JUSTICE IN ZIMBABWE 18 ____________________________________________________________________ to the police, yet at the time of the compilation of this report no arrests had been made. According to a newspaper report23, magistrates and prosecutors in Manicaland abandoned work24 in protest against the brutal attack upon the Chipinge magistrate. The report quoted a Chipinge court official as saying: “We are not open today because there is no magistrate. He was beaten up on Friday and we don’t know where he is or when he will return to work. At the moment things are at a standstill.” The report also quoted a prosecutor as having said: “This is unheard of. It is a total breakdown of the rule of law in the country and we cannot be seen to condone it. How on earth can people just walk into a courtroom, drag the presiding magistrate out and assault him?” In its editorial column a local newspaper had this to say about the attack upon the Chipinge magistrate: “Final nail in the coffin of the rule of law When it was first reported in the Press that a gang of suspected war veterans had, last Friday, dragged out of the courtroom the sole Chipinge magistrate, Walter Chikwanha, and took him to a government building where they severely assaulted him, every peaceloving, law-abiding Zimbabwean was genuinely dismayed. It was the ultimate proof, if indeed any more proof was needed, that the rule of law had completely broken down in Zimbabwe. Many felt anger and revulsion at the state of anarchy and lawlessness this country has been allowed to descend into … The attack on Chikwanha was, of course, not the first on a magistrate. Others in Bindura, Kadoma and Masvingo have in the past been threatened and demands have been made for them to be transferred or removed altogether because they had delivered judgments which ZANU (PF) supporters did not like. …. even High Court judges have had a taste of the nastiness of the so-called war veterans when they think the courts ‘have betrayed the party’ … [The present Chief Justice experienced this when he was heading the commission of inquiry into the looting of the War Victims Compensation Fund. The war veterans] ‘publicly derided him, danced on top of his desk and forced him to abandoned [the hearing.]