humanitarian.info

Obviously, this blog is dormant but we don’t often have good news to share; so, here we go…

The  baseless and preposterous charges of banditry against humanitarian.info’s friend, Zimbabwe Peace Project National Director Jestina Mukoko were yesterday bounced out by Zimbabwe’s Supreme Court. Zimbabwean Chief Justice Godfrey Chidyausiku, quoted in  the BBC, said:

“The state, through its agents, violated the applicant’s constitutional rights… entitling the applicant a permanent stay of criminal prosecution.”

I do not have a copy of the judgement, so it’s unclear to me whether this is a ruling on the procedural conduct of the authorities in failing to bring Jestina to court, or their complicity in her (and others’) abduction and torture. I hope  that this ruling opens the prison door for those who are still missing,  likely imprisoned in off-the-map places of detention , before the bitter fight to bring to book their abductors begins and closes it again.

Uh-oh … events overtake blogging. After writing the previous post about how Jestina Mukoko’s bail had been revoked, the following happened:

Zimbabwean rights activist Jestina Mukoko and 14 other people were ordered freed on bail Wednesday after the president and the prime minister forced a judge to reverse the previous day’s decision that had sparked outrage.

I guess this sort of rapid turnaround is what the otherwise wholly wretched Twitter was invented to report. Anyhow, this is far far better news, although the political intervention clearly shows the Zimbabwe legal process for the sham it is.

As feared, the Zimbabwean state continues to press its shonky case against my colleague Jestina Mukoko, National Director of the Zimbabwe Peace Project, and 14 other Zimbabwean political and civil society activists. From Violet Gonda at SW Radio Africa:

The courthouse was packed Tuesday with journalists, members of civil society and the diplomatic community, who were left shocked after the Magistrate remanded the accused persons in custody. Eyewitnesses said Mukoko looked pale and dejected when she heard the news. The accused persons were all abducted and tortured between the months of October and December last year.

It’s  going to be little comfort to Jestina as she is taken back to prison, but the authorities have only managed to delay, not stop the work of ZPP and others in monitoring what is going on in Zimbabwe’s hinterland. Just in is the meaty February report from ZPP:

Since January 2009, a total record of 2410 cases of politically motivated human rights abuse have been recorded: 1125 in January and 1285 in February showing  an upsurge by 160 cases. Although there were no reported cases of murder since 2009, cases of harassments, assaults, looting, displacement and unlawful detentions continue to maintain a stubborn presence.

It’s pretty clear to me that Zimbabwe’s resilient communities are making for resilient organisations too. This numerical analysis doesn’t really mean anything, but the datatrail and the paper beneath it – combined with the quiet work of many others in country writing down and photographing what is going on – is there for an eventual reckoning.

The discovery, digitisation and forthcoming publication of Guatemala’s Police Archives from during the 36 year conflict is one of the most inspiring, remarkable achievements in human rights work. As a strategic information resource for those seeking redress, the archive’s mind-boggling scale, level of detail, relevance, and the deep skills needed to make it accessible, really show the need for informatics, archiving and social science professionals in human rights work. I  feel very lightweight just looking at the work that’s been done there.

This month, the Guatemalan Human Rights Ombudsman released “The Right to Know” (Spanish, PDF, ~10mb), its first  analytical paper drawing on the contents of the 11 million documents which have been already scanned and indexed. The Ombudsman also intends to make some 7 million scans from the archives freely available to the public, a Google-scale undertaking in access to information. Some of the analytical work done on the archives recently led to the arrest of Héctor Roderico Ramírez Ríos, an official accused of engineering the disappearance of a prominent student leader in the 1980s.

Sadly, these initiatives have been accompanied by attacks on the Guatemalan Human Rights Ombudsman officials (and their families) responsible for this work. That won’t change a thing once the information is public. It’s certain that the thousands of paper trails inside that archive will lead to more such indictments, particularly as citizens start putting the pieces together. I don’t know yet whether the archives will ever get on online, or under what terms. If they are released in a reusable form, I wonder whether the tools of social media will have a meaningful role in the historical reconstruction, or whether their advocates will really have any interest in so doing.

(Hat tip: Witness Media Archive blog)

BBC and Alertnet are echoing the wires that the bail applications of ZPP’s Jestina Mukoko and Brodrek Takawira, and others have been granted.

The Police have routinely ignored previous court orders, so I hope that this is true. The lawyers seem to think so though. I await some confirmation from colleagues and if so, it’s terrific news.

The perpetrators of this event have caused deep and profound personal damage to a lot of decent people. If I were somehow involved in the abduction and torture of a fantastically eloquent, popular and relentless globally-known campaigner, who then became one of the world’s most prominent prisoners of conscience, and she were released, knowing my identity, with the world’s media baying for information, I’d consider the following:

a) Packing my bags (of money, that is),

b) Booking a ticket to  Hong Kong,

c) Trying to get that dirty amnesty agreement sorted out double-quick time.

Update 3 March 2009:

Seems to be true. From hospital, though looking unwell, Jestina is reporting as saying:

I am free now and I must concentrate on my health … The time will come for me to comment to the media. I am still being attended to by the doctors and I might be in here for some weeks to come.

Here’s something very real, via Denford Magora:

As Zimbabweans celebrate the unity between Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai, Jestina Mukoko, the human rights activist who is languishing in Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison is so criticially ill that her lawyers and doctors fear she will not last much longer.

… Staff at the private hospital are unanimous that the health condition in which they saw Mukoko and her prisoners constitutes inhuman and degrading treatment, especially since access to medication is being denied.

The abysmal detention conditions in which Jestina is being held pile on top of the severe mistreatment she experienced during the three weeks she was disappeared by members of Zimbabwe’s secret police. In her own words, from an affadivit submitted to the Harare High Court recounting the first days of her detention:

“… I was now being accused of  recruiting youths to undergo some form of military training and links with people at Harvest House. I denied the allegations. Firstly I was assaulted underneath my feet with a rubber like object which was at least one (1) meter long and flexible while seated on the floor. Later I was informed to raise my feet onto a table, and the other people in the room started to assault me underneath my feet. This assault lasted for at least 5 to 6 minutes. They took a break and then continued again with the beatings.”

Charges have yet to be levelled officially at Jestina, so lawyers acting on her behalf have been challenging the lawfulness of her detention. They have been remarkably agile, siezing every opportunity and contradiction, however small to get the case in front of Harare’s evasive judiciary for bail, medical treatment or visitation rights.  Again denying an application for bail on 4 February, a High Court judge actually said: ““At this rate, one is left wondering whether the defence wants to discredit the justice delivery system and portray it as one in disarray”. He should also add “cowardly” and “politicised” to the list, and then I think the defence would agree with his summary.

Sadly, the legal process simply sits atop a deeper political undercurrent :  that of the preposterous state security scenario cooked up by the Mugabe’s government to broadside the political opposition. Jestina and the others are simply hostages at this point. As this strategy yields some successful outcomes for Mugabe, as it appears to have with today’s appointment of  Morgan Tsvangirai as Prime Minister, it makes sense to think that the detained activists will be released.  At least the MDC appear to think so. This morning, I recieved a note via my MP from a UK government minister saying that “the release of Ms Mukoko and other political prisoners is something the MDC expect to happen before the power-sharing government takes office”.

Which is today.  No releases so far, so keep your eyes on the news.

Whilst we’re usually quite mild-mannered here, if someone happens to land a noisy slap on the chops on whomever at the BBC made the decision not to air the DEC’s Gaza appeal, we’ll certainly provide them with an alibi:

A BBC spokesperson said: “The decision was made because of question marks about the delivery of aid in a volatile situation and also to avoid any risk of compromising public confidence in the BBC’s impartiality in the context of [a] news story.”

I hope the BBC will now apply the same principle to other parts of their scheduling, pulling garbage like Eurovision: Your Country Needs You or Celebrity Fit Club because the public might think they are idiots.

(ZPP Director Jestina Mukoko, in red, and ZPP Provincial Coordinator Brodreck Takawira, in white shirt, entering court in Harare, 24 December 2008 [Source: BBC])

Earlier this month I wrote about my friend Jestina Mukoko, Director of Zimbabwe Peace Project, who on 3 December 2008 was abducted from her home near Harare.

Since then, despite a very loud international outcry from goverments and civil society, no information about her wherabouts was provided by the authorities. The Commissioner of the Zimbabwean Police denied they had her in any premises under their jurisdiction, and then ignored a High Court order to cooperate with her lawyers in finding her. One journalist reported that the Police were very polite to concerned citizens telephoning them to ask what was going on: “We will trace your call you sellouts, we will make you sh*** in your pants”. Nice.

Well, it now turns out the Police have had her all along! From Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, today:

Lawyers responded with a comprehensive but non-exhaustive search of a number of police stations, including Mabelreign, Marlborough, Avondale, Borrowdale, Mbare, Stodart, Matapi, Harare Central, Braeside, Rhodesville and Highlands police stations. By speaking to various police officials, examining Detention Books and requesting cell head counts, it was established that at least fourteen (14) individuals of the total number subjected to enforced disappearances, twelve (12) of whom appeared on the list of confirmed abductees, were being detained in custody at Mabelreign, Marlborough, Mbare, Stodart, Matapi, Braeside, Rhodesville and Highlands police stations. These individuals include Jestina Mukoko and her two (2) colleagues from the Zimbabwe Peace Project, who are being held at different police stations.

I’m relieved that Jestina is alive, and her family must be totally overwhelmed. But it’s not going to be an easy road to getting her back home and back to work. There are reports citing The Zimbabwean Pravda saying that Jestina will today face trial for recruiting people to undergo military training for the purpose of otherthrowing the goverment. Because it’s so jaw-droppingly craven, I’ll clip a portion of The Herald’s story here, but read the rest yourself:

A statement from the Zimbabwe Republic Police yesterday said some time in April this year, Manuel allegedly recruited Ricardo Hwasheni, a police constable based at Waterfalls in Harare, to undergo military training in Botswana with a view to forcibly deposing the Government and replace it with one led by Morgan Tsvangirai. Manuel allegedly tasked Hwasheni to recruit four other policemen, promising them US$2 000 each. Later, the statement said, Manuel and Kaseke, who is Hwasheni’s cousin, went to MDC-T’s headquarters at Harvest House, where a man identified only as Josen interviewed Hwasheni.After the interview, Josen allegedly told Hwasheni that he would hear from him within two weeks or that Mukoko would contact him.

In June, the statement says, Hwasheni met Mukoko at her offices in Milton Park in Harare where she further interviewed him before handing him over to Takawira, who told him that he would be contacted within two weeks. The statement further alleged that a man who had been sent by Mukoko met Hwasheni at Girls’ High School in Harare and gave him 200 pula and some Zimbabwean dollars for transport to Botswana where he was to meet a man known as Special. Hwasheni crossed into Botswana in July through the Plumtree border post and met Special at Ramokgwebana Border Post. Special took Hwasheni to a military camp in Botswana where he underwent training in the use of FN and AK rifles, military tactics as well as political lessons together with five other MDC-T recruits. There were, according to the statement, 50 other recruits undergoing military training in the same camp. Hwasheni returned to Zimbabwe with specific instructions to study the mood of junior police officers inasfar as loyalty was concerned and the mood of the public towards Government.

What are the narrative elements here? So far, we have:

1. A single statement from a junior Zimbabwean Police Officer; from,
2. The same law enforcement agency that has openly lied on paper, participated in and failed to investigate a wave of abductions, and directly ignored the the courts; involving,
3. A mystery protagonist known only as “Special”, marshalling a cast of people from an organisation that squarely beat Zimbabwe’s dicatator at the ballot box; and,
4. Staff from organisation that has evidenced tens of thousands of incidences of politically-motivated violence and human rights abuses being kept incommunicado in secret detention facilities by known torturers; and,
5. The alleged support of the only government sharing a border with Zimbabwe that has sustained open and trenchant criticism of the regime’s behaviour.

Sounds like a trustworthy, watertight case to me, and I’m sure that the Harare courts will scrub the bias from it, and test the evidence with their customary rigour. After all, Mugabe was right about the Wonga Coup, wasn’t he? Saracasm aside, a few days after Jestina’s abduction, one sharp commentator and Zimbabwean political insider argued that this would be the likely outcome of the this wave of abductions:

I now believe strongly that the next time we see Gandi Mudzingwa, Jestina Mukoko and the two staff members from the ZPP will be in the company of the eleven or 15 MDC activists who were also abducted as I explained above and as widely reported elsewhere. They will be appearing together as either “co-conspirators or architects of the insurgency” in the evidence to be put forward [to SADC] by Mugabe.

And there’s more, before today’s news:

…[the Attorney General's office] is being readied to carry out the mass prosecutions of MDC “terrorists” (I am taking bets on how long it will be before we start hearing this word, reading it in the Herald). From the silence of SADC on the matter, it would appear that there is nothing much anybody can do about it, except maybe shout a bit now and again.

I disagree. This conspiracy is convoluted even by the desperate standards of Mugabe’s regime, and will fall as flat in the courts as it will in the public’s eye. The question is whether this will matter, and how we can make it matter.

(Jestina in Geneva, 2008)

In Norton, just outside of Harare, in the early hours of yesterday morning, 15 armed men identifying themselves as police surrounded and broke into the house of Jestina Mukoko, the National Director of Zimbabwe Peace Project (ZPP).

They abducted Jestina in her nighty, without her glasses, which she needs, and without some prescription medication. Her teenage son reported the abduction to human rights organisations in Harare a few hours later. As at 0830 this morning, when I texted with ZPP staff, Jestina’s location remains unknown. Lawyers from Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights are now going from police station to police station to try and find her, or a paper trail leading to her.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve just read “On the Brink of the Precipice: A Human Rights Account of Kenya’s post-2007 Election Violence” (.pdf, 169 pages, ~2mb), an ambitious report by Kenya’s national human rights institution, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR) with the technical help of my alma mater No Peace Without Justice.

The bulk of On the Brink is a detailed narrative overview of the violence that occured in Kenya between December 2007 and March 2008. Whilst there is some discussion about the antecedents of the political crisis, the most solid stuff is in the analysis of the recent violence. Here, the authors slice the same source material different ways to give nuanced assessments of the violence through the lens of Kenyan criminal law, international criminal law, and Kenya’s commitments under international human rights law.

KNCHR find ample evidence of crimes against humanity, but note that they din’t find enough information to sustain the argument that these were in furtherance of any state or organizational policy. They also found that whilst much of the violence was motivated by ethnicity, genocide was not committed since “the intent was not to destroy but to create means by which to leverage political power following the disputed presidential election results.” The report’s standout recommendation for action is likely to be highly unwelcome, particularly now everyone’s friends again:

The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) should open investigations on Kenya to determine who bears the greatest responsibility in the commission of crimes against humanity detailed in this report.

This is the fourth major outing for “conflict mapping”, the investigation methodology behind this report. In 2004, I co-wrote a similar report for Sierra Leone using the same method. Investigators take lengthy statements from a key persons in all areas affected by violence throughout the country. From the statements, data analysts draw out references to unique “episodes”, simple information about which is then put into a database.  Episodes can include a wide range of topics, from a source’s recollection of specific acts of violence, to information about gangs, troop movements,  public statements of local politicians, and other sit-rep style information. It also includes hearsay, or information about things that the source was not a direct witness to. From the 1102 statements collected by KNHCR in the early part of this year, 7500 distinct episodes were separated out and databased. From these, it’s possible for analysts to build a “low resolution” picture of a mass event, and identify its scale, severity, major incidents and overall dynamics.

This wide not deep approach is designed to look for evidence of policies, planning and systematisation, all critical to the judgement about whether patterns of violence can be framed as crimes against humanity. As Kenya is a State Party to the International Criminal Court, this is something Kenyan policy makers and activists must consider anyhow, but other information available to help them with this is likely too narrowly focussed, raw or detailed, to be useful to this particular decision. In this respect, conflict mapping is fit-for-purpose; at this early stage, attempting to individually investigate every incident, of which there will be tens of thousands, is not.

The immediate deployment of investigators across across a wide geographical area is a good demonstration of capacity which might help a national human rights instituation fend off attempts to marginalise it.  It also creates an immediate context to the severity and significance of criminal incidents, something that it is hard to assess as events are unfolding. The popularly known atrocities aren’t necessarily either the most sure-fire winners for prosecutors, or the worst things that have happened. This, and the mapping exercise’s rapid generation of leads, can help prosecutors later by giving them a guide to where to invest investigative resource.

The report certainly won’t stand up in court, but it’s not designed to, and it wouldn’t be possible to produce a document of that sort in anything like a useful timescale. This is designed to provide timely analysis as part of the complex decision making process of bringing to account those most responsible for the violence.  Framed this way, On the Brink may have lost a lot of impact due the long period of drafting. I hope the recent appearance on Wikileaks of an embargoed confidential annex to the report (.pdf, 59 pages, ~2.5mb) containing the names of 250 alleged leaders, planners, faciliators and perpetrators of the violence makes up for this.