I saw a rather curious advertisement in The Herald today. It was inserted by the Zimbabwe Republic Police giving details of the Southern African Region Police Chiefs Co-operation (SARPCCO) Games to be held in Harare in August. Apparently a whole bunch of police chiefs from SADC are going to get together to challenge each other in athletics, soccer, volleyball, darts, chess and netball. They say that this is an effort to “build lasting relationships among law enforcing agents in the region for the betterment of all SADC citizens”.

How’s that! All SADC citizens. Presumably this includes Zimbabwe where the police recently beat up a group of lawyers in downtown Harare. One of them being a most amazing woman called Eileen Sawyer, otherwise known as gogo, (meaning grandmother) because of her age – 80. Eileen is the director of the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum.

Maybe the Zimbabwe Republic Police’s orgy of violence over the last couple of months has been part of their training regime for their August sporting event. Like beating a grandmother strengthens their “darts” arm, or something.

Sometime ago we published the SARPCCO Code of Conduct for Police Officials which makes for interesting reading in view of the entirely disgusting behaviour of some members of Zimbabwe’s police force and their cowardly generals like Bvudzijena. Article 4 of their Code of Conduct states

No police official, under any circumstances, shall inflict, instigate or tolerate any act of torture or any cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment to any person.

This entry was posted on May 11th, 2007 at 3:37 pm by Bev Clark and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.