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Rights groups track assaults on Zimbabwe opposition
Michael Wines, International Herald Tribune
April 13, 2007

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/13/africa/zimbabwe.php

JOHANNESBURG: Human rights groups in Zimbabwe have begun to document with numbers and names an extraordinary government campaign of abductions and beatings aimed at critics of President Robert Mugabe.

Increasingly, some say, the attacks appear directed largely at crippling the only opposition party of note in Zimbabwe, the Movement for Democratic Change, before a presidential election scheduled for next March.

The head of that party's main faction, Morgan Tsvangirai, charged during a news conference Thursday in Harare, the capital, that government agents had arrested or beaten at least 600 party members since Feb. 18, and that 150 had suffered life-threatening injuries.

There is no way to verify those claims. But separately, a spreadsheet provided in the past week by a Zimbabwe human rights advocate documents attacks on 150 residents of low-income neighborhoods in Harare in the five weeks from Feb. 18 to March 26. Ninety-nine were identified as members of the Movement for Democratic Change, and some were high-ranking officials.

Nearly 100 other beatings since Feb. 18 in the Harare area were listed. Most of them occurred as the police broke up opposition-party rallies.

The human-rights advocate, who is not an opposition-party member, estimated that the documented attacks could represent as little as one-fifth of all beatings, because many victims were afraid to report them. "It's very structured," said the advocate, who declined to be named for fear of retaliation. "They know exactly what they're doing and who they're going after. People are told not to seek medical treatment. They don't come to us and tell what happened, because they're simply terrified."

On Friday the Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights issued its own statement on the attacks, saying it had documented 48 hospitalizations and more than 175 lesser medical treatments for assaults in the past month alone. The association is nonpartisan and does not attempt to identify the political affiliations of the victims.

The chairman, of the group Dr. Douglas Gwatidzo, said in an interview Friday that the attacks seemed to have peaked in late March, but that they had continued steadily, albeit at a lesser rate, since then.

"It's a continuous level of attacks, without an increase or decrease," he said. "We see maybe three or four a day coming into hospital. But that's not a reflection of what's happening on the ground."

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