independence before absorbing it into his party in 1987.2 Until 1999 the country was a de facto one party state, with Mugabe firmly in command. However, by 1999 a combination of political and economic factors had lead to the formation of a trade unionist based opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), lead by Morgan Tsvangirai. The MDC posed a serious electoral threat to Mugabe’s hegemony, illustrated by his government losing a crucial constitutional referendum, intended to entrench his position even further, early in 2000. Very soon after this political defeat the present crisis began when Mugabe unleashed all his forces, firstly against the country’s white commercial farmers and then against the MDC, to maintain his grip on power. Since 2000 Zimbabwe has plunged into chaos, and is today suffering from an economic, political, social, agricultural and human rights disaster. Even before 2000 HIV/AIDS posed a very serious problem, but now the country’s difficulties have been hugely exacerbated by rampant inflation and unemployment, and wholesale political repression. The MDC, although nominally legal, is under constant physical attack, and the disruption to food production caused by the confiscation of almost all the commercial farms, combined with drought, has left half the population on the brink of starvation. In this context torture is now endemic. The rule of law has been abandoned, and the independence of the judiciary, particularly at the highest level, has been destroyed.3 Mugabe has a range of forces at his disposal to terrorise the population: so-called ‘veterans’ from the liberation war (many of them toddlers in 1980), youth militias trained under a new ‘national service’ programme whose primary function is to attack the MDC, the secret Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO), the army, various official Zanu-PF bodies, and the Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP). The ZRP, once a largely professional body, has become little more than an extension of Zanu-PF, especially at leadership level. It is now in the forefront of human rights violations, participating directly in the torture of detainees as well as co-operating in this with the more ‘traditional’ torturers in the CIO. Another aspect which illustrates the ZRP’s increasing culpability for the growth of systematic and gross human rights abuses is its blatant failure to investigate and arrest those in and outside of its ranks (especially amongst the war veterans and youth militias) who have committed horrific criminal acts, including political murder, torture and life-threatening assaults. Today Zimbabwe is a ‘rogue’ State under the dictatorship of Mugabe and his Zanu-PF henchmen. Until democracy is established there is no reasonable prospect of any of the 2 An estimated 20,000 unarmed civilians were massacred, and thousands of others tortured, at the hands of Mugabe’s forces during the period 1982-1987. There is overwhelming evidence that what happened constituted a crime against humanity, and possible genocide. The period is known as the Gukurahundi. 3 See for example Report of the Zimbabwe Mission 2001, International Bar Association, London, April 2001. When the MDC almost won the June 2000 general parliamentary election Mugabe intensified his war against what was left of democracy, culminating in the government orchestrated violence of the March 2002 presidential election in which Mugabe fraudulently retained power. This in turn lead to Zimbabwe’s suspension from the Commonwealth, and to EU and USA travel and financial sanctions against the Zanu-PF leadership. In December 2003 Mugabe pulled Zimbabwe out of the Commonwealth altogether after it had voted to continue the suspension. 2