ZIMBABWE: FROM IMPUNITY TO ACCOUNTABILITY strengthen bridges with outside organizations that can play an important supporting role. In these regards civil society should also not neglect or downgrade the necessity of strengthening itself. Recent experience has shown how vital a robust civil society is in the armoury of weapons required to protect human rights in Zimbabwe, and indeed everywhere. Irrespective of how ‘progressive’ any new Government will be or will appear to be, a strong civil society will always remain an essential and central component of any strategy to monitor and help prevent human rights abuses, and to support victims. For a variety of reasons which space here does not allow further examination, local civil society was very weak during the first decade of Independence, giving space to the state to commit 39 appalling human rights abuses. It must now not only continue to fight for the organisational gains it made in the 1990s and survive the current onslaught against all remaining manifestations of democracy, but at the same time it must prepare to develop and broaden its future capacities once the rule of law returns. This will require an improvement in the quality of its services, strategic thinking and commitment. 8. LAW REFORM: FURTHER ISSUES FOR THE FUTURE Some scholars in the field of reparation for victims of gross and systematic human rights violations have argued that judicial fora and the law ought not necessarily to dominate discussions for reparation in the context of political transition. The widely-used term ‘transitional justice’ is so clearly part of actual political processes that reparation can be considered partly as a matter of 40 politics, and calls for a more socio-political approach to the problem of finding measures to deal with large numbers of victims 39 An honourable exception was the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace, which almost alone spoke out against the Gukurahundi. The Law Society of Zimbabwe sat on its hands, as did most individual lawyers. 40 A helpful publication which develops these ideas is the Expert Seminar on Reparation for Victims of Gross and Systematic Human Rights Violations in the Context of Political Transitions (Universiteit Antwerpen and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2002). 30