Last March, Debbie Siyangapi took the pulpit in an Anglican church here in Zimbabwe’s second-largest city and confessed her darkest secret to several hundred worshipers. Within an hour, she had donned a nun’s habit as a disguise and slipped out of the church through a side entrance, literally fleeing for her safety, said Ms. Siyangapi and human rights groups that are now sheltering her. For Ms. Siyangapi’s secret was not merely her own. Her appearance was also testimony to one of the least documented — and most brutal — practices of the military enforcers of Zimbabwe’s authoritarian government, enforcers from whom she now has to hide. Ms. Siyangapi told listeners that month that she had been abducted from a Bulawayo street market in November 2001 and forcibly enrolled in the National Youth Service, a ragtag, government-run paramilitary group formed three years ago by the government to stifle growing political dissent among Zimbabwe’s civilians. Full Story
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