of the principle of black-majority rule. A new constitution was also agreed at Lancaster House. Robert Mugabe and ZANU won the 1980 elections, which the Commonwealth observed. Zimbabwe subsequently declared independence in the same year and it joined the Commonwealth in October 1980. Zimbabwe hosted the 1991 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Harare, which resulted in the seminal Harare Declaration setting out the Commonwealth's fundamental political values. Zimbabwe would later be assessed on these values by the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group (CMAG]. Post-independence until the 2000 referendum Zimbabwe’s new government invested in socio-economic development and education. However, the short-lived peace was destroyed by the Gukurahundi massacres when the North Korean trained ‘Fifth Brigade’ army was unleashed on the people of Matabeleland and an estimated 20,000 Ndebeles were killed. In 1987, there was a Unity Accord between the leaders Joshua Nkomo of ZAPU and Robert Mugabe of ZANU. Eventually these two parties would merge to become ZANU-PF. During the 1990s, the economy was in decline as a result of droughts, strikes for improved employment conditions, allegations of corruption and poor governance, and the impact of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP). Notable during this period was the growing strength of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) in challenging government policies and mobilising strike actions. Morgan Tsvangirai, then a ZANU member, was elected as its Secretary-General. He would subsequently become the head of a new opposition party formed in 1999 with support from the trade unions, civil society and commercial farmers – the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). By 2000, Zimbabwe was in both economic and democratic difficulty. In February 2000, the government held a referendum on a new constitution to replace the Lancaster House Agreement and was defeated. Although the government formally accepted the results of the referendum, ZANU-PF, as a party, interpreted the rejection of the draft constitution as the result of a conspiracy by the black urban middle-class elite (represented by the MDC), the country’s white commercial farmers and the government’s external enemies. The government decided to enact some provisions of the rejected draft constitution, in particular implementation of a fast-track land reform process which still reverberates in Zimbabwean politics. Shortly after the referendum, in what was perceived as retribution for ZANU-PF’s loss, some ‘veterans of the liberation war’ and their supporters moved to occupy a significant number of white-owned commercial farms and other lands amid a campaign of violence and intimidation. The continued implementation of the fasttrack land reform, aimed at benefiting landless black Zimbabweans but generating considerable controversy, led to a sharp decline in production and is said to have 5