No public campaign of opposition to the April elections was permitted by the Smith regime, and voting was preceded by a further police crackdown on supporters of the Patriotic Front throughout the country. On 17 April, the day polling began for the 72 black seats, it was reported that up to 1,000 people had been arrested in Salisbury alone in the past week, with further arrests of members of ZAPU (Patriotic Front) in Bulawayo, Shabani, Plumtree and Gwelo. "Several hundred" temporary detention orders were believed to have been served on Patriotic Front supporters.
In an interview on 2 April, the Joint Ministers of Law and Order had warned that those suspected of intimidating or attempting to intimidate prospective voters in the general election would be detained and kept in custody until polling was completed. As in the case of the Namibian elections of December 1978 the order in practice did not apply to those who intimidated others into taking part in the elections, as for example, members of the Rhodesian security forces who held up buses or locked the gates of protected villages until everyone had voted, but only to those suspected of advocating a boycott.
At the beginning of April 1979, the names of 269 people indefinitely detained under the Emergency Powers Regulations were known to IDAF. The majority of these were executive members or top officials of the internal organizations of the Patriotic Front. In the weeks preceding the elections the names of a further 96 people imprisoned at Wha Wha, outside Gwelo, were received by the Fund. The terms on which they are being held in custody are not yet known.
Most of those served with indefinite detention orders are held in Wha Wha detention centre. They are in fact only a small minority among the many thousands of people arrested and detained on a temporary basis under the Emergency Regulations, or under martial law. The scale of arrests is known to have accelerated sharply since the proclamation of martial law in September 1978. In March 1979, for example, one legal aid office reported that clients were arriving almost every ten minutes. Information received by IDAF has provided further confirmation of the existence of large ad hoc detention centres or concentration camps attached to police and security force base camps in the operational areas. By the beginning of March, over 1,000 people were being held at a single such camp in the Nkai area, some of whom were proceeding to trial before special courts martial, while others were sent on to detention centres in other parts of the country or in some cases were released.
According to information received from a further source inside Zimbabwe, Wha Wha contains 108 persons detained under the martial law regulations besides those detained under the Emergency Powers Regulations, while 140 martial law detainees are held at Connemara Prison about 15 miles from Gwelo. Another group held at Khami were expected to be transferred to Chikurubi Prison, outside Salisbury. According to the source the martial law detainees are differentiated from other detainees by being made to wear distinctive red vests with khaki shorts, as worn by remand prisoners.
