MatabelelandReport

SHORTCOMINGS OF INTERVIEWS
As with the BLPC interview data, the time lapse has taken its toll on what people can now remember of events. The
interviewer was, on occasion, more in touch with those events, having better cause to be so, than those who were more
involved at the time. People also destroyed key documents, having felt such documents were endangering their personal
safety during the years when house searches and detentions were commonplace. Other documents have been destroyed
more recently, in the belief that they were no longer of interest to anyone.
These shortcomings notwithstanding, personal interviews with people with a "larger view" of events proved very
enlightening.
VII:MATERIAL EVIDENCE
Project personnel established that corroborating evidence for claims of epidemic violence in 1983/84, now made by
over a thousand victims, exists in bulk in some places: some rural hospitals have, on their admission records, listings of
hundreds of civilians admitted to their wards during the 1980s, suffering from beatings, bayonetings, gun shot wounds,
and burns. Some of these records have already been referred to under CCJP data above. Hospitals where such records
are known still to exist include not only the Catholic mission hospitals but also other mission hospitals.
The Government hospitals in Bulawayo and rural Matabeleland and the Midlands are also known to have admitted such
patients, some of whom were referred to these better equipped hospitals, such as Mpilo in Bulawayo, by mission doctors
unable adequately to treat seriously ill patients. Doctors who were employed in Government hospitals during the 1980s
have independently confirmed this. The orthopaedic surgeon who was at Mpilo in the 1980s has confirmed that from
mid-1982 onwards, he saw patients suffering from gun shot wounds. The 1982 patients were army personnel and
"dissidents" allegedly wounded in shoot-outs. The latter were kept under armed guard in the wards. Then in early 1983
this same surgeon became alarmed at the sudden influx to his wards of gun shot wound and assault cases affecting
civilians: at the request of colleagues, in March 1983 he compiled a list of current patients including their names,
injuries and treatments and submitted it to the Minister of Health. These included gun shot victims, and patients so
severely beaten by soldiers that some later died of renal failure. He also took photographs of patients and submitted a set
to the Minister, who insisted that the photographic negatives be surrendered too. A duplicate set of prints had been made
by the surgeon, and these are still on file in the Nederlands, as is a complete duplicate set of these medical records.
There are a few individual cases well substantiated by medical records, notably victims whose cases were prepared for
the Committee of Inquiry by CCJP in 1984.
Apart from these cases, there are currently on project files only a handful of medical records substantiating claims made
by interviewees, although many other victims claimed to have such records, but did not bring them to the interviewing
venue. In other cases, victims brought records with them, but there were no photocopying facilities in the rural areas
where interviewing took place, and interviewers, having no medical background themselves, were not in a position to
note relevant details from such records. They were also hesitant to take such records away with them, as the logistics of
returning them to remote rural dwellers were daunting: in any case, such records were in some cases needed on a current
basis, by people paying regular visits to clinics.
In many other cases, victims did not still have medical records, or had never had them, having been too afraid to seek
medical attention at the time.
There were also very few post mortem or death certificates issued for the dead which acknowledged violent causes of
death, although a handful of death certificates acknowledging violent deaths are on project files.
There has been to date no large-scale, co-ordinated exhumation of the bodies of those persons whom others claim to
have been murdered, in order to conclude independently their cause of death. However, bodies were exhumed from
mine shafts in the Midlands and Matabeleland South in the 1990s, with coins in their pockets dating their violent deaths
to the 1980s: bodies exhumed at Cyrene Mission in 1984 showed clear evidence of recent gunshot wounds. There is
thus a handful of cases which have forensic post mortem evidence to substantiate the types of atrocities claimed by
many hundreds of people.
Other material evidence is the existence of many mass grave sites, throughout the curfew areas of 1983/84. Many such
sites were indicated in the interviews in the two case study areas, and were also brought to the attention of report
personnel by those doing independent research in Matabeleland North. A few such sites were actually visited by project
personnel, to confirm their location. People in both Matabeleland North and South also refer to the way in which bodies
31