60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

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208 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness killing and reduce any dissonance felt by those who murder’ (Chirot and McCauley 2006: 57). So far as leadership is concerned, Chirot and McCauley suggest that this must entail consideration of the psychology of those who ordered, planned and led politically-inspired mass murder. ‘In most instances of mass killing it is the perceptions of the group’s leaders that are the most important’, they write (2006: 59). Here there can be no doubt that the role played by Mugabe and the ZANU-PF Central Committee was absolutely crucial (Anon. 15/12/2005). In speech after speech, Mugabe and his immediate lieutenants repeatedly stoked up passions, legitimating Fifth Brigade actions as they did so. ‘ZAPU is irretrievably bent on its criminal path’, insisted Mugabe. ‘I’m sure the majority of our people will agree with me when I say the time has now come for us to show this evil party our teeth. We can bite and we shall certainly bite’ (Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum 2007: 5; and Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2003: 29-30). ‘We want to wipe out the ZAPU leadership’, proclaimed the minister for home aff airs, Enos Nkala. ‘You’ve only seen the warning lights. We haven’t reached full blast… the murderous organisation and its murderous leadership must be hit so hard that it doesn’t feel obliged to do the things it has been doing’ (Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum 2007: 6; Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace and Legal Resources Foundation 1997: 53-54). Nor have Zimbabwe’s leaders ever admitted responsibility or expressed contrition for what happened. When fi rst presented with the Catholic Commission of Justice and Peace report, Breaking the Silence, Mugabe’s immediate response was that ‘these people are trying to fan factional and personal divisions among us, digging up the past so that we could end up divided on tribal and even on village lines’ (Business Day, 14/5/1997). The closest Mugabe ever came to this was in July 2000, at a memorial service for Joshua Nkomo, when he described Gukurahundi as ‘an act of madness, we killed each other and destroyed each other’s property. It was wrong and both sides were to blame. We have had a diff erence, a quarrel. We engaged ourselves in a reckless and unprincipled fi ght’ (Financial Gazette, 4/7/2000). Indeed, top ZANU-PF offi cials and government ministers subsequently rowed back from even these disingenuous comments. Nathan Shamuyarira, when asked at a conference on ‘National Reconciliation’, if he regretted the Matabeleland atrocities, answered ‘No, I don’t regret. They [the Fifth Brigade] were doing a job to protect the people’ (Zimbabwe Observer, 2/10/2006). Not surprisingly, repeated calls since the 1990s for government acknowledgement of, and compensation for, the mass violence in Matabeleland have been ignored.
the making and meanings of the massacres in matabeleland 209 The last precise precondition identifi ed by Chirot and McCauley is the idea of the ‘essentialised other’. For them, this is a key psychological concept in explaining violence against groups. They argue that ‘by defi nition, genocidal killing is killing by category, by membership in a group rather than by individual guilt or crime. It inevitably includes many who are…non-combatants who could not directly hurt the perpetrators’. Victims of genocide, ethnic cleansing or mass violence have inhabited many categories, not only ethnic, religious or national. It seems that ‘almost any kind of social category will do, as long as it can be considered self-reproducing’. Class, ideology, residence and culture have all been invoked as essentialising, as have traits such as skin colour, physiognomy and stature (2006: 81, 82). But for all that the inhabitants of Matabeleland were indeed turned into the ‘essentialised other’, it needs to be recognised that this was never done solely on ethnic grounds. The overriding intention, at least at the top of the political tree, was the destruction of ZAPU and the political re-orientation of the region’s inhabitants. ‘People in Matabeleland are being tortured, raped, robbed and murdered because of the selfi sh political interests of Dr Joshua Nkomo’, declared Mugabe at an election rally south-east of Plumtree. ‘I am asking you to vote for Zanu(PF) because we want to be one people’ (The Herald, 29/6/1985). Much the same point was made at a press conference soon after the June 1985 election in which ZANU-PF had swept the board everywhere except in Matabeleland. Asked what he intended ‘to do about Matabeleland’, given the election result showing that the province was ‘still out of step with the rest of this country’, Mugabe’s reply was revealing. ‘It is really a pity that we are talking in terms of Matabeleland and the rest of the country’, he said. ‘Really the problem is Nkomo and ZAPU as I see it. Nkomo and ZAPU and the dissidents. Nkomo cannot accept a secondary role in our political order and so he must organise the people tribally, and if they cannot be organised tribally, he must set dissidents on them so that they do his will. We have been discussing this issue with the people of Matabeleland at various levels and there is no doubt in our minds that it’s more the fact of fear of the dissidents, fear of the wrath that should they be seen to be out of step… They [the people of Matabeleland] are not a strange people, they are not a foreign element – they are part and parcel of our population and we have interacted with them at various levels, governmental and political and we are satisfi ed that without ZAPU, without the dissident element, they will fall in line’. In answer to another question, Mugabe emphasised that ‘we do not distinguish them [the people of Matabeleland] from people elsewhere. Their fate is intertwined with the fate of others. Their destiny is the same as
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no. 50 | december 2008 Revisiting t
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Revisiting the heart of darkness -
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Acknowledgements The larger part of
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Dennis Brutus, born 1924 in then Rh
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8 development dialogue december 200
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In short, both the understanding of
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Behind most mass violence lurk econ
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ehind most mass violence lurk econo
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Is there a south perspective on gen
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is there a south perspective on gen
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The Voksenåsen Statement Genocides
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This Development Dialogue is publis
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60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

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