16 War Veterans A study of Zimbabwean war veterans was conducted in 1995,37which provide another source of data on the consequences of torture and organised violence. As regards the types of trauma reported, significant numbers reported physical and psychological torture, and a very high proportion reported some form of war injury together with an experience of torture. The types of torture experienced were similar to those found in other studies of torture survivors, with beatings and severe beatings being the most common forms of physical torture. The rates of witnessing human rights violations was also very high, both of torture, and war injuries and deaths. Furthermore, many persons reported a disappearance in their family, and a significant number also reported other family members having experienced some form of human rights violation during the war. In general, these results indicated a very high rate of organised violence and torture having been experienced by these veterans and their families. The prevalence of psychological disorders in these veterans was very high, with most reporting a mixture of physical and psychological symptoms. In fact, the rate of self-reported symptoms was considerably higher than comparable epidemiological studies in Zimbabwe. The sample showed clinically significant levels of disorder on the psychiatric screening instrument, but the pattern of diagnoses did not support PTSD being the most common diagnosis for survivors of organised violence and torture. As was seen from these results, PTSD was no more common than Somatoform Disorder, and only twice as common as Depression. This lent support to views that PTSD should not be seen exclusively as an Anxiety Disorder,38 and supported the view that the effects of torture should be broadly conceived. As a whole, these data indicated that Zimbabwean war veterans exhibit significant psychological disorders as a consequence of both war and torture, and that there was a significant need for rehabilitation services for these survivors of organised violence in Zimbabwe. Both sets of data taken together show that disorders due to human rights violations are common in areas which were reported to have experienced epidemic violence. A rough categorisation of the likely victims would go as follows: 1. War injuries 2. Torture survivors 3. Witnesses of war injury or death and torture 4. Families of torture survivors 5. Families of disappeared persons This list will include both primary and secondary victims, but does not include the damage to the social fabric of the community, or the material losses experienced by the community, but does give an idea of whom might need to be the recipients of a compensation policy. Here we would stress the tentative nature of these scientific findings, which can only be regarded as pilot studies in the main, but more comprehensive and reliable reports are in preparation, and will shortly be available.39 37 See Reeler & Mupinda.(1996), An Investigation into the Sequelae of Torture and Organised Violence in Zimbabwean war veterans, LEGAL FORUM, 8, 12-27. 38 See Turner & Gorst-Unsworth (1990), Psychological sequelae of torture, a descriptive model, BRIT.J.PSYCHIAT., 157, 475-480. See AMANI(1997), “Survivors of Torture in Mashonaland Central Province: Report and Recommendations”, Harare: AMANI (in preparation); Also Reeler, A.P., et al (1997), “Prevalence of Torture-related psychological disorders in Mount Darwin District”, (in preparation). 39