Evidence collected about human rights violations,
especially since the February 2000 Constitutional
Referendum and subsequent parliamentary elections
demonstrate the danger of not dealing with past
wrongs.
was constitutionally expressed through the Global
Political Agreement’s Articles VII, XVIII and several
other interrelated articles.
Machakanja (2010)
critiques Article VII, highlighting how the issues of
equality, national healing, unity and cohesion are
expressed in general terms thereby masking the so
important details relevant for transitional justice.
One perspective is that for a decade, the reconciliation
policy seemed to work remarkably well, at least
between black and white people. Another perspective
is that the policy worked less between white and
black people, as there was a mass exodus of whites
from Zimbabwe and in some respects, did not work
at all among black people themselves who thought
the policy was a betrayal of the liberation agenda.
Ironically, however, this gesture of open-handedness
from the new government was the first gross violation
of human rights, as the histories of colonisation and
the war were simply not addressed and the notion
of reconciliation located these issues into oblivion.
Couched under the guise of the Lancaster House
Agreement negotiated the policy of reconciliation
became distorted in both content meaning and
interpretation as there was no acknowledgement of
either the victims or the perpetrators, or of the many
atrocities committed during the war on both sides.
As a result the approach to reconciliation averted
any examination of violations perpetrated during the
war of liberation by the contending parties, thereby
failing to bring psychological closure to the traumas
of the past. More ominously, however, the integration
of the Rhodesian and the Zimbabwe security forces
brought the institutionalised technology of torture from
Rhodesia into Zimbabwe.
It is Article VII, however, that saw the establishment of
the Organ on National Healing, Reconciliation and
Integration (ONHRI). In its draft report, NANGO
(2009) through the Churches and Civil Society Forum
(CCSF), ruled out the idea of allowing politicians to
lead the processes of national healing, proposing
instead that the ONHRI proceeds in a facilitatory,
logistical and policy capacity. The ONHRI later
produced a position paper on its proposed strategies
and mechanisms for transitional justice in Zimbabwe,
but it continued to undertake consultative meetings
countrywide. The document suggested that the
transitional justice process in Zimbabwe be led by
an independent commission. The establishment of the
ONHRI was marooned in serious legitimacy debates
especially the absence of statutory powers.
2. Rationale for National Healing,
Reconciliation and Nation Building
The ‘reconciliation’ scholarship gained credence both
as a field of research and an adhesive for nation
building in the 20th century. In his argument, Allason
(2012) points out that reconciliation endeavours to
improve relations among parties formerly at odds with
one another. The nature and degree of improvement
required are debatable so too are the mechanism
of determining whether reconciliation is genuine.
In some accounts, reconciliation is judged to be
satisfactory if parties’ relations are improved and deal
with the emotional, epistemic, and/or material legacy
of the past. While the outcome of reconciliation is
oriented towards future peaceful and just relations,
the processes of reconciliation may perpetuate bad
feelings, suspicions, or harms that were created by
the conflicts and injustices of the past. The moral
and political value of reconciliation grew in the
1990s in response to its invocation during South
Africa’s transition to democracy (National Unity and
Reconciliation Act, No. 34 of 1995; South African
Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report
1998). The South African case, the post-genocide
Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia experiences, led
politicians and legal thinkers to redefine transitional
justice.
After the Gukurahundi atrocities which claimed
approximately 20 000 lives , the 1987 Unity Accord
allowed for the Amnesty to several political detainees
and since then oppositions parties had to suffer the
repression and selective application of the law by
the ZANU F-Led government. The Unity Accord itself
did not lay a firm ground for reconciliation or justice.
The signing of the Global Political Agreement (GPA) in
2008 after protracted electoral violence in 2008 and
a SADC-facilitated mediation marked a shift in the
transitional justice debates. The human rights violations
and deaths prior to the Government of National Unity
(GNU), with over 200 fatalities, were profoundly
woven in the electoral violence, historical and socioeconomic repression of the marginalised and the
poor in Zimbabwe. The involvement of civil society,
labour unions, the displaced white farmers under the
chaotic Fast Track Land Reform Programme and the
Operation Murambatsvina of 2005 which displaced
homeless citizens in the urban centres and the role of
churches and political parties in Zimbabwe accounted
for a new era of gross human rights violations that call
for peace, reconciliation and national healing . The
new thrust for national healing and reconciliation
The Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe? Legal
Resources Foundation (1997)
3
A Hammer, B Raftopolous and S Jensen, Zimbabwe’s Unfinished Business:
Rethinking Land, State and Nation in the Context of Crisis 2003
2
4
The question of transitional justice is: how can postconflict societies justly make the transition to stable
and democratic government given the reality of past
wrongs and harms? (Minow 1998, Teitel 2002).
Establishing the “Never Again” conditions is what
stakeholders and post-conflict institutions grapple with
especially where incumbent leaders were involved. In