World celebrate Human Rights Day but Zimbabwe Women still fight for those rights

As the world celebrated International Human Rights  Day (December 10), women in Zimbabwe continue to fight for their rights, albeit suffering the brunt of the economic crunch and a brutal government that does not respect people’s basic rights.

Women activists are harassed and detained by the police for peacefully demonstrating against human rights violations and in raising their social concerns.

But as human rights violations against women continue unabated, there are some who have confronted the system and challenge such practises. And some have been awarded for their work.

Prominent Zimbabwean human rights lawyer Beatrice Mtetwa has been awarded internationally for her work in defending persecuted media and political activists in Zimbabwe. She herself has been tortured and beaten by the police.

Last month US  President Barrack Obama presented the co-founders of Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA) Jenni Williams and Magondonga Mahlangu with the 2009 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award for their commitment to social justice.

Williams and Mahlangu formed WOZA  in 2002 and has held more than 100 peaceful demonstrations since 2002, many of which resulted in arrests and beatings for WOZA members and founders. Together, Williams and Mahlangu have been arrested more than 50 times and were subjected to all forms of torture by the police.

WOZA estimates that more than 3 000 of their number have been arrested for demonstrating.

Beatings and arrests of female members of pressure groups such as the WOZA and the National Constitutional Assembly are rampant.  
A new worrying development in the country has been the kidnapping of innocent civilians. The whereabouts of 14 MDC activists and a two-year old baby are still unknown more than a month since they disappeared.

In December 2008 Jestina Mukoko, director of the Zimbabwe Peace Project was kidnapped in a pre-dawn raid at her Norton home by a group of 15 armed men who identified themselves as from the police Law and Order section.

She was taken away still wearing her nightdress and was not allowed to get her shoes or spectacles.

"I was not wearing anything other than a nightdress," she says in a sworn affidavit. "I had no undergarments and other personal and medical requirements."

Mukoko's abduction received much response from Zimbabwean and International human rights groups concerned about the persecution of rights defenders by government security agencies. She was freed on bail in May.

The government had initially denied holding her, but at the end of the month brought her to court facing terrorism charges.
After 21 days, she was able briefly, in the presence of police, to see her family. On Christmas Eve, and without legal consultation she was made to appear in court. Alongside her in the dock were seven others who had been abducted, some held for up to 76 days, including a 72-year-old man and a two-year-old boy.

Chief Justice Godfrey Chidyausiku dismissed the case against Mukoko and nine other defendants.

Her lawyers told the court that she had been subjected to simulated drowning, locked in a freezer and beaten as the security forces tried to make her confess plotting to topple President Robert Mugabe.
Chief Justice Chidyausiku said: "The state, through its agents, violated the applicant's constitutional rights... entitling the applicant a permanent stay of criminal prosecution.”
She was questioned by six people who asked her a barrage of questions about her NGO, the Peace Project. Then the questions switched to allegations that she was recruiting youths for military training with the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. And the torture began.
For years Mukoko fearlessly catalogued cases of murder, rape and torture in Zimbabwe. Mukoko’s ZPP has played a crucial role in monitoring and documenting politically motivated violence before and in the run-up to the March 2008 elections and in the run-up to the June presidential run-off election.
The ZPP, which produces periodic reports on the human rights situation in Zimbabwe, has built an authoritative archive of rights violations compiled through a network of community based human rights defenders.
Mukoko was awarded Human Rights Award by the city of Weimar in Germany on 10 December 2009, the International Human Rights Day. Her unlawful abduction and subsequent detention had been widely noted in Germany and strongly condemned by the Germany government.
In the 18th and early 19 th centrury, Weimar was the home of Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, the most famous  German poets of the clasiccal period. In 1919, lawmakers gathered in Weimar to draft the constitution of the first German republic.