"Healing and reconciliation cannot start with mass exhumations and reburials, and certainly not if they are conducted by government or those it controls. "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. Organisations like Ibhetshu Likazulu are vehemently opposed to any government involvement in the healing process. His government has tried to carry out exhumations of the mass graves scattered throughout these provinces, without getting anyone to account for these killings, prompting family members and human rights groups to charge that the government was moving too quickly in an attempt to prevent a more thorough historical accounting. Under pressure from survivors and relatives of victims, President Mnangagwa - who is accused of masterminding the atrocities when he served as Mugabe’s right-hand-man as State Security minister - has held a series of consultative meetings with civic groups and traditional chiefs to find common ground on the issue.īut critics doubt the genuineness of his government’s commitment to fully address and account for the killings. He is one of the hundreds of thousands of stateless people from the three western and southwestern provinces of Zimbabwe that were affected by the strife where several generations have no identity documents.Įven long after peace had been restored, the people of Matabeleland have suffered systematic discrimination and marginalization from successive Harare administrations. Without identity documents, Ndaba could not proceed with his education, nor can he get a formal job or even enjoy basic services such as opening a bank account. "Without identity documents, there is nothing for me to show that I am a Zimbabwean I am stateless," he added. He is one of the thousands of children that were born from the mass rapes which constituted an integral part of the Gukurahundi strategy. "I was born during the Gukurahundi time and when my mother died when I was 14 in 1999, I still had no birth certificate and since her death, none of her relatives are comfortable relating to me because to them, I am an object of shame to the family," Ndaba (37), an artisanal miner, told FairPlanet in an interview. Over the years, efforts by survivors of the genocide and relatives of victims to get closure to this episode have brought them no joy as the government has continued to frustrate them, condemning them to a life of indignity and even of statelessness. "They have no shame, today they used an explosive, the unrepentant Gukurahundists continue to destroy the memory of their diabolic acts, they blew off the Bhalagwe plaque, we will not forget, we cry for justice, Gukurahundi was genocide, we demand justice," the pressure group stated, reacting to the latest destruction of the plaque in a tweet. The group is among the most vocal of civil society organisations calling for accountability for the massacres. Ibhetshu Likazulu, a local pressure group made up of advocates representing Gukurahundi victims, put up the memorial plaque and those that have been destroyed previously. Then Prime Minister, the late Robert Mugabe, responded by deploying his special North Korean-trained army unit called the Fifth Brigade to these strongholds of the opposition PF-ZAPU.īy the time a peace was restored through a lopsided unity accord in December 1987, over 20,000 had died and thousands others were maimed, raped or had gone missing in what had turned out to be a tribal genocide. This dark episode in the country’s history - referred to as the Gukurahundi era - started in 1982 when friction between two former liberation movements, ZANU-PF and PF-ZAPU, boiled over into an armed conflict. It is a memorial set up to memorialise the over 20,000 people from the Ndebele tribal group that were killed when the post-Independence government of Zimbabwe unleashed a crack military unit on the western parts of the country, then opposition strongholds. It was the third time within two years that this plaque, which is considered offensive by President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government, had been destroyed. On the night of 6 January, "unknown people" used explosives to blow up a memorial plaque at Bhalagwe, a former detention camp where thousands of people were detained and tortured - many of them to death.
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