Missing activist was 'collecting evidence' on Mugabe crimes

Human rights workers are going into hiding across Zimbabwe as regime
launches new wave of arrests

A prominent Zimbabwean human rights activist abducted 12 days ago was
working on case files to be used as possible prosecution evidence against
members of President Robert Mugabe's regime, The Observer has learnt.

Jestina Mukoko, director of the Zimbabwe Peace Project (ZPP), is the most
prominent among 20 political and civil society activists who have
disappeared in the past six weeks.

According to fellow campaigners, Mukoko had established a network of
hundreds of monitors - mostly church people, teachers and ordinary township
dwellers - who had provided handwritten testimonies of the campaigns of
brutality carried out by Mugabe's government. The testimony could have been
used in any future investigation of human rights abuses by the Mugabe
regime. 'She had catalogued thousands of incidents of murder, assault,
torture, arson, and who the perpetrators are. The work was so meticulous it
could stand up in any court,' said one associate.

A human rights lawyer revealed that just before Mukoko's abduction the ZPP
had shifted from cataloguing violence in townships to the organised abuse of
food aid, where people were forced to support Mugabe in return for maize
deliveries. 'That upcoming report was going to be extremely embarrassing for
the ruling party,' said the lawyer.

Lawyers and opposition politicians believe the abduction of Mukoko was
carried out as part of a new campaign by elements in the ruling party to
intimidate and hinder the work of those gathering incriminating evidence of
human rights violations in the country. Most leading human rights figures
have in recent days gone into hiding. The ZPP has closed and the National
Association of Non-Governmental Organisations (Nango) has warned that 'there
are reasons to fear for the safety of every activist in the land'.

At about 5am on 3 December, 15 armed men wearing civilian clothing burst
into the home of Mukoko in Norton, 25 miles from the capital, Harare. Her
15-year-old son watched as the men, who claimed to be police officers, beat
up a gardener, then bundled her, barefoot and dressed only in her pyjamas,
into a waiting Mazda 323.

Within days, other abductions were carried out by groups of between six and
nine armed men in civilian clothes using unmarked vehicles without number
plates. On 5 December Zacharia Nkomo, 33, brother of leading human rights
lawyer Harrison Nkomo, was taken from his home in Masvingo.

Three days later Brodrick Takawira and Pascal Gonzo, both of the ZPP, were
abducted in Harare. And on 10 December, Gandhi Mudzwinga, a close associate
of opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, was kidnapped near Harare.

The ZPP, which was formed in 2000 and is funded by the Dutch and Canadian
governments, is one of the most respected groups in Zimbabwean civil
society. Its reports have been made available to African and Western
embassies in Harare and used in confidential diplomatic briefing documents.

They are likely to have been among documents seen by the European Union
before it added 11 military, police and ruling party officials to its latest
travel blacklist, made official last Monday.

Lawyer Otto Saki said he and his colleagues have made desperate attempts to
establish Mukoko's whereabouts. 'We struggled to find a judge to hear our
application. Three days after her abduction, a judge we finally managed to
speak to in the High Court car park told us it would be heard on Monday, 8
December.

'A week after she was taken, we obtained an order that the police search for
Jestina in all places of detention where they have jurisdiction - in other
words, everywhere except military compounds. But we have no news and the
police say they do not have her.'

Lawyers say the last time the courts acted so evasively was in April - just
after the first round of presidential elections - when Movement for
Democratic Change activist Tonderai Ndira was abducted.Ndira was later found
murdered.

JB Nkatazo of the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace said Mutoko's
abduction sent 'cold shivers' down the spines of all Zimbabwean activists.
'The new disappearances send a clear message to civil society that we will
be picked up one by one,' said Nkatazo.

'We must fear the worst for Mukoko,' said Effie Ncube, 35, of the
Masakhaneni Projects Trust for victims of violence. 'If she has been picked
up and tortured, that means she also knows who her assailants were.' Paying
tribute to her courage, he said: 'We last sat together two weeks ago. She
understood the nature of the regime and the risks she was taking. She was
documenting cases of human rights abuses to liberate Zimbabweans but also to
liberate Mugabe. She paraphrased Nelson Mandela who said the South African
transition was about liberating the racists.'

He added: 'What we do is very risky because the regime's attitude is that we
are giving information to the CIA or to MI6. Mugabe's rhetoric is calculated
to set African governments against Europeans, and so we, as civil society,
are viewed as agents of Western imperialism.'

One of the greatest fears of Mugabe and those involved in this year's
election-related violence is that the UN Security Council will call for an
International Criminal Court investigation, as it did over Sudanese
President Omar el-Bashir's involvement in the Darfur killings.

Statements in the past week by Mugabe and his aides provide clear evidence
of the regime's paranoia. Presidential spokesman George Charamba told the
state-run Herald newspaper that Western countries were planning to 'bring
Zimbabwe before the UN Security Council by claiming the cholera epidemic and
food shortages have incapacitated the government'.

On Friday, in a bizarre effort to parry criticism of the regime at
tomorrow's meeting in New York, Information Minister Sikhanyiso Ndlovu said:
'Gordon Brown must be taken to the United Nations Security Council for being
a threat to world peace and planting cholera and anthrax to invade
Zimbabwe.'

But Minister for Africa Lord Malloch-Brown said the meeting would focus on
the humanitarian crisis in Zimbabwe, especially concerns that UN medical
officials have been denied access to the country to assess the cholera
outbreak.

'I don't see the prospect of an international tribunal coming up tomorrow,'
he said. 'Mugabe is in a state of exaggerated paranoia. The arrests of the
human rights activists are part of that. But it is certainly the case that
Mugabe's actions this year have exposed him as never before. The day he
falls he has huge future vulnerability.'