Dispatch from South Africa: RAU and WITNESS on campaign for

From http://www.witness.org | In August 2009, we asked you to join us in the Hear Us, Stand With Us campaign and support the women of Zimbabwe in their call for justice and accountability (more background below).

Your support has been truly amazing - in just two weeks, thousands of people added their voices to the campaign on Facebook and the Hub, more than 1600 people signed the petition and twitition, and hundreds of tweets and retweets on Twitter reached over 90,000 people across the world.

The message to the Zimbabwean government and to the members of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) was loud and clear: stop politically motivated sexual violence against women, end impunity, and provide assistance to the women who have survived this type of violence.

Last week, WITNESS' Bukeni Waruzi traveled to South Africa to meet with Memory - a Zimbabwean woman who shared her testimony in the video Hear Us - and with representatives from WITNESS partner Research and Advocacy Unit (RAU) and the Institute for Democracy in Africa (IDASA).

Together, they delivered the petitions, held press conferences, and met with key members of SADC. In this video, Kuda from RAU gives us an update of the week in South Africa and looks forward to the next steps in the campaign.

Stay tuned for more news as the campaign develops. In the meantime, THANK YOU for standing with us!

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• SADC
• zimbabwe
• RAU
• WITNESS
• women
• rights
• violence
• elections