The Zimbabwean Experience of Transitional Justice organized violence and torture of the past decades, and over ninety per cent of these derived their trauma from the 1980s.13 All the available evidence indicates that this epidemic of organized violence and torture can be blamed on the Fifth Brigade, the CIO and ZANU(PF) Youth. These were all organizations that reported to ZANU(PF) or the President; this is common cause and there are ample reports of the President, the government and the commanders of the Fifth Brigade confirming the chain of command. There has been no credible attempt to provide redress for the victims and no attempt to investigate the allegations of government-sponsored organized vio­ lence and torture. The government’s own reports have been suppressed, and it is only due to the efforts of civil society organizations – such as the Legal Resources Foundation, the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe, ZimRights and the Amani Trust – that any of the history is publicly known. Even in 2001, the government was reluctant for local newspapers to serialize the Breaking the Silence report. It is clear from the information available about this period that considerable claims can be made that the organized violence and torture differed significantly from their use in the Liberation War. Although the methods may be very similar, the aims and purposes were not. The torture and executions of the Liberation War occurred within the context of a very bitter war, with the loyalty of ‘the man in middle’ a crucial factor in its success. Although the human rights violations can never be condoned, they are at a least understandable: the guerrillas needed the unquestioning support and loyalty of the rural population in order to survive, while the security forces could not manage without the information that the rural people could give. The Gukurahundi period allows no such conclusion. The ZANU(PF) government, beleaguered as it might have been by the regional context, faced a weak dissident threat, and even that dissident threat it was to some extent guilty of creating through its own paranoia and partial treatment of ZIPRA and PF-ZAPU. Its response was massively inappropriate, to say the least. As the record shows, the formal military machine – the regular army, the Support Unit of the police and the police – were rarely implicated in gross human rights violations.14 The forces that reported directly to the party and were 13  Survivors of Organised Violence in Matabeleland: Facilitating an Agenda for Development (Bulawayo: Amani Trust, Report of the Workshop, 1998). 14  See, again, CCJPZ and LRF, Breaking the Silence. For a more detailed exposition, see also J. Alexander, J. McGregor and T. Ranger, Violence and Memory: One Hundred Years in the ‘Dark Forests of Matabeleland’ (Harare: Weaver Press; London: James Currey, 2000). International Conference on Transitional Justice, Zimbabwe 37