60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

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