ZIMBABWE: FROM IMPUNITY TO ACCOUNTABILITY 6. THE MAIN MECHANISM FOR THE PAST: SOME ISSUES The symposium averred that, “the main mechanism for dealing with past human rights abuses will be a Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation Commission” (emphasis added). Both of these aspects are significant, because they recognize that a TJRC, even an ideal one which achieves close to everything that it sets out to do, will not be a panacea for all past violations, and furthermore they acknowledge that a TJRC may not be the appropriate mechanism to prevent and/or deal with future violations. An obvious additional mechanism for dealing with the past is through the criminal justice system: the prosecution of perpetrators through the courts. At first blush this is an obvious and simple issue. One of the concerns of civil society which arose in formal and informal discussions at the symposium, and which has been voiced in papers and documents from time to time, as well as having been discussed inside and outside of Zimbabwe for years, is the desire to see justice done as normally conceived in the form of ordinary criminal trials. Indeed, special emphasis has been placed on the Justice aspect of a TJRC, precisely to distinguish it from the South African TRC as well as from ‘Mugabe’s reconciliation’ of 1980. There is considerable skepticism in Zimbabwean civil society regarding some of the outcomes of the South African TRC (and in particular the ‘truth for amnesty’ aspect which was central to it), and not surprisingly perhaps this echoes the serious and on-going reservations of many South Africans themselves over the process. There would also appear to be near unanimity amongst Zimbabwean civil society activists that the 1980 ‘arrangement’, in that it contained no element of truth or justice, had grave shortcomings. Thus, at a basic level, what will be the relationship between the TJRC and the ‘normal’ criminal justice system? Even assuming that the transition to democracy successfully avoids the trap of blanket impunity and sees the repeal of past amnesties where necessary, and that the work of the TJRC identifies many perpetrators of gross human rights abuses (it is taken for granted 20