86 From National Liberation to Democratic Renaissance in Southern Africa and had ultimately gone into exile. A blanket amnesty was given to the dissidents and many surrendered mostly after assurances from their leadership. A critique of the 1987 Unity Accord The best way to bring peace and reconciliation in communities is through truth telling and a shared willingness to reconcile by all the major actors in a war. Civil wars and systematic repression need to end and the keyword in post-conflict reconstruction is ‘reconciliation’. The government, social organisations, the churches, and the entire population have to come to terms with the past in one way or the other. All cultural and religious traditions have forms of reconciliation. Each of these traditions also puts forward certain requirements regarding reconciliation. For example, the truth is to be established ‘officially’, damages are to be paid, the guilty are to be recognised publicly, the victims are to be restored their honour, or the guilty persons are to be submitted to real or symbolic punishment (Gatsheni-Ndlovu 2003). These are also manifest in international law. The preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, ‘that it is of utmost importance that the human rights are protected by the supremacy of law’. A government is, therefore, obliged to investigate all accusations of violations of human rights, and report the violations from the past (Gatsheni-Ndlovu 2003). In Rwanda, the government built memorials to remember victims of the genocide and revived the traditional gacaca system of justice as a way of healing the nation in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide. Helen Vesperini (2002: 20) noted that: [T]he Rwandan government has revamped a traditional style of community justice known as the gacaca court system. The dual aim of the courts is to deal with the backlog of genocide suspects crammed into the country’s prison, and heal the deep scars left by the 1994 genocide that killed at least half a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The 1987 Unity Accord ended the war but did not bring peace and reconciliation. It was elitist and embodied a top-down approach to governance. Nkomo and Mugabe signed the Accord and then sold it to the people. The grassroots were never consulted in the peace-making process and no reconciliation efforts were made. According to Gatsheni-Ndlovu (2003), the foundation of reconciliation is the recognition of suffering. This distinguishes reconciliation from a process which does not go beyond political negotiations and compromises. Recognition of individual suffering may be shaped by extensive official reports with a 4.Mashingaidze.pmd 86 31/10/2005, 12:54