When a State Turns on its Citizens: 60 years of Institutionalised Violence in Zimbabwe

Preface

Preface In March 2010, Zimbabwean police prohibited two significant photographic exhibitions.ThefirstintendedtodisplayphotographsinHarareofgruesomepolitical violence perpetrated during the presidential run-off election campaign of AprilJune 2008. The second was held in Bulawayo to portray the ferocious violence committed by a military brigade during the Gukurahundi era of 1982-87. (Gukurahundi is a Shona term that literally refers to the first rain of summer that washesawaythechaffleftfromthepreviousseason.Butithascometobecolloquially used to refer to the civil war in Matabeleland in which up to 20,000 people lost their lives.) The police were reluctant to allow Zimbabwean citizens to go down memory lane to revisit the brutal violence and terror that has been part and parcel of Zimbabwe’s political and electoral processes in recent decades. This was not unexpected. Despite their participation in repression against opposition and civil society activists, especially during the decade 1999-2009, state security as well as state-controlled institutions are uncomfortable when images of beatings, torture, and corpses are put on public display. This study assesses the causes, patterns, dynamics, and consequences of political violence during the period of Zimbabwe’s crisis from 2000 to 2008. It seeks to explore how the violence has affected the country’s evolving political culture.The study deliberately focuses on how the violence has been institutionalized to the extent that it has been ‘organized’ by specific institutions. These include staterelated institutions, political parties, militia, and war veteran groups. Observing that the political violence is not random but consciously planned and executed at particular conjunctures, the study presents evidence to show how the military, police, security agencies, ruling and opposition parties alike have engaged in this violence. It is also shown that civil society organizations (CSOs) have not been immune from the cancer of violence both as victims of it as well as participants in it. Indeed, the study argues that Zimbabwean politics are embedded in a tradition and practice of violence that began more than half a century ago. The consequence of this state of affairs is a society traumatized by fear, withdrawal, and collective depression based on past memories of violence, intimidation and harassment. Yet less than a generation ago, the notion was widespread that violence had When a State turns on its Citizens xvii redeeming qualities for societies that waged liberation struggles, and that the independence so won was somehow superior to that obtained on a ‘silver platter’. It was Frantz Fanon who observed that: forthecolonizedpeoplethisviolence...investstheircharacterswithpositiveandcreativequalities. The practice of violence binds them together as a whole, since each individual forms a violent link in the great chain, a part of the great organism of violence which has surged upwards in reaction to the settler’s violence in the beginning... The mobilization of the masses, when it arises out of the war of liberation, introduces into each man’s consciousness the ideas of a common cause, of a national destiny and a collective history... (Fanon,1967:73). In the Zimbabwean experience, while violence was a decisive instrument in the attainment of independence, it was also a major divisive force afterwards. It has remained a cancer that corrodes the country’s political culture and blocks its democratic advance.The study is therefore more sceptical about Fanonian claims that ‘at the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force’. In the Zimbabwean case, violence has been institutionalised to build an authoritarian state that is contemptuous of citizen rights including expression of their preferences through the vote. However, at another level, we agree that some of the principal effects of violence are mental, emotional, psychological scars both temporary and permanent that Fanon observed and described in his book (Ibid.). Beyondtheassumptionofpowerbynewrulingelites,theuseofviolenceinliberation struggleshasyieldedambiguousresults.InsouthernAfrica,forinstance,thecivilwars that wracked Angola and Mozambique from the 1970s to the 1990s were ferocious by any standards.While external destabilization by certain powers was a major factor in the perpetuation of these wars, this did not exonerate collusion of local forces with thelatter,northemassivebrutalitiesandfatalitiesexperiencedinthoseconflicts.Some analysts who have revisited liberation war-type violence have cautioned that: violence is usually unjustified. It is a breach of peace, or potential peace in our case, which is a conditionforasocietybasedonmutualrespect.Violencetendstodehumanizetheother,especially in political violence where the victim is defined as the enemy... It is now undesirable to emphasize heroic acts of war where these feed into heroic actions... (Suttner, 2010). This sober assessment of violence as an instrument of dehumanization is sadly absent in Zimbabwean discourse on the liberation struggle and in postindependence politics. On the contrary, it is not uncommon for the ZANU-PF...