60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

mass violence in zimbabwe 2005 – murambatsvina 227
Thirdly, the language used by some politicians and members of the
uniformed services was the language of genocide. The president himself
had during a previous election campaign referred to the inhabitants
of Mbare, the oldest high-density suburb in Harare, as ‘totemless’,
thus excluding them from the Zimbabwean cultural community. The
minister for state security, Didymus Mutasa, had two years earlier
shocked Zimbabweans by saying publicly that we only need a population
of 6 million – we can do without the other 6 million. Some
people felt the two were referring to Malawians and Mozambicans
who have been absorbed into the population over the past century,
but this has not been explicitly stated, and hundreds of thousands of
citizens of purely Zimbabwean ancestry have also been victims. The
commissioner of police referred to the Zimbabweans whose houses
were being destroyed as ‘refuse’, even ‘maggots’(Zimbabwe Human
Rights NGO Forum 2005a: 23). This is the language used by those
who turn their enemies into ‘others’, non-humans; in Rwanda, for
example the genocidaires labelled those to be killed ‘cockroaches’.
People described in this way are being deliberately dehumanised so
that they then do not need to be treated as human beings.
Fourthly, the victims were blamed. They were in the way, committing
crimes, sabotaging the economy and the orderly appearance of
the towns. The poor were blamed for being poor, for engaging in informal
trade and living in unregulated settlements. The implication
was that they should have done something diff erently. Yet who other
than the government was to blame for the deteriorating economic
environment, the lack of adequate housing, the displacement of farmworkers,
the retreat into the informal economy of so many former
employees and school leavers? Even if the economic problems were
not entirely of its own making, the government, instead of looking
for rational solutions, turned round and blamed the victims for their
situation and punished them viciously and violently.
Fifthly, the action was initiated, not by the government making a decision
as government, but by a small group within the government
and the security apparatus. The specifi c individuals responsible may
not be known, but it is clear that many government ministers and
members of the Politburo were taken unawares. But rather than trying
to put a brake on the process, they quickly jumped on the bandwagon.
While refusing to take responsibility themselves, they picked
up the justifi cations given by the government and latched onto to
the urban renewal and crime-fi ghting explanation. Although some
ZANU-PF offi cials apparently voiced their concern privately, the
lone public voice of complaint was that of a backbench parliamentar-