Zimbabwe brutalizing women, children

Times:

A group of nursing mothers were ordered to put down their babies by Zimbabwean police before being beaten for hours.

The six women were among 160 people rounded up at the offices of the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA), an organisation dedicated to constitutional reform, after activists tried to hold a demonstration.

They were taken to Harare central police station and told to leave their babies in the corner of a hall and join other adults lying on their stomachs.

For the next four or five hours, witnesses say, the infants screamed as police lashed their mothers and the other adults continuously with metre-long, heavy rubber sticks.

“We were half men, half women. There were six women with children. There were grandmummies,” said a 35-year-old woman in hospital with a suspected broken shoulder. “We were made to lie down on our stomachs in rows of five or ten with our hands stretched out in front. All were beaten.

“From about 6pm to 11pm they were beating us, nonstop, going up and down the rows, one after another. When one group of police got tired another would take over.

“They trampled on our bodies with their boots. One of them hit me on my ear with his hand. Now I cannot hear. They said we wanted to have the country recolonised by Bush and Blair.”

One of the mothers – a thin, desperate-looking young woman in a worn, soiled red dress – had not been on the march, but was arrested anyway. Her infant son, who had been strapped to her back, was struck with a baton as she was being forced on to the back of a police truck. Still in shock in hospital yesterday, she was unable to answer questions.

She was given a packet of powerful painkilling tablets for deep soft-tissue bruising to her buttocks, back and the back of her thighs. “This is so perverse it makes me want to vomit,” the doctor examining her and her child said.

Wednesday night’s beatings were the largest mass assault yet carried out by Zimbabwean police. Violence in March, when Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition leader, and about 30 others were beaten for 2½ hours, sparked international outrage.

“This time the intensity was ten times worse,” said the NCA chairman, Lovemore Madhuku, who was among those assaulted in March but was not at the organisation’s offices when the police raided it on Wednesday. The victims yesterday were so numerous that they had to have beds made for them on the floors of at least two private hospitals. At a private clinic about 20 were still queueing for attention at 10am, including a scrawny, elderly woman on her knees babbling prayers.

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I suppose the UN "Human Rights" group will get right on this--not. That group protects thugs like Mugabe. As the situation deteriorates due to Mugabe's incompetent handling of he economy, corporal punishment is not going to make the people less hungry and less desirous of freedom to complain about that incompetence.