BANKET, ZIMBABWE — The man and woman who came to the 5-year-old boy's house in October were friendly and smiled a lot. They carried a bag of dried beans and asked where his mother was.
Alan Mutemagawu was thrilled -- his mother would be happy to get the beans. Proudly, he led them the hour's walk to the village where she was in hiding from Zimbabwean security agents.
The smiling couple didn't say much. But his mother didn't look pleased when Alan turned up with the visitors.
"She looked sad. She didn't say goodbye. She just walked away with them," the boy said recently at his grandmother's house, near the village of Banket. Neighbors found him crying after the visitors -- state security agents -- took away his mother, Violet Mupfuranhehwe, and his 2-year-old brother, Nigel. He found out later that they'd also taken his father, Collen Mutemagawu.
Little Nigel spent 76 days in jail before being released to relatives. After months of legal wrangling, his mother and father and some other jailed opposition activists -- including Roy Bennett, who has been tapped to serve as deputy agriculture minister -- were finally freed on bail early this month. But they still face trial on charges of terrorism and plotting to oust longtime President Robert Mugabe.
Since Mugabe was forced last month to join a "unity government" with the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, Zimbabwean hopes for justice over the political killings, arrests and torture by his often ruthless regime have soared. But the MDC's struggle to get its activists released from prison on bail suggests that there is a long, hard road ahead to reestablish the rule of law.
The security organs remain firmly in Mugabe's hands, with his ZANU-PF party likely to block prosecutions for crimes against humanity or any meaningful truth and reconciliation process. ZANU-PF hard-liners and security chiefs, many implicated in killings and abuses going back as far as massacres in the early 1980s, bitterly oppose the unity deal.
"They're interested in two things. One is the avoidance of any sort of accountability. Secondly, they want to stay on the gravy train," said Tony Reeler, director of the independent group Research and Advocacy Unit.
He says one of the most serious barriers to change is that the police and judiciary -- long used by the Mugabe regime to repress political opponents -- haven't changed.
