Mugabe ordered rape of former PM's daughter
Gavin du Venage

Johannesburg, 10jul07

A VETERAN human rights activist tortured by the Rhodesian government for opposing white rule, Judith Todd, has revealed that she was raped on the orders of Robert Mugabe's Government.

Todd is the daughter of former Rhodesian prime minister Sir Garfield Todd, a noted liberation struggle activist who opposed Rhodesia's declaration of independence and subsequent apartheid-style regime.

In her just-released biography, Through the Darkness: A life in Zimbabwe, Todd reveals how she was raped by a senior army officer in the early years of Mugabe's rule because of her outspoken opposition to the heavy-handed crushing of an insurrection in Matabeleland that left thousands of civilians dead.

In her memoir, she describes being picked up by an army officer one morning and driven to the Chikurubi prison outside Harare. There, she was taken to civilian quarters in the complex. "A servant let us in, not looking at us," she writes. "The (senior officer) led me into a bedroom, opened a bottle of beer for each of us, unstrapped his firearm in its holster, laid it on the bedside table next to my head and proceeded. I did not resist."

Todd later describes how she felt the officer, whom she names in the biography, appeared "unhappy" and that she regarded him as much of a victim as she was. She believed the man was under orders to attack her, foreshadowing more recent reports of Mugabe supporters using rape as a weapon against opponents.

Todd believes her attack was directly related to her speaking out on the massacres of civilians aligned with Zapu, an organisation led by Joshua Nkomo, a Mugabe rival. "It was appalling to see the smashing of one political group by another," she told The Australian.

Then, as now, fear pervaded the country as rumours of an impending attack on Mugabe opponents began to build.

"People spoke in fear of a new military unit being built--the Korean trained Fifth-brigade."

This unit was unleashed on the Zimbabwean countryside in the early 1980s, killing up to 25,000 people.

Many of those killed had been friends with whom Todd worked closely during the war against the Rhodesian government of Ian Smith. Todd, however, never considered fleeing, in spite of the mass killings and her rape: "I had been exiled for eight years by Smith. So I had only been back in the country for a short time. I stayed on because I love the country of my birth and did not want to leave again."

Instead, she became the director of the Zimbabwe Project Trust, an aid organisation, and worked closely with ex-guerilla fighters who returned from the liberation war with little more than the clothes on their backs.

Today, more than 24 years after she was attacked, the same climate of fear and rumour persists, she says.

"You really do hold your breath waiting to see what happens next."