MUTARE Perpetrators of political violence and human rights abuses must face justice if Zimbabwe is to achieve true national healing and reconciliation, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) has said. The Public Information Rights Forum (PIRF) urged the governments National Organ on National Healing and Reconciliation to set up village-based reconciliation committees and special courts to try perpetrators of rights abuses, a move it said would help quicken the national reconciliation programme.
PIRF is a grouping of activists drawn from labour unions, local communities, traditional leaders and the student movement campaigning for basic rights such as such as the freedoms of expression and association that remain under threat in Zimbabwe despite formation of a unity government last year.
Speaking at a reconciliation workshop in Mutare last week, PIRF chairman for Manicaland province David Mutambirwa said the national healing organ must: Establish village based reconciliation committees and special courts to try cases of human rights violation.
Mutambirwa also called on the organ to draw up a compensation plan for victims of the 1980s Gukurahundi atrocities and the political violence of the past decade.
The healing organ tasked to promote national healing and reconciliation after years of political strife and violence has achieved little since its establishment more than 12 months ago.
Zimbabwe witnessed some of its worst political violence in 2008 after a parliamentary election that was won by the MDC while then opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai defeated President Robert Mugabe in a parallel presidential poll but with fewer votes to avoid a second run-off ballot.
In a bid to ensure Mugabe regained the upper hand in the second round vote, Zanu (PF) militia, war veterans and state security agents unleashed an orgy of violence and terror across the country, especially in rural areas many of which virtually became no-go areas for the opposition.
Tsvangirai later withdrew from the June 27 run-off election because of violence that he says killed about 200 of his supporters and displaced thousands of others.
Mugabe won the vote uncontested in a ballot that African observers denounced as a shame and Western governments refused to recognize forcing the veteran leader to agree to form a power-sharing government with Tsvangirai and Mutambara
While the political violence of the past decade has caught the attention of the world more, Zimbabwes darkest period remains the 1980s Gukurahundi period when more than 20 000 innocent civilians from the Ndebele ethnic minority were reportedly killed during a bloody counter-insurgency drive by the army in the southern Matabeleland and Midlands provinces.
Mugabe who some say personally ordered deployment of the armys North Korean-trained 5th Brigade in Matabeleland and Midlands ostensibly to stop an armed insurrection against his rule has called the killings an act of madness.
But the 86-year-old leader has never personally accepted responsibility for the civilian murders or formally apologised. He has not yielded to calls by human rights activists for his government to compensate victims of the brutal army operation.
Post published in: Politics