to camp outside it all night if the President failed to address them. He did not oblige, but they dispersed at sunset with a promise to be back. ''We are tired of lies. We want to ask our patron where our money is. We don't want to talk to anybody else because they have been lying to us. They have all lied to us and so we want to hear what Mugabe has to say,'' they chanted. The war veterans shunned Mugabe's promise to allocate them some of the 1 772 large-scale white-owned commercial farms he said his Government had identified for compulsory acquisition under the controversial Land Acquisition Act of 1992. They were also unimpressed by Mugabe's offer of a Z$50-million War Veterans Fund to finance business projects for them. The Government was forced to make an undertaking to the International Monetary Fund to submit its plans on how it will raise the estimated Z$5 billion needed to pay war veterans' gratuities. This development followed demands by a high-powered seven-member IMF delegation that Government should make clear how it would raise the funds to pay the excombatants without upsetting the 1997/98 eighteen month budget. The amount was almost equal to what the Government realised from personal income tax annually. This was the fourth time that IMF officials had visited the country during 1997, although usually consultations between the Bretton Woods institution and its members states take place annually. The Fund can however initiate additional discussions if a member falls suddenly into serious economic difficulty or is believed to be following policies inimical to the interest of other member states, and observers were quick to point out that this visit by the IMF officials was not just a routine periodic consultation between Zimbabwe and the fund. It came at a time when the country, which had not had an IMF-sanctioned economic policy since the last half of 1995, urgently needed balance of payments support to prop-up its foreign exchange reserves which were said to be at a precariously low level. The scandal continued to unfold over the year, and all Zimbabweans became aware that there had been serious wrongdoings in the administration of the Fund, that many well-placed people had benefited, and finally that the President had been forced to make a special arrangement for the War Veterans, notwithstanding the possibility that many might be guilty of defrauding the Fund. Human Rights Issues Perhaps the most serious issue to emerge during the year was the brutal attack on the Secretary-General of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), Morgan Tsvangirai. He was injured when seven men attacked him with undisclosed weapons in the capital of Harare. He was taken unconscious to hospital. According to a union spokesman, a group of unidentified men attacked him with undisclosed weapons in his tenth floor office. The State undertook investigations into the attack but no arrests were made. Another of the important human rights developments of 1997 was the release by the Legal Resources Foundation of a report on the disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands during the 1980s. This report was based on a joint initiative of the Legal Resources Foundation (LRF) and the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe (CCJP). The disturbances of the 1980s had led to sustained allegations of widespread gross human rights violations by Government forces, and, in particular the Fifth Brigade, against ordinary citizens. Government had earlier commissioned an inquiry into the disturbances — the so-called Chihambakwe Report — but the report was never made public, despite repeated calls for its publication. The report, titled Breaking the Silence, Building True Peace: A Report on the Disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands, 1980-1988, dealt with the impact of period on the lives of ordinary people and concluded with a proposal for a Reconciliation Trust to channel funds into community projects. It also stressed the need for a full disclosure of the facts, hitherto swept under the national carpet in the name of unity, in order for reconciliation to work.