10 Stoning buses 4 2.8 When the incidents are itemized (Table 5) only 20% of the incidents can be conceivably described as criminal. Furthermore, abuse, hate speech, and “illegal” demonstrations are hardly the hallmarks of the violent campaign which the author seems to be at pains to depict. This is more a “trial of patience” for those trying to engage in non-violent opposition rather than the “trail of violence” claimed. Indeed, the author goes so far as to include, rather egregiously, as part of the “trail of violence”, an ordinary road traffic accident involving the MDC anti-Senate faction leader, Arthur Mutambara, who was subsequently charged with reckless driving. Although the other serious offences alleged – arson, attacking a police station, property destruction, and stoning buses – are a small proportion of the incidents alleged, the author has made every effort to exaggerate the number of these incidents and their scale. In so doing, the author has lied in a transparent manner in an attempt to bolster his or her argument. For example, on page 15 we are told that ZUPCO bus registration number AAS 0969 was stoned and had its windows smashed by a group of youths in Waterfalls suburb on March 11th, 2007. We are then later shown a picture on page 35 of what is alleged to be another bus with smashed windows. The caption underneath indicates that this bus was stoned by “MDC thugs” on March 13th 2007 along Simon Mazorodze Road (page 35). The bus in the picture has the number plates AAS 0969 and is clearly the same bus as the first. Immediately below that is a picture of what is manifestly the same bus, but with the caption: “Another ZUPCO bus that was stoned in Glen View by MDC supporters”. A further picture of the same bus appears on page 36 with the caption: “MDC supporters had set on fire the ZUPCO bus in picture (sic) on 18 February 2007”. The author has attempted, in a rather puerile fashion, to turn one incident of an attack on a bus into four, by photographing the same bus (in the same place) from three different angles and adding a written account of a fourth incident. Quite obviously this could not be a single bus 19 attacked on at least three different occasions in at least three different places. It is the same bus attacked once. Similarly, pictures of “two” police officers injured in petrol bomb attacks, appear to be the same officer given different names in each picture (pages 40 & 41 of the first report). In deploying such transparent falsehoods, the veracity of other evidence presented in the report immediately becomes suspect — if it were not before. Hence one’s initial impression that the bus (this time different) pictured on page 3 of the first report appears to have crashed into the elevation adjacent to the road, rather than being the victim of MDC “thuggery” as claimed, is bolstered somewhat. Almost four pages of the report are given over to large photographs of a petrol bomb attack on a single house 20 in a complex housing police officers. 19 Which would be entitled, in that event, to nurse a deep persecution complex. Although the first report claims, (page 38) that petrol bombs and tear smoke canisters hit houses numbers 43 and 52 it is later stated house number 52 was not hit by a petrol bomb and that a five litre 20