Anthony Reeler The state and organized violence As will be seen from this very brief exposition, Zimbabwe (and Rhodesia before it) has a long history of using violence. If we examine that history, briefly sketched above, we see that torture and summary executions were used to protect the guerrillas from informers or to ensure compliance from the rural population. This occurred in a war in which there could be no neutral position, and ‘the man in the middle’ was an important strategic resource for all sides to the conflict. Terrible things are always done in war and justified by the war, even though morality and international humanitarian law may disagree. So, immoral things were done in pursuit of a moral aim, the overthrow of a treasonous and racist regime, and the ending of a very bitter war: perhaps 60,000 dead, over 100,000 physically injured, tens of thousands tortured, and hundreds of thousands displaced – in just a decade! This, indeed, may have justified the amnesty in 1980 and allowed peace to come to Zimbabwe. Thereafter, this is not such an easy position to maintain. In the 1980s, the return to the methods of the 1970s, seen so graphically in the gross human rights committed by the Fifth Brigade, the CIO and ZANU(PF) Youth, cannot be simply explained as the use of immoral means to pursue a moral goal. The mass terrorizing of the southern half of Zimbabwe was out of all proportion to the threat, and put the government very much in the same position as the Smith regime, albeit with a constitutional mandate rather than a treasonous one. Old methods of ensuring compliance were dusted off the shelf and given a terrible new purpose: not to ensure the survival of a guerrilla army but to ensure the political supremacy of ZANU(PF). Immoral means were used for an immoral goal. This is not to suggest that there was not a crisis, nor that there was no dissident problem, but all available evidence shows, especially in respect of the latter, that the dissident problem was being contained successfully by conventional military means. It is noteworthy that most casualties inflicted upon the dissidents came from the regular army and the Support Unit of the police. In contradistinction, the other ‘political’ forces were responsible for the human rights violations. So we see that the lessons learned about enforcing compliance in the 1970s were quickly used again in the 1980s. The same lessons were applied in an abbreviated fashion during the Food Riots in 1998, on a massive scale during 2000, 2002 and 2008, and still continue in 2012. However, the new twist between 2000 and 2012 is the predominant use of torture and the minimizing of summary executions. The world has frequently failed to understand this, and comments about the small number of deaths 44 International Conference on Transitional Justice, Zimbabwe