Ibhetshu LiKazulu, a Bulawayo-based pressure group has castigated the Government’s initiative to address the legacy of Gukurahundi saying the process remains illegal without the active involvement of the international community.
Ibhetshu LiKazulu, which has fronted initiatives to immortalise the Gukurahundi story while calling for restorative justice, says Gukurahundi was a genocide.
Genocide is the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group to destroy that nation or group.
On Friday, 26 January President Emmerson Mnangagwa held a meeting with chiefs from the Matabeleland region at State House in Bulawayo.
It was the fourth interface between Mnangagwa and traditional chiefs over the Gukurahundi issue since 2019.
Mnangagwa said the country was resolving the Gukurahundi issue in its way and will not brook any external interference.
But speaking to ZimLive, Ibhetshu LiKazulu coordinator Mbuso Fuzwayo the Government is “trivialising” Gukurahundi as “there is no acknowledgement, no truth telling especially from the side of perpetrators”. He said:
It is unfortunate to look at how the attempt to deal with Gukurahundi is being trivialised.
There is no clear process to address this issue. There is no acknowledgement, no truth telling especially from the side of perpetrators. The process is not victim-centred; it is perpetrator-led.
This matter can only be resolved by impartial, nonaligned people. Genocide is an international crime.
Samuekele Hadebe, leader of the small Freedom Alliance party, said that Gukurahundi cannot be fully resolved without truth-telling by the perpetrators. Said Hadebe:
Those who killed people were the Zimbabwean army on the payroll. The CIO were on the payroll, the police were on the payroll, prisons were on the payroll, and the Fifth Brigade were on the payroll.
Traditional chiefs are unnecessarily burdened with the task.
Every country has archives to refer to when information is required. When people are serious about getting information, they can just refer to those records.
During the atrocities, there was a newspaper blackout, journalists were not allowed to come in, and those who covered it were said to have been writing lies.
Indeed, that may have been true because some of the atrocities were committed in the dead of night and it was difficult for anybody to know about it.
Truthtelling should be the first process. The truth should come out. Only the truth shall free us.
Gukurahundi refers to the killing of thousands of mainly Ndebele civilians carried out by the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade of the Zimbabwe National Army in the 1980s.
Many were maimed, others lost homes while some were raped. The Fifth Brigade was deployed by the Government ostensibly to hunt down “dissidents”, that is, a handful of army deserters who were sympathetic to former Vice President Joshua Nkomo’s PF ZAPU.
The term Gukurahundi is derived from a ChiShona term which loosely translates to “the early rain which washes away the chaff before the spring rains.”
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