Zimbabweans cannot protect themselves

In papers filed at the High Court, Didymus Mutasa, head of Mugabe’s much reviled spy agency, the CIO, admitted this appalling truth – something we had known along but which the government had never confirmed.State agents kidnapped Jestina Mukoko, director of The Zimbabwe Peace Project engaged in cataloguing atrocities committed by the Mugabe regime against its own people, from her home in early December. When she was finally brought to court after weeks of torment, Jestina told the judge that she had been blindfolded, tortured and poisoned while in custody.

A doctor who was eventually allowed to visit her in prison, said he was shocked by her condition and recommended that she be moved to hospital for urgent treatment. The judge agreed and issued a court order to this effect – which has until now been contemptuously ignored by the police. Instead. Jestina and more than 40 other MDC supporters and human rights activists have been remanded in custody in appalling conditions until January 16th. Jestina is understood to be in solitary confinement. Her family fears for her life.

The police initially lied to the courts – claiming that they did not know what had happened to Jestina, that she was not in their custody and that they were investigating the matter as a kidnapping. Despite perjury being a criminal offence in Zimbabwe, nothing has yet happened to the policeman who misled the judicial authorities.It is worth noting that Jestina’s kidnapping follows the same pattern of the state-sponsored kidnapping of several other activists, most of them MDC officials, who were later found murdered. They have all been kidnapped by groups of armed men in plain clothes driving unmarked vehicles.

At a meeting in Johannesburg this week, the senior leadership of the MDC under its president Morgan Tsvangirai, decided that it would not budge from its insistence that the Mugabe regime must not be allowed to continue to control the police force under any new government of national unity. They are absolutely right.

If Zimbabweans cannot seek protection from the courts against the agents of a terrorist government, then surely the international community has a moral obligation to step in?