Mugabe bends minds in hatred camps
Willem-Jan Markerink
van Saddamsje (geeft die man nog een kansje!) of van Mugabe?
En hoelang zou het duren voordat ZA ze ook heeft?
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"zakanaka" <lala...@yahoo.com> wrote in
news:3e463...@news1.mweb.co.za:
> From The Sunday Times (UK), 9 February
>
>
> Mugabe bends minds in hatred camps
>
>
> Christina Lamb, Manicaland
>
>
> The title of the first lesson was Patriotism. It began with raised-fist
> salutes and chanted slogans in praise of "Great Leader Robert Mugabe"
> and ended with denunciations of Britain's prime minister. "Tony Blair is
> a pig and we don't want to associate with the pig and his gay
> playmates," the class was told. Later they learnt how to strangle
> enemies of the state with their shoelaces. Such classes, taught by
> uneducated war veterans from the ruling Zanu PF and attended by teachers
> against their will, are Mugabe's latest and most insidious weapon
> against his own people in the country where the England cricket team is
> scheduled to play in the World Cup this week. The players were meeting
> today to decide whether to boycott the match on moral and security
> grounds. In the past few weeks hundreds of teachers in the central
> highveld and eastern highlands of Zimbabwe have been rounded up and sent
> to "reorientation" camps. Having used his youth militia to beat
> opponents, rig elections, deny food aid to supporters of the rival
> Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and rape their wives and daughters,
> Mugabe is now trying to brainwash the population through a sinister
> re-education of teachers. Myheart Muusha, 31, was so disgusted that he
> escaped from his camp. A gentle, soft-spoken man, his decision means a
> life on the run, leaving the woman he loved and the end of a teaching
> career which made his family so proud that his father cried at his
> graduation from teacher training college. Trembling with fear, he met me
> secretly last week and gave the first account of life inside what he
> termed the "terror camps". It seemed a world apart from the scene at the
> Harare Sports Club yesterday where gardeners were putting the final
> touches to the manicured emerald cricket pitch awaiting the England
> team. Just two blocks away in court A of the old colonial High Court
> building, Morgan Tsvangirai, the MDC leader, is on trial for his life on
> what he says are "trumped-up charges" of plotting to assassinate Mugabe.
> Less than a mile up the road, behind Harare station, Aids orphans are
> trying to catch sparrows to cook. According to the World Food Programme,
> 7m of Zimbabwe's 11m population are threatened with starvation and 2,500
> are dying each week of Aids and hunger.
>
>
> Travelling undercover, I met torture victims and teachers who emphasised
> that Muusha's account of repression is the reality of life for millions
> of rural Zimbabweans. "The ruling party wants a situation where
> everything is militarised and Zanu-ised," said Takavafiria Zhou,
> president of the Progressive Teachers Union for Manicaland province,
> from where many of the teachers have been taken. "They want us to sleep
> Zanu, breathe Zanu, live on Zanu food and tell our children that there
> is nothing on earth apart from Zanu. It's pure propaganda." For Muusha,
> the nightmare began when he returned from his holidays on January 14 to
> his job as science teacher at Vumbunu secondary school in Mutasa to be
> told that he had been selected, along with 10 others, for an "in-service
> programme" to teach some new syllabus material. "I knew it was something
> bad," he said. "Mugabe is suspicious of teachers because many of us
> support the MDC and we carry a lot of weight in the community. For the
> past three years his thugs have come into our school and beaten us,
> making us chant slogans in front of the pupils. "We were scared to
> punish any students in case they reported us to the local Zanu PF."
> Muusha and his colleagues were piled on to an army truck and driven to
> Nyadzi with about 30 teachers from other schools. It was made clear that
> this was not an optional course. "We knew what these people are capable
> of," he said. "There was an American called Richard Gillman who had
> started helping our school, bringing in textbooks and raising money so
> we could have electricity, but the Zanu people kept telling us to keep
> away from the white man." Gillman was shot dead by police at a roadblock
> last November, supposedly because he did not have his papers. When the
> teachers arrived at the camp they were ordered to remove their clothes
> and were given camouflage gear and army boots. They were told that these
> had belonged to the fallen heroes of Zimbabwe's liberation. "They lined
> us up and told us, 'You are misinforming the pupils,' " said Muusha.
> "They said, 'You are not teaching but cheating and now you must learn to
> be responsible citizens who place the flag and our fallen heroes at the
> forefront of our history.' " Then they asked the teachers how many meals
> they wanted to eat a day. "We said three," recounted Muusha. "They asked
> why people are eating only one, so we replied, 'Because there's no
> foreign currency, so no food.' They said, 'No, it's because of Blair and
> Tsvangirai, these are the people who are vandalising the economy and
> must be stopped.' "
>
>
> They were woken at 4am for 25-mile road runs with soldiers who beat them
> if they lagged behind. Lessons started at 8am when they were taught that
> Comrade Mugabe, Comrade Castro and Comrade Gadaffi were the true leaders
> and that Blair was spearheading a movement to destroy Zimbabwe. "Between
> each class we were made to shout 'Forward with Mugabe' and 'Down with
> MDC' and 'Down with Blair'. They kept asking us what the colours of the
> Zimbabwean flag represent and the names of the war heroes. If you don't
> know they call you a traitor." One of the textbooks was a Book of Fallen
> Heroes which included Chenjerai "Hitler" Hunzvi, the man behind the
> violent invasions of white farms that began in 2000, and Border Gezi, a
> top Mugabe lieutenant who set up training camps for the youth militia,
> known as the Green Bombers, responsible for some of the worst
> atrocities. They were also shown videos of white South African police
> setting dogs on blacks. "It was all incredibly racist, anti-white," said
> Muusha. "They said we should not talk about football or music but about
> the struggle and how the British have dispossessed us. They told us
> about Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden and said they are doing the right thing."
> For Muusha, the last straw came when "they showed us how to kill by
> striking someone on the back of the neck just behind the ear with a
> heavy object and to strangle them with shoelaces so you wouldn't be
> detected." He fled. "Now my job is gone and if they capture me I'm
> dead," he said. "We were told if you run away that's equivalent to
> treason." Although petrified, he insisted that his name be published. "I
> had been proud to be a teacher," he added, sadly. "I wanted to educate
> children to be a source of enlightenment, but now it's all spoilt. The
> whole education system is destroyed." Similar experiences were described
> by Memory, a primary school teacher I met late one night in the village
> home of a traditional healer; and by Barnabas, another teacher who had
> fled the camp and who talked to me in a safe house in Mutare. They were
> picked up last month by police and members of Mugabe's feared Central
> Intelligence Organisation, with lists of names. "There was no choice,"
> said Memory. "If you said no that means you don't support the
> government." He was taken to Mushagashi Training Centre in Masvingo.
> "They called it nationalism but it was Zanu-isation," he said. "It was
> complete indoctrination. They said many teachers have been inclined to
> the opposition so it was time we learnt the 'truth' about politics."
>
>
> The teachers were made to go on 3am runs, followed by history lectures
> presenting Mugabe as a great leader thwarted by the evil British. "On
> the first day they showed us a shocking video of dead bodies during the
> liberation war and said, 'This was the work of the British, they killed
> your brothers and sisters and now they are trying to do the same thing.'
> " The course defended Mugabe's land reform programme which has seen
> 3,800 of 4,300 white commercial farmers thrown off their property. "They
> said it was to empower the blacks but the British came in to derail the
> process and used the MDC as their stooges," recounted Memory. "We were
> told the British want to recolonise and it is the duty of every
> Zimbabwean to defend the sovereignty of the nation." At the end they
> received a Certificate of National Service and a copy of Mugabe's Little
> Book extolling the president' s policies and achievements. They were
> instructed to go back to their community and spy on other teachers and
> pupils and to give a weekly report to the local Zanu PF chairman.
> "Teachers in rural areas are very influential because the population are
> uneducated and poor and so go to the teachers for advice," explained Roy
> Bennett, an opposition MP from Chimanimani, one of the areas from which
> teachers have been forced to go on the courses. "Teachers being
> independent spoil Mugabe's communist thing of controlling everybody. But
> if they think they can take people for three weeks and steal their minds
> they must be real idiots."
>
>
> The courses are part of an attack on education that has seen European
> history scrapped from the syllabus to be replaced by "current history",
> and war veterans sitting on interview boards to select teachers.
> Newspaper advertisements for teachers now state: "Preference will be
> given to National Service graduates." It is all part of life in Mugabe's
> Zimbabwe, a topsy-turvy world where people buy black market petrol from
> rose sellers in restaurants rather than queue for nine hours at filling
> stations; where the shelves of supermarkets are full of lavatory paper
> and empty of foodstuffs, but where taxi drivers sell bread and meat; and
> where personal banking officers in state banks will change money at 20
> times the official rate. The surrealism was illustrated last Thursday by
> a demonstration of people waving palm leaves and placards saying "No
> Cricket". Surprised to see demonstrators - they are banned - I asked who
> they were and why they were protesting. After a while one of them
> admitted they were plainclothes policemen holding a pretend
> demonstration to attract real protesters so they could lock them up. The
> true threat to Mugabe may come from within his own party. Rumours
> persist of Emerson Mnangagwa, his Zanu PF protégé, and
> Lieutenant-General Vitalis Zvinavashe, the army chief, trying to broker
> a deal with the opposition that would see Mugabe exiled to Malaysia.
> Another indication that all is not well in Mugabe's world comes from the
> increasing number of people prepared to risk their lives to speak out.
> "So many of our educated people have gone," said Barnabas. "Some of us
> must stay and fight. Every story has a beginning and an end and the end
> must be Morgan Tsvangirai becoming president and me being a teacher
> again."
>
>
>
>
>
--
Bye,
Willem-Jan Markerink
The desire to understand
is sometimes far less intelligent than
the inability to understand
<w.j.ma...@a1.nl>
[note: 'a-one' & 'en-el'!]