Greenbombers: a still from the BBC news footage

BBC Radio 4 : Broadcast 6 March 2004
Hilary Andersson

Never before have I spent months sitting in front of young people who have tortured, raped, beaten their relatives and who speak of it quite matter-of-factly.

Hilary Andersson spent months interviewing young rapists and torturers for a BBC investigation which revealed the brutal secrets of Zimbabwe's training camps. This job is a steady diet of wars, death at close range, natural disasters that make the earth shake, or that cause liquid fire to spew from mountains, planes that fall out of the skies, diseases that kill millions and meetings with individuals at the heart of unspeakable tragedies.

Green bombers leaving the train station

via Irinnews.org : 23 January 2004

Youth camps are said to emphasise loyalty to ruling party Some volunteers to the Zimbabwe government's controversial youth service programme are deserting because of the poor conditions and allegations of brutality, according to former recruits and human rights NGOs.

Twenty-year old Brighton Mukunga says he is a bitter man. He finished his A-Level studies two years ago and although he passed well, he could not obtain a place in college to do journalism, the career he had always wanted to pursue.

New York Times (Michael Wines) : 29 December 2003

BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe Last March, Debbie Siyangapi took the pulpit in an Anglican church in Zimbabwe's second-largest city and confessed her darkest secret to several hundred worshipers. Within an hour, she had donned a nun's habit as a disguise and slipped out of the church through a side entrance, fleeing for her safety, said Siyangapi and human rights groups that are now sheltering her.

Siyangapi's secret was not merely her own. Her appearance was also testimony to one of the least documented - and most brutal - practices of the military enforcers of Zimbabwe's authoritarian government, enforcers from whom she now has to hide.