By the Financial Gazette
21 June 2007
Njabulo Ncube
Harare

BIG brother is watching.

This aptly describes the jittery mood within the media and telecommunications sectors in Zimbabwe following the passing by Parliament last Wednesday of the controversial Interception of Communications Bill, despite opposition to some of its provisions by opposition legislators and free speech advocates.

The passage of the Bill, which allows government to monitor e-mails, telephone calls, the Internet and ordinary mail, has drawn widespread criticism.

Under the Bill, service providers will be compelled to install the enabling equipment on behalf of the government.

The new law empowers the chief of Defence Intelligence, the director-general of the Central Intelligence Organisation, the police commissioner and the commissioner general of the Zimbabwe Revenue Authority to intercept telephonic, e-mail and postal messages.

A monitoring centre or agency, which will be the sole facility through which authorised interception shall be effected, will be established.

Contributing to the debate during the Bill’s reading stages, Bulawayo South Member of Parliament David Coltart said the judiciary, and not the Attorney-General, should be empowered to review the exercise of the powers of the Transport and Communications Minister in the issuing of warrants for the interception of any communication. Coltart stressed that the decision on the right to grant a warrant should be the preserve of the judiciary and not the Executive.

In separate interviews this week, stakeholders in the communications field condemned the new law — which they referred to as the “spying bill” — saying it was the latest demonstration of government’s paranoia and extension of a drive to stifle freedom of expression.

MISA-Zimbabwe national director Rashweat Mukundu, said the passing of the Bill marks yet another sad chapter in the country’s long history of free speech violations, as it will have serious implications on citizens’ fundamental right to freely express themselves without hindrance.

Section 20 of the Constitution guarantees a citizen’s freedom to receive and impart ideas without interference.
“By passing this Bill, especially without any amendments, the House of Assembly has regrettably and sadly dealt yet another devastating blow to the country’s deepening human rights and political crisis, which is being duly recorded by historians and will be judged accordingly by posterity,” said Mukundu.

Internet service providers will be required to bear the burden of additional costs, as they will be expected under the law to install enabling equipment and software, called spyware, despite the acute foreign currency shortages in the country.
Jim Holland, spokesman for Zimbabwe’s Internet Service Providers (ISP), said most ISPs could not afford to install the equipment that would allow government unfettered access to data.

“Potentially, they (government) could insist that anyone operating as an Internet service provider would be forced to monitor it, which is beyond business’s budget,” said Holland.

Wellington Chibebe, secretary general of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), said the Bill deals a major blow to the enjoyment of human rights. “It is an unwarranted invasion of people’s privacy. If signed by the President, this Bill will join other draconian pieces of legislation such as the Public Order and Security Act, and the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act,” said Chibebe.

The ZCTU boss said the need to have such laws was a sign of growing paranoia within President Mugabe’s government.
“The government has taken it upon itself to stifle whatever little freedom Zimbabwean citizens had. The ruling party has perceived and convinced itself that it has enemies bent on toppling it. A government elected by the people, for the people, as ZANU PF claims to have been elected, surely has nothing to fear from its people,” he said.

“It also boggles the mind why government would want to pass the cost of acquiring and installing the spying equipment on to the service providers. This will push some small service providers out of business, as they might have to purchase the equipment outside Zimbabwe’s borders.

“If President Mugabe has any decency left in him, he will not put his signature to this ill-thought and ill-timed Bill. The ZCTU urges President Robert Mugabe instead, to concentrate on finding solutions to the Zimbabwean crisis rather than continue to find ways of harassing and violating innocent people’s rights.”

The government argues that countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States of America have similar laws in place to protect their sovereignty and to fight crime and terrorism.

Voice of America
By Peta Thornycroft
Southern Africa
15 June 2007

Zimbabwe this week passed a new law allowing the government to monitor telephones, mail and the Internet. For VOA, Peta Thornycroft reports that the Zimbabwe government justifies this new law by saying it is necessary to protect national security.
President Robert Mugabe regularly tells his country that Zimbabwe’s sovereignty is under threat, which is the reason he uses when he puts the army and police on alert. He says the main opposition political party, the Movement for Democratic Change, is a “puppet” of the west, and that its leaders take their orders from Washington and London.

The new law, the Interception of Communications Act, sailed through both houses of parliament, where the ruling ZANU-PF has a large majority.

Opposition Movement for Democratic Change legal secretary David Coltart said the new law was what he described as “typically fascist legislation.” He said this law gives enormous powers to “a tiny coterie of people” to intercept e-mails and all other communications.

Coltart said the law was “not subject to review in any way by any independent authority.” He said he had no doubt it will be abused to “interfere with legitimate democratic activities”

Transport and Communications Minister Chris Mushohwe said similar legislation existed in the west. He said Zimbabwe needed the legislation to prevent crime and guard national security. Few Zimbabweans have access to telecommunications, and those that do have long believed that the government was already monitoring phone calls and e-mail.

This week riot police interrupted a stage play, called “The Good President” at a theater in the country’s second largest city, Bulawayo, saying it was a political gathering and that police permission was needed before it could go ahead.
Most opposition political meetings and rallies are presently banned in Zimbabwe.

By Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA)

Zimbabwe’s House of Assembly on 13 June 2007 passed the controversial Interception of Communications Bill without amendments despite opposition to some of its provisions by opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) legislators.
MISA Zimbabwe National Director Rashweat Mukundu said the passing of the bill marks yet another sad and retrogressive chapter in the country’s unfolding crisis as it has serious implications on the citizens’ fundamental right to freely express themselves without any hindrance in the form of the envisaged spying law.

Section 20 of the Constitution guarantees freedom of expression, and the freedom to receive and impart ideas without interference with one’s correspondence.
“By passing this bill, let alone without any amendments, the House of Assembly has regrettably and sadly contributed yet another devastating blow to the country’s deepening human rights and political crisis, which is being duly recorded by historians and will be judged accordingly by posterity,” said Mukundu.

“The future viability and development of the telecommunications sector will also be seriously compromised by this draconian law, considering that Internet service providers will have to bear high costs as they will be expected to install the enabling spying equipment in a country that is experiencing acute foreign currency shortages.”

Under the bill, service providers will be compelled to install the enabling equipment on behalf of the government while empowering the chief of defence intelligence, the director-general of the Central Intelligence Organisation, the commissioner of police and the commissioner general of the Zimbabwe Revenue Authority to intercept telephonic, e-mail and cell phone messages.

The bill, which seeks to empower the government to spy on telephone and e-mail messages, was presented to Parliament on 26 July 2006.
It also proposes to establish a monitoring centre or agency which shall be the sole facility through which authorised interception shall be effected.

Contributing to the debate during its reading stages, Bulawayo South legislator David Coltart, who was elected on an opposition MDC ticket, said the judiciary and not the attorney-general should be empowered to review the exercise of the powers of the minister of transport and communications in the issuing of warrants for interception of communication.

Coltart also argued that the decision on the right to grant a warrant should be the preserve of the judiciary and not the executive.

By Reuters

Published: June 13, 2007, 4:44 PM PDT

The lower house of Zimbabwe’s parliament passed a bill on Wednesday allowing the government to monitor phones, mail and the Internet to protect national security.

While conceding the country needed to protect itself against terrorism, opposition members said they feared the bill would pave the way for President Robert Mugabe’s government to curtail freedom of speech and breach privacy.
The Interception of Communications bill sailed through the lower house without amendments and will now be sent to the upper house, where it is expected to face little opposition. Mugabe’s ruling party has a majority in both houses.

Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) legislator David Coltart called the proposed law a “fascist piece of legislation” that Mugabe’s government could use in an ongoing crackdown on political dissent.

“I recognize the need for legislation of this nature, especially after the emergence of al Qaeda and international terrorism,” Coltart said. “The objection is what checks are there to stop the abuse of this law.”

Published in the Washington Post by Michael Gerson

A nation is dying, its leader a tyrant, its neighbors indifferent

Thursday, June 14, 2007

WASHINGTON – When I talked earlier this week with David Coltart, a
Zimbabwean member of parliament and human rights lawyer, his office in
Bulawayo had been without power for five hours. The central business
district of Zimbabwe’s second-largest city, he said, was “a ghost town,”
with “hardly anyone on the streets” and “signs everywhere of total economic
collapse.”
Four days previously the price for a liter of gasoline had been 55,000
Zimbabwean dollars; that morning gas stations were advertising 85,000
dollars. Inflation, by conservative estimates, gallops at 3,700 percent.

Perhaps 31/2 million people — about one-fourth of the population — have
left the country, in a massive drain of youth and ambition. “Land reform”
has been a land grab for ruling party elites, who are proving that
intimidation and brutality are powerless to make the corn grow. Orphans,
many with the signs of childhood malnutrition, have begun coming to Mr.
Coltart’s parliamentary office for help.

Zimbabweans have discovered with horror that their founding father, Robert
Mugabe, is an abusive parent, as if George Washington had grown mad with
power, expropriated Monticello and given Jefferson a good, instructive
beating.

With elections for president and parliament set for next year, Mr. Mugabe
can hardly run on his record. So he has kicked off the campaign season by
attempting to destroy his opposition and rig the election in his favor. In
early March, his police crushed a protest rally and began arresting and
torturing political opponents. In response to international criticism, Mr.
Mugabe coolly replied, “We hope they have learned their lesson. If they have
not, then they will get similar treatment.” Constitutional changes are
moving forward that will allow Mr. Mugabe to handpick his successor. Next
week parliament will debate measures that permit the interception of e-mails
and the suppression of democratic groups, with the excuse of fighting
“foreign terrorism.”

Mr. Mugabe, having spent a lifetime consuming his country, now seems
determined to drink it to the dregs.

For years, nations in the region did nothing in response, and called their
silence “quiet diplomacy.” More recently, those efforts have progressed from
nonexistent to inadequate. After the recent round of beatings and arrests, a
summit of the Southern African Development Community — a 14-country
regional organization — appointed South African President Thabo Mbeki to
mediate the political conflict in Zimbabwe. Yet the summit refused to
clearly criticize the regime’s human rights violations. “We got full
backing,” boasted Mr. Mugabe, “not even one criticized our actions.”

South African diplomats tell American officials that there is no serious
alternative to the regime — that the opposition is weak and divided. But
perhaps that opposition is dispirited because in March and April of this
year, 600 of its leaders were arrested or abducted, 300 hospitalized and
three killed. Any hope of “mediation” in this atmosphere is a sham. How do
you sit down at the negotiating table when one side is using a truncheon on
the other?

The precondition for mediation is an end to beatings and torture on Mr.
Mugabe’s part — and the South Africans should insist on it. They should
also start considering more muscular options if Mr. Mugabe continues on his
current path. South Africa has tremendous leverage if it chooses to use it.
A cutoff of energy, fuel and trade could end Mr. Mugabe’s regime in a matter
of days.

The hesitance of many democracies to confidently promote democracy is one of
the great frustrations of recent years. The South Korean government does its
best to downplay massive human rights abuses in the North. India and Japan
do business with the brutal regime in Burma. It would be progress if South
African diplomats even raised the issue of human rights in Zimbabwe and
began showing the kind of moral clarity that once benefited their own cause.

In Zimbabwe, a collapsing economy, malnutrition, high rates of disease and a
failing health care system have produced some of the lowest life
expectancies in the world — 34 years for women and 37 years for men.

So Mr. Mugabe, at age 83, has achieved a rare distinction in the history of
tyranny — living twice as long as his citizens are expected to live.

According to Mr. Coltart, the most vivid image of Zimbabwe is found in the
cemeteries, which “are filled to overflowing.” “There are burials at any
time of the day,” he told me, “row after row of fresh dirt, with no
headstones, because the poor can’t afford them … It is the way,” he said,
“that I imagine the Battle of the Somme.”

That terrible battle during World War I lasted 142 days. Zimbabwe has
suffered for years — and the burials go on.

Financial Times by Alec Russell

Published: May 21 2007 03:00

The people of Nswazwi are once again on the move. Three decades ago their tiny settlement of thatched mud huts, a few miles from the border with Botswana, was caught up in Zimbabwe’s liberation war. Many residents fled across the frontier before returning home to enjoy the fruits of freedom. Now, again, abandoned huts and empty kraals (enclosures) testify to an exodus.

Since the days of Lobengula, the 19th-century Matabele king, lustrous cattle have grazed in this remote corner of Zimbabwe. But now food stocks are running low; the average household income is a few US dollars a month; and the intimidation from the regime is intensifying. Those who remain are clearly struggling. Local tracks are dotted with people who cannot afford the bus fare to the local town. And so they walk for hours in the sun, bearing scraps of food that they hope to sell or barter – and this in a country that was until recently dubbed the bread-basket of southern Africa.

These are tense times. Few people talk openly to strangers, lest agents of the feared Central Intelligence Organisation are watching. Hidden behind the corner of a cattle kraal, a young girl said she wanted to speak out. “There are so many who are going,” she said. “They say they will come back one day but I don’t think so. It is so difficult to get food now. We are finishing off last year’s maize and then we will have no stocks.”

The situation in Nswazwi is mirrored across Zimbabwe, where security forces tightly monitor the main roads and most journalists, including this correspondent, have to operate undercover. “Every year we say this must be the end,” said a veteran of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), who acted as a guide for the FT. He recalls how his first car cost $Z5,000, a thousandth of what half a tank of petrol costs now – or rather what it cost when he spoke, for the next day the prices went up. “Mugabe can’t last much longer,” he added. “Or maybe he can . . . ”

In the latest grim signal of Zimbabwe’s vertiginous decline, the official rate of inflation was last week put at 3713.9 per cent. Economists believe it may be much higher. With unemployment at over 50 per cent, three or four million out of a population variously estimated between 12 and 15 million have fled the country in search of work. Perversely, their remittances are a crucial prop to the regime. Yet the government blandly delivers statistics as if inflation were four per cent and not four thousand.

Gideon Gono, the Zimbabwean central bank governor, said on Thursday that inflation had been fuelled by chronic food shortages. The government attributes these to the sanctions imposed by the European Union and the US, as well as to the drought affecting southern Africa, and denies a link to the land expropriations that have led to the near-total collapse of Zimbabwe’s commercial agriculture. The sanctions include a ban on arms sales, a freezing of assets in European banks and a travel ban on senior officials in the government and Zanu-PF.

Mr Gono said he would continue large-scale printing of money despite the warnings of the International Monetary Fund that this would merely increase inflation. “We offer no apology, we offer no remorse for our intervention in all spheres of the economy when we do the unorthodox,” he told MPs.

Some commentators have argued that, such is the economic chaos, the regime must be near its “tipping point”. But comparisons suggest Zimbabwe may well fall a lot lower before this happens. The country is not policed with the ruthlessness of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Nor has it been reduced to the state of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) under its late dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. By the end of his ruinous regime in 1997, many roads and railways built by the Belgians had been reclaimed by the jungle and visitors were routinely fleeced by officials on arrival at Kinshasa’s Ndjili airport. Despite all Mr Mugabe’s catastrophic decisions in the past decade or so, unlike Zaire in its last days Zimbabwe still somehow staggers along with the odd vestige of normality.

One evening at the Bulawayo Country Club earlier this month, a young white couple were discussing their wedding plans with a caterer. “So do you want fish as well as pâté?” she asked. “And when are you going to do the speeches? Do you want me to wait before bringing in the meat?” Similar exchanges have been overheard in the club’s panelled interior for years and will no doubt be heard for years to come. But the most myopic visitor or resident could not now miss the evidence of a society under terrible strain.

On the fringes of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second city, queues form outside shops on the rumour of deliveries of sugar or other foods. Banknotes are exchanged in brick-sized wads. Many shops change prices twice a day. Most business is done by barter. One world-weary businessman says that after years of marriage he has changed his mantra to his wife. “I no longer say: ‘You are spending too much.’ I now say: ‘You are not spending quickly enough.’ Whenever we have cash we spend it.”

For seven years since Mr Mugabe first faced a serious challenge to his rule with the formation of the MDC, Zimbabwe’s opposition has been in a state of increasing despair. Since 2000 there have been three elections, two parliamentary and one presidential. With the economy in freefall, each should have been a stiff challenge for Mr Mugabe. But he won all three easily, relying on a formula of populism, thuggery and skulduggery at the polls.

Now more than ever, Mr Mugabe’s back is against the wall. His Zanu-PF party is in disarray. Ten days ago, party meetings in Bulawayo, an opposition stronghold, and the central town of Masvingo broke up in chaos amid clashes between supporters of the two factions vying to replace the president. Also, his sovereignty has for the first time in his 27 years in power been
compromised: regional leaders have mandated South Africa to mediate between Zanu-PF and the MDC ahead of presidential and parliamentary elections due next March.

Yet barring a move from within Zanu-PF – and insiders suggest that this, despite the party’s unhappiness, is unlikely for the moment – the earliest the 83-year-old can be expected to leave office is after the elections. In the meantime, the opposition is struggling to speak with one voice and overcome regional scepticism as to its viability as a political force. All the while, Mr Mugabe’s supporters are doing their best to ensure that it is in no state to contest the election.

“The regime has thrown all caution to the wind,” says David Coltart, a veteran human rights lawyer and a leading MDC MP. “It has been pushed into a corner and is now lashing out. As with so many dictatorships, the closer they get to the end the more vicious they become. They are deadly serious now. This isn’t an aberration. This is an attempt to crush the opposition before elections.”

He was speaking shortly after police beat two of Zimbabwe’s best-known human rights lawyers in Harare. This was merely the latest act of state-sponsored brutality since March 11, when Morgan Tsvangirai, the head of one of the MDC’s two wings, and other leaders were beaten in the streets of the capital. These are dangerous times for the opposition as Human Rights Watch, the US rights group, made clear in a report this month that recorded the summary arrest and torture of hundreds of activists since the attack on Mr Tsvangirai.

Day by day, the fabric of the old law-abiding and functioning order becomes more threadbare and people more desperate. Earlier this month, on Suzanne Street on the northern fringe of the city hundreds of people had gathered outside a high metal gate. Briefly it opened and some bags were thrown out. The crowd surged forward. Behind the gate was a chicken farm. The crowd was waiting for chicken heads and feet for the pot, or to sell on. “There is a new rule,” said a pastor watching in dismay. “If you buy it, don’t eat it, but sell it, make your mark up.”

The pastor was on his way back from delivering food to impoverished victims of Murambatsvina (Operation Clear Out the Trash), the government’s brutal 2005 campaign to raze informal settlements in the main cities. Hundreds of thousands of people had their homes destroyed and were then dumped in the countryside. Now many are eking out an existence on land confiscated from white farmers a few years ago.

Ten miles outside Bulawayo, Edward Sibanda, 52, is living on a dusty five-hectare plot with his wife and four children. It used to be part of a successful commercial farm. His experience highlights the folly and crime of both Murambatsvina and the expropriations. A decade ago the commercial farmers accounted for half Zimbabwe’s foreign currency earnings. Now most of their land is in small plots and all but uncultivated. Mr Sibanda ticked off on his fingers what he needed to make a go of it: “We have no rain, no tractors, no petrol, no tools, no food.”

He is one of many who can no longer afford monthly school fees ($Z15,000 – just over 50 US cents at the unofficial rate) for his children. Zimbabweans were long regarded as some of the best educated people in Africa and in his early years, Mr Mugabe rightly took pride in his government’s investment in schooling. Now, a malnourished and uneducated generation is growing up. A nurse burst into tears as she described the implosion of the health service. “We’ve got kwashiorkor [a type of childhood malnutrition] again. I didn’t see it 25 years ago when I was trained. Now you are seeing the telltale signs, golden hair and pot bellies.”

South African officials are increasingly concerned about the crisis on their northern border. Western criticism of the country’s policy of “quiet diplomacy” over the past few years has infuriated Pretoria, which argues that trumpeting its concern would be counter-productive. But privately, officials concede the crisis sends all the wrong signals to the foreign investors they want to attract. They also fear it risks overshadowing the 2010 football World Cup in South Africa, which they hope will be a showcase for the post-apartheid state.

Now they are pushing forward with their mediation plans. They have held several meetings with the opposition factions and written formally to Mr Mugabe seeking his response to their mandate. Meanwhile, western agencies have done their sums and calculated that the world will need to stump up one billion US dollars a year for a decade after the regime falls.

The best-case scenario is for the region somehow to force Mr Mugabe to step down in favour of a coalition between reformist elements of the Zanu-PF and the MDC. But no one is holding their breath. A senior former cabinet minister believes Mr Mugabe has only one goal: to stay until he dies and so avoid the risk of prosecution. As a senior opposition figure concedes, Mr Mugabe knows all too well that the MDC’s promises of amnesty are meaningless.

“I think we are in for growing violence and eventually some sort of conflagration this year, next or even the year after,” says one diplomat with long experience of Zimbabwe. Given Zimbabweans’ relative quiescence in the face of the growing tyranny, until recently that might have been dismissed as alarmism. Moses Nzila-Ndlovu, an MDC MP, fears that is no longer the case.

“There are so many people who have been traumatised and brutalised by Zanu-PF. If the MDC were cheated at the elections again there could be carnage. There is so much anger. And even if Mugabe goes, it may not end there. Look at it from the perspective of the ordinary people. You have a pot, boiling. Lift up the lid and the steam boils over.”

Institute for War and Peace Reporting

New bill aims to address emotional scars of mass killings, but some say it doesn’t go far enough. By Fiso Dingaan in Lupane, Matabeleland (AR No. 109, 18-Apr-07)

Fighting hard to hold back tears, 52-year-old Ernest Ngwenya points to three mounds of soil crudely marked with stones and burnt logs at a clearing two kilometres from his homestead.

The contorted face tells of the emotional turmoil Ngwenya is battling to control. When he eventually manages to speak, his voice is full of pain and grief.

“I have waited 24 years for this day to grieve openly with my relatives and to show them where I buried our father, brother and uncle who were killed during Gukurahundi,” he said.

“All along, I was afraid that if I talked about something like this, more of my relatives would be beaten or killed – just like what happened during Gukurahundi.”

The government’s bloody suppression of opposition in southern Zimbabwe after independence in 1980 is known as the Gukurahundi, or “the rains that sweep away the chaff”.

The North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade killed an estimated 20,000 people, ostensibly for being dissidents. Many were buried in unmarked graves or thrown down disused mines. But survivors say the killings were systematic and targeted at Zapu office bearers and community leaders such as teachers, nurses and headmen.

Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe has not publicly apologised for the massacres except to say the atrocities were “a moment of madness”.

More than two decades later, life is back to normal in Matabeleland and the Midlands. But the relative calm is deceptive.

Ngwenya was able to overcome his fear thanks to help from the local legislator and members of a social justice pressure group called Ibhetshu Likazulu. Lupane member of parliament, Jabuliso Mguni, also counselled Ngwenya and his extended family, saying that it would do them good to talk about their experiences.

Ngwenya says he needed assurances that nothing would happen to him if he spoke out.

Movement for Democratic Change legislator and lawyer David Coltart believes Zimbabwe is still in a state of denial regarding Gukurahundi. Coltart was part of a team of researchers that compiled a report, called Breaking the Silence, on the atrocities over ten years ago.

“I do not think that even many sympathetic democrats who oppose the Zanu-PF regime have a clear idea of the scale of this crime against humanity – nor the extent of the psychological damage done to the affected communities,” he said.

Indeed, most survivors are still seething with anger and grief. Elda Mlalazi is a mother of two and gets highly emotional when she recounts what she endured during Gukurahundi. She shows this reporter knife wounds that she says were inflicted by a neighbour on instructions from the soldiers.

“The scars are a constant reminder, especially when my in-laws, who don’t know how I got them, start saying I was a prostitute before I got married. They laugh and say the scars were punishment from jilted boyfriends. There is nothing I can say to them but I know the truth,” she said.

Ibhetshu Likazulu chairperson, Qhubekani Dube, says his organisation is trying – albeit on a very small scale – “to bring peace and closure among people who are still grieving and hurting inside. We realise that if people don’t bring the issue out into the open, tribal enmity will continue,” argued Dube.

The pressure group, formed in 2005, helps families identify where their relatives are buried and helps to organise burial rituals. During the ceremonies, villagers are encouraged to share their experiences and concerns over the massacres. Listening to some of the mainly Ndebele villagers recounting their experiences during a grave identification ceremony for Ngwenya’s father, Mfungelwa, his brother, Aleck, and an uncle, Kaise Moyo, one is struck by the frequent reference to how “Shona-speaking soldiers” committed the atrocities.

Dube says the organisation fears that if such thoughts are left unaddressed, tribal hatred between Ndebeles and Shona will be perpetuated. He says that Ibhetshu Likazulu is trying to explain to survivors and families of victims that they should direct their anger at Mugabe “because it was him who issued the order to kill”.

Mguni believes there is a desperate need to assuage the pain and grief of Gukurahundi. He worries that life has been at what he calls a “cultural standstill” for affected families. This, he explains, is because families have not buried their relatives according to custom and consequently they cannot communicate with their deceased as tradition demands.

“We have ways of burying our own. We have not done that. People were not given a chance to grieve. We are hurting inside. We have wounds festering within that need to be treated and healed by openly talking about how and why our relatives were killed. Keeping quiet will not do us any good,” he said.

Additionally, Mguni says people’s experiences of Gukurahundi must be recorded for posterity.

Another Matabeleland North legislator, Professor Jonathan Moyo, has drafted the Gukurahundi National Memorial Bill. Moyo is an independent member of parliament for Tsholotsho. His constituency was the first area where the Fifth Brigade was deployed in January 1983.

He says he will soon publish and distribute the proposed legislation for public input before tabling it in parliament.

Moyo, a former minister of information and publicity in Mugabe’s cabinet, reckons the bill would garner enough support to allow it to be enacted because its objective of “putting in place a mechanism to deal with unresolved issues, healing the open wounds and invisible scars by seeking truth and justice”, is noble.

Coltart, however, says legislation alone will not suffice. He accepts the proposed bill “may be a useful vehicle to ascertain the views and needs of victims” but adds, “The bill itself will not heal wounds – the wounds of this atrocity will require a deep-rooted commitment by government and the entire nation to understand what happened, to apologise for what happened, and to take far-reaching steps to reconcile..the ongoing suffering caused.”

The legislator’s views resonate with those of survivors such as Ngwenya and his cousin Mlalazi. Ngwenya says now that he has dealt with the emotional side of Gukurahundi, he can start facing up to the realities of getting national identity papers for his nephews and nieces. And, one day, he hopes that the government will compensate him and his neighbours for property destroyed during the massacres.

Even then Gukurahundi will remain a part of his life. “I won’t forget. I cannot forget. How do you forget something like that? But at least now I can be at peace with myself, I know where my father is buried,” he said.

Fiso Dingaan is the pseudonym of an IWPR journalist in Zimbabwe.