Let’s be honest about violence

Newsday

By Conway Tutani

February 18 2011

This past week the police have catalogued what they say are incidents of violence perpetrated by the MDC-T, which, to all intents and purposes, is being treated as an opposition party despite being part of government. The week has also seen the arrest of several MPs from the same party for public violence. Are these arrests justified or targeted?

The question needs to be asked because there have been similar trends whenever there is talk of elections.

From this arises a further question: Are these arrests ploys calculated to intimidate and cripple the MDC-T because this has been happening since 2000 when the then united MDC arrived on the scene as a powerful political force?

I hold no brief for the MDC-T, but for justice and fairness, and any keen, neutral observer cannot help but notice that in the police’s eyes, Zanu PF has been the victim and only hits back after provocation. There is indeed a pattern to all this.

A few examples will suffice in dissecting this questionable conduct of the police and the whole state machinery which remains firmly in the hands of Zanu PF as they control all the levers of power, specifically coercive power.

I say it is questionable because most, if not all, of these charges have not stood in a court of law or have completely disappeared into thin air but after doing great harm to the individuals named as suspects and at great economic cost.

Israeli Ari Ben-Menashe, a former spy and arms dealer who claimed he had a “personal relationship” with President Robert Mugabe, was the key prosecution witness in the treason trial of MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai in 2002.

He incriminated Tsvangirai in an assassination plot two weeks before the 2002 presidential election.

Ben-Menashe’s key piece of evidence cited was a statement issued by his political consultancy Dickens & Madson which said the firm in October the previous year had been contracted by Tsvangirai to kill Mugabe and secretly filmed a video of a meeting held in Montreal, Canada, to discuss how to instal Tsvangirai into power after the assassination.

Then High Court judge Justice Paddington Garwe dismissed the case, saying plainly: “Nowhere in the videotape is there a request of Ari Ben-Menashe to assassinate Mugabe and stage a coup.”

Justice minister Patrick Chinamasa was outraged, saying Tsvangirai “has been wrongly acquitted”.

For his lies, Menashe was paid $100 000 at a time the country was reeling from a fuel crisis, and that amount could have gone a long way in alleviating the shortage as it would have covered more than a month’s supply at the prevailing price.

Before the court case commenced, ZTV with much hype prepared the nation to watch the video footage on prime time news.

When the time came for screening, the video stuck on screen and when it eventually obliged, what appeared was a hardly audible black-and-white grainy film with squeaking noise. It left no doubt in people’s minds that there had been much ado about nothing.

The discovery in November 2001 of the body of war veteran Cain Nkala, who had been implicated in the abduction of MDC activist Patrick Nabanyama (who has since been declared dead) the previous year also raised the issue of the impartiality or not of the police and the supportive state machinery. MDC “suspects” were immediately arrested.

On November 13, 2001, statements made by the two “suspects” were broadcast on ZTV in which they implicated themselves and others in the abduction and subsequent murder of Nkala.

But their acquittal in 2003, after one of the longest-running trials in this country, left the government with egg on its face as in the Ben-Menashe case.

Then High Court judge Justice Sandra Mungwira (may her soul rest in peace) concluded that the state had not put up a solid case against the MDC activists for which the court could convict and ruled against placing them on their defence. She established that their “confessions” had been made under duress.

One of the suspects died soon after release because of the harsh prison conditions he had been subjected to without adequate medical care.

“The judgment brings us back to the question: Who killed Cain Nkala?” said MDC secretary for legal affairs David Coltart, continuing:

“The judgment is a serious indictment of Zanu PF. The acting Attorney General should immediately investigate the murder of Nkala, and I suggest he starts closer to home.”

These are but two examples where people faced the noose for what were clearly fabricated charges, but for a fair and transparent judicial system they would have been hanged.

In 2008, the year of the bloody elections, Zanu PF offices were gutted by a fire and the police immediately implicated the MDC-T for carrying out a petrol bomb attack.

However, it eventually emerged that the fire had been caused by petrol which was being kept on the premises for sale on the thriving black market at a time of critical shortage.

During that tumultuous period, MDC activists were alleged to have bombed trains and arrests were made. Nothing came of it, but the suspects suffered immense psychological and physical torture.

Then there was the pure facile fabrication about uniformed soldiers who had been recruited by the MDC-T to attack patrons in nightclubs in Chitungwiza, but nothing again came of this despite their being paraded in front of state media cameras.

Last month MDC-T supporters in Mbare reported an attack on them by Zanu PF supporters. What did the police do?

They came a little later, didn’t arrest the culprits, but rounded up the complainants. Does this not keep them awake at night?

Fortunately, the magistrate saw through all this and released the complainants from custody without paying bail.

Peace activists, like Woza, trying to do things as harmless as singing songs and distributing leaflets calling for harmony have been repeatedly attacked.

Now we are having police-sanctioned violent demonstrations in the city and this is being blamed on MDC “hijackers”.

Fascism came to power in Italy and Germany through a combination of street violence (carefully orchestrated from above but still undeniably with great mass support), deep infiltration into the police, bureaucracy and army, and the connivance of “centrist” political leaders.

Crude violations of laws and constitutional norms alternated with the Fascists’ loud protestations of respect for legality.

They alternated between an occasional apology and much more frequent and intensified aggressive violence.

Adolf Hitler repeatedly asserted his party’s respect for legality but meanwhile his security police chief Hermann Goëring “Nazified” the police, organised street encounters in which more than 50 anti-fascists were murdered, and set the scene for the notorious stage-managed Reichstag (parliament building) fire, after which first the communists, and then all opposition political parties and trade unions were quickly eliminated and destroyed. The central government did not lift a finger.

Now the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Defence and Home Affairs has summoned Police Commissioner-General Chihuri to testify before it on the upsurge in political violence, the nation hopes there won’t be the usual obfuscation and prevarication, and that he will distinguish genuine threats to national security from normal political activity in a modern, democratic state.

As for those behind the hooligans deployed on the streets to commit violence, they had better be careful.

In December 1971, demonstrations broke out in the main cities and towns in the then Rhodesia.

The Ian Smith regime wanted to force on the oppressed blacks a constitution agreed between itself and Britain (the so-called Pearce proposals) without any clear roadmap to majority rule and a justiciable Bill of Rights; in other words, the Pearce proposals virtually maintained the status quo of white dominance.

The “No” vote prevailed in 1972 as it similarly won the day in 2000. It’s impossible to suppress the people’s determined will as shown over vastly different political eras and circumstances despite organisational hurdles that were deliberately put in place.

Smith used traditional chiefs, dubious newly-created political parties, force and the one-sided state media to advance the “Yes” vote, but he still failed. Now it’s practically impossible to control the minds of the people because of advanced technology. Technology is a vast transformer.

The same scenario is being played out today with violence at Copac meetings and, in a contrived manner, only hand-picked individuals allowed to air the viewpoint of vested interests in the ruling elite to maintain the status quo while the views of the ordinary people and various stakeholders are suppressed.

But the initiative and power always swing back to the long-suffering people.

The 1971 protests descended into looting and shops owned by people of Asian origin at the southern end of Salisbury (now Harare) were broken into as they were within walking distance of the Mbare hostels, where there was a significant thuggish element.

One of the looters was arrested within days, tried and jailed. How was he caught when hundreds were involved in the looting?

In his rush to put on the new pair of trousers he had looted in the shop, he did not remove his ID from the old trousers he discarded in the shop.

So those responsible for this ongoing violence at whatever level will, sooner or later, leave incriminating evidence at the scene of the crime and pay heavily for that.

One of these days they are going to drop incontrovertible evidence linking them to all this violence. They can’t get away with this forever.

And this will finally force the hand of the police to act.