Guerrilla Veterans in Post-War Zimbabwe: Symbolic and Violent Politics, 1980-1987 (review)

Between 1980 and 1987, veterans of the guerrilla war and the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front conspired to establish power bases in Zimbabwe within the security forces and among workers. Both relied on violence and appeals to their role as freedom fighters in the national liberation war. However, the appeals of an aging party leadership, which continued to stake its legitimacy on its "liberation heroism" in defeating the Rhodesian government, fell increasingly on deaf ears among the population, a growing majority of whom are under thirty years of age and rather hard to invoke the liberation war to justify a struggle for democracy. Many veterans, moreover, were increasingly disillusioned that the sacrifices made during the liberation war had not brought rewards in terms of a better life. For the Zimbabwean people, as a whole, the great promises of victory in 1980 had not been realized.

In March 2000 Zimbabwe's guerrilla veterans, under the direction of Perence Shiri, Mugabe's cousin and one of his most trusted lieutenants, burst into the news "as the storm troopers in Mugabe's new war of economic liberation." Shiri, who directed the organisation of white farm occupations and re-education camps around the country, is the former commander of 5 Brigade, which carried out the Matabeleland atrocities in the 1980s. Utilising terror methods learnt from the North Koreans, he has, in a carefully planned operation, directed an open, nationwide war. Of the approximately seven thousand war veterans involved in the farm invasions, some fifteen hundred are also former 5 Brigade men. The campaign of 2000 displays all the old hallmarks: from organised gang-rapes and systematic beatings and murders, to the hut burning and re-education camps. Today, violence and a liberation-war discourse are still salient, as Mugabe's party and its reharnessed guerrilla veterans struggle to maintain power through land invasions and purges of a new political opposition.

Norma Kriger claims that her findings in this book contribute to a new interpretation of the Zimbabwe peace-building experience and, underlining the inherent limitations in peace-building studies more generally, she offers a good benchmark. As in this case, such studies, she argues, miss "how the [political] settlement set the stage for subsequent violent conflict and how veterans' programmes were characterised by a central political dynamic in which the ruling party and its liberation war veterans collaborated to establish power and privilege in ways that built a violent and extractive political order" (p. 5). This is indeed a fresh approach. Too few political scientists, most of whom chase contemporary data and the derivation of neat theories, make adequate reference to the historical background of events.

With this book, Kriger gives this latest war in Zimbabwe a historical background and highlights the continuities between past and present. Arguing that the peace settlement, which gave birth to Zimbabwe in 1980, was a harbinger of continued armed conflict and set the stage for the politics of guerrilla reincorporation, Kriger poses three major questions. First, how did the political settlement ending the liberation war shape postwar politics? Second, what characterised the relationship between the ruling party and the war veterans after independence? Third, what were the political outcomes of their engagement for the ruling party, the veterans, and the society more generally?

Kriger has produced a study that evaluates how war-ending settlements, politics, and power agendas may shape political outcomes contrary to peace-building. Her examination of the construction of a new political order in Zimbabwe is fresh and provides a challenging way for social scientists to view peace-building and post-conflict societies.