These members of the army are guilty of human rights abuses – please make sure the whole world knows it!

The table at the end of this post holds a list of names of army personnel responsible for specific atrocities in Zimbabwe.Some of these names may already be familiar to you, but we are now calling on our readers to do all they can to publicise this list widely. We ask you to carefully look through it and try and remember some of these names.

Look at Harare, for example, where an army employee identified as “Paratema” has been associated with several victim testimonies: “soldiers assaulted Rungano Kureva and force marched her to their base, chanting zanu slogans”; “he heavily assaulted Beatrice Musiiwa with sticks and she sustained body injuries. This was 30 May 2008.”; “Forced Patrick Makarabha to surrender his party regalia, made him chant liberation songs and beat him severely in May 2008.”

The image above is of a man who was beaten with fan belts and chains towards the end of April 2008. To remind yourselves of how severe the violence was, please visit our Flickr set showing images of post-election violence. Not for the faint-hearted!

The significance of this list is that all these people, as army employees, answer to the State. At the time of these crimes, their direction came from the Zanu PF party under the leadership of Robert Mugabe and his henchmen. The fact that they are known to have done these things is evidence that the Zanu-PF party orchestrated the terrible violence in the aftermath of the elections last year. We have future elections to face, it is important that soldiers engaged in criminal behaviour understand they are not protected by the State and that their names will enter the public domain if they set out to violate human rights.

The best way to send this signal to the army and to their controllers, is to get this list out as far as it can possibly go. Please circulate it by email, tweet it if you have a twitter acount, re-tweet it from our twitter account, and publicise it via your Facebook accounts by sharing it with your Facebook friends from our Facebook page. Please ask everyone to do the same.

All of the victims are Zimbabwe civilians, guilty of absolutely nothing more than believing in democracy and freedom, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This entry was posted by Sokwanele2 on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 3:13 pm. You can follow any comments on this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.