Zimbabwe:Ndira body found

by Peta Thornycroft
Harare
May 22, 2008

Tonderai Ndira’s body was identified in the mortuary at Harare’s Parirenyatwa Hospital by a bangle around what had been his wrist.

He had been dead a long time, or at least a week as it was on May 14, in the early hours of the morning that this extraordinary activist, probably the most persecuted political personality in Zimbabwe, was snatched from his working class home in Mabvuku township, eastern Harare.

They came at night, about 10 of them, and in front of his children, Raphael 9 and Linette 6, and his wife Plaxedes, beat him up and then dragged him screaming into a white double cab.

Tonderai Ndira, 33, was certainly Zimbabwe’s most renowned street activist who had been arrested and beaten up and hospitalised scores of times since he began campaigning for democracy in late 1999.

His decomposing, naked body was found in the bush near the old commercial farming district Goromonzi, about 40 km south east of Harare, close to the torture centre run by the security forces, usually the Zimbabwe National Army, where so many Zimbabweans have been worked over since independence.

Hours after his brothers identified the body - it was so decomposed and mutilated that his own father was not sure whether the long, slender remains on the slab was his oldest son - the police began harrassing the family saying they could not have the body for burial.

His brother Cosmos Ndira said yesterday: “He was in the mortuary where they keep the unknown people, the street kids. He was naked. The bangle was given to him by his wife.

“I think Tonde was arrested 35 times, but maybe more, we lost count. We were all so happy after the elections, thinking that the eight years was now over and we could begin new lives.

“We often talked about dying, and Tonde often used to tell us that he would be killed by Zanu PF because he was arrested and beaten up so often.”

Ndira was head of the Movement for Democratic Change’s provincial security department in Harare.

He was detained for five months last year in the pitiful prison cells, unfit for human occupation, and was suing home affairs minister Kembo Mohadi and police commissioner Augustine Chihuri for wrongful arrest.

Despite all the arrests since the MDC was launched Ndira was never brought to trial. All charges, including a two year period when he was remanded every two months, were dropped for lack of evidence.

The police have failed to convict a single MDC activist among the tens of thousands detained in the last eight years.

Ndira was one of the activists who was, occasionally openly critical of the MDC when he believed it had gone wrong.

He didn’t believe in “my party right or wrong” but was a founding member of the party and destined for high office one day although he always saw himself as a background activist.

“I do this for my children. I want them to have a better life than me,” he told journalists who asked him why he kept on going.

His death came on a day when two more MDC activists were buried at the Warren Park cemetery west of Harare. One of their friends was buried last Sunday.

Those three were beaten to death in a rural area about 65 km north east of Harare where most, but certainly not all of the violence has taken place since the March 29 elections.

No one is sure how many people have died since Zanu PF and President Robert Mugabe were defeated in parliamentary and presidential elections. So far 42 victims have been identified by relatives, but many people believe the real toll is much higher especially in remote parts of northern Zimbabwe. If there are any Zanu PF victims, police and the party have failed to provide details.

At least 600 terrified people including dozens of nursing mothers and babies, are sheltering at the MDC’S Harare headquarters, Harvest House.

They have no blankets nor food, and the ablution facilities are blocked, and the conditions are inhuman as the building is an office block.

So far neither the International Committee of the Red Cross nor the United Nations has even been to inspect or assist the internally displaced,

”It is an appalling crisis,” said MDC lawyer Alec Muchadahama yesterday.

“The people are supposed to go to a neutral area so they can get international assistance. Where is a neutral area? Where should they go?” he said.

“This is Zimbabwe’s darkest hour. Will anything or anyone rescue us? Can there be an end to this? We can’t keep up with it,” he said, and admitted he was exhausted.

Scores are in detention including two recently elected MDC MP’s, Iain Kay, Amos Chibaya and Dr Alois Mudzingwa, MDC executive member and close friend of MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai.

Kay was one of the first white farmers to be assaulted by Mugabe’s “war veterans” in 2000, and he was later forced off his farm. He won his seat on March 29 with support from people from his old farming area, around Marondera, 70 km south east of Harare.

He and Chibaya are being charged with incitement to public violence, according to Muchadahama and were due to appear in their local magistrate’s court yesterday.

No one has been arrested in connection with any of the MDC murders, nor in connection with tens of thousands who have been assaulted. No one has been arrested for arson of village after village in the last three weeks either.

“We can’t really keep up with all the deaths and arrests. I have to go and attend to someone else from the national executive who has been arrested.” Mchadahama said.

[Posted with Author's Permission]

In Zimbabwe today, politics is violence

In previous elections paramilitary violence came before the actual polling, usually slowing down in the week or so before polling when international election observers and the world press arrived. This has not been the case in the present elections, as violence since the beginning of May has been reported by numerous and diverse sources to be perpetrated by the police, military, and the militias under ZANU-PF control. The intention of this political violence is to terrorize, destroy, and break the will of the MDC and their supporters leading up to the June 27th run-off for the presidential election. What makes the political violence feel like such an excessively brutal betrayal this time around is that it had appeared, for a brief period in April, as if the impressive showing of the MDC in the election and the wide support it had gained would have insulated it from further reprisals from the ZANU-PF before the run-off. After all, wasn’t the world watching this time? This hope for a peaceful campaign was not to happen. As a number of the contributions to this special issue have suggested, violence is the only language ZANU-PF knows, and it has once again unleashed its complete arsenal, resulting in the killing of 50 MDC members and the displacement of hundreds of people, including rural villagers, teachers, and activists.

The innovation of posting the polling results immediately outside the polling stations should have made it easier for the MDC to prove to officials and the world that they had won--the hoped for “orange” revolution result where a corrupt regime is forced from office after stealing yet another election. Instead, this innovation has only served to become the record keeping apparatus of violence for the military, police, and militias. Soldiers, police, and the party youth were sent to the rural districts and villages where the MDC did well, sent out to “re-educate” the rural population by using tactics developed during the liberation war to punish villagers who were accused of working with the Rhodesian forces. The American Ambassador, James McGee, along with his British, Australian, and Tanzanian counterparts, toured the military camps set up for reeducation and visited victims of torture and violence. He reported being shown ledgers with names of villagers alleged to have supported the MDC in the March 29th elections, lists of names of people to bring in for interrogation and re-education. [See Robert Dixon, “The not-so-diplomatic ambassador to Zimbabwe”, LA Times, May 23, 2008 ]
The reports from early May also included collective punishment of those rural villages where records showed the citizens had voted against the ruling party. Public torture has been reported, resorting to the gouging out of eyes and the cutting off of ears. Women have been raped, others have been beaten on their buttocks with plastic pipes and forced to sit on their wounds all day in the sun. A number of villagers died of these injuries or were beaten to death. [See Jong Kandemiri and Blessing Zulu, “Politically Motivated Attack on Zimbabwean Villagers Said to Leave 11 Dead” VOA News, 6 May 2008]

In addition to collective punishment and harassment of rural voters, there have been direct attacks against MDC organizers and candidates. On Monday, May 26th, reports indicated that the body of MDC candidate Shepard Jani was found dumped on a farm near Goromonzi. Jani had lost in the election to ZANU-PF’s Tendai Bright Makunde, but it is believed ZANU-PF is targeting the MDC in Murehwa “…because they are very effective at organizing and had produced very good results for the MDC in the province.” [See Tererai Karimakwenda, “Abducted MDC candidate Jani found dead” (May 26, 2008)]

Peta Thornycroft provides an account (see her article on this blog) of the disappearance, murder, and funeral of MDC activist Tonderai Ndira. Thornicroft’s piece shows that the ruling party and its close associates are going after key MDC activists with a greater vengeance and desperation than in the past. Ndira, aged 33, had reportedly been arrested 35 times previously by the state. This time, the way he was taken from his home, tortured, his body mutilated and then dumped at the central hospital morgue shows the extreme forms of violence the ruling party has decided to use. [Farai Sevenzo also wrote a very thoughtful account of Ndira’s death for the BBC News “Death of a Zimbabwean Activist”]

While those who carry out these acts do so with a sense of impunity, the leaders hope they have timed the violence to avoid having the world pay attention and actually do something about it. They have worked out this timing fairly well in the past. The world only tunes into Zimbabwe for a brief time and then moves on to the next “crisis”. The xenophobic attacks in South Africa, as clearly as they implicated Thabo Mbeki’s “quiet diplomacy” with Zimbabwe over the past 8 years, also turned the world press’s gaze away from the political violence in Zimbabwe. Concerned scholars need to think of ways to keep the focus on Zimbabwe, and to help disseminate the stories written by so many brave journalists inside Zimbabwe, in South Africa, and elsewhere.

The funeral of Tonderai Ndira may turn out to be a turning point in the history of the opposition. As Peta Thornycroft and others who participated have written, the event symbolized the “war” in Zimbabwe. Just as Zimbabwean nationalism has had a host of martyred heroes, just as the funerals of Steven Biko and so many others in South Africa represented the “no turning back” attitude of the militants in the ANC and PAC, the public display of the MDC burying a hero of the ongoing Zimbabwean struggle against totalitarianism (once again) will likely become a major event in Zimbabwean history. The challenge for those who care about the future of Zimbabwe is not to let this orchestrated campaign of terror and political violence continue without protest.