7 Here, it seems very plausible that there was a family and community process of recruitment into the militia and the consequent violence, and it becomes important to examine this further. This cannot be done with the data available, but would undoubtedly be adequately tested by a commission of inquiry. The suggestion that recruiting to the militia operated through family and community pressure is perhaps different to other settings. The point here is that not all situations in which militia operate are the same. Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Rwanda are distinct in many ways. Recruitment of the youth in the first two countries was in the context of civil wars, involving massive internal disruption and destruction of communities: children and young people were dragged in by force of circumstances, although their individual motives for joining an armed group may have varied greatly, as suggested above. In Rwanda, there was a deliberate process of recruitment along ethnic lines, backed by a ferocious propaganda campaign to foster recruitment. Unfortunately few of the reports on Zimbabwe provide detailed enough information on the breakdown of the perpetrators by category other than gross political affiliation, and thus it is hard to determine trends in any statistical fashion. Regarding the identification of the perpetrators of organised violence and torture, virtually no reports show the changes over time in this, apart from very gross indices. One report, relying wholly on medical examinations and affidavits, showed that “war veterans” and youth militia was a very significant proportion of the total (33%). This is shown in Table 3 below. Table 3. Perpetrators identified by victims. (Taken from Amani Trust, “Beating your opposition. Torture during The 2002 Presidential Election in Zimbabwe”, 25 June 2002) Perpetrator ZanuPF supporters Youth militia Zimbabwe Republic Police MDC War veterans Zimbabwe National Army Unknown Percentage 46% 29% 12% 5% 4% 2% 2% However, the assertion in this paper is not that the youth militia were the organisers of the organised violence and torture rather that they were the “foot soldiers” under the control of other leaders (see above). In 2000, these were assumed to be “war veterans”, and this assumption seems to be held by a recent analysis of the worst perpetrators xii. As the analysis above indicated, relatively stable numbers of perpetrators were found per category – MP, police, “war veterans”, etc – between the two elections, but, interestingly, when the data was sorted according to frequency of mention, then “war veterans” and ZanuPF youth were much less frequently mentioned. “War veterans” however were a very high percentage of the top 50 worst offenders, and some “war veterans” were the most frequently mentioned of all. When ZanuPF MPs, many of whom make much of their “war veteran” credentials, are added to the “war veteran” category, then these two categories make up 15% of the total of the worst perpetrators mentioned by victims. It thus is not difficult to see a link between the youth militia and their likely leaders. In fact, given the decision by the Mugabe government to constitute both “war veterans” and the youth militia as official auxiliary forces, this link must be denied rather than proven. Another interesting use of the data is the examination of the use of the bases and their association with militia and the violence. Using the reports of the Human Rights Forum, it is possible to see some trends and some changes over time. As is seen from Table 4, there are some marked changes. It is clear that no strong statement can be made about the overall number The Perpetrators of Gross Human Rights Violations in the current violence in Zimbabwe.