Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's government has terrorized almost every single opposition member of the nation's parliament with violence, intimidation and jail, according to a new report.
A survey of 50 of the Movement for Democratic Change's 59 MPs and of 28 of its parliamentary candidates found that all claimed to have personally experienced human rights abuses in the past three years at the hands of the security services and supporters of the ruling Zanu-PF party.
In collecting MPs' accounts of vandalism, torture and attempted assassination for the first time, the Zimbabwe Institute, a non-governmental organization based in South Africa, said it had revealed the price of standing up to Mugabe.
The report, to be published this week, paints a grim picture of life as an opposition MP: their houses are burned, their cars stoned, relatives and colleagues are abducted and sometimes killed, the MPs themselves are liable to arrest and beatings in police custody.
By targeting such visible and well-known people the regime was sending a clear signal to citizens to support only Zanu-PF in next year's parliamentary election, said the report.
"Any person who contemplates standing for the opposition in 2005 in the existing environment is well aware they they will pay dearly for this choice," the report said.
The Zimbabwe Institute found that the 78 MPs and parliamentary candidates interviewed had experienced 616 incidents, an average of eight each.
More than 90 percent of the MPs had experienced jail, violence or the threat of it.
A quarter had survived murder attempts, 42 percent reported being physically assaulted and 16 percent reported torture, including electric shocks to the genitals, being stripped naked and whipped and beaten on the soles of the feet.
Just under half had had their homes or cars vandalized. Three MPs reported murders of their staff and nearly 40 percent said they moved their families for greater security.
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