Posted on 06/12/2008 5:17:44 AM PDT by nuconvert
Robert Mugabe Militia Hacks, Burns Alive Opposition Leader's Wife
June 12, 2008
Jan Raath in Mhondoro
The men who pulled up in three white pickup trucks were looking for Patson Chipiro, head of the Zimbabwean opposition party in Mhondoro district. His wife, Dadirai, told them he was in Harare but would be back later in the day, and the men departed.
An hour later they were back. They grabbed Mrs Chipiro and chopped off one of her hands and both her feet. Then they threw her into her hut, locked the door and threw a petrol bomb through the window.
The killing last Friday – one of the most grotesque atrocities committed by Robert Mugabe’s regime since independence in 1980 – was carried out on a wave of worsening brutality before the run-off presidential elections in just over two weeks. It echoed the activities of Foday Sankoh, the rebel leader in the Sierra Leone civil war that ended in 2002, whose trade-mark was to chop off hands and feet.
Mrs Chipiro, 45, a former pre-school teacher, was the second wife of a junior official of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) burnt alive last Friday by Zanu (PF) militiamen. Pamela Pasvani, the 21-year-old pregnant wife of a local councillor in Harare, did not suffer mutilation but died later of her burns; his six-year-old son perished in the flames.
Yesterday about 70 local MDC supporters gathered in Mr Chipiro’s small yard in Mhondoro, 90 miles south of Harare, to protect him. Inside the hut where his wife of 29 years died, women sang softly to a subdued drum beat next to the cheap wooden coffin. The thatched roof had been destroyed in the fire so they sat under the open sky. The lid could not be closed because Mrs Chipiro’s outstretched arm had burnt rigid. Her charred hand was found as women swept the hut.
Mr Chipiro, 51, a small, determined man, arrived from Harare on Friday afternoon to find his three brick huts ablaze. “I was trying to put the fire out,” he said. “I thought my wife was hiding in the bushes.”
His four-year-old nephew, Admire, heard him calling her. “He ran to me. He said, ‘Auntie has been beaten and they threw her in the fire’.”
Bright Matonga, the Deputy Information Minister and the MP for the area, lives just over a mile away. There is also a Zanu (PF) youth militia camp near by. Mr Matonga routinely blames the violence – in which nearly 70 people have died and 25,000 have been left homeless since the elections on March 29 – on Britain and the United States. He claims that they pay the MDC to put on Zanu party regalia and attack Mr Mugabe’s opponents.
When Mr Chipiro went to the police, they refused to give him an official crime incident report. They fetched the body at about 10pm, he said. A post-mortem examination was carried out at St Michael’s Catholic mission hospital. At first police gave Mr Chipiro a report that left out the causes of death. An officer intervened and produced an authentic report.
The report said that seven men assaulted Mrs Chipiro “before dragging her in one of the houses and set all three houses on fire”. It said that the body showed “signs of assault since all hands and legs were broken”. The doctor who carried out the post-mortem described the cause of death as haemorrhaging and severe burns. “These youths are taught cruelty,” Mr Chipiro said. “They get used to murdering. They enjoy murdering. They are doing it for money.”
He said that thugs returned for him two nights ago but fled when they saw his supporters. “I am very frightened,” he said. “They want to kill me. But I have no alternative. My presence here as a leader is very important. If I leave, everyone else will leave. I intend to fight the battle, from here.”
The devil never takes a vacation, does he?
But for diversity we must honor these people and history as they are no better or worse then ours.
If anyone deserves assassination, it’s Mugabe.
....Africa is hopeless....it’s been all down hill since White colonials started pulling out.
Couldn't be that we evil Americans aren't involved.
Nah ... didn't think so.
ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒE
More of the Jimmy Carter legacy...
When I was a young lefty I went on marches in London for a free Rhodesia. Guess who was the hero of the hour? We clapped him, and shouted for him to take Rhodesia and be it’s saviour - MUGAARBEEE!!!
How wrong we were.
Meanwhile, Bishop Desmond Tutu was sipping wine and pontificating on the evils of the United States with several enlightened members of the Blame America For Anything and Everything Social Register.
Ah, self-rule.
Truly, this is beyond horrid. Why is there not more of an outcry?
If he’s deserving of anything, it’s a tall tree and a short piece of rope.
< jaw dropped>
Damn.
Do they have TV in Zimbabwe? This seems to be their main form of entertainment
I hope everyone that worked to destroy Rhodesia years ago is proud of the outcome, these are the same people that want to destroy Israel
The devil never takes a vacation, does he? ................. EVIL exists without the Devil’s influence. Torquemada wasn’t the Devils desciple, but he was Evil. Evil people exist in our world, like it or not, and its unfortunate that they reach positions of power. The good are often to meek and helpless to resist them. Zimbabwe is a basket case, nothing short of the complete extermination of Mugabe and his henchmen will solve their problems.
And so it goes, and so it goes, and so it goes...
I find it impossible to be shocked at anything that happens in Zimbabwe anymore. Any sense of outrage I ever possessed has long since burnt out.
Zimbabwe is going to continue its slide back into the stone age. Things are just going to get worse. South Africa is not that far behind. That’s just the way it is.
We gotta do something about this. Maybe send in the military. No wait !! Do we really have any right to interfere in another nation's affairs. Yes, we do we are so much more enlightened than these stone age cultures. That gives us the right, no, the obligation to intervene. It gives us the right to assassinate their President.It's the dominant progressive power's burden. Just sayin...
Africa is devolving, returning to a more savage and primitive state.
It's all the fault of colonialism doncha know? /sarc
Actually James Michener theorized in his novel THE COVENANT that Africa may well go through a one or two century period after colonialism to simply get back to where it was under the European powers.
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