REDRESS/AMANI (i) 1 9 8 0 -1 9 8 2 Compared to the years before independence, this was a period of relative peace when human rights abuses fell dramatically during the euphoria following the end of the bitter civil war.22 On coming to power with an absolute majority, Mugabe adopted a policy of reconciliation towards the whites and towards his black rivals, forming a Government of national unity with Nkomo’s PF-Zapu party. The state of emergency which Smith had announced in 1965 before UDI, however, was retained and indeed was to continue right up to 1990, 23 along with almost all of the repressive security laws inherited from the previous regime. (ii) 1 9 8 2 – 1 9 8 8 (Ù«µ«®¿¸«²¼·) The uneasy coalition between Mugabe and Nkomo was short-lived, and for a variety of reasons broke down completely during 1982, leading to six years of civil war known as the Gukurahundi.24 The two leaders had never trusted each other, and there was an ethnic element involved in that Zanu-PF was predominately a party of the Shona majority in the east, while the older PF-Zapu party drew most of its support from the Ndebele minority in the west. Agents of apartheid South Africa played a role in exacerbating existing rivalries, leading to serious security problems in various parts of the country, particularly in the western half. Bandits or “ dissidents”began killing civilians and destroying property, and the government responded with a huge security clampdown on Matabeleland and parts of the Midlands. What followed were two overlapping conflicts. The first was the one between the dissidents and the Government security forces. The second was that directed by Government agencies against all those thought to support PF-Zapu. In this latter conflict the Government units committed many gross human rights violations. 25 Thousands of unarmed civilians died, were physically tortured (torture included rape and the phenomenon of mass beatings), or suffered loss of property, Zimbabwe: Past, present and future, a paper presented to the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria on 19 March 2003, published by Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights in Zimbabwe Human Rights Bulletin Issue No 9, Harare, October 2003, p. 113. 22 It was by no means entirely peaceful. There were a number of major clashes between Zanla and Zipra soldiers during their amalgamation with the former Rhodesian security forces into a new national army. Agents of apartheid South Africa also committed serious acts of sabotage including the destruction of a substantial percentage of Zimbabwe’s Air Force aircraft at the Thornhill air base in Gweru in July 1982. This latter episode led to the detention, torture and trial of six local white air-force officers (including Air Vice Marshall Hugh Slatter, the Chief of Staff of the Zimbabwe Air Force) who had been members of the Rhodesian Air Force and who had remained after independence and sworn allegiance to the new state, but who were suspected of having been involved in the destruction. They were acquitted, the judge ruling that their confessions made under torture were inadmissible, but they were promptly re-detained and only released on condition that they immediately left their country. See S v Slatter & Others 1983 (2) ZLR 144 (H). 23 The state of emergency had to be renewed by Parliament every six months, and was so renewed by Mugabe’s Government for the next ten years until being finally lifted in July 1990. Thus for a quarter of a century, from 1965 to 1990, a state of emergency prevailed. This gave the power to legislate by regulation, rather than through Parliament. Regulations included the Emergency Powers (Maintenance of Law and Order) Regulations, which gave sweeping powers of arrest and detention without trial, the right to control meetings, and so on. During those twenty-five years, both the RF and Zanu-Pf Governments used emergency powers to authorise many infringements of human rights. 24 The name means “ the rain that washes away the chaff from the last harvest, before the spring rains” , after the notorious North Korean-trained Five Brigade which led the Government’s assault against unarmed civilians in those rural areas which traditionally supported PF-Zapu. 25 In the conflict between the security forces and the dissidents there were few actual military engagements between the two sides. The Government saw the conflict with dissidents and the conflict with PF-Zapu as the same, and that to support PF-Zapu was tantamount to supporting dissidents, which was not the case. Rural civilians again bore the brunt of the violence as they did during the liberation struggle, as once more they were caught in the middle of a problem not of their making. 5