Harare  - Expectations that decades of violent repression meted out by President Robert Mugabe's henchmen would end with the creation of the new coalition government have been bitterly disappointed, a leading local human-rights body said Thursday.

Instead, "not much has changed yet" to the "almost inherent Zimbabwean culture of political victimization and discrimination," said the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO forum in its latest report.

It catalogued "continued heavy handedness" by police in handling peaceful protests, the upsurge in invasions of white-owned farms and the forced evictions of farmers, and the "selective arrests" of supporters of new Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai's supporters in incidents where they had clashed with backers of Mugabe's ZANU(PF) party.

The report cited the blanket amnesty for perpetrators of "the gruesome crimes" committed by Mugabe's supporters in the bloody campaign for Mugabe's re-election in June 2008, and the arrest of Roy Bennett, the white ex-farmer appointed by Tsvangirai to be a deputy minister.

Most of the incidents occurred after Tsvangirai, the leader of the former opposition Movement for Democratic Change, was inaugurated as prime minister on February 12, ushering in the new government partnered with Mugabe, it said.

"The swearing-in of the prime minister ... created optimism for a new political dispensation," it said, but it did not bring an end to repression.

In a series of demonstrations, protesters - one with an appointment with the new MDC education minister to hand over a petition over the collapse of the education system - were "unlawfully arrested," and many of them assaulted.

Observers say that the continuation of the violence and repression is the key reason for Western governments' refusals to help finance the bankrupt new government's desperate attempts to restore Zimbabwe's economy, shattered after years of misrule by Mugabe.

Western leaders have said that they want to see far-reaching reforms in human rights before they contribute toward the 5 billion US dollars the government says it needs to rebuild ruined infrastructure.

Bennett's arrest on allegations of plotting insurgency contravened "the spirit and the letter" of the agreement setting up the coalition government, the report said. Bennett was arrested after a month in jail on the orders of the Supreme Court.

The harassment of the white farmers was "in complete disregard" of a ruling last year by a regional Southern African court, which ordered the Zimbabwe government to protect the rights of the farmers and denounced as "racist" their persecution since the start of Mugabe's notorious "land reform programme," which has left scarcely 400 of the original 5,000 farmers still on their land.

Mugabe on Wednesday said there were "no invasions," but that white farmers were "resisting" attempts to evict them so that their land could be given to landless blacks. Human-rights bodies say the farmers' land has instead been parcelled out to members of Mugabe's ruling clique and his family, and millions of hectares of once productive land now lies fallow. (dpa)