11 be traced to the separation of the elements discussed earlier. • • • The avoidance of justice; The institutionalising of corruption; The creation of apathy based on fear; The avoidance of justice has become epidemic in Zimbabwe. It manifests itself in a variety of ways, most seriously with the passing of statutes of impunity, as described above. It also manifests in other more subtle ways in the ways in which government ministers and officials are able to avoid the consequences of their wrongdoings. To avoid the consequences of human rights violations, the Government has a remarkable record of setting up judical commissions and then ignoring the findings, or even not making the findings public. In the 1980s, there were two such commissions; the Dumbutshena Commission and the Chihambakwe Commission. The findings of both commissions remain unpublished. Government now no longer tries to avoid by using this route, and, after the Food Riots in 1998, it merely ignores the calls for judicial or independent commissions of inquiry. As regards other areas of wrongdoing, the government has largely adopted the same approach. For example, during the 1980s a scandal over the ways in which Ministers and other high officials used their offices to illegally obtain and sell motor cars was followed by a judicial commission, identification of the main culprits, and then exoneration by Presidential pardon of the same culprits. A similar scandal emerged in the 1990s, with massive fraud by Ministers and many other war veterans of the War Victims Compensation Fund. Over Z$1 billion was embezzled through fradulent claims, and, despite the findings of another judical commission, little serious action has been taken. Firstly, the report of the commission has not been made public, secondly the committee appointed to recommend prosecutions has not even met, and, thirdly, to add insult to injury, the President illegally disbursed Z$5 billion to all the war veterans in order to satisfy their demands for compensation. Many of the war veterans who benefited from this payment were also parties to the previous fraud. One needs little imagination to see how upsetting this must have been to the survivors, and may have been at least one reason behind the Food Riots17. The institutionalising of corruption becomes another consequence of impunity, and as can be seen from the earlier stories, corruption has become a way of life. How could it not when there is no accountability for wrongdoing? Corruption has now grown to the level where the Zimbabwe Congress of Trades Unions estimates that nearly Z$30 billion was lost in the 17 See Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum [1999], A Consolidated Report on the Food Riots, 19-23 January 1998, Report compiled by the AMANI Trust on behalf of the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum, HARARE: