ZANU PF rapist jailed in Rusape

By Alex Bell
16 December 2009

A self proclaimed war veteran and ZANU PF member has been jailed for 32 years, for raping two female MDC supporters during the violent 2008 election period.

Lovemore Manjeni, who is a Bishop of the Mabasa Avapositori Church in Rusape, was found guilty of five counts of rape by magistrate Hosea Mujaya, who lambasted the accused for using rape as a political weapon against MDC supporters. Manjeni, who was revealed to be a ZANU PF base commander operating under the name ‘Untouchable’, attacked and raped two married MDC supporters in their own homes over a period of a week, armed with a machete and a packet of condoms. One of the women testified how she was raped in front of her young children when Manjenji broke into her village hut. Magistrate Mujaya likened his behaviour to that of an animal and a bully, questioning how brutalising the women would force them to vote for ZANU PF.

Manjeni is just one perpetrator in ZANU PF’s brutal campaign of rape carried out during the 2008 election period, a campaign that a leading advocacy group has said Robert Mugabe is clearly complicit in. The group, AIDS-Free World, last week released a shock report detailing 70 testimonies of rape survivors, arguing there is enough evidence to warrant the prosecution of Mugabe and other top ZANU PF officials for crimes against humanity.

The 64 page report (Electing to Rape: Sexual Terror in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe) documents 380 rapes committed by 241 perpetrators, all ZANU PF members who identified themselves to their victims. All the women targeted in the attacks were supporters of Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC party.

Co-director of AIDS-Free World, and a former United Nations special envoy on HIV/AIDS Stephen Lewis, said the evidence contained in the report is ‘incontrovertible’.

“Mugabe believes he can sanction rape without fear of consequences and he has used this tactic as a weapon to successfully stay in power,” Lewis said. “Zimbabwe, for this reason, is the biggest test for ending impunity for crimes against humanity.”

The report details how the rape campaign unleashed on the country’s female opposition supporters, and often their children, was both widespread and systematic, with recurring patterns. This included the uniform physical and emotional brutality of the rapes, with all the survivors explaining they were horrifically abused and beaten. Some women were forced to watch the rape of their daughters and murder of their husbands and other family members, before or after they were raped. Other women were held as sex slaves in ZANU PF camps for weeks at a time. Other testimonies detailed how the perpetrators even used their HIV-positive status as a weapon of further cruelty, telling women they were being infected as punishment for supporting the MDC.

The police have in the majority of cases refused to investigate or follow up on the brutality, making individual prosecution difficult. But AIDS-Free World has argued that Mugabe and those who were members of his government at the time should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity, for their complicity in the rape campaign. The report states that the ZANU PF government was well aware of the campaign that, along with the election violence, was masterminded by the Joint Operations Command (JOC). The report details Mugabe’s complicity, explaining how the ageing dictator not only knew about the campaign, but also refused to prevent it or punish those responsible.

“This combination of knowledge, the refusal to prevent, and the failure to punish the widespread political rape requires that Robert Mugabe and members of the JOC should be investigated and prosecuted for their individual criminal liability for the rapes,” the report reads.