Zimbabwe: The Face of Torture and Organised Violence 2. Zimbabwe’s deteriorating human rights record Zimbabwe has not always had such an odious reputation as it does today.4 The collapse of the Soviet empire, the end of the Cold War, and the arrival of democracy in South Africa, resulted in a new world order which placed a greater emphasis on democracy, good governance, the rule of law, and observance of human rights. In this new order Zimbabwe’s deteriorating human rights record in recent years began to come under increasing international scrutiny, reflected in the growth of reporting on Zimbabwe, both from a human rights perspective as well as generally. An examination of reports on Zimbabwe since 1975 shows that every decade since that time saw an increase in the number of such reports compared to the decade before, with an enormous increase since 2000.5 This massive increase represents a focus of increased attention: however, in the same way that crime statistics can reflect an increase in policing activities rather than an increase in crime, whether this massive increase in the reporting of human rights violations is partly a result of increased monitoring or not, it is also a reflection of the concern about Zimbabwe, and the clear demonstration on many fronts that the country is in crisis: this is attested to by both local and international commentators and observers. Thus it is erroneous to simply assert, as the Zimbabwe Government frequently does, that the current plethora of reports represents an attempt by Western nations, using Zimbabwean NGOs as their proxies, to vilify Zimbabwe on account of its land policy.6 4 Although there is a long history of gross human rights violations in the past, including during the colonial and immediate post-colonial eras, these past violations did not draw the widespread attention and opprobrium that the current violations have attracted. This lack of attention partly derived from the policy of reconciliation put in place by Mugabe’s Government at Independence in 1980, which earned him an international reputation for tolerance and forgiveness, albeit at the cost of impunity for those responsible for past human rights abuses. In addition, the gross human rights violations during the period known as the Gukurahundi in the immediate aftermath of Independence were obscured and overshadowed by the attention given to the anti-colonial struggles in South Africa and Namibia, as well as the terrible civil wars in Angola and Mozambique. The central role taken by Zimbabwe in the struggle to liberate Namibia and South Africa, as well as the relative political and economic stability of Zimbabwe in the Southern African region, in retrospect appears to have produced a degree of myopia in respect of Zimbabwe’s own human rights record. 5 A database of reports on Zimbabwe was compiled for this purpose, and as many on human rights and governance generally as could be identified issued since 1975 were included, and classified according to the type of report. There are virtually no human rights reports on Rhodesia before 1975, when the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace issued the first in a number of important reports on the human rights violations being committed in Rhodesia. A total of 418 preliminary reports were classified under the following headings: Organised violence and torture – pre-independence; Organised violence and torture – post-independence; Elections and organised violence and torture; Land and organised violence and torture; Organised violence and torture – psychological and psycho-social; Legal and constitutional considerations; Legislation; Judiciary and criminal justice system; Media and repression; Refugees/migrancy; Social and economic considerations; Food security/agriculture; Gender and human rights considerations; General. Clearly, reports can be classified under more than one heading, and issues of categorization can be disputed. Hence the classification used was based on an analysis of the total set of reports to provide the most generalised classification: reports were separated according to whether they deal with human rights in the narrow sense (i.e. political and civil rights), or were reports on other aspects of Zimbabwe (including social and economic rights). Table 1 (Appendix I) indicates that over the past four decades each decade shows more reports than the previous one. A breakdown of the data by decade is shown in table 2, 3, 4 and 5 (Appendix II.) There is an enormous increase since 2000, both in terms of the number of human rights reports emerging, as well as the total number of reports on Zimbabwe; human rights reports since 2000 comprise 33% of the total number of reports on Zimbabwe since 1975, and almost half the total issued since 2000. The reports analysed include reports from both national and international organisations. 6 As can be seen from Figure 1 (Appendix III), the sheer increase in the number of reports on human rights violations as opposed to other types of reports does not support this view of the Zimbabwe Government, especially since 2000. There have been nearly three times as many reports issued since 2000 than in the whole of the previous three decades; human rights reports issued since 2000 comprise over 33% of all reports, and some 82% of human rights reports, issued since 1975. The onus is on the Zimbabwe Government to provide an adequate refutation of the assertions of gross human rights violations, and not to merely claim a conspiracy, or even worse to attempt to shoot the messengers of this news, as the Zimbabwe government intends to do with the promulgation of the Non-Governmental Organisations Act. This Act was passed by the Zimbabwe Parliament in December 2004 against the recommendations of its own Legal Affairs Committee, 4