It’s the morning after doctor Peter Magombeyi’s alleged abduction in Harare the Saturday night before, and activists are jumpy. It’s not the first time someone critical of the government was grabbed in the middle of the night by balaclava-clad men.

“Usually, he should have surfaced by now,” Harare-based human rights lawyer Doug Coltart said on Sunday, a day after almost a dozen African heads of state jetted in and out of the capital for former president Robert Mugabe’s memorial service.

Magombeyi’s friends and sympathisers fear the worst. As acting president of the Zimbabwe Hospital Doctors Association, he’s been at the forefront of campaigning for better wages for doctors from government amid increasingly tough economic conditions.

Protests related to wages and a petrol price rise in January have resulted in arrests and clampdowns. In August, activists attempting to organise protests, to commemorate the post-election killing of protesters by the army a year before, faced a fresh clampdown.

Tatenda Mombeyarara, outreach officer from the human rights activist organisation Citizen’s Manifesto, said he was abducted from his Harare home on a cold night on 13 August, ahead of the planned protests. Three men with assault rifles banged on his door.

“They woke everyone up including the landlady. She said ‘if it’s the police, just hear what they want and go’. That was mistake number one and I paid dearly for it,” he said.

So nervous are the activists that the interview with Mombeyarara is conducted in a car. Every time his companions spotted something suspicious, we moved on. Daylight attacks on activists are uncommon, but the thought that someone could be on our track was intimidating.

The Mail & Guardian recently reported the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum as having recorded six abductions, including Mombeyarara’s, and at least 128 arrests, with 12 people needing urgent medical attention after injuries allegedly sustained at the hands of police. With the January fuel protests the forum recorded 844 human rights violations: 12 deaths, 78 gunshot injuries, 242 incidents of assault, torture and inhuman and degrading treatment, 46 incidents of vandalism and looting, and 466 arbitrary detentions.

Zimbabwe’s government has denied being responsible for atrocities, and on Sunday, as health workers in white coats picketed outside hospitals, health minister Obadiah Moyo expressed “alarm” in a statement, vowing that security agencies were “seized with this matter (of finding him) with no stone left unturned”.

Foreign affairs minister SB Moyo also issued a statement on Magombeyi’s abduction, blaming it on government detractors.

“The government under the new dispensation is totally averred to any practices that put the lives of any citizen in danger,” he said.

Moyo noted it was “very curious” that “these acts” often happen before big international gatherings, such as August’s Southern African Development Community summit, or the United Nations General Assembly this week, which also coincides with a visit by UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights to Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association, Clément Nyaletsossi Voule.

“These two events provide an opportune time for the New Dispensation’s detractors to soil the country’s image,” he said. “As the government continues to spruce up the country’s image, it is unthinkable that any of its security agencies would be involved in such blatant criminal acts.”

Government has previously variously blamed opposition supporters themselves, as well as Mugabe supporters who were bitter with the way he was forced out of power, for the abductions during a time when the government was trying to shake the yoke of international sanctions and attract investment to grow the economy. One of the biggest differences after the Mugabe era has been, for example, opening up to foreign journalists again. Moyo said government invited the UN Special Rapporteur in November “as we feel we have nothing to hide”.

Voule’s visit, starting on Tuesday 17 September, is historic; it’s the first official visit to Zimbabwe by an independent human rights expert, appointed by the UN Human Rights Council. Also, the Special Rapporteur only makes a couple such visits a year worldwide.

Voule said the visit “represents a key opportunity to learn first-hand about the laws, policies and national realities in relation to the rights to peaceful assembly and of association in the light to the 2013 Constitution and the change of leadership”.

Coltart, who works with the NGO Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, which is expected to do a submission to Voule together with the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum, including trade unions, welcomed the visit. Coltart said civil society hoped to highlight the extreme clampdown on freedom of assembly, the way the law is applied – or not – when it comes to that freedom of assembly, and the media’s role.

“Mnangagwa promised to repeal the Public Order and Security Act (POSA), which is one of the main laws used and which is based on a colonial Rhodesian law,” Coltart said, “but the Maintenance of Peace and Order Bill is virtually identical to POSA in every respect. Some of it is worse than POSA even though it’s been touted as a reform bill aligning POSA to the Constitution”. An example of this was the way the August protests were “unilaterally banned by the police using frivolous excuses for the grounds on which it was banned”. Trade unions, which are exempt from POSA, have also suffered. Teachers were arrested by riot police and charged with being a criminal nuisance after they tried to hand over a petition over their salaries, Coltart said.

There have also been the arrests of independent local journalists covering such protests, while state media has been used to “demonise everyone who exercises their rights to freedom of assembly and delegitimises people who are abducted and tortured after exercising their right to freedom of assembly”.

Even though the Mugabe era was brutal too, things seem worse now. “This (Mnangagwa’s) regime has crossed lines that in the latter years of the Mugabe’s era were not crossed,” Coltart said, adding that a study by the NGO Forum showed “quantitatively that the human rights abuses since the coup (Mugabe’s ousting in November 2017) are worse or in greater intensity than Mugabe’s last term in office.” President Emmerson Mnangagwa “has a much weaker hold on the state than Mugabe, which means the section of the state he has control over are that much more vicious and ferocious.” Coltart and other activists reckon the abductions and torture “appear to be directed from the highest echelons”.

Despite admitting that experiences like his had a chilling effect on some, Mombeyarara said he would continue to speak out about his experience to “increase the political costs for [the perpetrators] to continue doing it by exposing it”.

Also, he now felt even more strongly about speaking out on human rights to prove that brutal tactics don’t silence activists.

“It does intimidate, you don’t feel secure. It has not changed my resolve, though, but it has made me aware of how vulnerable I am and how brutal and unrelenting the system is in crashing down on dissent and free expression.” MC