai Biti, secretary general of the Movement for Democratic Change, fears that the regime will use the incident, in which Shirii was reportedly shot in the hand, as a “Reichstag” excuse to suppress all opposition. “Mugabe can kill two birds with one stone,” Biti said. “He can use it as a way of attacking us, and then attacking whatever faction of ZANU-PF he wants to decimate.”
A leading member of the Joint Operations Command, the security service hard-liners currently guiding Mugabe, Shiri is deeply implicated in recent atrocities. He is also Mugabe’s cousin and headed the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade that perpetrated the Ndebele massacres of between 8,000-20,000 civilians from 1982 and 1987.
Opposition forces have faced incrementally growing repression over recent weeks. A march by several hundred civil society activists of the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) was attacked by police using tear gas and dogs. International labor unions condemned the arrests and beatings of more than 48 union activists, including the arrest of Wellington Chibebe, Secretary General of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions.
Other activists have been quietly spirited away or ‘disappeared’ in a manner eerily reminiscent of Latin America’s worst military dictatorships.
Where is Jestina Mukoko? asks Norman Geras, a British blogger who has written consistently and intelligently on the crisis in Zimbabwe. Mukoko resigned from state television to lead the Zimbabwe Peace Project, a human rights monitoring network. He links to this report detailing abductions of Zimbabwean human rights activists and to this story detailing the circumstances of Mukoko’s abduction:
She has collected evidence of tens of thousands of abuses in the past decade. Her monthly reports have detailed the routine tyranny of violence, the shortage of food and the denial of free speech that characterise Zimbabwean life today, particularly in rural areas.
Mukoko pioneered the use of information technology to map Zanu-PF’s attacks on its opponents. Before elections last March she presented her findings publicly in a Harare hotel. She knew her audience included members of the CIO but nevertheless set out patterns of violence in the 2002 and 2005 elections and predicted where trouble would occur in 2008.
The places she identified – such as Manicaland and Masvingo provinces – were indeed subjected to Zanu-PF campaigns of mass eviction, communal beating and murder. Opposition figures believe much of Zimbabwe’s current tragedy might have been avoided if international observers had followed her advice and gone to such trouble spots.
Mukoko has been an outspoken critic of Zimbabwe’s system of supplying food. Her analysis shows food is supplied to those showing loyalty to the ruling party and is denied to opposition supporters.
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