A top international rights group said yesterday that Zimbabwe’s two-year-old coalition government has failed to end human rights abuses and political violence.
Amnesty International said in a report that violence, mainly by militants of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s party, continued with the “tacit approval” of police.
Its researchers witnessed an incident on Jan. 21 in which riot police watched but did not intervene when mobs seriously injured two people in an attack on suspected supporters of Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, the former opposition leader.
Amnesty called for urgent reforms in police and military units traditionally loyal to Mugabe.
Violence surged last month after Mugabe called for elections later this year to bring the troubled coalition to an end.
The power-sharing government took office Feb. 11, 2009, after disputed elections plagued by violence and allegations of vote rigging in 2008.
Erwin van der Borght, Amnesty International’s director for Africa, said the formation of the coalition raised hopes for an end to a decade of human rights abuse.
Two years on, such hope is “rapidly fading away and has been replaced by fear and instability amid talk of another election,” he said.
Amnesty officials saw supporters of Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party “beating members of the public in the presence of anti-riot police” during a protest outside the offices of the Tsvangirai-led Harare City Council on Jan. 21. Riot police monitoring the protest did nothing to assist the victims, van der Borght said.
He said Mugabe’s supporters in recent weeks have targeted rivals suspected of loyalty to Tsvangirai, and that police did not act to stop the violence.
“ZANU-PF supporters who use violence against members of the public or their perceived political opponents are beyond the reach of the law,” he said.
In the western Harare township suburb of Mbare, the report said, police failed to protect victims of violence and even arrested victims who came to report violent attacks and evictions from their homes.
“These events are just the tip of the iceberg; thousands of people in rural areas live in fear of violence” and the official “security apparatus” that instigated violence surrounding the last elections was still intact ahead of polls proposed this year, van der Borght said.
Human rights activists were also arrested, including on Wednesday three leaders of the biggest alliance of rights groups, the Zimbabwe Human Rights Forum. They were released after interrogation on their work concerning reforms in the justice system.
“Security sector reform is needed in Zimbabwe to end a legacy of partisan policing and abuse of the law to achieve political goals,” van der Borght said.
He said regional leaders headed by chief Zimbabwe mediator South African President Jacob Zuma were also to blame for failing to pressure Mugabe into abiding by terms of the 2009 power sharing agreement. African leaders “have missed every opportunity to end human rights violations in Zimbabwe,” he said.
They allowed political bickering to continue, their “oversight mechanism” was inadequate and they neglected reforms that would ensure any upcoming elections would be free from violence, van der Borght said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema