23 Under the new (1997) system, the victim must now get two affidavits from non-relatives and one from the community leader.95 Also, the victim has the option of submitting a letter from the police that incident was reported or a hospital report of sustained injuries.96 Then the Department of Social Welfare will give the victim two forms, one medical and one application.97 The Department of Social Welfare then schedules the applicant’s visit to a government doctor.98 Previously, the applicants could have been examined by any government doctor but the new system has only one reviewing doctor.99 Although, the new system is more stringent and better to prevent sham claims, the system fails.100 The Act inappropriately gives the medical doctor power to make legal decision of compensation.101 According to section 7(2), the medical doctor is not to consider the claimant’s earning capacity, but he must make an assessment base upon a comparison to a healthy person using the schedule of injuries.102 The drafters attempted to separate the legal assessment of compensation from the medical assessment.103 However, when the doctor assesses the claimant’s degree of disability using the schedule of injuries, he has determined the claimant’s compensation, which is a legal analysis.104 Furthermore, the reliance upon a single medical doctor reviews the claimant’s condition poses problems.105 Most medical doctors are currently trained to detect physical ailments rather than psychiatric ailments. Even with provisional training in psychology, some mental related injuries will remain undetected, i.e., neurological injuries. The value of the assessment lies only in the training and experience of individual doctors, and thus doctors with no experience of torture, psychological disorders or rehabilitation will be ill-equipped to make the sensitive assessments required to determine realistic compensation. In practice, assessment of torture survivors requires a medical team composed of medical doctors, psychologists, nurses, physiotherapist, occupational therapists, and social workers. The process of assessment is usually lengthy, victim-friendly, and always with rehabilitation in mind. This is seldom the case in Zimbabwe, and the referral to other medical specialities or health professionals is purely at the discretion of the examining doctor. Additionally, most Zimbabwean War Victim live in the rural areas, and, since the Act does not require notice, Zimbabweans war survivors can only receive informal notice. In practice, this turns out to be by word of mouth. Therefore, the potential to have a number of actual victims remain uncompensated exists. 95 supra supra 97 supra 98 supra 99 supra 100 supra 101 supra 102 Sec 7(2), War Victims Compensation Act, [Chapter 11:16]. 103 supra 104 supra 105 Ministry of Health and Child Welfare, Medical Boards: War Victims Compensation Act, [Chapter 11:16]. 96