NEW YORK - Zimbabwean author and journalist, Geoff Hill, says he will use his new position as an advisor on genocide to urge that the Gukurahundi campaign in be declared a crime against humanity. (Pictured: Geoff Hill)At a vote in Washington last week, Hill secured one of six places on the advisory council of the International Association of Genocide Scholars or IAGS. A total of 18 candidates competed for the board, and the decision was taken by a secret ballot of lawyers, academics and activists on all six continents.
The grouping – whose pronouncements on mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide are followed closely by both the United Nations and the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague – was formed in 1994 and has been dominated by members from the USA and Europe.
Hill is the first journalist and first African to serve on the board. The IAGS was vocal in campaigns to send former Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milosevic and Liberian dictator Charles Taylor to trial at The Hague.
At a ceremony in Washington to mark his election, Hill delivered a speech wearing his trademark black cowboy hat, and called for the Gukurahundi massacres to be officially classified as genocide.
These crimes in Africa must be judged by the same standard as the Nazi holocaust or the Khymer Rouge murders in Cambodia, he said. People now accept the 1994 slaughter in Rwanda as genocide, but the previous attacks on Tutsis in that country and Gukurahundi have been ignored.
Speaking from New York last night, Hill told The Zimbabwean that he had already started lobbying within the IAGS for a pronouncement to be made on Gukurahundi.
Once it is officially recognised as genocide, it may be easier to gain support for prosecution of those who carried out the killings and compensation for survivors, he said.
In 1983, on orders from Robert Mugabe, the North Korean trained Fifth Brigade, entered Matabeleland and murdered between 20 000 and 40 000 civilians. Thousands more were tortured and more than a million people displaced. A special report commissioned by the Zimbabwe Government has never been made public and, in 1987, Mugabe granted an unconditional pardon to all who had taken part.
However, recent cases including that of the late Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet, showed that, under international law, such pardons have no standing. Despite a 1990 amnesty in Chile, Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998 on a Spanish warrant, and was later prosecuted in his home country, when the new government revoked his immunity.
He died in December 2006, before the trial could be completed. Pinochet was accused of issuing orders that led to the murder of 3 600 people between 1974 and 1990, considerably less than the number of deaths that might be laid at the door of the Mugabe government since it took power in 1980.
Under the Statute of Rome which set up the ICC at the Hague, the mass destruction of peoples homes as happened in the Murambatsvina programme is also classified as a crime against humanity, and can be punished by life imprisonment.
But Hill said that Gukurahundi remained the strongest case against the Mugabe government. “Genocide is not just random killing, he said. “It is a special category because victims are not targeted at random. Rather, they are killed or maimed because of their race or religion. For example, Turkish slaughter of the Armenians before World War I and Hitlers persecution of the Jews are clear acts of genocide. And using that formula, I think we would have to say that murdering thousands of people because they spoke isiNdebele or chiKalanga follows the same pattern.
Hill, who has written extensively on genocide, is Africa bureau chief Africa for The Washington Times and author of the book, What Happens After Mugabe?
Post published in: Politics