Mugabe's Campers

As part of their training, some youths are sent out to beat their own relatives, especially if their family members are critical of the government. Thomas, 23, who was kept in a camp in the west of the country, was forced to attack his own mother. "The commanders told me, 'If you don't want to beat her we will beat you,'" he says. "I beat her with a stick." Such attacks make it almost impossible for the attackers to return to their communities, which in turn makes it easier for the government to control and indoctrinate them. For several hours a day youths in at least six known camps across the country attend lessons where they are taught that opposition supporters are ruining Zimbabwe. This helps them rationalize their violence. "They have to take out the stuff which you have in your mind and put in new stuff which is literally brainwashing," says one man who has been through the camps. With no adults to trust, the youths learn to obey even the most terrible orders.

One camp commander told the BBC that youths in his camp killed two opposition supporters two years ago. "My superiors instructed that the people must be eliminated," he says. Human-rights groups in Zimbabwe say they know the location of graves where they believe other victims killed in the last two years are buried.

Mugabe's government recently more than doubled the budget for the ministry responsible for the camps. Ministers have publicly said it is compulsory for every Zimbabwean youth to attend several months of training, though this is not enshrined in Zimbabwean law. "These guys are going to be used by the ruling party," says the camp commander, who has already received his instructions prior to the next elections. "Our main concern is that we keep this opposition party out of power."

After the Panorama program aired in Britain late last month, Zimbabwe's government denounced its content as "lies" and Western propaganda designed to misrepresent the political situation in Zimbabwe. The government said the camps were used to teach youths patriotism, discipline and entrepreneurial skills. "National Youth Service graduates have no record of violent behavior," said a statement from the ministry. "No youth, not even one, has ever been coerced to join the National Youth Service," it added. Zimbabwe's Youth Minister, Ambrose Mutinhiri, dismissed allegations that girls in the camps were raped, saying they were safely accommodated in their own hostels "cordoned off with a razor-wire fence" and guarded by watchmen.

In Washington last Wednesday, Zimbabwe's human-rights record dominated a congressional human-rights hearing held by the Committee on International Relations. "The Mugabe regime takes what excess foreign exchange it can obtain and it uses [it] to open new camps," said Congressman Ed Royce, chairman of the subcommittee on Africa, who says he will now ask the Zimbabwean government for access to the camps. Two weeks ago, not long after the State Department released its annual human-rights report, which condemned Zimbabwe for using "torture by various methods" against those politically opposed to Mugabe's regime, the United States tightened "smart" sanctions on Zimbabwe by banning transactions with a number of companies with suspected links to ministers close to Mugabe.

"I would like to see a more vigorous effort on the part of the government in the E.U. and our government to track down Robert Mugabe's assets," said Royce, adding that he thought African governments, in particular South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki, were not sufficiently critical of Zimbabwe's human-rights record. And in South Africa two weeks ago the leader of the opposition Democratic Alliance Party, Tony Leon, asked the International Criminal Court to open an investigation into Mugabe's human-rights record. As of late last week Leon's office said the ICC had not responded.

The morning after her first night of rape, three years ago, Debbie went to the camp commander to ask for medical help. She was punished for complaining. "He told me the rape is part of training," she says. Eight months later Debbie discovered she was pregnant; more recently she discovered that she is HIV positive. Her 1-year-old daughter Nunus leaps around happily, unaware of the horrific circumstances in which her life came about. Debbie is likely to be dead before the child grows up. Two weeks ago, she sent a friend in South Africa an SMS message from her safe house. I WANT A GUN, she wrote. The next line said joking, but it was hard to believe that was true.