60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

206 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness
ingly oblivious to the possibility that informants located with the help
of ‘a guide provided for me by the District Administrator’ might not be
entirely forthcoming about state-sponsored mass violence in the very
recent past, the article noted that there had been ‘too many collapses
of discipline, too many rapes, too many killings’, but only on the part
of dissidents. Benefi ciaries of Mugabe’s ‘generosity and courage’ when
dissidents were off ered amnesty, the people of Matabeleland South’s
Matobo district had apparently of their own accord reached a general
opinion: ‘a condemnation of dissident violence’ (Ranger 1983: 162-163,
172). 3 That this prudent expression of opinion might have been infl
uenced by popular memory of Bhalagwe Camp, the huge detention
centre in the south of the district where thousands of villagers were
detained and tortured by the Fifth Brigade (Catholic Commission for
Justice and Peace and Legal Resources Foundation 1997: 120-124), was
nowhere considered in this myopic celebration of the peace of the grave
in Matabeleland.
III
Explanations for the Mugabe regime’s actions in Matabeleland which
focus on short-term causes, particularly the period 1980-82 when
there were clashes initially between government forces and elements
of ZAPUs armed wing prior to its disbandment, and latterly when
confl ict encompassed dissidents, South African destabilisation, and
ZANU-PF’s determination to crush ZAPU and construct a one-party
state, have undoubted merit. But for all the immediate contextual
plausibility of such explanations, they fail fully to account for the extremely
violent form assumed by the Gukurahundi campaign almost
from the start. It is here that a valuable vantage point is provided by
Daniel Chirot and Clark McCauley’s Why Not Kill Them All? The
Logic and Prevention of Mass Political Murder (2006). Written by a historical
sociologist and a psychologist, this study identifi ed four main
motives leading to mass political murder. While the necessary condition
for mass political murder was obviously that one group has overwhelming
superiority in power, it takes additional suffi cient conditions
to sometimes turn vast power over enemies into mass murder.
These are convenience, revenge, simple fear, and fear of pollution. By
‘convenience’, Chirot and McCauley mean an ‘instrumental, coldblooded
calculation of costs and benefi ts’. If the material or political
ambitions of the stronger group are thwarted by the weaker group’s
opposition, then ‘eventually the stronger party may consider mass
3 Also see Ranger’s self-exculpatory ‘Narrative and Responses: the Zimbabwean Case’
(2006), where it is claimed that ‘human rights organisations did not publically condemn
Zimbabwe in the 1980s’. But see Lindgren (2005).