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MatabelelandReport

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They feared making their whereabouts known by seeking legal redress. In addition, people faced economic constraints:<br />

legal advice was often beyond their financial reach.<br />

The policy of protecting Government personnel was established during the rule of the Rhodesian Front (RF). As the war<br />

for majority rule intensified, so did the repressive legislation. Before UDI was declared in 1965, a state of emergency<br />

was announced. This gave the Government the power to legislate by regulation, rather than through Parliament.<br />

Regulations included the Emergency Powers (Maintenance of Law and Order) Regulations, which gave sweeping<br />

powers of arrest and detention without trial, the right to control meetings, and so on. Using emergency powers, the<br />

Government had the right to override almost all fundamental rights in existence under the Constitution, if this was<br />

deemed necessary to maintain law and order.<br />

Rights which the State could curtail under these powers included: personal liberty, freedom from arbitrary search or<br />

entry, freedom of exression, freedom of assembly and association, freedom of movement, and freedom from<br />

discrimination. These laws were used to ban political parties and meetings, detain people without trial for indefinite<br />

periods, and enforce extensive curfews, to mention some of their applications.<br />

The state of emergency had to be renewed every six months by Parliament, and remained in force from shortly before<br />

UDI in 1965, until ten years after Independence, being finally lifted in July 1990. During those twenty five years,<br />

emergency powers were used to authorise many infringements of human rights by both the RF and ZANU-PF<br />

governments.<br />

Both the RF and ZANU-PF Governments also passed indemnity laws. These were, respectively, the Indemnity and<br />

Compensation Act 45 of 1975, which was repealed in 1980, and the Emergency Powers (Security Forces Indemnity)<br />

Regulations 1982 (SI 487/1982), which fell away when the State of Emergency was lifted in 1990.<br />

In terms of these laws, all State officials and members of the security forces were granted immunity from prosecution, if<br />

their actions were "in good faith" and "for the purposes of or in connexion with the suppression of terrorism" (the 1975<br />

law) or "for the purposes of or in connexion with the preservation of the security of Zimbabwe" (the 1982 law). These<br />

laws, together with the Presidential amnesty for all dissidents and security forces declared in 1988, meant that human<br />

rights abusers were once more not held accountable, no matter how severe their crimes.<br />

In addition to inheriting a formidable array of repressive laws from the previous regime, Zimbabwe also inherited an<br />

army and CIO which retained some men well versed in the techniques of torture. Emmersen Mnangagwa, the<br />

Zimbabwean Minister responsible for the CIO in the 1980s, would point out to his visitors the old CIO members who<br />

had personally tortured him when the RF held power. While, on the one hand, this points to extraordinary powers of<br />

forgiveness, on the other hand it also could have conveyed to the old guard the message that they were not to be held<br />

accountable.<br />

The very men who had been responsible for inhuman and degrading torture in the 1970s used exactly the same methods<br />

to torture civilians in the 1980s. This has been well documented, by Africa Watch, Amnesty International, the CCJP<br />

Confidential Report on Torture (1987), and the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.<br />

Maintaining old members of the CIO also laid Zimbabwe wide open to espionage. In fact, several members of Smith's<br />

CIO became double agents for the South Africans, and were in an ideal situation to inflame the brewing troubles in<br />

Matabeleland.<br />

Minister Mnangagwa maintained that he had no option but to retain the old CIO agents, as ZANLA did not have a welldeveloped<br />

intelligence unit to replace it, and the "old CIO guard" had key information in certain areas. However,<br />

ZIPRA had a well established intelligence unit which it was not asked to make available to the new Government, and<br />

consequently the unit was dismantled.<br />

B.THE LEGACY OF ZANLA-ZIPRA ANTAGONISM<br />

While it has been pointed out that too much can be made of antagonisms between, and differences in the "modus<br />

operandi" of ZANLA and ZIPRA, there was nonetheless a legacy of unease between the two armies of liberation and<br />

their respective political followings which played an incontrovertible role in the events of the 1980s.<br />

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