A television documentary produced with hidden cameras in Beitbridge  in March 2009 featured these emaciated prisoners.

By Our Correspondent

HARARE – There were scenes of jubilation and celebration at Harare Central Prison on Friday as relatives reunited with their loved ones as they were released  freed from prison after serving terms of incarceration.Prison authorities began releasing hordes of inmates who are beneficiaries of a recent order of clemency extended to 2 500 convicts by President Robert Mugabe.

While the total number of beneficiaries of the presidential amnesty was first reported in the state media last week as 1 544, Zimbabwe Prison Service public relations officer, Elizabeth Banda, told journalists Friday the actual number of those to be freed was 2 513.

Among those granted amnesty were all women prisoners, inmates serving three-year terms who had completed a quarter of their sentence, as well as those in open prisons and life inmates who had served 20 or more years.

The amnesty excluded prisoners jailed for serious crimes including murder, rape and vehicle hijacking.

Officials say that while Zimbabwe’s prison have a holding capacity of 17 000 inmates, the current population is about 13 000.

Elated relatives said they had been living in fear of losing their loved ones to hunger and disease in Zimbabwe’s notorious jails.

Close to 1 000 prisoners are reported to have died in Zimbabwe’s jails between January and June this year.

The death rate is said to have since dropped from three per week to two.

“I cannot believe this. For the past two nights I have not had sleep trying to contain my happiness. I will never move near a jail again,” said a visibly elated Lovemore Bvuno (63), who was released from Harare Central prison after serving for 23 years.

He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1986 for murder.

Christopher Munyoro (64), who had served 25 years of a life sentence for the murder of his employer, said he felt born again.

Munyoro, whose entire family died of hunger and disease while he was in prison, said he was apologetic to both his victim and family.

Toendepi Mahaso, who volunteered to speak on behalf of a batch of 30 newly freed prisoners who were paraded for their final briefing by prison officers, said he was thankful to President Mugabe for the clemency.

“I say thank you very much to the President Robert Gabriel Mugabe,” he said, speaking in English. “I say thank you very much for the clemency.

“Sometimes justice has got to be tempered with mercy. Justice must have a human face and we have seen the human face of justice today by being released before our EDR (Expected Date of Release).

“We promise we are going to behave, to do very well out there. This is not the end of the world. Imprisonment is not the end of life, this is actually the beginning of a new life. Our old life has been destroyed and we are given a new lease of life.

“That is what we have received.”

The amnesty is an attempt by the current inclusive government to ease congestion in Zimbabwe’s 42 jails.

The jails are now viewed as death camps because of their poor sanitary conditions and a perennial shortage of food and medical drugs.

The country’s prisons did not survive the deadly cholera epidemic which broke out mid-last year killing 4 000 and living more than 80 000 hospitalised.

The epidemic was only contained after the intervention of humanitarian aid groups which brought medicine and other forms of assistance that helped suppress the continued spread of the dreaded disease.

HARARE-With nowhere else to run and few people left to blame, President Robert Mugabe has conceded that the country’s prison system has collapsed while inmates continue to succumb to treatable diseases.

So serious is the situation that President Mugabe was forced to make an order that has been cited as the Clemency Order No 1 of 2009 through the government gazette Vol LXXXVII, No 60 of 21 August 2009 which serves to release inmates from custody in a variety of categories.

At least 1 544 inmates are expected to benefit from the President’s mercy.

The dire circumstances had led to trials failing to take place effectively trampling on the constitutional rights of suspects and prisoners.

Last month, the Justice Ministry committed itself to alleviating the plight of prisoners whose death toll had risen to over 1000 in the first four months of the year.

In light of the above and the in concurrence with the 100 day government plan, the Zimbabwe Prison Service through its acting public relations officer Elizabeth Banda said: “Due to inadequate financial resources coupled with the unfavorable economic environment, the ZPS has faced challenges in fulfilling its set objectives and statutory obligations which include provision of prisoners’ rations, clothing and bedding, toiletries and transport among others.

“As a short term relief option to try and contain some of these challenges seriously and negatively impacting on the effective and efficient administration of prisoners, a proposal to have a general amnesty granted to inmates was submitted to the Ministry of Justice and Legal Affairs.”

Categories which have been cited include; full remission of remainder of sentences for convicted female prisoners, save for those serving for specified offences, full remission of remainder of sentences for convicted juveniles, full remission of sentences for prisoners sentenced to 36 months and below who will have served a quarter of their sentences save for those serving specified offences, full remission of remaining period of imprisonment to all terminally ill prisoners upon certification by a prison medical officer of government medical officer of the fact that they are unlikely to survive their prison terms provided they are not serving for specified offences.”

Banda said a full remission of sentence has been granted to all inmates serving terms of imprisonment at open prisons provided they are not serving specified offences.

She added that all inmates sentenced to life in prison or to long terms of imprisonment on or before May 31 1989 and have served 20 years of more have also been granted full remission of the remaining period of imprisonment.
Prisoners excluded from amnesty include those on death row, habitual criminals serving a sentence of extended imprisonment, any person who escaped from custody and is still at large, person on bail pending appeal against conviction or sentence, persons serving sentences imposed by a court martial and persons serving sentences of imprisonment for a specified offence.

Specified offences include murder, rape or any sexual offence, carjacking, armed robbery, stock theft, tampering with apparatus for generating, transmitting, distributing or supplying electricity with results of electricity interruption or cutting off and damaging destroying or interfering with any apparatus for generating transmitting distributing or supplying electricity. Conspiracy and being an accessory to the offences above.

Zimbabwe Prison Service (ZPS) Deputy Commissioner Washington Chimboza said the service was unable to feed or clothe prisoners to the standards prescribed by law, adding that authorities had not been to observe the rights of prisoners over the last three years.

Chimboza, who was addressing a workshop on prisoner’s rights organised by the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR), said: “The Zimbabwe Prison Service has been unable to satisfy any of its mandatory obligations due to the fact that we were heavily incapacitated . . . we have now become an embarrassment to the criminal justice system.”

The ZPS official said prisons were required under the law to provide adequate food to inmates but were unable to do so due to budgetary constraints.

“Food commodities spelt out in the statutory instrument have not been able to be provided. Since 2006 we have experienced the worst and highest death rate in the history of the service. The most severe cases were experienced in 2008 where pellagra was rampant in our prisons,” said Chimboza.

Zimbabwe has 72 prisons carrying 12 971 prisoners, according to Chimboza.

The ZPS official said most of the prisoners walked semi-naked every day because ZPS cannot afford prison uniform for both inmates and staff. The water and food situation was “very poor” at most prisons, he said.

He said ZPS was using only two pots to cook for 2 000 inmates at Chikurubi:
“The little food procured has not been prepared under healthy conditions since all the cooking pots we had have seen their days. We have resorted to using drums sourced from the neighboring Larfage Cement.

“Even after we cook the food, we don’t have plates and other utensils. Prisoners have had to rely on lunch boxes and empty ice cream containers from relatives to use as plates,” said Chimboza.

He said the situation was equally dire for lowly paid staff whose working conditions had deteriorated.

He said lack of accommodation had resulted in prison officers renting houses or rooms from prisoners. – Simplicious Chirinda, ZimOnline.

From left: Paradzai Zimondi,  Perrence Shiri, Constantine Chiwenga and Augustine Chihuri.

HARARE (New York Times) – President Robert Mugabe’s top lieutenants are trying to force the opposition Movement of Democratic Change to grant them amnesty for their past crimes, according to senior members of Mugabe’s party.

Their fixation on getting amnesty was described by four senior ruling party officials, all Mugabe confidants, who spoke to a Zimbabwean journalist working for The New York Times.

To protect themselves, some of Mugabe’s lieutenants are trying to implicate opposition officials in a supposed plot to overthrow the president, hoping to use it as leverage in any amnesty talks, the officials said.

Mugabe’s generals and politicians in Zanu-PF have organised campaigns of terror for decades to keep him and his party in power.

Crimes committed during last year’s election campaign, while the world watched, included abducting, detaining and torturing opposition officials and activists.

Mugabe’s lieutenants, part of an inner circle called the Joint Operations Command, know that their 85-year-old leader may not be around much longer to shield them, and fear losing not just their power and ill-gotten wealth, but their freedom, party officials said. The security chiefs include General Constantine Chiwenga, commander of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces, Air Marshall Perrence Shiri, commander of the Air Force, Commissioner General Augustine Chihuri of the police and Paradzai Zimondi commissioner of the Zimbabwe Prison Services.

Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa, one of Mugabe’s principal negotiators in the power-sharing talks that led to the current government, informally told opposition officials around the time that the transitional government took office in February that his party wanted an amnesty, according to a senior Zanu-PF official close to the talks.

“The MDC did not sound very forthcoming,” said the official.

HARARE – The government has established a cemetery at one of its biggest jails to bury hundreds of prisoners dying from disease and hunger, according to a confidential report shown to The Zimbabwean on Sunday. The report prepared by prison officials for Commissioner of Prisons Paradzai Zimondi paints a horrifying picture of conditions in Zimbabwe’s overcrowded jails, long neglected by a government hard pressed for cash and resources after nearly a decade of acute recession.

At one time, last month, prison officials had to contact a mass burial of decomposing bodies of prisoners that had been kept in a room at Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison for six moths because a mortuary at Harare Central Prison was full, the report said in horrifying illustration of grim conditions in jails.

Last year saw the highest number of deaths of inmates ever recorded since Zimbabwe’s 1980 independence from Britain, said the report titled “End of year 2008 brief to the Commissioner of Prisons”.

The report was handed to Zimondi on Monday this week, according to our sources in the prison service.

Efforts to get comment on the report from either Zimondi or Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa were fruitless.

According to the report, 2008 was “the most horrific and traumatic year” for both inmates and prison wardens.

Prisoners went for days without a meal and were occasionally supplied with food “only meant to keep a person alive” such as the staple sadza (a thick porridge made from maize meal) and salted, unclean water, according to the eight-page report.

“The death impact of prisoners saw the opening of a cemetery at Chikurubi Prison Farm. The main causes of prisoners’ deaths included reduced meals, shortage of drugs and poor health environment in our prisons,” it said.

“Sir, we want to believe that 2008 had the highest number of prisoners’ deaths in the history of the ZPS (Zimbabwe Prisons Service). In Mashonaland Region alone in 2008 we witnessed a total number of 900 prisoners deaths,” according to the report.

A cholera epidemic that has killed close to 3 000 Zimbabweans since August has apparently also spread to jails, killing 234 prisoners between 23 December 2008 and 10 January 2009, according to the report.

“The most challenge we faced was living with dead bodies outside mortuaries,” the grim document said. “The situation was even very bad at Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison where bodies have been kept in a room since July 2008 up to 31 December 2008 mainly because the mortuary at Harare Central Prison could not accommodate them.”

With Mugabe’s government preoccupied with trying to find money to buy food, essential medicines, fuel, electricity and for salaries for hundreds of thousands of its workers, prisoners are a forgotten lot.

More often than not, inmates in many of the country’s jails have to survive on a single meal per day of sadza and cabbage boiled in salted water because there is no money to buy adequate supplies.

An outbreak of pellagra disease in 2007 killed at least 23 inmates at the notorious Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison. Pellagra is a vitamin deficiency disease caused by shortage of vitamin B3 and protein.

Overcrowding has only helped worsen the situation with the country’s 55 jails said to be holding anything above 35 000 inmates at any given time which is more than double their designed carrying capacity of 17 000 inmates.

A parliamentary committee that toured Chikurubi and other prisons in 2006 was shocked to find inmates clad in torn, dirty uniforms and crammed into overcrowded cells with filthy; overflowing toilets that had not been flushed for weeks as water had been cut off due to unpaid bills.

The committee said in a report that the conditions in prisons were inhuman. However, nothing much has been done to date to improve conditions due to a lack of resources.

President Robert Mugabe’s regime has reneged on an agreement to release dozens of opposition activists, who have been abducted and severely tortured to extract false confessions of terrorism, before Wednesday’s swearing in of a power-sharing government in Zimbabwe.

Doctors’ affidavits seen by the Guardian reveal a pattern of torture of many of the 30 political and human rights activists held by the state for months. Nine of the prisoners seen by doctors were subjected to simulated drowning, being hung by their wrists in handcuffs and beaten, and high-voltage electric shocks.

One man was hung upside down from a tree and dumped into a water-filled drum until he passed out.

A 72-year-old man was held in a deep freeze before scalding water was poured on his genitals.

Human rights lawyers say the detainees have been tortured to force them to falsely confess to bomb attacks on police stations or plots to overthrow Mugabe, in an attempt by his regime to justify further state violence against the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

The MDC leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, had demanded the release of the detainees, who include his own security chief and a former close aide, as a condition for being sworn in on Wednesday as prime minister in a power-sharing government with Mugabe.

A deal was reached between the MDC and Nicholas Goche, a senior negotiator in Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF, for 16 detainees to be released.

Some were to be taken to hospital last Friday and then quietly freed by a judge in order for the regime to save face. Eight were to appear in court on Monday on the understanding they would be freed.

But none of the detainees were produced after the prisons commissioner, Major-General Paradzai Zimondi, refused to hand them over.

Zimondi is a hardline member of the Joint Operations Command (JOC), which acts as Mugabe’s security cabinet. JOC organised the campaign of terror, beatings and killings against MDC supporters during last year’s elections. The general has threatened violence against the opposition, and recently he burst into a court and broke up a hearing on the release of some of the detainees.

The MDC is interpreting Zimondi’s intervention as evidence that the JOC intends to subvert the power-sharing administration by continuing the violence and intimidation against Tsvangirai’s officials and supporters.

Suspicion over Mugabe’s intent has been further reinforced by what the MDC says is false allegations of corruption laid against seven of its MPs last week in an attempt to overturn the party’s newly won majority in Parliament.

The tortured detainees include Kisimusi “Chris” Dhlamini, a former officer in the Central Intelligence Organisation, who became the MDC’s head of security.

According to an affidavit from a doctor who examined Dhlamini in Harare’s maximum security prison, he was repeatedly assaulted, including being subjected to simulated drowning, hung by his wrists in handcuffs, beaten and burned. The affidavit said there were injuries consistent with high-voltage electric shocks as well.

Gandi Mudzingwa, Tsvangirai’s former personal assistant, was severely beaten with sticks, kicked, subjected to simulated drowning and had his feet smashed with bricks.

Doctors’ affidavits on other prisoners show they were subjected to similar tortures, particularly having their heads forced underwater. A 72-year-old MDC activist, Fidelis Chiramba, was forced into a freezer, stripped naked and had his genitals burned with hot water.

Eight women are being held, including Jestina Mukoko, the director of the Zimbabwe Peace Project, who was abducted and tortured, and has been held in prison since last year, accused of training insurgents in Botswana to overthrow Mugabe. – guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2009

BULAWAYO – Zimbabwe prisons chief Paradzai Zimondi is funding and feeding ruling ZANU PF party militias terrorising and murdering opposition supporters in Mashonaland East province, a human rights group has said.

The Zimbabwe Peace Project (ZPP) said Zimondi sheltered and fed the ZANU PF terror gangs at his piggery farm in Uzumba district in the province from where they unleashed violence against suspected members of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party.

The group’s director Jestina Mukoko said: “We are aware of a high ranking officer Paradzai Zimondi who runs a piggery in Chidondo in Uzumba in Mashonaland East province who is feeding and funding the youths who are perpetrating the violence and are terrorising and beating villagers.”

Zimondi – who is among top security commanders loyal to President Robert Mugabe’s rule and who have publicly threatened to stage a military coup if the veteran leader was defeated in elections – was not immediately available for comment on the matter.

The ZPP and other human rights groups have long accused the army and other state security agencies of spearheading and directing a campaign of violence and murder by ZANU PF youths and war veterans that the MDC says has killed at least 24 of its members and displaced another 5 000, while 800 homesteads have been burnt down.

But this is the first time that a senior government security officer is being directly linked to political violence.

Mukoko, who was speaking at a workshop for journalists that ended in Bulawayo on Saturday, said her organisation had begun a campaign to name and shame all those involved in perpetrating violence against defenceless civilians.

“The masters of violence are ZANU PF, its supporters and state security agents and it is worrying and very sad for people to go to the extent of burning livestock and plucking out eyes of goats because the owner voted for the opposition, it is very sad,” said Mukoko.

Political violence broke out in many parts of Zimbabwe almost immediately it became clear that the MDC and its leader Morgan Tsvangirai had defeated Mugabe and his ZANU PF party in the March polls.

The MDC, Western governments and human rights groups have accused Mugabe of unleashing ZANU PF militias and the army to beat and torture Zimbabweans into backing him in a second round presidential ballot.

The run-off presidential election is due to be held at a yet unknown date after the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission said Tsvangirai defeated Mugabe but failed to garner more than 50 percent of the vote needed to take power under the country’s electoral laws.

United Nations chief Ban Ki-Moon, the United States and Zimbabwe’s former colonial power Britain have urged African leaders to do more to pressure Mugabe to end violence in Zimbabwe which is also battling unprecedented economic recession and food shortages.

The Zimbabwe government denies authorising violence and instead says it is the MDC that has carried out political violence to tarnish Mugabe’s name. – ZimOnline.

Departing from a prepared speech last Thursday during a function at which higher ranks were conferred to 14 senior officers recently promoted by President Robert Mugabe, Zimondi, who is head of prisons, said: “If the opposition wins the election, I will be the first one to resign from my job and go back to defend my piece of land.”

He also ordered his staff to vote for Mugabe saying: “I am giving you an order to vote for the President (Mugabe). Do not be distracted. The challenges we are facing are just a passing phase.”

In a press statement, ZCTU secretary general Wellington Chibebe said “the ZCTU notes with concern the reckless utterances by the head of the Zimbabwe Prison Service, Retired Major-General Paradzai Zimondi”.