Rule of the lawless

Jan Raath on the continuing story of murder and intimidation in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe

Harare

Most brutal regimes dispatch troublesome colleagues and pretend afterward to know nothing about it. Lenin perfected the wiping from memory of freshly eliminated aides. President Robert Mugabe's government, according to a decision just handed down by a high court judge in Harare, has now produced the ideal package for dealing with the disposal of a disloyal servant. Murder him when he becomes unreliable, declare him a national hero before the corpse grows cold, blame the opposition for his demise and then lay into them with righteous vengeance.

Cain Nkala was the leader of Mugabe's war veteran rabble in Matabeleland in 2000. He directed both the violent invasion of white farms and the ruling Zanu PF party's campaign of savage intimidation of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) before the parliamentary elections in June that year. He was implicated in the abduction in Bulawayo of veteran opposition activist Patrick Nyabanyana, the day before the election. A year later Nyabanyana had still not been found and, as a reluctant concession to a huge outcry, authorities had Nkala charged with kidnapping and then murder.

Suddenly insecure, Nkala began talking. He admitted abducting Nyabanyana but said he had handed him over to one of Mugabe's cabinet ministers. He spoke of fleeing to Britain. Retribution came fast. On 5 November 2001, Nkala himself was kidnapped from his home by eight men with AK47 assault rifles. A week later police announced that his body had been found, strangled, in a shallow grave outside Bulawayo.

The rest ran according to established Zanu PF practice. The state media loosed a barrage of vilification that blamed the opposition MDC and denounced it as 'a violent terrorist organisation'. State television hourly showed grisly footage of the body being 'discovered'. A reporter in the government press was curiously able to describe how Nkala sang hymns as he was being strangled with a shoelace.

Mugabe's politburo swiftly declared him a 'national hero'. At his burial in Heroes' Acre — reserved only for the Zanu PF faithful — outside Harare, Mugabe laid it on thick. 'Comrade Nkala's brutal murder was the bloody outcome of an orchestrated, much wider and carefully planned terrorist plot by internal and external enemy forces' who included the MDC, white farmers, Selous Scouts and even the Westminster Foundation. Zanu PF mobs went on the rampage in Bulawayo and Harare, burnt down buildings and left hundreds injured.

About the same time, six MDC activists, including the national treasurer, Fletcher Dulini-Ncube, were arrested on murder charges. Three were tortured until they signed 'confessions'. For the next year, in prison, all six were subjected to horrible neglect — Ncube lost an eye. Court orders for their release were ignored. Then their trial began in January 2002, and the authorities encountered an unexpected obstacle — an upright judge.

Mugabe badly needed a guilty verdict. Despite a sustained five-year torrent of accusations of treachery and violence, the government has failed to make a single case stick against the MDC. A murder conviction could permanently disable the MDC's reputation as an organisation based on tolerance and non-violence, and wreck its considerable international support.

The government wanted a conviction so badly that the judge, Sandra Mungwira, who was undergoing chemotherapy for cancer, was threatened. Her clerk was hounded by Central Intelligence Organisation agents who came to his office and demanded copies of her judgment. When he said he couldn't get them, they told him to snoop into her computer.

Edith Mushore, one of the defence lawyers, was phoned repeatedly after midnight and menaced by Joseph Chinotimba, the war veteran gangster who terrorised former chief justice Anthony Gubbay into resigning (and whom Mugabe routinely introduces to visiting heads of state). She was followed daily to and from work and when she ferried her children to school. CIO agents would telephone Erik Morris, another lawyer, and threaten his wife and children.

It was all spectacularly in vain. Mungwira said all 14 police involved in the investigation 'spewed forth untruths' throughout the trial, their records were 'an appalling piece of fiction' and they had conducted themselves 'in a shameless fashion' by torturing the suspects. She found that most of the six were arrested on murder charges days before police had officially found Nkala's body. She acquitted them all.

Who, then, killed Cain Nkala?

Mungwira was excluded from examining culpability beyond the six MDC accused. However, she made a highly significant acknowledgment that 'a third force' was controlling the police in the case. She effectively, with great courage, pointed directly to the government as the murderer. She referred to the constant appearance in evidence of two related organisations. The first was a group of senior army, police, CIO officers and war veterans called the Joint Operational Command. It is a continuation of a counter-insurgency structure that the Rhodesian security forces used in the civil war against black nationalist guerrillas in the Seventies.

The second was a group called 'the ferrets', a unit of high-ranking and experienced CIO agents selected for important covert operations.

The involvement of these two organisations reveals Mugabe's comprehensive abuse of national police, defence and intelligence resources as his private political property. Worse, it shows that he is conducting his political contest with the MDC, which espouses its principles of transparency and fair play with probably

more commitment than I have seen elsewhere in Africa, as a military operation.

As it was in the Rhodesian era, the job of the senior officers and 'the ferrets' is surveillance, infiltration, disinformation, covering-up and, most importantly, elimination and assassination.

Zanu PF is notorious for slaughtering its own. An international commission blamed it for assassinating party leader Herbert Chitepo in Zambia in 1975. No one believes that the decapitation of Josiah Tongogara, the head of Mugabe's army, in Mozambique in 1980 was the result of a car accident.

Ask any ordinary Zimbabwean how several others, also buried at Heroes' Acre, got there and the answer is always: 'It's obvious.'

It remains for the attorney-general to order an investigation into Nkala's murder. David Coltart, the MDC MP whose election agent was Patrick Nyabanyana, says the attorney-general should now look 'closer to home'. 'We always knew it was Zanu PF,' he says.

Mungwira is quitting, the 11th judge to do so since 2001, The Herald and Zimbabwe television broadcast her verdict, but in such paucity of detail that it could have been about a rural beerhall murder. The file on Nyabanyana's disappearance remains undisturbed. The 'third force' is in control.