HARARE – A government organ for national reconciliation will look into human violations before and after Zimbabwe’s independence including an 80s army crackdown in the south of the country that killed thousands of innocent civilians from the Ndebele ethnic group. 

Organ chairman John Nkomo told civic society groups in Harare that the organ formed by the country’s power-sharing government would examine all cases of politically motivated violence and human rights abuses including a bloody army campaign known as Gukurahundi that is one of the darkest periods in Zimbabwe’s history.

But Nkomo, himself a Ndebele and also an ally of President Robert Mugabe – who some say personally ordered the army crackdown – did not say whether his organ would consider recommending general amnesty for perpetrators of human rights violations and other political crimes.

“We are going to look into what happened post and pre-independence. You cannot ignore that some of the violence that happened post-independence was carried over to what happened before independence,” said Nkomo, who is also chairman of Mugabe’s ZANU PF party.

“There are people who died, executed, incarcerated for their political views and we cannot ignore that,” he said.

Nkomo heads the healing and reconciliation organ together with Sekai Holland from Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC-T party and Gibson Sibanda from Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara’s MDC-M. The three parties make up Zimbabwe’s coalition government.

Asked if the organ would specifically look into the Gukurahundi killings – that remain an emotive subject that is rarely spoken about among Zimbabwe’s rulers – Nkomo said: “Gukurahundi cannot be ignored because they were disagreements and people died.”

While human rights groups and Western governments began focusing serious attention on rights abuses by Mugabe only in the last 10 years after he began seizing white-owned farms, the Zimbabwean leader is accused of trampling upon the rights of opponents with the launch of Gukurahundi barely three years after taking over power at independence from Britain in 1980.

Gukurahundi was lunched ostensibly to crackdown on armed dissidents in the Matabeleland and Midlands provinces dominated by the Ndebeles who were the main backers of the then opposition PF-ZAPU party.

Analysts say the real purpose of the onslaught by the army’s North Korean-trained 5th Brigade was to demolish PF-ZAPU’s support base.

At least 20 000 innocent civilians were reportedly killed, some of them by having their stomachs prised open by soldiers while others were rounded up into huts and set on fire.

Mugabe has previously called the killings an “act of madness”. But he has never personally accepted responsibility for the civilian murders or formally apologised.

The Zimbabwean strongman has also not yielded to calls by human rights groups for his government to compensate the Gukurahundi victims.

Analysts say he veteran leader’s unwillingness to leave office and the fierce resistance by his top security commanders to political change was partly because of fears they could be hauled before the courts or even to The Hague once they agree to give up power.

By Zimonline