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Exhumations - Mugabe's ploy to win the hearts of many
Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition
March 24, 2011

ZANU-PF has yet again come up with another grand campaign strategy ahead of elections expected later this year - 'healing the dead', an exhumation exercise. The exercise is questionable as there are reports of bodies still intact being seen by witnesses yet according to one pathologist after 12 months of burial there would only be dry remains and approximately after 24 months ligaments and tendons decompose. If these bodies are 30years old as they say then none of them should have been intact. It did not occur to Mugabe and ZANU-PF that after 33 years in weather and conditions in southern Africa bodies decompose quickly ordinarily by this time there should only be bone remains. This has led to the speculation that these corpses could be of MDC activists killed during 2008 violent elections and what baffles one the most is that ZANU-PF has taken so long to exhume the bodies to give the so called victims a decent burial.

The transparency is lacking in the whole exhumation process of the victims because surely after 33 years of burial, there are likely to have problems with identification, and this is curiously getting people wondering who these people being re-buried are and when they died. The normal practice is that when somebody discovers human remains the police are involved straightaway to investigate thoroughly how the remains got there, forensic tests are done at the site and on the remains to ascertain the cause of death and the person who discovers the remains is questioned thoroughly. But with no adequate equipment ZANU-PF's henchmen are pinpointing dead bodies without any explanation at all as to hoe they are doing it. The party is simply trying to get political mileage in the name of pin pointing Rhodesians for genocide. It is hypocritical for ZANU-PF to talk about the genocide of Smith while they refuse culpability in the massacre of thousands of Zimbabweans in the 1980s during the infamous Gukurahundi period.

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