The Trust has decried the lack of involvement by forensic experts and holds that the graves are “a chest of evidence” to be preserved and not tampered with.
The Vice Chairman of the Trust, Buster Magwizi, laments that, “It is most likely some skeletons exhumed at Chibondo Mine belong to ZPRA cadres who disappeared in the 1975-6 anti-Rhodesia insurgency conducted jointly with ZANLA guerrillas. The joint force was called Zimbabwe Peoples Army (ZIPA). After independence, the Gukurahundi massacres could have witnessed more ZPRA comrades being killed and dumped there.”
Magwizi said the exhumations at Chibondo were inhuman. “The manner in which they were exhuming those corpses made us feel that somebody was trying to tamper with evidence. This evidence if protected may help us know exactly what happened to those people, when and why, and could also set a precedent for other exhumations that could be carried out across the whole country. If we fail to do so, we run the risk of erasing the evidence of what happened during Gukurahundi,” he said.
“ZPRA veterans are sons and daughters of this country and they are spread out throughout the whole country. And more so, ZPRA veterans did not fight in only one section of the country. They fought throughout all the provinces of Zimbabwe during the armed struggle. And you remember very well in 1979 when all veterans were being pushed into the Assembly Points (AP), ZANU hatched … a plan of redeploying back into the rural areas, and coercing people to vote for Zanu (PF) in the 1980 elections. … A degree of violence erupted at that time that coerced people to vote for Zanu (PF) through fear. And we suspect that some of our comrades in the armed struggle, and even at integration, could have been some of those people who are found in those graves, but give the scientists the opportunity to exercise their expertise and tell us exactly who is on the ground. It’s only fair that way,” added Magwizi.
Post published in: News