LONDON, Aug 25 (AFP) - Hundreds of women and girls are being raped in rural Zimbabwe by President Robert Mugabe's youth brigades, a British newspaper reported on Sunday.
Girls as young as 12 are being raped, tortured and forcibly kept as concubines in camps in what human rights lawyers have branded "systematic political cleansing" of the population, The Sunday Telegraph reported.
A former militia member interviewed by the newspaper claimed he and others received orders to attack the wives and daughters of opposition sympathisers, the report said.
Human rights activists say the use of rape is part of a drive to terrify all opposition into submission.
"They are raping on a mass scale," Frances Lovemore, member of the Harare-based Amani Trust which monitors torture, told the paper.
Lovemore claimed girls were being systematically taken and used and abused by because of their families' political views.
"We're seeing an enormous prevalence of rape and enough cases to say it's being used by the state as a political tool," said Tony Reeler, a director of the Amani Trust.
The Sunday Telegraph said the Amani Trust was compiling video evidence of rape camps set up for youth brigades and riot police in rural areas and hopes to bring Mugabe to trial at the international court of human rights.
Victims living in hiding told the newspaper how they had been gang-raped by police and war veterans and had their genitals burnt with iron rods.
They said the abuse was punishment for their parents not supporting Mugabe in the March presidential poll which returned him to power amid widespread allegations of fraud and voter intimidation.
In a country where some 40 percent of the population is HIV positive, rape can amount to a death sentence, the report said.
The report told of one 12-year old girl, in the Vumba mountains in eastern Zimbabwe, who was gang-raped by war veterans and policemen while her mother and younger sisters were forced to chant Mugabe's praises and watch the ordeal.
She was raped because her father supports the country's main opposition group, the Movement for Democratic Change.
Other victims were severely beaten, and some claimed brigade members urinated on their food supplies -- a terrible indignity in a land where millions are close to starvation, the report said.
"We found a population living in terror, some towns completely "cleansed" of all opposition," a Sunday Telegraph reporter said.
Zimbabwean officials are speaking in chilling terms about the need to take the country back to zero, the report said.
Last week, Didymus Mutasa, the organisation secretary of Mugabe's ruling Zanu-PF Party said: "We would be better off with only six million people (out of a total 12 million), with our own people who support the liberation struggle."
The report emerged as world attention focuses on Mugabe's efforts to evict white farmers while famine threatens the country.
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw on Sunday attacked Mugabe's Zimbabwe as a "pariah state" amid reports that Britain is to step up pressure on the president's regime at the UN Earth Summit in Johannesburg that starts Monday.
According to UN figures, six million people, making up half the country's population, are facing starvation.
Police and Zanu-PF supporters have arrested some 200 white farmers for ignoring eviction notices to quit their land served on some 2,900 white farmers.
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