Gukurahundi: Renewal Team vows redress

via Gukurahundi: Renewal Team vows redress 07 July 2014

THE MDC Renewal Team has moved to revive discussion of the emotive 1980s Gukurahundi conflict, insisting victims of the killings must be compensated and those responsible for the atrocities made to account for their actions.

The sensitive subject has also come up a time a former British cabinet minister has revealed that the UK did not act to stop the excesses in its former colony because London did not want to be seen as “overreacting”.

Leaders of the Renewal Team, a breakaway group from the opposition MDC-T party, brought up the unresolved post-independence conflict while addressing a structures meeting in Bulawayo at the weekend.

“You talk to people in Tsholotsho, Kezi … who had their relatives put in a hut which was locked and doused with paraffin before being set ablaze.  We can’t forget without talking. My own brother was killed by Gukurahundi. We can forgive, but will not forget.”

Rights groups say as many as 20,000 civilians, most supporters of the rival PF Zapu party, were killed when then Prime Minister Robert Mugabe deployed a North Korea-trained army unit to track down dissidents in the Matabeleland and Midlands regions.

While the Tony Blair-led British government badgered South Africa to help facilitate a military invasion of Zimbabwe after Mugabe unleashed war veterans on white commercial farmers around 2000, with a handful of them killed, it has emerged the UK saw Gukurahundi in ‘the big picture’ and chose not to act.

The UK’s ‘hands off’ attitude is revealed in an article titled ‘The Origins and Functions of Demonisation Discourses in Britain–Zimbabwe Relations’ which was published in the Journal of Southern African Studies last week.

Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the Conservative government’s Africa Minister in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (1983–86) is quoated as saying “he (Mugabe) was the legitimately elected government, even if we did not approve of the bad things he was doing in Matabeleland. We had to be pragmatic.

“(again) most of what had happened before Matabeleland was very positive and we did not want to jeopardise that by overreacting. We recognised that there was always going to be an internal tension and hostility between ZAPU and ZANU, between Matabeleland and Mashonaland, and that was a part of the country’s dynamic.”

Sipepa Nkomo however, said lasting peace in Zimbabwe would always be at risk unless simmering anger over Gukurahundi was resolved through mechanisms such as a truth and reconciliation commission.

“People must be allowed to confess their sins and then we can find peace,” he said to thunderous applause from the audience.

“When we form the next government, we want to look at the plight of victims in this country, starting with those of Gukurahundi,” said Mangoma.

“We will pay compensation for people who were killed, goats and cattle killed.  Where the children need to have school fees paid or medical expenses paid for victims, we will start helping them now as a party before we come into government.”

Mugabe has never apologised for the killings, only describing them as a moment of madness. The veteran leader and his Zanu PF party want the 1987 Unity Accord with PF Zapu to be the last word on the conflict.