Peace and reconciliation remain “a pipe dream” for genocide survivors in Zimbabwe

The unveiling of a new constitution in 2013 brought fresh hopes to different Zimbabweans. 

For Duncan Maseko, then 41, the inclusion of the National Peace and Reconciliation Commission (NPRC), a statutory body tasked with searching for truth and ensuring past injustices are remedied, gave him hope. He could finally know the truth about his father, who had been abducted from their home three decades ago. 

Maseko was not alone in investing his hopes in the NPRC. The NPRC also appeared to be an answered prayer to tens of thousands of others who had suffered various injustices and were searching for truth and closure. But as the ten-year tenure of the commission draws close, Maseko and the others are thoroughly dejected.

“To me, the NPRC is just a circus,” Maseko, now 51, tells Minority Africa. “My only wish is to have full information on the remains of our loved ones.” 

Thousands Killed, Raped, Disappeared

Shortly after Zimbabwe’s independence, friction between ZANU-PF and PF-ZAPU, two former liberation movements, boiled over into armed conflict. 

In 1982, then Prime Minister, the late Robert Mugabe, responded by deploying the Fifth Brigade, his special North Korean-trained army unit, to the western parts of the country – strongholds of the opposition PF-ZAPU. 

During the five-year (1982-87) campaign of terror that followed, over 20,000 people died, and thousands of others were maimed, raped, or simply went missing. Maseko’s father, Sam, was one of the over 20,000 people unaccounted for. 

A former Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) combatant during the armed struggle that resulted in Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980, Sam was abducted from his home in Bulawayo, the country’s second-largest city, on February 11, 1984, by state security agents and just like thousands of others, never to be seen again.   

Most of those so rounded up ended up at Bhalagwe, a Nazi-style detention camp 100 km south of Bulawayo, where they were gruesomely tortured – many of them to their deaths.

By the time a cold peace was established through a lopsided Unity Accord of December 1987, Gukurahundi, a full-blown genocide, had taken place against the Ndebele tribal minority.

Attempts To Bring Closure Resisted

Since the signing of the Unity Accord, efforts by survivors and families of the victims of the Gukurahundi genocide to get closure have been resisted for more than three decades by successive governments of Zimbabwe.

The closest former president, Robert Mugabe, came to acknowledge the Gukurahundi atrocities was describing them as a “moment of madness.” Still, he resisted calls for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, similar to one that was convened in South Africa in the aftermath of Apartheid, to bring closure to the survivors.

Since coming into power in the November 2017 coup, President Emmerson Mnangagwa – who stands accused of masterminding the atrocities as State Security minister, Mugabe’s right-hand man – under pressure from survivors and relatives of victims, held a series of consultative meetings with civic groups and traditional chiefs to find common ground on the issue. 

But critics rightly doubted the genuineness of his commitment, as in 2020, his government tried to exhume mass graves in the Midlands and the Matabeleland provinces without getting anyone to account for these killings. This drew the ire of family members and human rights groups that accused the government of trying to prevent a more thorough historical accounting of the genocide.

Organisations like Ibhetshu LikaZulu, which had three memorial plaques erected for Gukurahundi victims at Bhalagwe blown up by suspected security agents, vehemently oppose any government involvement in the healing process.

“Under no circumstances should there be any government-controlled exhumations and reburials of Gukurahundi genocide victims,” the group’s coordinator, Mbuso Fuzwayo, said in a statement. 

The pressure group argues that healing and reconciliation cannot start with mass exhumations and reburials, and certainly not if they are conducted by the government, who happen to have been the perpetrators of the genocide, or those it controls. 

They insist that exhumations should be done by an independent body and should come after, among other things, an acknowledgement of the genocide and the release of the Chihambakwe and Dumbutshena commissions’ reports.

The two commissions were set up by the government after public outcry during the massacres in the mid-1980s, but successive governments of Zimbabwe have refused to release their findings.

An Unwanted Foster Child

Analysts say when the NPRC was included in the new constitution, although the hopes were misplaced, it was only natural for those affected by Gukurahundi to hope for closure. 

The commission was forced into the constitution by the opposition during the country’s four years of inclusive government and turned out to be an unwanted foster child under the ZANU-PF government.

Its birth was so complicated that it took about five years, of which two and a half were spent choosing commissioners, and another two before the act was passed to come into this unwanted existence. It has left the commission with only five out of its original ten years to exist, most of which it has struggled from lack of resources to carry out its duties.

In 2019, Concilia Chinanzvavana, an opposition legislator, successfully applied to the Harare High Court for the extension of the duration of the NPRC to 2028 to recover the five years lost before it was instituted. The Government appealed to the Supreme Court and got the judgement reversed.

‘Virtually Nothing Achieved’

The Supreme Court’s decision means the NPRC will be coming to an end on August 21 without having served not only the victims of Gukurahundi but many others that had looked toward the commission to get closure. 

Trumpeted as “the realisation of the social and political will and aspiration of Zimbabweans to transition from a conflictual past to a harmonious future,” the NPRC comes to an end without achieving this goal.

Chinanzvavana tells Minority Africa that resistance to the extension of the Commission’s tenure is testimony of the government’s lack of commitment to peace and reconciliation.

“If we may ask what really has been achieved by the NPRC, virtually nothing in so much as bringing closure to victims who include the over 20,000 Gukurahundi victims, those who suffered inter-party brutalities mostly at the hands of the ruling party and their militia, the atrocious land reform, to name a few,” Chinanzvavana says. “There is no goodwill. Peace and reconciliation in Zimbabwe remain a pipe dream, many souls have suffered in silence, and Zimbabwe, as a nation, will continue bleeding.”

Ibhetshu LikaZulu’s Fuzwayo tells Minority Africa the NPRC was destined to fail from the onset because there was no political will to address the issue of the Gukurahundi genocide. 

“Gukurahundi will not be resolved by a government that doesn’t want to take full responsibility, there’s no acknowledgement that it happened… who did what, to who, how and when,” he says, adding that the NPRC had been incapacitated to deliver on its mandate so even if its term were to be extended, nothing will change. “Communities have never expected anything from their killers, they are not fools to believe that those who killed them can wake up overnight and say we are now willing to view you as humans… Victims and survivors of the genocide will never get healing nor closure.” 

Zenzele Ndebele, the co-founder of the Centre for Innovation and Technology (CITE), a local think-tank that has done extensive research and documentation of the events of the genocide, told Minority Africa that the creation of the NPRC raised expectations among the communities affected by the genocide, but it failed to live to its billing.

“There seem not to be political will… the expectation of the general public, especially the people of Matabeleland who were affected by the Gukurahundi genocide, was that there was going to be public hearings where they were going to talk to people,” Ndebele says, “ask them what happened, give solutions, probably ask government to actually say their side of the story on why it had happened, but this did not happen.” 

Instead, the government handpicked some chiefs and a few individuals to lead the exhumations and reburials without making an effort to get the atrocities accounted for.

“The challenge is that the government does not really want the issue of Gukurahundi to dealt with to finality because the main perpetrator was government. Most of the perpetrators during Gukurahundi are now senior government officers, so they don’t want to talk about it. It’s another project that will fail, and this August NPRC comes to an end, and it’s the end of the story,” Ndebele says.

Journalist Mxolisi Ncube, who comes from the communities affected by the genocide, said those who were sceptical about the commission have since been vindicated.

“I think the NPRC was more of a public relations stunt by the government of the day than a body formed to fulfil any purpose,” Ncube tells Minority Africa. 

“Its failures are well-captured in the lackadaisical approach towards addressing not only the Gukurahundi massacres but also the past and present political violence and political murder cases in the country. For as long as anger and grievances over Gukurahundi, undocumented survivors, tribal antagonism, and toxic politics in the country still exist, the NPRC has not done its work and these are still glaring and flaring as we speak. 

“It is so sad that those who were sceptical about the existence of political will behind the work of the NPRC have been vindicated at a time when Zimbabweans need to unite more than ever in healing past atrocities, political skirmishes, tribal antagonism and rebuilding the country.”

As local efforts such as the NPRC are proving to be of no help, some of those who have no confidence in a process – in which some of the perpetrators are returning to the crime scene to lead the healing process – are now calling for the international community to investigate the killings. One of the traditional chiefs from the area, Vezi Maduna Mafu, has since approached the United Nations seeking an international commission to investigate the killings.

Edited/Reviewed by Samuel Banjoko, Uzoma Ihejirika, and Caleb Okereke.