idea of creating a de jure one party state, it certainly did not abandon the idea of crushing political opposition and establishing a de facto one party state. ZANU (PF) continues to hold the strong belief that by fighting and winning the liberation struggle it earned the right to rule Zimbabwe in perpetuity. Army commanders, the Police Commissioner, and war veterans loyal to the ruling party all subscribe to this view, and have publicly expressed this sentiment. Since it came to power in 1980, ZANU (PF) has displayed immense intolerance of political opposition, and has treated criticisms and opposition to its policies as being tantamount to treason. The brutal military campaign in Matabeleland, during the 1980s that led to the deaths of thousands of people and the detention and torture of many others was primarily aimed at smashing PF ZAPU, a party that had its main support base in the Ndebele population. 2 The police force has been transformed into a partisan force that applies the laws on a selective basis. It has increasingly become an instrument of repression used against the ordinary people of Zimbabwe. In the process of reconstructing the police force moderate police officers have been driven out of the force to be replaced with ruling party loyalists such as war veterans and youth militia who have graduated from the National Youth Service Training programme and are considered to bear allegiance to the ruling party. Before elections, the ruling party had frequently engaged in violence and other forms of intimidation against opposition supporters, and after elections it has exacted reprisals upon those that it believes voted for the opposition . 3 When a strong opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, emerged at the end of the 1990s and this party mounted a real challenge to the rule of ZANU (PF), the ruling party’s response was to unleash its supporters to wage an intense campaign of violence and intimidation against the opposition party and its supporters. The ruling party also orchestrated large-scale land invasions of commercial farms. One important reason for these often-violent occupations of white owned farms was to eliminate a support base for the opposition amongst white farmers and their farm workers . These land occupations, and the subsequent compulsory acquisitions of these farms, had the 4 effect of drastically undermining the entire commercial agricultural sector, with consequent severe adverse effects on the national economy. This compounded the already dire economic situation in the country. It also rendered homeless and jobless large numbers of farm workers. No sensible person would have disputed that there was a pressing need for equitable land re-distribution in Zimbabwe. But many would have argued that there were far more sensible ways of proceeding than simply devastating the commercial farming sector before ensuring that the resettled farmers would have the capacity to farm large commercial farms on a productive basis. There is an element of the same philosophy, that of destroying in order to rebuild, in Operation Murambatsvina. By its mismanagement of the economy, the Mugabe Government has created mass unemployment. Up to 60 per cent of the employable population is unemployed. As formal sector unemployment has risen, compounded by tens of thousands of youths entering the job market annually, more and more people have had to move into the informal trading sector to earn some sort of livelihood. The Government has very much encouraged the growth of the informal sector. In a speech in 1995, the then Minister of Home Affairs, Dumiso Dabengwa, had this to say at a conference on deregulation: