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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 After writing the previous post about how Jestina Mukoko’s bail had been revoked, the following happened: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.

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.

(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 »

Since last year, I’ve been doing some work with Zimbabwe Peace Project (ZPP) on human rights monitoring stuff. In the course the work, one man Perl strikeforce Sam Smith coded a script which claws its way through ZPP’s Human Rights Monthly Monitoring Reports (MMRs) and makes the content more accessible.

The MMR is an information-rich rundown of politically-motivated acts of violence which its 240 field monitors investigated that month (here‘s a sample, for July 2007). As you’ll see, the documents are structured along geographical and chronological lines: Region > Province > Constituency > Incidents ordered in date order. There are easily 500 incidents in each report, which has been produced monthly since late 2002: that’s more public domain information about Zimbabwe than you could shake a stick at, but its format makes it very hard to get at, even for the authors. Sam’s script takes this content and puts it into an Excel sheet, allowing a better measure of re-use and quick analysis than is possible from the document itself.

What’s striking in seeing this vast amount of retooled information (or spreadsheet of horror, as a colleague named it) is the absence of a stable, detailed geography underpinning the recording of incident information. Constituencies can be changed, so it’s probably short-sighted to use them as the main locational value when recording or processing data from incident reports.

Just such a thing has happened on quite a grand scale at least twice in the last five years in Zimbabwe. I have just seen the list of freshly updated constituencies for the forthcoming 29 March 2008 election in Zimbabwe. There are now roughly double the number of parliamentary seats up for grabs, but how have the boundaries changed? In the absence of accurate geographical data, though, it’s not clear to me how the constituencies differ precisely and which areas would now find themselves in different constituencies.

For any monitoring organisation, boundary changes are a nightmare. Obviously, an incident happens in a place irrespective of the constituency it’s in; if this precise location isn’t captured in a database or somesuch system first time, the original records – most likely paper monitoring forms – will have to be hauled out and re-processed. This radically increases the cost of making useful comparisons between patterns of violence currently being experienced and those observed in previous elections.

To avoid this problem, future monitoring efforts should make sure that precise locations are recorded first time. So, here are two questions for our five or so readers: what’s working well on this issue in the real world; and, what’s the most practical way to manage information about electoral boundaries?

Update – 25/02/2008:

On Disruptive Proactivity, Sam has responded in more detail about his part in this work, with some smart comments about how to resolve the geography issue.