How do I pass my time?

UN torture investigator detained in Harare

Manfred Nowak(Left)

HARARE – State security agents detained a top United Nations human rights expert on a fact-finding mission at the Harare International Airport Wednesday night after government cancelled his visit at the last minute.Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, Manfred Nowak, who was invited by the government to conduct an official fact-finding mission, from October 28 to November 4, faced deportation Thursday morning.

He was arrested as he disembarked from the same plane that brought in foreign ministers who flew into Harare for talks with President Robert Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai. The MDC leader cut all communication with Mugabe two weeks ago over a catalogue of problems blighting the troubled eight-month old administration.

DRC President Joseph Kabila also arrived later.

Despite the presence of SADC foreign ministers and head of State, security agents still took Norwak into custody.

The Austrian academic was only informed upon his arrival in Johannesburg, in transit to Harare, that the mission had been postponed by the government on October 26, stating that it “regrets to advise that due to the previously unanticipated consultative process currently taking place in Harare involving the government of national unity and the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the Government of Zimbabwe will be unable to receive the Special Rapporteur on the proposed dates.”

Nowak said in a press release that he welcomed the SADC initiative, as well as all efforts to resolve the political crisis in Zimbabwe.

But he stated that he was not convinced that the consultations, scheduled to be held today, were a valid reason to cancel his eight-day mission shortly before he was due to arrive.

Earlier this year, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) led by Tsvangirai, and President Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party formed a government of national unity, following months of tension after disputed presidential elections.

Allegations that MDC supporters and human rights defenders have been arrested, harassed and intimidated in recent days underscore the urgent need for an objective fact-finding mission by an independent UN expert, Nowak stressed.

Observers say the blockade was meant to white-wash Mugabe’s appalling human rights record and the recent crackdown on the MDC, characterised by abductions of low-key party officials. Ahead of Nowak’s visit, security agents abducted two MDC officials, raided an MDC house and detained two MDC MPs.

Nowak, appointed Special Rapporteur on 1 December 2004 by the UN Commission on Human Rights, is independent from any government and serves in his individual capacity. He has previously served as member of the Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances, the UN expert on missing persons in the former Yugoslavia, the UN expert on legal questions on enforced disappearances, and as a judge at the Human Rights Chamber for Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Nowak is Professor of Constitutional Law and Human Rights at the University of Vienna and Director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights.

Police stop DRC refugees from trekking home

Photo: Judith Basutama/IRIN

The refugees had refused to be relocated to another camp

Police in Burundi have forcibly prevented a group of refugees from leaving a camp because they intended to trek home to Democratic Republic of Congo, according to residents.

“The police fired and we all ran away. Two have been injured; three others lost consciousness because of fear. They have been taken to Kibumbu hospital for care,” one refugee told IRIN on 6 October.

A leader of the refugees, Freddy Gakunzi, said police had sealed off the camp early in the morning to prevent about 2,000 refugees in the camp in Gihinga, who have refused to be relocated to another camp in Burundi, from making good their pledge to return to eastern DRC, despite major military operations there.

The camp was officially closed on 30 September.

In the morning, the Mwaro local administration ordered people to dismantle the camp, removing plastic shelters. Some refugees were still there with their mattresses, kitchen utensils, bags and jerry cans and other belongings.

Felix Shikiro said he would stay with friends locally while waiting for a promised lift back to DRC.

Some refugees say they were beaten and brutalized. Some women bore the marks of beatings on their hands. One woman with a child on her back was seen handcuffed and forced to board a police van.

The UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, has advised against a return to DRC at this stage.

“The conditions which forced the refugees into exile in June 2004 … still essentially prevail,” UNHCR said in a statement on 5 October.

“It would be irresponsible to allow refugees to expose themselves to almost certain risk through the decision to return,” said Clementine Nkweta-Salami, UNHCR representative to Burundi, in the statement.

Speaking on local radio, Burundi first deputy president, Yves Sahinguvu, said: “No one can prevent a refugee from repatriating but they should make sure they are briefed on the situation prevailing in their country of origin so they do not take risks.”

Jestina Mukoko – “Not bitter, but better”

Jestina Mukoko’s abduction, detention and torture in 2008, and the subsequent dropping of all charges by a full bench of Zimbabwe’s Supreme Court on 28 September 2009, is serving as a timeline in a country emerging from the depths of despair into the first glimmer of hope.

Mukoko, a single mother, journalist and human rights campaigner, became a cause célèbre for both local and international human rights organizations, with her personal ordeal seen as a representation of the state’s repression and its contempt for the rule of law.

The Supreme Court said in its judgment: “The court unanimously concludes that the state, through its agents, violated the applicant’s constitutional rights protected under the constitution of Zimbabwe to an extent entitling the applicant to a permanent stay of criminal prosecution associated with the above violations.”

Mukoko was charged with banditry, but many believe her work of collating the litany of human rights abuses committed against political activists, unionists and civil society members by President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF government – which held power before the current unity government – ensured that she would occupy the same dank prisons and suffer the same beatings as those whose stories she had documented.

After the judgment she told IRIN: “I came out of this experience not a bitter person, but a better person; better in the sense that I was able to understand what fellow Zimbabwean activists had been going through all this time.”

In 2008 Zimbabwe was trapped in a vortex of political violence, widespread hunger, hyperinflation and keenly contested elections that threatened to end Mugabe’s nearly three decades of rule.

Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and now prime minister, withdrew from the second round of the presidential poll – after narrowly failing to win the first round outright – in protest over the deaths of scores of activists, and the torture of hundreds if not thousands more.

Mukoko, head of the Zimbabwe Peace Project, a non-governmental organization that detailed human rights abuses such as gang rape and political violence allegedly perpetrated by the security forces, patiently transcribed the harrowing experiences of those who survived while they recuperated in hospitals or safe houses, fearing further arrests.

The international community, including African election monitors, declared Mugabe’s uncontested presidential victory as hollow. On 15 September 2008, ZANU-PF and the MDC signed a power-sharing agreement, but it was only enacted in February 2009 with the formation of the unity government. The intervening months were marked by increased reports of state violence, meticulously documented by Mukoko.

“I am so relieved to know that the charges against me have been dropped, but I think the victory was only possible because of the support from the international community, fellow journalists and colleagues in civic society, and human rights defenders,” she told IRIN.

The abduction

In the early hours of 13 December 2008 a group of masked men and a woman hauled Mukoko from her bed, and under the terrified gaze of her teenage son, bundled her into an unmarked car and disappeared as fast as they had arrived.

Dressed in only her nightdress, her prescription medicine left by her bedside, she disappeared without a trace. Over the next few days, then weeks, people expected her body to be found by the roadside, or stumbled upon in a shallow grave by someone collecting firewood in the bush.

In fact, she was constantly being moved from one police station to another and other places of detention. Disorientated and suffering round after round of interrogation, during which she was made to kneel on gravel, punctuated with beatings on the soles of her feet, to try to force her to admit she was recruiting Zimbabweans for military training in neighbouring Botswana.

On 2 March 2009, a month after the unity government was formed, amid a furore over her detention by local and international journalists as well as human rights organizations, she was released on bail. She immediately filed a court challenge over the manner of her “arrest”, and violation of her human rights.

Emotional scars

“I view the judgment in a positive sense, in that it resulted in a reform of the judiciary, especially at a time when the country is going through a constitution-making process, and that the same charges brought against other activists will be dropped,” she said.

The emotional scars of her ordeal are still fresh. “It is difficult at this stage to give a detailed account of what I went through because it is such an emotional subject. I would really have to psych up for that kind of discussion.”

The question that Mukoko cannot answer is why she was targeted for abduction. “It has been suggested that it may have been because of the work that our organization was doing, but I was shocked that I was being charged for recruiting people to undergo military training.”

The ordeal has not deterred her or her organization from documenting human rights abuses.

“I am a widowed mother, and what I went through brought a lot of trauma to my family, especially to my son, who did not know if he had lost the only remaining parent that he had.”

LRA torture of civilians continues

(IRIN) – The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) is continuing to kill and kidnap civilians in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), according to the UN.

In the first fortnight of July alone, the Ugandan rebel group carried out 33 attacks in the districts of Upper and Lower Uele, killing 26 civilians and abducting 144, according to a report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Six of those abducted were children. The LRA has a long history of boosting its ranks by kidnapping children, forcing boys to fight and girls into sexual slavery. On 12 July, DRC troops clashed with LRA fighters in the area, freeing one abducted child, the report stated.

Fifteen children abducted by the LRA on the night of 14 July were freed a few hours later after local self-defence groups took on the Ugandan rebels, according to Radio Okapi, which is run by the UN Mission in DRC (MONUC).

Following an assault by Ugandan troops in December – mounted after Joseph Kony, the LRA leader and International Criminal Court indictee, yet again failed to sign a peace deal – the rebel group went on the rampage in northeastern DRC, killing more than 1,000 civilians.

Read the full article here

« Previous Page