TORTURE IN ZIMBABWE, PAST AND PRESENT deterrent was that if it was found that a confession had been made under duress it would not be legally admissible, but apart from such considerations little stood between the torturer and his victim. The Lancaster House settlement, and the amnesties just prior to independence, prevented the new Government from instituting any investigations and prosecutions relating to ‘political’ torture in the pre-independence period, and it had little interest in examining ‘non-political’ torture either. B. Post Independence ( 1 9 8 0 -1 9 9 8 ) Although the police, the prosecuting authorities and indeed the whole State machinery was rapidly Africanised after 1980, the post-independent period still saw State officials making widespread use of torture to extract information and confessions. One clear difference was the disappearance of the blatantly racist element, as within two or three years of independence only a handful of whites remained in the police, the army and the CIO,118 and after a few more years the same process had been all but completed in the magisterial and prosecuting services.119 The other difference was that the country now had a Constitution with a justiciable Declaration of Rights. However, there was no political will to eradicate or seriously curb the use of torture, and no policy of investigating and prosecuting offenders. In 1983, Mugabe excused torture in custody on the grounds that the police work long hours and therefore “ tend to do their work over120 enthusiastically.” No independent structures were set up to deal with the issue, and torture only reached the public domain during criminal trials where accused persons who had been tortured raised the issue. Undisputed evidence of torture of those accused of being apartheid agents emerged in a number of high-profile cases, including S v Slatter & Others121 and S v Harrington.122 The judiciary condemned what had happened, but the authorities did nothing about the perpetrators who could easily have been identified and prosecuted. Indeed, when evidence of the torture of Air Vice Marshal Slatter and the other officers was given to the press by their lawyers in a desperate effort to halt what was being done at the time of their initial detention, the only response of the State was to charge the lawyers with contempt of court on the grounds that they were trying to influence future legal proceedings.123 118 A few remained and worked as double-agents for apartheid South Africa: see S v Hartlebury and Evans 1985 (1) ZLR (1) (H). 119 Before independence the vast majority of magistrates and prosecutors were white, as were all judges. There were thousands of black soldiers and policemen, along with thousands of white soldiers and policemen, but at all levels of the security forces the whites were in command. At independence there was a mass exodus of whites from every level of the Rhodesian public sector, and these whites either left the country or went into the private sector. At the height of UDI the white population reached about 250,000 and then began to decline as the war intensified. Within a few years of independence there were less than a 100,000 whites remaining. Today there are probably about 25,000 still in Zimbabwe. Several million black Zimbabweans have left the country in recent years, most of them for political and economic reasons. 120 Quoted at p. 68 of Breaking the Silence (supra). Justification for torture was also expressed in The Chronicle, the government’s Bulawayo newspaper, during Gukurahundi (ibid). 121 1983 (2) ZLR 144 (H): see also Attorney General v Slatter and Others 1984 (1) ZLR 306 (SC); sub nom S v Slatter and Others 1984 (3) SA 798 (ZS). 122 1988 (2) ZLR 344 (S). 123 The two lawyers, Michael Hartmann and Nigel Gardner, were later tried and convicted in the Regional Magistrates Court, but acquitted on appeal: see S v Hartmann & Gardner 1983 (2) ZLR 186 (S); 1984 (1) SA 305 (ZS). 22