FEATURES
Rule of the lawless
Jan Raath on the continuing
story of murder and intimidation in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe
Harare
Most brutal regimes dispatch troublesome colleagues and pretend
afterward to know nothing about it. Lenin perfected the wiping from
memory of freshly eliminated aides. President Robert Mugabe’s government,
according to a decision just handed down by a high court judge in
Harare, has now produced the ideal package for dealing with the
disposal of a disloyal servant. Murder him when he becomes unreliable,
declare him a national hero before the corpse grows cold, blame
the opposition for his demise and then lay into them with righteous
vengeance.
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‘I’m sure David Blunkett will respect
our privacy.’ |
Cain Nkala was the leader of Mugabe’s war veteran rabble in Matabeleland
in 2000. He directed both the violent invasion of white farms and
the ruling Zanu PF party’s campaign of savage intimidation of the
opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) before the parliamentary
elections in June that year. He was implicated in the abduction in
Bulawayo of veteran opposition activist Patrick Nyabanyana, the day
before the election. A year later Nyabanyana had still not been found
and, as a reluctant concession to a huge outcry, authorities had Nkala
charged with kidnapping and then murder.
Suddenly insecure, Nkala began talking. He admitted abducting Nyabanyana
but said he had handed him over to one of Mugabe’s cabinet ministers.
He spoke of fleeing to Britain. Retribution came fast. On 5 November
2001, Nkala himself was kidnapped from his home by eight men with
AK47 assault rifles. A week later police announced that his body had
been found, strangled, in a shallow grave outside Bulawayo.
The rest ran according to established Zanu PF practice. The state
media loosed a barrage of vilification that blamed the opposition
MDC and denounced it as ‘a violent terrorist organisation’. State
television hourly showed grisly footage of the body being ‘discovered’.
A reporter in the government press was curiously able to describe
how Nkala sang hymns as he was being strangled with a shoelace.
Mugabe’s politburo swiftly declared him a ‘national hero’. At his
burial in Heroes’ Acre — reserved only for the Zanu PF faithful —
outside Harare, Mugabe laid it on thick. ‘Comrade Nkala’s brutal murder
was the bloody outcome of an orchestrated, much wider and carefully
planned terrorist plot by internal and external enemy forces’ who
included the MDC, white farmers, Selous Scouts and even the Westminster
Foundation. Zanu PF mobs went on the rampage in Bulawayo and Harare,
burnt down buildings and left hundreds injured.
About the same time, six MDC activists, including the national treasurer,
Fletcher Dulini-Ncube, were arrested on murder charges. Three were
tortured until they signed ‘confessions’. For the next year, in prison,
all six were subjected to horrible neglect — Ncube lost an eye. Court
orders for their release were ignored. Then their trial began in January
2002, and the authorities encountered an unexpected obstacle — an
upright judge.
Mugabe badly needed a guilty verdict. Despite a sustained five-year
torrent of accusations of treachery and violence, the government has
failed to make a single case stick against the MDC. A murder conviction
could permanently disable the MDC’s reputation as an organisation
based on tolerance and non-violence, and wreck its considerable international
support.
The government wanted a conviction so badly that the judge, Sandra
Mungwira, who was undergoing chemotherapy for cancer, was threatened.
Her clerk was hounded by Central Intelligence Organisation agents
who came to his office and demanded copies of her judgment. When he
said he couldn’t get them, they told him to snoop into her computer.
Edith Mushore, one of the defence lawyers, was phoned repeatedly after
midnight and menaced by Joseph Chinotimba, the war veteran gangster
who terrorised former chief justice Anthony Gubbay into resigning
(and whom Mugabe routinely introduces to visiting heads of state).
She was followed daily to and from work and when she ferried her children
to school. CIO agents would telephone Erik Morris, another lawyer,
and threaten his wife and children.
It was all spectacularly in vain. Mungwira said all 14 police involved
in the investigation ‘spewed forth untruths’ throughout the trial,
their records were ‘an appalling piece of fiction’ and they had conducted
themselves ‘in a shameless fashion’ by torturing the suspects. She
found that most of the six were arrested on murder charges days before
police had officially found Nkala’s body. She acquitted them all.
Who, then, killed Cain Nkala?
Mungwira was excluded from examining culpability beyond the six MDC
accused. However, she made a highly significant acknowledgment that
‘a third force’ was controlling the police in the case. She effectively,
with great courage, pointed directly to the government as the murderer.
She referred to the constant appearance in evidence of two related
organisations. The first was a group of senior army, police, CIO officers
and war veterans called the Joint Operational Command. It is a continuation
of a counter-insurgency structure that the Rhodesian security forces
used in the civil war against black nationalist guerrillas in the
Seventies.
The second was a group called ‘the ferrets’, a unit of high-ranking
and experienced CIO agents selected for important covert operations.
The involvement of these two organisations reveals Mugabe’s comprehensive
abuse of national police, defence and intelligence resources as his
private political property. Worse, it shows that he is conducting
his political contest with the MDC, which espouses its principles
of transparency and fair play with probably more commitment than I
have seen elsewhere in Africa, as a military operation.
As it was in the Rhodesian era, the job of the senior officers and
‘the ferrets’ is surveillance, infiltration, disinformation, covering-up
and, most importantly, elimination and assassination.
Zanu PF is notorious for slaughtering its own. An international commission
blamed it for assassinating party leader Herbert Chitepo in Zambia
in 1975. No one believes that the decapitation of Josiah Tongogara,
the head of Mugabe’s army, in Mozambique in 1980 was the result of
a car accident.
Ask any ordinary Zimbabwean how several others, also buried at Heroes’
Acre, got there and the answer is always: ‘It’s obvious.’
It remains for the attorney-general to order an investigation into
Nkala’s murder. David Coltart, the MDC MP whose election agent was
Patrick Nyabanyana, says the attorney-general should now look ‘closer
to home’. ‘We always knew it was Zanu PF,’ he says.
Mungwira is quitting, the 11th judge to do so since 2001. The Herald
and Zimbabwe television broadcast her verdict, but in such paucity
of detail that it could have been about a rural beerhall murder. The
file on Nyabanyana’s disappearance remains undisturbed. The ‘third
force’ is in control.
© 2004 The Spectator.co.uk
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