4 monitoring project to document and report upon the violence. The Human Rights Forum issued a number of reports during and subsequent to the election, and the present paper draws strongly on these earlier reports and upon the data collected. More detailed and analytical reports will be shortly forthcoming. The information was gathered from a variety of sources. Statements taken from victims of political violence are the main basis for the conclusions drawn by the Forum about the nature and extent of the violence. Medical assessments of the victims were made in many cases and copies of medical reports were obtained in others. The victims mentioned in reports were generally given a pseudonym or have had their names removed in an effort to avoid them being easily identified. The Forum always remains deeply concerned about the security of every individual who reported to the Forum. Many of them have good reason to believe they are still “being sought”, and several have reported further incidents subsequent to their initial statement. This is particularly the case for those victims who have elected to testify in the current petitions under the Electoral Act. The Forum also used reports from the individual human rights organisations that are members of the Forum and from other organisations, including the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims. The Forum has drawn upon reports from teachers and health workers’ organisations, the Churches, newspaper reports, the three political parties whose members were the worst hit in the violence, the United Party (UP), the Zimbabwe Union of Democrats (ZUD) and MDC, the farm workers union, The General Agricultural and Plantation Workers Union of Zimbabwe (GAPWUZ), and the Commercial Farmers Union (CFU). Where possible the Forum has tried to cross check information that has come from secondary sources, bearing in mind that particularly regarding political parties there may be a possibility of exaggeration or distortion. The reports of the Human Rights Forum have been corroborated by the reports from other bodies, both local and international. Here we can mention the EU, the Commonwealth, the NDI, the Zimbabwe Election Support Network and the Zimbabwe Civic Education Trust. All drew largely similar conclusions.