BBC exposes Mugabe's torture camps

BBC exposes Mugabe's torture camps

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By Agencies
29/02/04
ZIMBABWE President Robert Mugabe's government has set up youth militia training camps in which thousands have been brutalised to ensure their loyalty, according to a BBC documentary screened Sunday.

"In their training camps the Zimbabwean government is subjecting thousands of innocent youths to rape, brainwashing and brutality," the BBC said in a statement about the programme on Sunday. "It is all part of a horrific process designed to mould youths loyal to Robert Mugabe and his ZANU party."

Mugabe's supporters and security forces have clashed in recent years with opponents from the Movement for Democratic Change, which has emerged as the most potent challenge to Mugabe in 24 years of rule.

The BBC's Africa reporter, Hilary Andersson, said the programme team and human rights groups had interviewed almost 100 former camp youths for the Panorama documentary, "Secrets of the Camps", due to be broadcast on Sunday evening.

Around 50 percent of the girls said they were regularly raped in the camps. One, Debbie, said she was raped nightly for six months after being forced into a camp aged 20, and contracted HIV and fell pregnant before fleeing to South Africa.

"Youths testified to being taught how to torture with electricity, or by hanging victims upside down and lowering their heads into buckets of water below until they nearly drown," Andersson wrote in Britain's Sunday Telegraph.

She said a former Youth Ministry official had confirmed that killings and hit lists were discussed openly at ministry meetings, and a camp commander interviewed said youths from his camp had been sent out to kill opponents of the government.

Andersson said six large camps housed thousands of Zimbabweans aged 11 to 30. An estimated 50,000 youths had already passed through the camps, and Mugabe wanted to make the training compulsory for all young Zimbabweans in a bid to help him secure victory in parliamentary elections in 2005.

Mugabe, accused by the opposition and several Western countries of rigging the 2002 presidential polls, rejects charges that his mismanagement is to blame for Zimbabwe's critical shortages of food, fuel and foreign exchange.

Instead, the former guerrilla leader, who has ruled Zimbabwe since independence from Britain in 1980, accuses Western powers of seeking his overthrow because of his seizure of white-owned commercial farms for redistribution to landless blacks.
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