LITMIR.BIZ

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deep-seated intolerance against all dissenting voices (as seen in Chapter 1), violence is part and parcel of the “one-party-state” culture, which remains to date ZANU-PF’s ideological mold.

      Contrary to the dominant historical narrative and the apparent collective memory, the internationally monitored 1980 elections were far from being “free and fair.” In fact, widespread intimidation played a major role in ZANU-PF’s victory: between 4,000 (official British estimate) and 10,000 ZANLA fighters were not stationed in the assembly points when the December 1979 ceasefire took effect but were hidden in the villages to prevent other parties from campaigning,⁵ telling people to vote for Mugabe’s party or the war would resume. ZANU’s Enos Nkala publicly confessed this in Matabeleland.⁶ Authors of a biography of Mugabe, generally sympathetic to ZANU’s leader, write the following on the basis of an election supervisors’ interim report: “More than half of the people of Rhodesia were being intimidated by Mugabe’s guerrillas and supporters, they said. Conditions for ‘free and fair’ elections did not exist in five of the eight electoral districts in the country. Contrary to the claims of Mugabe, the supervisors found little proof of intimidation by [pro-UANC] Rhodesian security force auxiliaries.”⁷

      Although in some areas of Manicaland and eastern Mashonaland Province, UANC youths also employed methods of intimidation, nothing could match ZANU-PF’s “paramilitary campaign” carried on against the background of wartime coercion. In any case, the UANC auxiliaries were kept in closer check, by journalists and Commonwealth observers, than ZIPRA and ZANLA forces. In regions like Masvingo, the Midlands, or some Harare townships where ZANU-PF and ZAPU were in direct competition, or Manicaland, the UANC stronghold, intimidation was paramount: “voting in these areas took place in an atmosphere of fear and under evident compulsion.”⁸ Political murder and explicit threats of retaliation were rife. In more than a quarter of the country no parties other than ZANU-PF had been able to campaign for fear of reprisals. Joshua Nkomo warned, “People are being terrorized…. There is fear in people’s eyes.”⁹

      Incensed by overwhelming evidence of ZANU-PF’s violence and intimidation, Lord Soames—the British governor appointed to oversee the transition—confronted Mugabe but refused to ban his party from contesting or to nullify the poll altogether in the relevant districts, and for obvious reasons: when challenged, Mugabe had threatened to throw away the peace agreement and he was likely to resume war. The British government had no intention of taking that responsibility and risking an international outcry at the United Nations. It was not prepared to lose such a golden opportunity to rid itself once and for all of the Rhodesian problem, that thorn in the flesh of its African policy since the 1960s. These calculations took precedence over concerns for democratic elections. The fact that ZANU-PF, most probably, would have won the elections anyway, contrary to Ian Smith’s claims in his memoirs, is beside the point. Even if intimidation accounted only for the difference between a simple majority and an absolute majority, it mattered politically. Mugabe’s 57 seats made his claim to the premiership indisputable. He could form a government of his choice, even with apparent magnanimity, and Joshua Nkomo had to surrender.¹⁰

      So the people voted for “peace” in 1980, for the party that could deliver the war end as they had done in April 1979—then in favor of Muzorewa.¹¹ Yet the founding elections set a terrible precedent: for Mugabe what matters is the balance of forces and the electoral process a mere technicality to emphasize power. Therefore, there is a continuity in behavior between the wartime violence against black peasants and the harsh tactics implemented since February 2000 against farmworkers and selected communities suspected of supporting the MDC. For many people who lived through the war in the rural areas, ZANLA surpassed all other sides in brutality.¹² Recent historiography on Zimbabwe’s liberation war indicates that routine coercion was an important and in some areas crucial resource to obtain political support from the “masses”:

      Parents, youth, and the rural elite had little choice but to identify with ZANU and provide logistical support for the guerrillas…. One dared refuse only at the risk of personal physical harm…. A war [village committee] chairman succinctly expressed the sentiments of others when he explained that “comrades would know if you refused the job and then you could get beaten. I never knew of anyone who did refuse. There was just that fear that if one did, one could get beaten.” …Failure to conform with guerrilla demands might also result in death, usually with the same instrument with which the guerrillas beat people.¹³

      Villagers would be beaten for being too slow to surrender their meager resources, for declining to attend political meetings, or for their lack of commitment to the war and ZANU-PF.¹⁴ Punishment of “sellouts” more than once degenerated into collective retribution against whole villages.¹⁵ This dreadful experience created the basis of the culture of fear that has pervaded Zimbabwe’s politics since Independence. Therefore, the use of violent methods to ensure the ruling party’s electoral victory in 2000 and 2002 does not come as a surprise. Victims describing war veterans’ terror techniques spontaneously recalled their war experience and the mix of ideological propaganda and violence they endured in the notorious compulsory night meetings—called “pungwes.”

       Gukurahundi

      In the post-independence era the worst example of politically motivated violence was the massacre of thousands of civilians in Matabeleland in an orgy of killing known as “Gukurahundi.” As argued in Chapter 1), the main purpose of these deliberate killings, rapes, torture, and destruction of property (huts, crops, and cattle) was the elimination of ZAPU’s popular following as a way to force the party’s leadership into submission. What is striking though is the savagery of the onslaught by the North Korean-trained and Shona-recruited Fifth Brigade, the CIO, some other army units, and the ZANU-PF Youth League, which left thousands of people dead and many more maimed and marked for the rest of their lives, most families being affected one way or another.¹⁶ “From about the beginning of 1983, the people of Matabeleland experienced once again military and political terror hardly distinguished from that inflicted on the people of Zimbabwe by the Rhodesian State.”¹⁷ There was a dimension of ethnic hatred that resembled the “ethnic cleansing” later practiced in the former Yugoslavia in the 1992–95 wars: Fifth Brigade members told the women and girls they raped that they would bear Shona babies to wipe out Ndebeles in Matabeleland. There is little doubt that ZANU-PF leaders encouraged this attitude.¹⁸ To this date, some ZANU-PF leaders who took part in these crimes boast of having no regrets as “the Ndebeles got what they deserved.”¹⁹ According to Amnesty International (AI), “The abuses documented during this period by Amnesty International and other organizations, including torture, extrajudicial executions and ‘disappearances,’ are serious crimes under international law, and may amount to crimes against humanity, as defined in the Statute of the International Criminal Court, adopted in July 1998.”²⁰ When one sees to what extreme Mugabe was prepared to go in 1982–86 to get rid of ZAPU, the terror campaign launched against MDC since 2000 fits in the pattern.

      In rural Matabeleland, the memory of the Fifth Brigade and Gukurahundi has not faded yet and it forms the background of any political activity in that region and to a large extent in the southern Midlands to date. At election time, frequent references to the 1983–87 violence could be found in the government press and in the ZANU-PF leader’s speeches. For example, government intelligence was leaked to the press in January 1994 revealing that “a security joint operation command (JOC) [had] been put on full alert [in Bulawayo] to deal with any disturbances that might occur following surfacing reports that a group of youths calling itself Super ZAPU [was] allegedly planning to terrorise non-Ndebele speakers.”²¹ It was a reference to the South Africa-backed guerrilla unit that infiltrated Matabeleland during the conflict of the early 1980s and that was accused of the worst of the atrocities perpetuated by the “dissidents.”²² The allegation that Super-ZAPU was revived fooled nobody but was meant to create a climate of fear in the region. During the 1995 campaign, several ZANU-PF cadres threatened a return of the civil war of the early 1980s if the people in Matabeleland voted for the opposition parties. There was also a veiled threat

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