Anthony Reeler outside military or police control – the Fifth Brigade, the CIO and ZANU(PF) Youth – were the major perpetrators, the Fifth Brigade being the overwhelming culprit. This speaks right to the crux of the problem: that ZANU(PF) remained a liberation movement at heart and had not made the transformation to a civilian, democratic party. This becomes a factor in understanding the problems of the new millennium. The story of the 1990s The story of the 1990s is somewhat different from that of the previous two decades. There were relatively few victims of politically inspired organized violence and torture during most of the decade. Moreover, civil society had an increasing ability to monitor and document the misbehaviour of the state, and this was described in a number of reports.15 As a victim, you would be most likely to have suffered at the hands of the police as a suspect in a criminal investigation, although you might have run foul of political party supporters during the general election in 1995. There was at least one celebrated assassination attempt, on Patrick Kombayi, which followed the usual pattern: found guilty of attempted murder, Kombayi’s assailants were immediately pardoned by the President, Robert Mugabe. However, the number of victims reported in the 1990s were relatively few, as seen in the reports of Zimbabwean human rights organizations such as the CCJPZ and ZimRights, as well as in the reports of international bodies such as Amnesty International. As a citizen, you could be forgiven for believing that the nation was making the all-important transition from a liberation-war ideology to modern democratic principles. You would have changed your mind by the end of the decade. However, if you were a student, you would have few illusions about the police and especially the riot police. At demonstration after demonstration, you would have witnessed unrestrained violence, with beatings, tear gas, dogs and the lot being unleashed upon the university campus. On every occasion that the riot police met the students, it was clear that the principle of ‘minimum force’ had a different meaning for the Zimbabwe Republic Police riot squad from that conventionally accepted. That the student body increasingly rejected ZANU(PF) may have had 15  See A Consolidated Report on the Food Riots, 19–23 January 1998, comp. Amani Trust on behalf of the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum (Harare: The Forum, [1999]), available at <http://hrforumzim.org/wp-content/uploads/1998/01/consolidatedreportonfood.pdf>, accessed 8 Apr. 2013; see also Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum, Organised Violence and Torture in Zimbabwe in 2000 (Harare: The Forum 2000). 38 International Conference on Transitional Justice, Zimbabwe