JOHANNESBURG - AIDS-Free World, a human-rights group has said it is launching a legal investigation into crimes against humanity that occurred in Zimbabwe during the run-up to the June 27 elections.

The investigation will focus on women and girls who were subjected to a wide range of sexual violence including gang rape, beatings, torture and being exposed to the threat of HIV infection. The widespread abuse of women was part of a Zanu-PF campaign of violence against the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party.

In a report released at the XVII International AIDS Conference in Mexico, Stephen Lewis a former UN special envoy for AIDS in Africa who set up the United States based human-rights group said his group is collecting legal evidence of politically aggravated mass rape to women in Zimbabwe by President Robert Mugabe's youth militia and state agents in a bid to build a strong case for prosecuting president Mugabe and the men responsible.

He said his group will shortly dispatch a team of international human rights lawyers to Zimbabwe to interview the rape survivors and document their cases and gather testimony for prosecutions that could take place domestically or in an international tribunal after Mugabe leaves power.

"We will muster every conceivable resource to support the struggle by these courageous women. Impunity in Zimbabwe must end for every rapist and every figure, up and down the chain of command, who has perpetrated, encouraged or master-minded these intolerable crimes." Lewis said.

"The legal definition of a crime against humanity is a widespread and systematic attack against a civilian population. We believe members of Mugabe's inner circle who turned ZANU-PF's youth militia into rapists and killers are responsible for crimes against humanity." he added

Speaking at the conference Betty Makoni, founder of a Zimbabwean girls group Girl Child Network (GCN) said her organisation had collected evidence from over 53 women who had been raped by Zanu-PF youth militia, and private doctors had accumulated evidence for many more and total of known cases may be up to over 700 with no single perpetrator arrested.

She said the mass rapes occurred just before and after the stalemated March 29 election, when many male members of the opposition were forced to go into hiding.

"We are living through a plague of brutal violence directed at women and girls," said Makoni. "Rape is being used as a weapon of political intimidation to instill fear in us, in our families and communities. The men who have committed these crimes belong in prison."

Makoni reported that marauding Zanu-PF gangs tear through villages, moving door to door to wreak violence, rape and humiliation. Targeted victims have been raped in front of family members, men have been forced to rape their mothers-in-law; some women report having been stripped naked and flogged in public, while others said that pesticide had been shoved into their private parts.

The Zimbabwe Times broke the story on June 18 that Paraquat, a pesticide that can cause death was being applied by Zanu-PF militants on the wounds of victims of political violence.

"We've all seen the headlines from Zimbabwe about hyper-inflation and voter intimidation," AIDS-Free World legal director Noah Novogrodsky said.

"The reports of sexual violence tell a story that goes way beyond those crises. They point to crimes against humanity directed at the women of Zimbabwe, and the horror is still unfolding. Our goal, while protecting the identities of the victims, is to preserve the evidence of these politically-motivated mass rapes so that justice can be pursued."

Makoni said some of the perpetrators are members of the ZANU-PF youth militia, which includes some 20,000 youth between the ages of 18-24 years old.

---

Bookmark this article with any of these social bookmarking sites: