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

By Lloyd Sachikonye

Lloyd Sachikonye traces the roots of Zimbabwe's contemporary violence to the actions of the Rhodesian armed forces, and the inter-party conflicts that occurred during the liberation war. His focus, however, is the period since 2000, which has seen state-sponsored violence erupting in election campaigns and throughout the programme of fast-track land reform. The consequences of this violence run wide and deep. Aside from inflicting trauma and fear on its victims, the impunity enjoyed by its perpetrators has helped to mould a culture within which personal freedoms and dreams are strangled. At a broader social level, it is responsible - both directly and indirectly - for millions of Zimbabweans voting with their feet and heading for the diaspora. Such a migration 'cannot simply be explained in terms of the search for greener economic pastures. Escape from authoritarianism, violence, trauma and fear is a large factor behind the exodus'. Sachikonye concludes that any future quest for justice and reconciliation will depend on the country facing up to the truth about the violence and hatred that have infected its past and present.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Weaver Press
• Release date: Sep 26, 2011
• ISBN: 9781779222312

Lloyd Sachikonye

Lloyd Sachikonye is a Professor of Political Science based at the University of Zimbabwe where he has researched and taught for over 30 years. His main research interests relate to democratic processes in Africa and development strategies in southern Africa. Amongst his many publications are Civil Society, State and Democracy (1995), When the State turns on its Citizens (2011) and Zimbabwe’s Lost Decade (2012). Prof. Sachikonye is a founding Trustee of the International Development Institute (IDI).

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Methodology

Tables and Boxes

Tables

Table 1 Cases of gross human rights violations

Table 2 Frequency of alleged perpetrators

Table 3 Freeness and fairness of elections, 1999-2003

Table 4 Expectations about freeness and fairness in future elections

Table 5 Decline in voter participation, 1980-2008

Table 6 Attitude towards perpetrators

Table 7 Victim of intimidation, threat or harassment by party

Table 8 Whether respondent has experienced intimidation, threat or harassment

Boxes

Box 1 Six deaths at Chiweshe

Box 2 Epworth: violence and terror against the opposition

Box 3 Beatings in Chitungwiza by soldiers

Box 4 Violence and terror in Chikomba

Box 5 Buhera study site

Box 6 Chitungwiza violence

Box 7 Terror in a Mutasa community

Box 8 Torture of a labour leader, 2006

Box 9 Extra-judicial restitution in Buhera, 2010

Box 10 Hallucinations

Box 11 Youth militia in their own words

Acronyms

Preface

In March 2010, Zimbabwean police prohibited two significant photographic exhibitions. The first intended to display photographs in Harare of gruesome political violence perpetrated during the presidential run-off election campaign of April-June 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 washes away the chaff left from the previous season. But it has come to be colloquially 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 state-related 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 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:

for the colonized people this violence... invests their characters with positive and creative qualities. 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.).

Beyond the assumption of power by new ruling elites, the use of violence in liberation struggles has yielded ambiguous results. In southern Africa, for instance, the civil wars 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 the latter, nor the massive brutalities and fatalities experienced in those conflicts. 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 condition for a society based on mutual respect. Violence tends to dehumanize the other, 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 post-independence politics. On the contrary, it is not uncommon for the ZANU-PF leadership to extol the ‘virtues’ of violence and its heritage of ‘degrees in violence’. As another analyst has argued, ‘violence breeds violence and victims of violence become violent themselves’ and:

at independence, our society did little to rehabilitate itself from the habits of violence prevalent during the liberation war. We have assumed that violence is a tool that we can take up, use and drop at any time. History has proved that this is not so...’ (Kaulem, 2004:81).

This study shows how dangerous the inculcation of values based on the use of political violence for electoral advantage and for the accumulation of power has been, especially during the period under review.

To reiterate, this study does not have the ambition to be comprehensive. It limits itself to the period between 2000 and 2008. This is the period during which Zimbabwe’s political, economic, and social crisis deepened. With the exception of the Gukurahundi era of 1982-87, it was also a period that witnessed the most intense political violence since independence. A limitation of the study is the absence of a linkage between political violence and other types of violence in Zimbabwean society. Domestic violence is a significant form of violence and so is crime-related violence. The study does not explore how these different types of violence relate to each other and whether they feed on each other. A study that explores this dimension would be illuminating.

This study consists of five chapters. The first chapter provides an overview of political violence through a review of its historical phases and changing dynamics and patterns. It argues that the foundations of violence as an instrument in political competition were laid more than half a century ago in nationalist inter-party conflicts. Resorting to violence became common in factional rivalries within and between liberation forces in the 1970s. The post-independence period witnessed qualitative and quantitative leaps in the institutionalization of violence, with state agencies acquiring advanced technology for use in repression. The chapter argues that continuities in impunity and repressive techniques from the colonial period compounded the magnitude and regularity of institutionalized violence.

In the second chapter, the material imperatives of political violence are spelt out. They explained the accent on violence organized by the then ruling ZANU-PF party in conjunction with a militia and war veterans, with the collusion of certain state agencies against the opposition parties. It was not an accident that violence reached its peak during election campaigns. There was often a ‘margin of terror’, which induced fear amongst the electorate, and tipped election outcomes in favour of the incumbent regime. Land reform was another catalyst of widespread violence in 2000-2003. Many farm-workers and commercial farm owners were caught up in the violence, which served a dual purpose of land redistribution to small farmers, and accumulation of land, sometimes multiple farms, by the elite. It was also a time of concerted repression of opposition movement supporters. As the decade progressed, the military and state bureaucracy became increasingly confident as they enriched themselves through the state, and as they identified their interests more closely with those of the incumbent regime. In their arrogance they warned that they would not allow a leader without liberation credentials to assume the reins of power, even if he/she won at the polls.

That warning was implemented during the 2008 election. State agencies played an active, if not a leading, role in ensuring that the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, would not win in the run-off election and assume office. The violence that shook the country in April-June 2008 was systemic as well as systematic. Chapter 3 explores how the violence was strategic rather sporadic, relentless rather than fragmented. While this institutionalized violence succeeded in sowing widespread fear and trauma, it left a large residue of resentment, frustration, and thirst for retribution amongst the population. Some of that pent-up frustration found expression in autonomous actions by communities in 2009 and 2010 for restitution of their property confiscated or destroyed by supporters of ZANU-PF. Unless sensitively handled, the embers of injustice and quest for revenge could create combustible conditions for a future explosion.

Finally, Chapters 4 and 5 assess the broad effects of violence on Zimbabwe’s political culture. While ZANU-PF and its allies – youth militia, war veterans and state agencies – have been sources of most violence, there has also been a resort to violence by the opposition and civil society organizations. These chapters observe that even if that violence occurs on a relatively limited scale, and some of it largely self-defensive, this is a worrying development. There remains a dangerous possibility that the values and practice of political violence of ZANU-PF could be reproduced in other parties and in civil society. Chapter 5 shows, in particular, that the wider effects of violence in Zimbabwe are still unfolding. They include fear and withdrawal, stress and depression, spawning a myriad of mental and psychological disorders whose prevalence and depth still need to be fathomed.

Chapter 1

Background, History and Patterns of Political Violence

Introduction

In March 2007, the world was shocked by the scenes of brutality seared into swollen faces and battered heads as well as broken limbs of Zimbabwean opposition politicians and civil society leaders. They had been extensively beaten and tortured by state security forces and denied medical treatment for several days. The gruesome treatment that they received from the state was punishment for attempting to hold a public prayer meeting. Six months earlier, in September 2006, harrowing torture had been applied to trade unionists who were exercising their right to protest against the regime’s economic policies. Even more shocking was the retributive violence, largely orchestrated by state security forces, against opposition and civil society activists in April-June 2008. State-organized violence against opponents of ZANU-PF has been a central instrument in the perpetuation of its tenure and hence its systematic deployment during election campaigns since independence. But violence as a method of political competition, and for seeking and maintaining power, has deep roots in Zimbabwean politics. The practice and culture of violence were established more than 50 years ago. By the time a split occurred in the nationalist movement in 1963 – the formation of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) as a splinter party from the Zimbabwe African Peoples Union (ZAPU) – violence was already frequently used in political contest.

Half a Century of Political Violence

To trace the roots of political violence to the period 1960-63 is not to provide any excuse for its