Calls to release findings into Gukurahundi massacres

Activists have approached the Bulawayo High Court to compel former President Robert Mugabe and incumbent Emmerson Mnangagwa to release the findings of the commission of inquiry into the Gukurahundi atrocities. Legalbrief reports that Gukurahundi was a series of massacres of Ndebele civilians carried out by the Zimbabwe National Army from 1983 to 1987. The consensus of the International Association of Genocide Scholars is that more than 20 000 people were killed. New Zimbabwe reports that the activists also want the British Government to release all the classified reports on the 1980s killings. Vice President Kembo Mohadi and British Prime Minister Theresa May were also cited as the third and fourth respondents, respectively. Mohadi was recently appointed to head Zimbabwe’s National Peace and Reconciliation Ministry. Mugabe launched an inquiry in 1983 to investigate the massacres. However, the findings of the inquiry which was chaired by Justice Simplius Chihambakwe were never released.

A former Zimbabwean Cabinet Minister and liberation war intelligence supremo has made startling claims regarding the massacres, claiming the atrocities were planned well before independence, with the involvement of colonial master, Britain. Dumiso Dabengwa, an opposition leader of the revived Zimbabwe African People’s Union (Zapu), alleged the atrocities were planned long before the 1979 Lancaster House talks that ushered in independence a year later. The Cape Argus reports that Dabengwa said this was planned meticulously when it became apparent Zapu would emerge victorious in the elections. Britain is said to have preferred Robert Mugabe’s Zanu ahead of Joshua Nkomo’s Zapu. ‘Gukurahundi was planned very meticulously and I think it was planned as early as the Lancaster talks when it became clear that the British would prefer Zanu to be victors in the 1980 elections. It is then that they planned to make sure that Zapu and Zipra (Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army, Zapu’s military wing) was the enemy,’ Dabengwa alleged. He was speaking in the second city of Bulawayo at a public dialogue organised by the Southern African Political Economy Series Trust, a regional think-tank headquartered in Zimbabwe.