The point of this paper is not to talk about Darfur or Rwanda, but to talk about learning from the lessons that history holds for us in Zimbabwe. The report of the Legal Resources Foundation and the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace should be mandatory reading for every Zimbabwean. It details what has been euphemistically described as the “Matabeleland Disturbances”. But “disturbances” doesn’t begin to cover the deaths of over 20 000 people. A disturbance is when a dog barks in the night, waking you up form your sleep. It’s annoying, but hardly fatal. It could even be when two neighbours exchange words over the cutting down of a tree on a common border. At worst, in these days of accommodation shortages, it might your landlord telling you he now wants his rentals paid in hard currency resulting in an argument. It’s nasty, it’s uncomfortable, it’s inconvenient (when you get evicted) but it is rarely life threatening. It is not a “disturbance” when 62 people are lined up and shot-execution style as happened at Cwele River in Lupane. It is not a disturbance when a government to flush out less than 200 so-called dissidents, brings nearly 400 000 people to the brink of starvation by banning all food relief activities and imposing a strict curfew on the movement of food supplies. All this in the third successive year of a severe drought where people had no food apart from drought relief from donors and what they could buy in stores.

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This entry was posted on July 18th, 2008 at 2:38 pm by Catherine Makoni and is filed under Elections 2008, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.