As Democracy Advocates: Women HRDs 33 Through this project, the three organisations were able to show that CSOs in Zimbabwe can work professionally, impartially and without being affiliated to any political party in order to build state accountability and promote peace. ZZZICOMP was able to provide credible and substantive information on progress and challenges facing the national constitution-making process. It was hoped that the three political parties involved in the constitution-making process (ZANU PF and the two MDC formations) would take corrective measures to ensure that the process complied with international best practices and standards, and that civil society would use the ZZZICOMP findings to press for greater accountability of political players during this process. Being a patriarchal society, and with three women HRDs taking an initiative to influence national processes, some men within political parties and civil society were not very comfortable with this; nor were they happy that they had been excluded from the initiative. The three women leaders of ZZZICOMP thus gained a nickname – “Sisis” – being the plural of the singular Shona word, sisi. Ordinarily the word sisi is used in addressing the maid. In this case, it appeared like this word had been chosen to belittle the women HRDs who were leading this process, to continue to remind them that no matter what national processes they engaged with, they would still continue to be viewed as “lowly women” in a patriarchal manner. Despite these challenges, ZZZICOMP remains, to date, one of the few successful initiatives from civil society during the constitution-making process, and the only platform to produce substantive information from monitoring and research efforts and a written record of the national process from a non-political party perspective. Such monitoring efforts have been replicated as a best practice since that time. It is worth recording that Jestina Mukoko, the director of ZPP, had been subjected to grave human rights violations in the past but nevertheless continued with her important monitoring and peace building work. On 3 December 2008, Mukoko was abducted from her home in the early hours of the morning. During her enforced disappearance she was severely tortured. The Minister responsible for state security, whose agents are known as CIOs, acknowledged in court documents that his employees were responsible for her disappearance and that of other ZPP employees abducted around the same date. Mukoko was subsequently released into the custody of the police by her abductors and, despite the police acknowledging that Mukoko and others in her predicament had been kidnapped, she was detained on 22 December 2008 and was charged with violating provisions of the Criminal Law (Codification and Reform) Act. The prosecution was eventually stopped in 2010 after the Supreme Court ruled that the ill treatment Mukoko had suffered prevented the state from pursuing charges against her. Other than the problems presented by non-state actors as highlighted above, state actors have remained very active in their harassment of ZPP. On 6 February 2013, before national elections, at least six police officers from the Law and Order Section at Harare Central Police Station raided the ZPP offices. ZLHR lawyers who attended to represent ZPP’s interests were shown a search warrant that empowered the police to “search for articles for criminal use” as stipulated in section 40 of the Criminal Law (Codification and Reform) Act. Other charges included violating the Customs and Excise Act, as well as the Immigration Act. The police officers searched all the offices except the Director’s office (as she was away) and seized numerous documents that included incident reporting forms, files with activity information, radios and some mobile phone handsets. No employee