5th December 2024 at 14:00 to the Office of the UK Prime Minister,
Also by e-mail and post to The FCDO and the Commonwealth Secretariate in London. Also the UN OHCHR in Geneva
Some may know this as the Gukurahundi Genocide - but the Shona word of 'Gukurahundi' cannot ever convey the horrors and 'pure psychotic outrage' conducted sometime from 1983 (approx.) to 1987 when - due to this violent and heartless pressure the leader of ZAPU at that time Dr Joshua Nkomo, reluctantly agreed to subsume ZAPU into the newly created ZANU PF - laughingly termed the "UNITY ACCORD".
A lesson in violence and deceit that still haunts Zimbabwe to this day - as well as being an ongoing strategy of the Zanu PF regime ever since - and now continued by the complicit (in the genocide} E D Mnangagwa.
But returning to the word "GUKURAHUNDI" - the literal meaning, which loosely translates to "the early rain which washes away the chaff before the spring rains". However this can never represent the inhuman genocide which took place - instigated by Mugabe to enforce a one-party State.
The Beginnings
Identifying as a member or supporter of ZAPU became a death wish.
Under the then Prime Minister, Robert Mugabe, a caveat was promulgated, outlawing ZAPU and forfeiting all its properties to the State. Some of the properties belonged to ZPRA, the armed wing of ZAPU during the liberation struggle. Everything was seized and forfeited to the state. Dr Joshua Nkomo was persecuted and hounded into exile. His lieutenants, the late Dr Dumiso Dabengwa and the late Commander Lookout Masuku were thrown into Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison on trumped up charges.
Just like in East Germany in 1990, it has been four decades of denial and deafening silence.
The Evidence Slowly Emerging {Still}
But now, the new light is being shed on these days of horror. Thousands of historical documents that appear to expose the perpetrators are now becoming available in a raft of foreign archival collections. The documents are wide-ranging and include, among others, diplomatic correspondence, intelligence assessments and raw intelligence garnered by spies recruited from within the Zimbabwean government. These papers—augmented by the testimony of Zimbabwean witnesses finding courage in old age—appear to substantiate what survivors and scholars have always suspected but never been able to validate: Mugabe, then Prime Minister, was the prime architect of mass killings that were well-planned and systematically executed.
The documents appear to show that the massacres were closely associated with an effort by Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party to eliminate opposition groups in the aftermath of Zimbabwe’s independence. ZAPU, a party led by nationalist rival, Dr Joshua Nkomo, represented the main obstacle to that objective. Given that ZAPU enjoyed overwhelming support among Ndebele, the Ndebele as a whole came to be seen as an impediment. In the words of Mugabe, the people of Matabeleland needed to be “re-educated”.
The little that Mugabe has said since the 1980s on this taboo subject has been a mixture of obfuscation and denial. The closest he has come to admitting any form of official responsibility was at the death of Nkomo (1999), when he remarked that the early 1980s was a “moment of madness”—an ambivalent statement in itself.
The documents also record that Msipa talked to other members of Zanu who revealed that the killings were not simply the whim of a small coterie, but the result of a formal and broad-based decision by the leadership of Zanu-PF. Eddison Zvobgo, a member of Zanu’s 20-member policy-making body, spoke of a “decision of the Central Committee that there had to be a ‘massacre’ of Ndebeles”. That statement squared precisely with 5 Brigade’s ethnocentric modus operandi. Mugabe’s heir apparent, the current First Vice President, Emmerson Mnangagwa, was a member of the Central Committee. But so, too, were others who have subsequently developed a reputation for moderation, not least because of their latter-day rivalry with Mnangagwa. Former Vice President Joice Mujuru heads that list.
The army commanders who directed the killings, many of whom still retain key positions in a security sector that underwrites the regime, are also shown in the documents to have been eager accomplices. Zvobgo commented that the first commander of 5 Brigade, Perence Shiri, had said the “politicians should leave it to us” with regard to “settling things in Matabeleland”.
But who Knew what was Happening
Observers have always wondered how much of this was known to Western governments—and what they did about it. It is clear from the documents that they knew a great deal, even if some of the detail remained obscure. It is also clear that the polite questions asked by diplomats were—along with courageous representations by churchmen and their allies in Zimbabwe—pivotal to the government’s decision to reduce the violence. Up to that point, there was no indication that the brutal force of the massacres would be curtailed. Nevertheless, Western governments did little once the massacres were brought down to a lower, but still savage, intensity. Perhaps as a sign that Western censure had its limits, the campaign in Matabeleland North continued during the remainder of 1983; 5 Brigade was redeployed further south in 1984.
The International Association of Genocide Scholars estimates the deaths at of 20,000 - their logo links to thier report form 2005 regarding Zimbabwe;
"The Zimbabwe government organized major massacres during the 1980’s against the Matabele people, which cost over 20,000 lives. The massacres were carried out by an all-Shona army brigade trained by North Korean advisers. The Mugabe government has again organized Shona youth militias, nick-named the “Green Bombers,” who terrorise members of the political opposition, many of whom are Matabele. The government’s denial of food thus has an ominous ethnic dimension, an early warning sign of potential genocide by attrition."
The Present Day
In 2018 ZAPU members in the UK, supported by ZHRO members presented a petition to the then (short lived) Conservative Prime Minister, Theresa MAY. See article here at this link {CLICK HERE}
The BBC ran an article about the Genocide on 13th July 2024 {SEE Full Article - CLICK HERE} a few extracts are worth noting from this report by the BBC: Testimony from those who witness the horrors:
"An astounding number of mass graves surround Thabani Dhlamini’s home in south-western Zimbabwe. One pointed out to the BBC lies near the ablution block at a primary school in the village of Salankomo in Tsholotsho district. Teachers were killed and dumped there in the 1980s."
"In the neighbouring village of Silonkwe, 77-year-old Julia Mlilo shuffles slowly to meet us. She can barely walk now, but remembers every detail of what happened on 24 February 1983. At the sound of gunfire she had dropped her hoe in the field where she was working and escaped into the bush with her husband and children."
“I haven’t forgiven them, I don’t know what would make me forgive. Whenever I see soldiers I feel the pain and I start trembling,” Ms Mlilo told the BBC.
“I don’t trust the process because it's being done by the government, but I will take part in it,” she said.
New Petition and Demonstration - 5th December 2024
Now again the ZAPU, ZHRO, ROHR, CCC {led by Senator Jameson Timba in Zimbabwe, who is 'pro' Nelson Chamisa}, MyRight2Vote - are revisiting the issue of the Gukurahundi Genocide. Please to all genuine Zimbabweans in the diaspora and those willing to stand with these calls for Justice, meet with us at the Zimbabwe Embassy for 12:00 and then walk to the Office of the Prime Minister {Now Keir Starmer} to watch a group of 6 people enter the Gates to Downing Street {at 14:00}.
At his time and subsequent to the Petitioners emerging from Downing Street there will be speeches, protest songs and even some dancing near the Statue of Montgomery - opposite the entrance to Downing Street.