The Zimbabwean Experience of Transitional Justice Anthony Reeler Research and Advocacy Unit (RAU), Harare 1 In Zimbabwe, one of the more enduring consequences of the organized violence and torture of the 1970s and 1980s is the number of people who have been left handicapped by the experience and exposure to violence. Remarkably, against the general trend from most centres of conflict, the effects in Zimbabwe have been relatively well researched, and not only from a medical standpoint. Medical evidence – or, more properly, forensic evidence – is particularly important, especially as it has increasing significance in criminal tribunals and can provide the only hard evidence where eyewitness testimony may not be available. Scientific evidence is thus important in the understanding of organized vio­ lence, and, here, evidence of extra-judicial executions and torture provide some of the ‘hardest’ facts that can determine whether gross human rights violations have taken place. Torture is a particularly useful indicator of human rights nonobservance, particularly since both the physical and psycho­ logical effects of torture can now be detected many years after the original insults and injuries. However, scientific evidence of human rights violations is not confined to socalled ‘hard’ science but can be deduced from other areas of social life. Any examin­ ation of the status of the press and media freedom in a country, for example, will also give a simple measure of human rights observance. Count the number of dead, tortured, attacked, harassed, detained and imprisoned journalists and you have a good idea of whether a country has a fair number of torture victims. In Zim­babwe at present there is evidence of continual harassment and violence perpetrated against journalists and newspapers. Many other indices of human rights non-observance correlate with human rights violations, but the frequency of torture remains an extremely ‘hard’ indicator of human rights non-observance in a country. Of course, it is the case that the whole picture is needed in order to explain the situation of human rights observance satisfactorily, but this is not 1  This paper is based on an earlier version published as A. P. Reeler, ‘Sticks and stones, skeletons and ghosts’, in D. Harold-Barry (ed.), Zimbabwe: The Past is the Future: Rethinking Land, State and Nation in the Context of Crisis (Harare: Weaver Press, 2004), 225–38. 30 International Conference on Transitional Justice, Zimbabwe