Criminalising Zimbabwe’s human rights defenders
Criminalising Zimbabwe’s human rights defenders isn’t necessarily a new strategy for the police, but it is one they’ve adopted in a particularly cunning manner in recent months.
Last Thursday night, ZBC viewers saw Zimbabwe’s Police Commissioner Augustine Chihuri personally name Zimbabwe Peace Project director Jestina Mukoko as “wanted,” accusing her of operating an illegal organization. According to someone who watched the broadcast, “If you didn’t know any better, after you watched the news, you’d think Jestina was a criminal.”
In a segment rich with the fabrications standard in state propaganda, the police described her as “on the run,” even though police had been in touch with her lawyers all week. Mukoko wasn’t in hiding, but she was the wrong person to answer the police’s questions, which were more suitably directed to the ZPP Board Chairperson, not its Director.
Particularly given her 2008 abduction, disappearance and 89-day detention, which she speaks about movingly in this Oslo Freedom Forum talk, Mukoko was not in a rush to enter police custody. Be that as it may, on Friday Mukoko presented herself to the police, and was charged with “a litany of baseless charges.” Much to the relief of her lawyers, colleagues and Zimbabwe’s human rights community more generally, Mukoko was not detained on Friday. Civil society has condemned the harassment of Mukoko and other human rights defenders. It would appear Mukoko is being targeted for the work of the Zimbabwe Peace Project in monitoring violence – particularly election related and political violence.
Thus, it’s all the more ironic that the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission has announced that it “won’t accredit NGOs under probe.” For example, ZEC turned down a request from ZimRights to observe the referendum. ZimRights staff including Leo Chamahwinya and Okay Machisa have been subject to police raids, prolonged detention and harassment since December last year. The charges against the ZimRights team are just as baseless as those against Mukoko and ZPP.
It’s a cunning strategy worthy of a George Orwell story – Send the police to investigate the organisations which monitor and report on violence and elections, and then tell these organisations that they can’t be accredited to observe elections, because they’re “under investigation.”