ANDREW Makoni is a cautious man. Yesterday was his first public appearance in South Africa since fleeing to the country from Zimbabwe last weekend in fear of his life – and not only his.
A colleague was appearing in a Harare court and Makoni feared president Robert Mugabe's regime would punish him doubly if they knew of his own flight.
One of Zimbabwe's top human rights lawyers, Makoni fled the country after five of his clients, a
ll activists of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), were abducted and murdered by Mugabe's supporters.
Makoni, 37, travelled the 720 miles southwards through the night from Harare, Zimbabwe's capital, after he was tipped off from within Mugabe's security forces that a death squad had been assigned to assassinate him.
"My informant said they were close to executing their task," Makoni told The Scotsman yesterday at the headquarters in Johannesburg of the Southern Africa Litigation Centre, which promotes human rights and the rule of law throughout southern Africa and is giving the Zimbabwean lawyer shelter.
After corroborating the information from another source, Makoni, who has been detained several times in Zimbabwe, decided he needed to move fast before he suffered the same fate as Tonderai Ndira, Shepherd Jani, Cain Nyere, Godfrey Kauzani and Better Chokururama.
The "Tonderai Five", clients of Makoni's law firm Mbidzo, Muchadehema and Makoni, were abducted after the 29 March presidential election. In a poll marked by fraud and widespread ballot rigging, MDC candidate Morgan Tsvangirai won by 47.9 per cent of the total vote to the incumbent president Mugabe's 43.2 per cent, falling short of the 50 per cent required for absolute victory.
A run-off election is scheduled for 27 June, but human rights workers say the ruling Zanu-PF party's campaign of violence has reached a level and intensity not seen in Zimbabwe for more than two decades.
The first of the "Tonderai Five" to die were Godfrey Kauzani, Cain Nyere and Better Chokururama, a close friend of Tonderai Ndira, a widely admired MDC activist known to his followers as "Zimbabwe's
Steve Biko," after South Africa's Black Consciousness leader who was murdered by apartheid police in 1977.
Better, an aide to an MDC member of parliament, had first been abducted in April by security forces, beaten up and thrown from a moving lorry. Both legs were broken.
"Then last month Better, Cain and Godfrey travelled to Murehwa (50 miles east of Harare] to collect Better's mother and bring her to Harare because the violence and intimidation in the countryside was escalating," Makoni told The Scotsman.
"Better's legs were still in plaster. But on their way they were abducted and killed."
Tonderai Ndira, who had been arrested 35 times by Mugabe's police and had shared a cell with Better, said his friend had been stabbed and shot to death in a police station and was buried on 17 May. The bodies of Cain and Godfrey, with similar stab and bullet wounds, were found near Better's decomposing corpse by villagers.
Tonderai Ndira was the next to die, said Makoni. "When he was abducted by eight armed men from his home in Mabvuku (a poor Harare township], we knew what his fate would be." A search began for his body and everywhere that MDC activists and lawyers went they were discovering new bodies. Eventually Tonderai's body was found in the mortuary of Harare's Parirenyatwa Hospital. His neck had been broken, his eyes had been gouged out and his tongue cut off when his corpse was found. Tonderai had once given an interview to the BBC in which he said: "We are prepared to die. We are dying by hunger, by diseases, everything. So there is nothing to fear, nothing to be scared of."
The fifth of Andrew Makoni's clients to die was Shepherd Jani. He had fought the Murehwa parliamentary seat for the MDC on 29 March. He was challenging the result, alleging that it had been rigged in ZANUPF's favour, and Andrew Makoni had filed the legal petition on Shepherd's behalf.
"Shepherd visited our office on 21 May and then went to the High Court in connection with his petition," said Makoni.
Shepherd returned to Murehwa but was seized by four armed men the following day. His mutilated body was found by a farmer on 24 May and was buried on 28 May with Morgan Tsvangirai in attendance.
While dealing with the murders of the "Tonderai Five," Makoni was asked by the MDC to investigate the cases of another 38 MDC activists who had disappeared, believed killed, since the 29 March election.
"I sent a letter to Augustine Chihuri (the national police commissioner] asking him to investigate the alleged murders of the 38 by state security agents and Zanu-PF militants and get back to me," said Makoni.
"By the time I left, I had not been contacted by Commissioner-General Chihuri."
The police chief had, however, found time to embark upon a countrywide journey to instruct all serving officers to vote for Mugabe in the second round poll.
While the death toll in political violence has widely been given as 50, Makoni said the real figure is much higher. "The killings continue on a daily basis, and many deaths are going unreported," he said.
"People are being displaced from the countryside, where the violence is most intense, and are streaming steadily into the towns."
Makoni said the 27 June run-off would not be free and fair. In a truly fair election, Mugabe would get scarcely 20 per cent of the vote because people are hungry following the failure yet again to produce an adequate maize harvest despite good summer rains.
Mugabe is attending the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation summit on food security in Rome, where, in his allotted speech, he blamed the fact that millions of his citizens are facing starvation on western sanctions. In fact, there are no economic sanctions on Zimbabwe, just a freezing of the assets in the West of Mugabe and his top lieutenants and severe restrictions on their ability to travel in North America and Europe. Land reforms, which threw 4,000 white farmers off their land and resulted in the collapse of Zimbabwean agriculture, had been welcomed by "the vast majority of our people but has elicited wrath from our former (British] colonial masters," said Mugabe.
Makoni added: "People are just fed up with the system, even those who previously sympathised with Zanu-PF. I won't return before 27 June. I would have liked my vote to count, but it is too dangerous."
Fears that dictator will use army to cling on to powerNOTWITHSTANDING the level of government violence and intimidation, Andrew Makoni believes that Morgan Tsvangirai will emerge victorious in Zimbabwe's run-off presidential election on 27 June.
"But I fear for what might happen then, given the utterances of the armed service chiefs and Grace Mugabe, the president's young second wife," said the fugitive human rights lawyer.
Civil and human rights groups in Zimbabwe have this week been predicting that there will be more violence saying they do not believe Mugabe will step down if he loses. "Mugabe will not transfer power to the winner," asserted Gordon Moyo, of the civil rights group Bulawayo Agenda.
Last weekend, in a clear indication that Mugabe's security chiefs are thinking of a military coup in the event of a Tsvangirai victory, the army chief, Major-General Martin Chedondo, warned his troops: "We have signed up and agreed to fight and protect the ruling party's principles of defending the revolution. We should therefore stand behind our commander-in-chief."
Grace Mugabe, a former secretary known scathingly in Zimbabwe as the First Shopper for her spectacularly extravagant spending trips abroad, told a rally last week husband would not be removed from office by anyone outside Zanu-PF. "Even if Baba (Mugabe) loses, he will only leave State House to make way for someone from Zanu-PF. Even if people vote for the MDC, Morgan Tsvangirai will never step foot inside State House," she said.
The International Crisis Group said there is "a growing risk of a coup in a pre-emptive move to deny Tsvangirai victory, or after a Tsvangirai win."
The full article contains 1379 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
