60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

198 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness
to join the party that was responsible for the independence and freedom
of Zimbabwe’ (Sunday Mail, 30/8/1981). One of the fi rst harbingers of
Matabeleland’s subsequent fate, this announcement juxtaposed the creation
of the Fifth Brigade with the renewed articulation of an authoritarian
and intolerant nationalism. Quite how ruthlessly the two would
operate together was soon enough revealed. Starting in Matabeleland
North in January 1983, and eventually expanding to encompass Matabeleland
South the following year, a campaign of terror was waged by
the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade against the region’s inhabitants.
Largely if not exclusively Shona-speaking in composition (Africa
Confi dential, 3/3/1982, Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2003: 24-25), it was ostensibly
deployed by Mugabe to suppress dissident guerrilla activity in Matabeleland.
This unrest, which the Harare government claimed was perpetrated
by forces loyal to Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU party who were not
prepared to accept the result of the April 1980 election, was deemed all
the more dangerous because of the opportunities it provided for proxy
intervention by South Africa. That the apartheid-era Pretoria regime
armed and controlled bands of so-called ‘Super ZAPU’ insurgents as
part of a wider strategy of destabilising its neighbours would seem to
be beyond dispute (Hanlon 1986; Martin and Johnson 1986 and 1987;
and especially Woods 2007). But it would also appear that the scale of
the threat posed by dissident activity, whether internally based or externally
directed, was greatly exaggerated. It was a convenient justifi
cation, cynically used by offi cial spokesmen to turn away criticism
(The Star, 30/3/1983; Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace and
Legal Resources Foundation 1997: 27-37). Indeed, the Fifth Brigade
was never put up against such armed dissidents as there actually were.
Its energies were devoted entirely to the rural civilian population (Africa
Now, 1983; Africa Confi dential, 1984). This single-minded focus, as
the journalist and former editor of the Bulawayo Chronicle, Geoff rey
Nyarota, later described it, saw ‘an estimated 20,000…innocent civilians…brutally
massacred by the time Five Brigade was withdrawn in
1986’ (2006: 135). Probably ‘hundreds of thousands of others were tortured,
assaulted or raped or had their property destroyed’, concluded
the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum (2007: 3). ‘Of the people
who died, some were shot where they were found; some were “disappeared”,
then executed and buried or thrown down disused mine
shafts; some were taken to torture camps where some died under torture
or were later executed’.
Individual testimony of the tens of thousands of crimes committed
by the Fifth Brigade, removed from the regular chain of military
command and answerable directly to Mugabe, was harrowing in the
extreme. As much of this is in the public domain and is now well