By Eileen Sawyer – former National Director of the Legal Resources Foundation
Chatham House, London,
4th September 2007
“Gukurahundi†is the Shona name which the Mugabe regime used to describe the massacres in Matabeleland and the Midlands in Zimbabwe between 1982 and 1987. It means the early rain which washes away the chaff before the spring rains. It describes the onslaught by the 5th Brigade, a North Korean trained military unit, against a civilian population in which at least 20,000 people lost their lives and thousands more were subjected to unspeakable acts of violence.
The book “Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe†commemorates the tenth anniversary of the publication of a Report entitled “Breaking the Silence; building true peace†by the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace (CCJP) and the Legal Resources Foundation (LRF) in Zimbabwe.
The background to the involvement of the CCJP has been adequately described by Mike Auret, the former Director. The involvement of the LRF, of which I was the National Director at the time, is less well known.
The LRF is a Charitable and Educational Trust established in 1984 which promotes human rights through its paralegal, educational and publications programmes. It has 5 urban, 7 suburban and 18 rural legal advice centers in Zimbabwe.
From the time when the Bulawayo Legal Projects Centre (BLPC) opened the first of its rural legal advice centers in Lupane in Matabeleland North in 1990, paralegals received constant requests for help from the communities still suffering the aftereffects of Gukurahundi. For example help was needed to obtain death certificates for heads of families who had disappeared in the 1980s to enable children to get birth certificates to entitle them to go to school and for other administrative purposes.
It became apparent to the then Director of the BLPC, David Coltart, and his staff that unless the full extent of what had happened during the Gukurahundi was brought to the attention of the Zimbabwean Government and the Zimbabwean people in general, the plight of the victims would never be adequately addressed. Likewise it was also clear that whilst statements regarding what had happened could be taken (and were being recorded), without the contemporaneous data collected by the CCJP in 1983 and 1984 in particular, the picture of what had happened would always be incomplete.
It was at this point in 1994 that the Director of the BLPC wrote to Mike Auret, in his capacity as Director of CCJP, to see whether the CCJP would enter into a collaborative venture to produce a detailed report. Subsequently the LRF entered into a contract with the CCJP to produce what became known initially as the “Matabeleland Reportâ€.
During the course of 1994, 1995 and 1996 the staff of the BLPC interviewed some 2000 victims and their statements were then combined with the data received from the CCJP. At the same time other sources of data were identified and retrieved. Interns, for example, scoured local newspapers for contemporaneous reports of what had happened. Towards the end of 1995 a research coordinator/editor was employed full time by the BLPC who then pulled all the data together and wrote the bulk of the report. At the same time experts, such as the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, were engaged to write specialized chapters of the report. The Recommendations chapter was based on an analysis of the views expressed by the hundreds of victims interviewed over the course of some 6 years.
Without the intervention of the then Director of the BLPC, the support of his BLPC staff and the considerable expertise of the research coordinator/editor and chief interviewer, the shocking events of the 1980s would have remained a closed chapter.
In the preface to the 1997 edition the authors recognized that it was important for people to have their suffering publicly acknowledged; that the suffering in Matabeleland and the Midlands at the time was unknown except to those who had experienced it first-hand and that by seeking to break the silence “surrounding this phase in the nation’s historyâ€â€¦â€¦.â€the greater openness will lead to greater reconciliationâ€. It was also recognized that while the report in itself could not “result in greater reconciliationâ€, it did put forward some concrete suggestions as to how the hardships caused in the 1980s could be addressed.
The recommendations covered such areas as;
• National acknowledgment through the publication of the “Matabeleland Report†and Government’s own “Chihambakwe Commission Report†which described events at the time. (1984)(Inspired by international pressure).
• Human Rights Violations including the removal of those directly responsible for the violations of human rights from positions of authority in the future.
• Legal Amendments, including enabling compensation to be claimed under, for instance, the War Victims Compensation Act, and government honoring its undertaking given to the United Nations in 1996 to pay compensation to victims.
• Identification and burial of the remains of missing persons, protecting and leaving undisturbed all mass grave sites and mine shafts containing remains with a view to reburial.
• Health, including the provision of appropriate medical persons to address the effects of psychological trauma.
• Communal reparation, including the establishment by government of a Reparation Trust.
• Constitutional safeguards, including an urgent debate between government, citizens of Zimbabwe and civil society to provide constitutional safeguards to prevent widespread violations of civil rights.
Over the years, including the period following the signing of the National Unity Accord between ZANU PF and PF ZAPU in 1987, there have been some half-hearted attempts by government to address some of the problems caused by the Matabeleland massacres but nothing concrete has materialized as will become evident from the contribution by Nokuthula Moyo which follows my presentation and which draws attention to what the future, post the Matabeleland Report, could have been had even a part of the recommendations been implemented.
It is common knowledge that there was some disagreement between the Catholic Bishops Conference (CBC) to which the CCJP was answerable and the LRF on the appropriate time to publish “Breaking the Silence†with the CBC wanting to get an acknowledgement of the receipt of the report (not received to this day) from the President and the LRF wanting the grim facts to be publicized as soon as possible.
Arguments were raised that disclosure of the facts could lead to ethnic uprisings in the country but this did not happen, with the people in Matabeleland and the Midlands expressing the view that while they knew what had happened to them, they wished others to know.
In an attempt to secure the publication of two reports relevant to the period, Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights ZLHR and the LRF applied to the Supreme Court in terms of S 24(1) of the Constitution for an order that the President make public the findings of two commissions of inquiry which had been given to the President but not made public. It was argued that the applicants were not entitled to proceed against the President without first obtaining the leave of the court to do so. It was held that although S 30 of the Constitution provides that the person holding the office of the president has immunity from civil and criminal proceedings whilst he is in office, legal proceedings can still be brought against the office of the President in his official capacity.
Unfortunately, the judgment did not go beyond this point so that the only published record of the massacres of the 1980 remains the “Matabeleland Reportâ€, updated by “Gukurahundi in Zimbabweâ€.
The original report, from which I quote. states “We Zimbabweans need to ensure that what happened in Matabeleland North, Matabeleland South and Midlands Provinces in the 1980s will never happen again anywhere in Zimbabwe. If we pride ourselves in being a democracy, a leader among nations, then we must conduct much self-analysis to understand why it was that such horrendous atrocities could occur after our hard fight for independenceâ€.
We were naïve to have included “Building True Peace†in the title of the original report. Nothing could have been further from the truth when we examine the nature and level of organized violence and torture in Zimbabwe which have characterized the behavior of the state since Independence in 1980, in its endeavors to retain political power, particularly through state agents and their ancillaries.
Some time after the publication of the report President Mugabe referred to the events in Matabeleland and the Midlands in the 1980s as a “moment of madness†that must never be repeated. However in February 1998 he also personally attacked both David Coltart and Mike Auret on national television, accusing them of fomenting trouble – presumably because of their involvement in the publication of the report; and so it is questionable whether President Mugabe is fully prepared to acknowledge the grievous wrongs done to thousands of victims during Gukurahundi.
What happened in the 1980s amounted to genocide perpetrated against a defenseless civilian population on the justification that they were supporting dissidents who were attempting to destroy the hard-won independence in Zimbabwe.
The ruthless campaign was directed from the top and when it ceased with the signing of the 1987 Unity Accord, all those guilty of perpetrating the atrocities were covered by a General Amnesty thus ensuring that “those responsible for the most heinous acts against unarmed civilians were not held accountable for their actions, thus strengthening the culture of impunity that prevails in Zimbabweâ€.
In Matabeleland and the Midlands, the moldering sore continues to fester as a grim reminder of the ghastly events of the 1980s. Sadly the violence experienced by thousands of Zimbabweans throughout the country since 2000, including atrocities such as “Operation Murambatsvinaâ€, is rooted in the Gukurahundi and the sense of impunity that the Zimbabwean Government and military have to this day. To that extent, part of the solution to the Zimbabwean catastrophe is to be found in addressing what happened in the Gukurahundi. For that reason alone the report produced by CCJP and the LRF in 1997 is even more important to the Zimbabwean discourse today than it even was when it first published in 1997.