On March 9, 2015, five men driving a white truck with a concealed number plate abducted Itai Dzamara, a Zimbabwean journalist and activist, from a barbershop in the Zimbabwean capital Harare.
Within seconds, he was bundled into the unmarked car and driven to an unknown location.
Dzamara has not been seen ever since.
Eight days before his enforced disappearance, he had called on Zimbabweans to demonstrate against the tough and deteriorating socioeconomic conditions in their country.
And he had called on then-President Robert Mugabe to resign.
His forced disappearance was not an extraordinary event in a country where journalists were (and still are) routinely harassed and detained by authorities for publishing stories deemed to be “politically sensitive” or damaging to those in positions of power.
Sixteen years earlier, in January 1999, two journalists, Mark Chavunduka and Ray Choto, who worked for the Standard newspaper, were forcibly disappeared for 10 days. While under illegal detention, they suffered electric shocks to their hands, feet, and genitals and their heads were submerged in drums of water. When they eventually appeared in court, they both had burn marks on their bodies. Their alleged crime was to publish a story about 23 army officers being arrested for plotting a coup against President Mugabe.
In 2008, Jestina Mukoko, a prominent former TV journalist, who also runs an NGO, was abducted from her home in the middle of the night, detained incommunicado for days and tortured by alleged state agents, for her alleged involvement in planning anti-government protests.
She thankfully survived her horrific ordeal, and returned to her family and advocacy work.
But Dzamara has not been as lucky. He has never returned home to his wife and two young children.
Every year on the anniversary of his disappearance, Zimbabweans take to social media to remember him and to vent their frustrations about Zimbabwe’s seemingly never-ending war on journalists, and truth.
Despite efforts by civil society........