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The government oiling its wheels of violence
Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition
May 14, 2007

"Don't cry if your relatives get killed in the process . . . where men and women provide food for the dissidents when we get there we eradicate them. We do not differentiate who we fight because we cant tell who is a dissident and who is not."
- -President Robert Mugabe (1983)

On Friday, 11 May 2007, the Deputy Minister of Youth and Employment Creation, Saviour Kasukuwere enunciated that the government intends to resuscitate the notorious National Youth Service, infamous for its graduates who are still traumatizing civilians and opposition supporters across the country. The centres were introduced by the late ZANU PF Political Commissar, Border Gezi.

The announcement comes at a time when the civil society, opposition members, journalists and lawyers are facing reprisal from the 'law enforcement agents'. The recent attack on the legal practitioners spells out the level at which the government is prepared to silence dissenting voices.

We therefore question the motives of the resuscitation of the para-military camps with regards to the terror they unleashed in the run up to the 2002 presidential election which witnessed the worst bloodshed in post independence Zimbabwe after the 1983 holocaust in Matebeleland and Midlands in the ruling party's bid to establish one party state agenda. More than 20 000 civilian lives were lost during the Gukurahundi massacres.

The youth militia, under the guise of 'national youth service' terrorized innocent Zimbabweans, brutalized opposition supporters, forced people to buy ZANU PF party membership cards and have been implicated in politically motivated murders over the last six years. During the drought and food shortages of 2002 and 2003, they played enforcers of government policy - attacking retailers, arresting people in possession of scarce commodities, confiscating goods and stopping opposition supporters from getting food aid. In return for their services, they were rewarded with immunity from prosecution and with jobs in the military and police forces.

The militia are intended to service ZANU PF's need to control an increasingly restive population fed up with an autocratic government, which ignores their most basic needs. Fueling that restiveness are the extreme levels of poverty and hunger and an economy in freefall. Indeed, the Zimbabwean economy has so sharply plummeted in the last nine years that the current level of unemployment is 85% while inflation soars at more than 2200%.

The militia will become an infrastructure, whose strength emanates not from the quality of ideas and decisions but the pace at which the replicates violence on perceived state enemies.

The Coalition calls upon the government to desist and start denouncing violence publicly. The nation deserves a national healing process from the blood shed of 1983, 2000 and 2002 which led to the loss of more than 300 people, the majority of which were opposition supporters.

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