Hunzvi's surgery is turned into a torture centre
Marie Colvin
IT IS an evil inversion of the oath sworn by every doctor. In Harare,
men can walk when they pass through the door of the surgery of Dr
Chenjerai "Hitler" Hunzvi, the physician who has led the war veterans
occupying farms throughout Zimbabwe. But they leave so bruised and
battered that they can barely move.
Hunzvi's surgery in the Budiriro neighbourhood of the capital looks
innocent enough at first glance. It is a single-storey concrete building
with a tin roof, painted a pale blue and emblazoned with "Dr C Hunzvi,
Surgery" in block capitals across the front.
But merely stopping in the road outside draws an angry swarm of menacing
men through the front gate, who try to prevent the car from leaving when
they see a white face. This former place of healing has become a torture
centre.
A week and a half ago, about 50 men calling themselves war veterans
moved into Hunzvi's surgery compound and began sending out gangs to
kidnap local residents they suspected of supporting the opposition.
Once through the doctor's gates, their victims were subjected to hours
of beatings and sadistic abuse. Their move into Harare was evidence that
the violent campaign to intimidate people into voting for President
Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF party had widened from the farms to the cities,
the stronghold of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), the main
opposition party.
A man who can be identified only as Emanuel was forced into the centre
on Thursday. When I met him in the casualty ward of Harare hospital, he
wore a detached blue hood to try to hide his injuries. His left
cheekbone was swollen and his left eye blood-red.
He could barely hear because the "war veterans" had boxed his ears so
ferociously. His back was a mass of bruises and welts that went all the
way down his thighs. The welts on his buttocks were bleeding.
He wouldn't show me the worst of his injuries and I didn't want to look.
His captors had tied a rubber strip tight around the tip of his penis
and kept it bound for the 13 hours that they held him in the surgery,
preventing him from urinating.
Emanuel's sin was to buy a membership card for the MDC, the party that
hopes to challenge Zanu-PF in elections due by August. "About 12 of them
picked me up near my friend's shop at about noon," Emanuel, 28, said. "I
had no chance. They said you are MDC and drove me to Hunzvi's surgery."
Two other men were already on the floor, naked and bruised. His ordeal
began at once.
"They beat me with electric cables and wooden poles like table legs," he
said. "They kept shouting, tell us the names of your MDC members. I kept
telling them I am just a simple man, I am not participating in the
party, but they didn't care."
The Zanu-PF thugs based in Hunzvi's surgery are terrorising the
neighbourhood. Residents call the surgery "the concentration camp". They
named three other men who had been abducted, taken to the surgery and
beaten, and said many more had suffered the same fate.
Hunzvi toured the country last week in a government helicopter with a
delegation of white farmers, claiming to be seeking an end to the
occupation of farms that has provoked weeks of violence.
On Friday, just hours after Emanuel was released from Hunzvi's surgery,
the physician turned politician sat to Mugabe's left at a negotiating
session with white farmers to resolve Zimbabwe's crisis. Three white
farmers have been killed by his followers.
Mugabe, say those who have met him in recent weeks, turned on the
farmers not so much because he wanted their land but because he was
furious that they were helping finance the MDC, led by Morgan
Tsvangirai, the trade union leader.
Further anxiety swept the British community in Zimbabwe yesterday after
the publication of a report in The Herald, the state-owned newspaper,
that 86,000 people of British origin would be asked to surrender their
Zimbabwe passports.
Western diplomats played down the report, saying information would be
needed from the British government to implement any such initiative, and
was unlikely to be forthcoming.
HARARE, May 14 (AFP) - Former Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith
said Sunday that his cattle and maize farm in central Zimbabwe has
been invaded by a group of about 50 people, who were pegging out
plots.
He was not concerned about the situation, however, he told
reporters outside his house in Belgravia suburb here, as the
invaders seemed peaceful and farming operations had not been
disrupted.
"I'm not worried, I have more black friends than Mugabe," he
said, referring to President Robert Mugabe, who took over power from
Smith when Rhodesia gained independence from Britain in 1980 and
became Zimbabwe.
He believed those who had invaded his land were unemployed
miners from the town of Shurugwi, near his 200-hectare (490-acre)
farm Gwenara, and not, as was first believed, veterans of the 1970s
guerrilla war fought by black liberation groups against his white
rule.
War veterans have invaded some 1,200 white-owned commercial
farms since February, with the support of the ruling ZANU-PF party,
in an often violent land-grab that has the blessing of Mugabe.
"Our information is that they are not war veterans," the
81-year-old Smith said Sunday.
"They have been told that everybody else in the country has gone
on to farms and staked out the ground, so why shouldn't they try.
"And if they decide to try, whose farm is better than that bloke
Ian Smith's. Everyone knows him better than anyone else."
Describing his farm as "peaceful", he added: "There is no
politics on my farm."
Smith's son Alec earlier told AFP that the group was "not
confrontational in any way" and that normal farming operations were
continuing.
"Our feeling is that this is nothing to panic about," he said.
"Had it been different, if they were destroying farming
operations, (Ian Smith) would have gone down there to rescue
things," Alec Smith said, adding that his father runs about 1,000
head of Brahman cattle on the farm.
He said the invasion differed from those that have occurred on
other white-owned commercial farms.
"This does not appear to have been orchestrated by ZANU-PF,"
Smith said, referring to the ruling Zimbabwe African National
Union-Patriotic Front.
Smith declared unilateral independence for Rhodesia in November
1965, declaring it a republic in 1970.
His party, the Rhodesian Front, overwhelmingly won elections in
1970 and 1974, as government clashes with guerrilla fighters
intensified.
In 1977, Smith allowed for black majority rule, with his party
still in power, but was forced in 1979 to negotiate with Mugabe's
Patriotic Front.
Mugabe was elected prime minister of an independent Zimbabwe in
1980 under a new constitution. He was sworn in as president in
1987.