population during colonial occupation. Our liberation struggle was very obviously not just a battle for control of the state but also a struggle for human security and human rights.” Which of these freedoms have we secured in order to provide enhanced safety and security to our citizens? Certainly we have delivered on freedom from racial oppression and made advances on freedom to till the land. In recent months we have improved our capacity to enable freedom of expression and to some extent freedom to dissent and protest. But clearly we still face major challenges on some of the hard issues including policing, rule of law and most importantly the development of a national consensus and process to transform the security sector in its widest sense in order to ensure effective delivery of safety and security to all Zimbabweans, male and female, in an independent and sovereign Zimbabwe. Dealing with the Past With regard to issues of legacy we also need to confront the more unpalatable aspects of the liberation legacy, which have been omitted from the official historical narrative, and which have not been addressed by government since independence. These concern two key challenges to the security sector transformation process, the first of which centers on the broad issues of war, violence and trauma and can be situated within the Dealing With the Past (DWP) agenda. The unresolved traumas of war and violence and the unmarked graves of the liberation war dead are core elements of the inexplicably neglected question of making peace with the past in Zimbabwe. Former ZANU (PF) Secretary General, the late Edgar Tekere, expressed his own deep bitterness about the failure to “report to the parents of all those who had died… to summon the chiefs and give them a full report which they would then carry to their villages… (to give an account to) the representatives of the ancestral spirits who had fought the first chimurenga”.5 Tekere describes how it had been agreed that a ceremony to address these issues, to commemorate the dead and cleanse the survivors, would be held and that immediately after independence, as Secretary-General of ZANU (PF), he made all the necessary preparations and then informed Mugabe of the plans. According to Tekere, Mugabe responded by saying he was too busy and a furious row ensued. Tekere “stormed out the office, banging the door”. “Since independence many people have asked why there was no cleansing ceremony after the war, and many of the ills which subsequently fell upon Zimbabwe have been attributed to this fact. Even the Mocambican people asked 5 Tekere, Edgar, “A Lifetime of Struggle”, SAPES Trust, Harare, 2007, p 89. 11