Africa-Press – Zimbabwe. The Government is set to roll out community consultative meetings in January 2024 to engage victims of Gukurahundi, the president of the Council of Chiefs, Chief Mtshane Khumalo has said.
Addressing the media in Bulawayo on Monday, Chief Khumalo said that the Government has provided resources and conducted training for the various people who will be involved in conducting the outreach programmes. CITE quoted Chief Khumalo as saying:
As we go out to the people with our panels as chiefs, we don’t know the perpetrators of Gukurahundi. We can only hear from the people that were affected and who the perpetrators were.
We shall record that and maybe make recommendations to the president as to what we believe should be done to those perpetrators. But as it stands now, we don’t know who the perpetrators were.
Speaking at the same event, the former president of the National Chiefs Council, Chief Fortune Charumbira, who is now Chief Khumalo’s deputy, said Zimbabweans believe in restorative justice, where someone who was wronged must state how they were wronged and how they want to be compensated. He said:
The point of departure in this unique way of doing things, you will know from our departure that we are for restorative justice. That is where we differ from the West.
We believe in restoration. If someone loses something, they need to be restored. That is the Zimbabwean way of doing things. To restore the person.
We have dialogues, with the affected people, ask them how they want to be restored and they tell us not the Western system which we say is rich in the procedure, yet very poor in restorative justice.
Our way of doing things is not to make people fight further but to build peace. The government is saying that for those who will submit credible evidence and can state what they want, the government is willing to compensate them.
The reason why we want this to be handled by chiefs is because such issues are culture-sensitive. We want the chiefs to be directly involved so that they can deal with matters because they are culture-specific.
The chiefs will know how to deal with missing persons or those who were affected in any way during Gukurahundi.
We want to deal with this in a way that is peculiar to Zimbabwe. This is why we do not want to nationalise and internationalise this issue. The problem with generalising this is we may lose the cultural aspect of things.
Gukurahundi is a term used to refer to the killing of an estimated 20 000 Ndebele people by the North Korean-trained 5th Brigade of the Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA) which was deployed ostensibly to deal with “dissidents” in the 1980s.
In 2021, President Emmerson Mnangagwa assigned chiefs the task of resolving Gukurahundi in the affected communities.
However, critics questioned Mnangagwa’s sincerity and demanded that Government officials who facilitated the deployment of the 5th Brigade be held accountable for the atrocities.
Plaques that have been erected in memory of Gukurahundi victims have repeatedly been vandalised and the perpetrators have never been identified.
Since 1980, Zimbabwe has experienced several episodes of State-sponsored violence even during elections.
During the 2000 and 2002 elections, 2008 elections, and 2018 elections, several people were murdered in cold blood allegedly by suspected State agents or party activists who were protected by the State.
In January 2019, several people lost their lives after security forces were deployed to quell countrywide riots triggered by a 150% increase in the price of fuel.
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