Violence And Abuse Worries ZPP

According to a ZPP August report, ”The Constitutional outreach meeting continued in a heavily polarized environment where participants cannot freely express themselves for fear of retributive violence‘’

‘’For the other most volatile provinces of Masvingo, Midlands and Mashonaland Central, the levels of violations remained almost constant with sporadic incidents of physical violence. It continued in areas where the COPAC outreach teams would have already finished their consultations. The main
perpetrators of the violations recorded in August have been war veterans, ZANU (PF) youth militias, chiefs, police officers and serving members of the Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA)’’ says the report released over the weekend.

Zanu (PF) local leadership used opening prayer sessions as forms of threats while venues were changed by local political leadership without notice to
neutralize views of other parties. ZPP notes, ’’ It is highly deplorable as it leads to a recycling of views, robbing locals of the once-in-life opportunity to express their views on how they and the future generation should be governed‘’

The report says that traditional leaders continued to abuse their positions in society and this was increasingly pushing for one political party agenda.

The NGO called for the traditional leaders to exercise their leadership duties ‘’judiciously without fear, bias or favour‘’

The perpetrators analysis by gender show that males were the chief culprits representing 82% of the violators of human rights compared to their female
counterparts who constitute only 12%. ‘’In August, 1 097 males were recorded as perpetrators while only 158 were females caused human rights violations throughout the country”, the report says.

The highest numbers of violations were recorded in the Manicaland Province which had 199 cases followed by Mashonaland East with 182.

On food and other forms of aid related human rights violations, 200 cases were recorded where people could not access aid from the different sources across the country.

‘’Most of the cases were related to the rights to education and the right to health as most victims were denied life saving drugs such as anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs).

It further says, “Midlands province had the majority of cases where people were denied food relief for failure to produce political party cards and for failing to chant party slogans”

ZPP was formed as a coalition of Churches and NGOs working in human rights and peace building initiatives as a vehicle for civic interventions during political crisis. It monitors and documents human rights abuses and politically motivated breaches of peace among them violence.