Paul Jané has the latest horror stories from Zimbabwe about brutal “training camps” that use gang-rape as a tool to indoctrinate youngsters to torture and kill. A BBC documentary got a chilling inside story reminiscent of their exposé on North Korean prison camps:
Debbie was taken to one of the so-called training camps for President Robert Mugabe’s Green Bombers youth brigades. That night the camp boys came into her dormitory. They locked the doors, then took it in turns to rape her. “The boys… told me: ‘If you cry, if you make a noise, we’ll beat you.’ ” The ordeal didn’t end there. Debbie said she was raped again – and again, every night for the next six months. She shared her blanket with an 11-year-old girl called Sitembile. The little girl would scream night after night as she too was raped.
The morning after being gang-raped for the first time, Debbie asked the camp commander for medical help. He told her not to complain and sent her on a 20km run. Like many of the other youths in the camp, she was often deprived of food for days at a time, and frequently beaten.
One day Debbie was caught trying to escape, and was sadistically punished. She was buried up to her neck in the ground. When she was dug out hours later she was made to roll in raw sewage. “The water, it was dirty,” she said. “My head was rolling inside.” The commanders then forced Debbie to eat her meal with the other inmates without being allowed to wash. “The commanders, they laughed,” she said.
Debbie, now 22, is understandably a deeply traumatised young woman. She fled to South Africa after speaking publicly about her experience in Zimbabwe. As a consequence, she now lives isolated and in hiding, in fear of Mugabe’s secret police. At least two Zimbabweans have been tortured, one to death, for telling the truth about the camps.
But Mugabe is Zimbabwe’s “democratically-elected” leader, right?
Cheers for the link, Sari. 🙂