60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

the making and meanings of the massacres in matabeleland 205
ing skulls’, as if the Gukurahundi campaign was merely some kind
of robust police action conducted against unruly demonstrators. In
May 1986, when Amnesty International published its damning report
on human rights abuses in Matabeleland, the Mugabe regime did
not even bother to rebut the charges. Instead the government-owned
Sunday Mail attacked Amnesty for ‘wasting away its credibility thanks
to its growing naïve acceptance and use of baseless and alarmist reports
created by dishonest and discredited sources’ (11/5/1986; see also
Zimbabwe News, June 1986). These ‘dishonest and discredited sources’
turned out to be the director and chairman of the Catholic Commission
of Justice and Peace, both of whom were arrested. Charged
with supplying information to ‘the human rights group, Amnesty
International, for its report on Zimbabwe’, they were released after a
brief spell in detention (The Herald, 28/5/1986 and 5/6/1986, and the
Sunday Mail, 8/6/1986). Anxious to put the incident behind him, the
Commission’s chairman insisted that Mugabe was ‘a good man who
overturns injustices’. Despite everything, Zimbabwe remained one of
the few African governments willing to tolerate internal critics. From
the Church’s perspective, he added, local policies were more humane
than those of many Western countries critical of human rights in
Zimbabwe, which ‘have the most abominable record…on abortion…
It makes Zimbabwe look a saintly place’ (Askin 1986).
If the Commission for Justice and Peace had reason enough of its own
to persist in trying to keep open channels of communication with Mugabe
and his henchmen, others were keener still to see no evil. One
anodyne study rushed into print in the latter part of 1983 concluded
that the government’s reaction ‘to downplay, even deny, what has happened
and to launch a counter-attack on foreign journalists and “meddlesome
priests”’ had ‘some justifi cation’. Its slide into ‘authoritarianism
and illiberalism’ was ‘understandable’, if ‘regrettable’, given the universal
tendency of power to corrupt. But for all that this particular
publication preferred to talk about detentions and ‘exemplary punishments’
rather than mass murder, it did acknowledge that ‘some atrocities
have taken place and that women and children have been killed’
(Hodder-Williams 1983: 19, 17-18). This was considerably more than
could be said for the second article on Matabeleland to appear in these
years. Published in African Aff airs, the Royal African Society’s journal,
it purported to describe events in the troubled province, but without
once mentioning the Fifth Brigade. Although the author professed to
be ‘in no doubt about the scale of…the brutalities of 1983 and 1985’, he
wrote as if the ‘balance of terror’ was weighted most heavily on the side
of the dissidents. Underpinned by the belief that there was ‘almost no
suspicion of me as a historian sympathetic to ZANU/PF’, and seem-