The International Committee of the Red Cross says it has begun distributing food and other supplies to thousands of Zimbabwean prison inmates.

It did not comment on conditions, but previous reports have depicted ill, emaciated detainees living in squalor.

The ICRC said food shortages in prisons were closely linked to the economic crisis in the country as a whole.

It said it was working closely with authorities to improve the situation for “the most vulnerable detainees”.

Despite the ICRC’s policy of not commenting on conditions in the prisons it visits, the BBC’s Imogen Foulkes in Geneva says the statement is in itself an indication of how bad things are.

The ICRC says it has begun feeding 6,300 prisoners, setting up therapeutic feeding programmes – a sign of severe malnutrition.

Maggots

A month ago, a secretly filmed South African TV documentary – called Hell Hole – exposed the appalling conditions inside Zimbabwean jails.

It showed sick and healthy prisoners living side by side in unhygienic and overcrowded cells.

There are people there who look worse than the photographs of prisoners in Dachau and Auschwitz Roy Bennett Imprisoned MDC politician, speaking on release in March

Amid high death rates, makeshift mortuaries had been set up in prison grounds, housing prisoners’ bodies crawling with maggots.

The appalling conditions were confirmed by Roy Bennett, a leading politician with Zimbabwe’s erstwhile opposition MDC party – which now shares power with President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF.

He was imprisoned for several weeks on charges including terrorism and banditry.

After being freed on bail in March, he said his time in jail had been a “harrowing experience” which “I don’t wish on my worst enemy”.

“There are people there who look worse than the photographs of prisoners in [Nazi concentration camps] Dachau and Auschwitz,” he said.

At one prison, Chikurubi, at least 700 of the 1,300 inmates died last year, Zimbabwe weekly The Standard reported in May.

Minister’s woes

Three days ago, the South Africa-based ZimOnline website carried an interview with Zimbabwe’s Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa.

He said his ministry had received only a fraction of the budget it had been promised for the year – $327,000 (£200,000) of $17.7m.

He said the money was going towards food and basic provisions for prisoners, but did not meet even those needs.

Mr Chinamasa said in the face of the prolonged budgetary freeze, his ministry had resorted to appealing for private donations.

Red Cross goals

The ICRC says that by the end of the year it expects to be feeding 10,000 prisoners – more than half the official figure of Zimbabwe’s prison population, though the real figure is thought to be much higher.

In addition to food, the ICRC said it was providing prisoners with basic provisions such as blankets and soap.

It also plans to renovate prison kitchens and water systems in a bid to prevent the spread of diseases such as cholera.

It said it was working with the Zimbabwean authorities to try to ensure the improvements are maintained – something our correspondent says will not be easy.

MORGAN Tsvangirayi, Tendai Biti and various other members of the former opposition movement in Zimbabwe, which is now part of the inclusive government, have spent time as enforced guests of the Zimbabwean prison system.

One must assume, therefore, that they have experienced first hand, the current conditions in our prisons. One assumes because, to the best of my knowledge, they have not disclosed, in public at least, the conditions under which they were incarcerated for various lengths of time.

When Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) treasurer and deputy Agriculture Minister designate, Roy Bennett, finally walked out of prison last month, he used an expression that has become something of a cliché. He said that he would not wish time in a Zimbabwean prison on his worst enemy.

I must admit that although I sympathized with the man, there was a part of me that thought that these were the sentiments of a white Zimbabwean failing to come to terms with the realities of prison system that thousands, including his own colleagues in the MDC, have endured in silence.

I owe Mr Bennett an apology.

This week, a South African Television channel ran a program on conditions in Zimbabwean prisons based, in part, on Bennett’s experiences. It was sobering and frightening, bringing into our homes, images that I would normally associate with black and white photographs of victims of the Holocaust and television pictures of the Ethiopian famine!

Even taking into account Zanu-PF’s grim record in government, this looked particularly horrific. Yes, they massacred people in Matebeleland in the name of flushing out dissidents. They have routinely abducted, tortured and killed opponents. They have allowed facilities that were once some of the best on the continent to deteriorate to a level where they are a danger to their supposed beneficiaries.

In short, they have been a callous, unfeeling, uncaring government. But to see live human beings living in the conditions that Zimbabwean saw in that documentary was beyond anything that I could have imagined in my county, in the 21st Century!

Now I seriously doubt Bennett will ever be sworn in as deputy minister.

It brought my opinion of Zanu-PF to a new low. Yet I was not completely surprised by this new revelation of the cruelty of a party that has always thrived on the total oppression of its people. What I found frightening was the fact that there had been so much silence on such serious violations of basic human rights at our very door step.

Prison officers who have presided over these death camps have remained silent, even when they have had to preserve the corpses of dead prisoners by covering them with sand onto which they pour water (as was described in the program); they have remained silent when there has not been enough food for the prisoners; doctors who have gone to prisons to attend to patients have said nothing. Even those close to prisoners have remained silent when their relatives have shown signs of emaciation or even told them (as they must have done) of the conditions they were living in.

Commissioner of Prisons, Paradzai Zimondi, has presided over this death and decay with such remarkable hard-heartedness that he thought nothing of dressing a few luck prisoners in bright yellow uniforms – all brand new – to go and sing “Happy 85th Birthday” to President Mugabe in Chinhoyi. At least they had more than a square meal on that day as compensation for the indignity. Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa had the audacity to suggest the emaciated figures appearing on TV screens last week were citizens of another African country.

Many almost believed them. The scenes depicted were just too terrible to be out of Zimbabwe.

And the politicians who have experienced the prison conditions for themselves have also remained silent. It is as if in Zimbabwe, nothing is too appalling. We accept whatever the government throws at us without question – as long as we are in situations that are less appalling.

Zanu-PF, if they were to be asked to account for the state of our prisons would probably blame “sanctions”, but I wonder if they will ever get asked now; now that they are part of a new “inclusive” government. In any case, what sanctions have been imposed on Zimbabwe that would account for such human suffering?

The MDC, who have the majority in Parliament but are the junior partner in the inclusive government have allowed themselves to become partly responsible for the state of our prisons – as they have allowed themselves to be identified with just about every failure of Zanu-PF. They, at least appear to still have some consciences. As they look at redressing all the other messes created by the old government, they should also look at the prisons.

Even those that society wishes to punish have some rights.

ZIMBABWE — HARARE  —The unfolding humanitarian disaster in Zimbabwean prisons has driven me out of my little delusionary world and hit me right between the eyes.

Roy Bennett the much maligned and  incarcerated MDC official attempted to highlight to the world  upon his release from Mutare remand prison the inhuman and degrading conditions behind Zimbabwean prison walls but it appears everyone else is too busy with their own business and are oblivious to the plight of these wretched and dehumanised souls that are Zimbabwe’s prisoners.

Whilst it should be a given that if “you do the crime you should do the time“, it is the statutory duty of those who place these men behind those prison walls to ensure that they are well fed and nourished.

If they cannot feed them then they should explore other alternative forms of punishment to custodial sentences.

It is scandalous in the extreme that human beings should be subjected to these Dickensian and medieval conditions in prison in this the 21st century.

The magnitude of the plight of prisoners has not been accorded the attention it deserves.

The grotesque and antiquated judiciary system continues to churn out custodial punishment when it is  manifestly clear that the equally antiquated and rotten prison infrastructure is completely unable to provide for these inmates.

The prison infrastructure was designed and constructed during the colonial era and there has been no expansion whatsoever in these structures as a consequence of which some of them are carrying tenfold their capacity.

The acute decline in living standards in the country due to the ruinous policies of the Zanupf Government have been replicated and magnified in the country’s prisons.

Inmates periodically starve to death and those that are living manifest severe symptoms of inter alia malnutrition and some other untreated conditions whilst others are clearly in the last stages of their lives.

This article is a clarion call to the authorities that are now in charge of running these institutions of mass suffering to act urgently to alleviate this humanitarian disaster.

There are those who will argue that we should not be overly concerned with the welfare of prisoners when we cannot even feed the ordinary law abiding citizens in the first place.

The state has through its courts taken away the liberties of these individuals and saw it fit to confine   them. It has thus become vicariously liable for the sustenance of these individuals. If it cannot feed and clothe them then it should not put them there in the first place.

Recent developments and research in criminology point to the fact that imprisonment is not always the best and productive form of dealing with offenders.

Incacerating offenders often lead to a scenario where they mix with hardened criminals and chances of recidivism are compounded by imprisonment.

In the case of Zimbabwe sodomy has been well documented in the prison system and first time prisoners are at risk of being infected with the deadly HIV virus from those who routinely engage in sodomising young and vulnerable inmates.

Because of the overcrowded nature of the prisons contagious diseases like tuberculosis and other skin ailments are also rife. Sanitary conditions are woefully absent and deplorable. Toilets which do not flash are constantly overflowing with human waste.

It is an understatement to describe the conditions as hellish. It was recently reported that one prison had completely run out of the scant rations of food it had this week.

The fact is that conditions in Zimbabwean prisons have been under-reported and the longer we keep quite in the face such depravity makes us complicit in this whole inhuman transaction. We have allowed the commission of mass murder on our watch.

The puerile stench that emanates from these death holes poisons the blast of fresh air which the new political dispensation is attempting to engender.

We should not rest easily in our mansions and drive comfortably in our new government issued limousines when such a transgression is obtaining right in our faces.

Kenneth Kudakwashe Nyoka is a former magistrate and prosecutor in Zimbabwe.