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Wounds: Open, closed and healed
Sokwanele
March 21, 2013
Zimbabwe is
probably unique among nations in having not just one but three government
ministers responsible for “national healing”. This should
be a hopeful indicator that wounds suffered will not be left to
fester any longer – but the “organ” which they
administer has so far failed to find a viable means to make progress
to that end. Even the mandate of the Organ of National Healing was
subject to acrimonious political dispute, as there was no genuine
agreement on how recent a wound needed to be to qualify for healing.
This situation of stalemate was to be expected, as long as major
perpetrators of abuses continued to hold power as part of an imposed
and artificial “Government of National Unity”. Experience
from elsewhere teaches us that only when perpetrators have been
dislodged from control of state power can justice and healing take
place.1 However, the situation in Zimbabwe is complicated by the
fact that those very abusers themselves claim also to be the victims
of historical violations of their rights. Confusing and complex
as it may be, the need for healing intensifies and at some point
in the future it must be met. The fact is that Zimbabweans have
suffered many injuries over the past hundred and twenty-five years
– a time spanning at least five generations. And the truth
is that most of these injuries have created wounds - physical, material
and spiritual - which have never properly healed. The cataclysm
of conquest during the last decade of the 19th century affected
all Zimbabweans in one way or another – through loss of family
members, loss of access to a livelihood, loss of sovereign control
and loss of collective and individual dignity. Land seizures continued
almost throughout the colonial occupation, with the majority of
families being evicted from the land which they considered theirs,
some as late as the 1960’s. The Tonga people of the Zambezi
Valley experienced the bitterness of removal late in the day, but
the total destruction of their traditional environment and their
livelihoods was more precipitous, complete and traumatic than for
many others.
These injustices
created wounds which gradually faded for some but the dream of restitution
remained, and eventually, in the absence of any peaceful resolution,
the response of Zimbabweans was to launch a war of liberation as
an instrument to correct injustices. It eventually succeeded in
its goal of regaining sovereignty for Zimbabweans, but on a completely
different basis from which it had been exercised three generations
earlier. Inevitably with violence being used to try to correct injustices,
more wounds were inflicted and suffered during that war, on all
sides, some at the hands of comrades. And in the aftermath, instead
of peace and healing, ZANU PF in power has inflicted further wounds
- during Gukurahundi, during Murambatsvina,
during election violence in every election it has contested, and
during land seizures which purported to correct dispossessions,
often violent, of the colonial period. Violence has been perpetrated
throughout our history and it remains in the consciousness of adults
and children, and is passed from one generation to the next.
How have Zimbabweans
survived with all these festering wounds? What happens when a person
or a people with a collective identity is wounded, either physically
or metaphorically? A wound may remain open – in such a case
the individual victim who does not die will continue to live with
an extreme disability. Or, a wound may close – the skin regrows
to cover the damage, but the pain and some debilitating consequences
remain, hampering the full recovery and the enjoyment of life; the
person lives with the effects for the rest of his days. Or, a wound
may heal. In such a case scars will certainly remain, but the deep
pain is overcome by the growth of healthy tissue to replace the
damaged one, and the individual will be capable of living a productive
life. Those with unhealed wounds – whether open or closed,
physical or spiritual – may be bitter, resentfu l, filled
with hatred and a desire for revenge, or alternatively completely
disempowered, victims, unable to direct their own lives in productive
ways. Whichever the outcome, the potential of the people and the
nation is hobbled, bound by chains, and the propensity for retaliatory
violence remains. We must then raise the question: can we as a nation
heal such wounds to prevent them becoming a negative force leading
us towards a violent future?
The healing
of physical wounds is only the beginning. The healing of the material
and spiritual is a much more complex matter. The loss of livelihoods,
the loss of control over one’s life and pride in one’s
identity and self-expression are not so easily mended. But with
determination it is possible, even if it is going to be very difficult.
Three critical
processes are necessary to bring healing : first, a public recognition
that wrong has been done – an acknowledgment by the government
and / or the individuals who perpetrated the offences of their guilt.
Second, some form of punishment of the offender is required, or
at least an accounting to the victims or survivors, an explanation
or apology for the wrong-doing. Finally, compensation or restitution
for the material damage suffered is necessary. For survivors of
wounds inflicted, it is often not the physical wound that becomes
most significant, but the spiritual wounds. And the spiritual wounds
will not be healed without some form of justice meted out to the
perpetrators and some balancing of the material losses.
But what about
those who suffered their losses generations ago? Some would not
take the descendants’ grievances seriously, but it is important
to pay attention. The governments which inflicted them no longer
exist. They never acknowledged their wrong-doing, individuals and
institutions have not apologised or been punished. In accordance
with the Lancaster House agreement, the independent government did
not attempt to deal with this in their early years in office; nor
did they treat it as urgent a decade later. The restitution of material
loss was not fulfilled for the vast majority. The highly partisan
compensation funds for war victims were so corruptly administered
that this form of restitution has unfortunately lost all credibility.
Eventually, rather than handling it as a matter of healing, government
allowed and encouraged the forces of resentment and bitterness to
dominate in bringing a measure of material restitution through the
seizure of land from the owners of what was appropriated by others
generations ago. The majority of those thus deprived were not even
descendants of the original appropriators, even though one might
claim that they had benefited nevertheless from the political economy
of the colonial period.
Unfortunately,
during this land appropriation, political motives overtook any aim
to heal, to correct the historic injustices by providing restitution.
Instead, lingering grievances were cleverly manipulated to serve
politicians’ desire to retain power. There are several reasons
why the seizure of land can hardly be considered to have contributed
to restoring that balance of justice and material losses and healed
the nation: firstly, the manner in which it took place enabled only
a small minority of those who originally suffered losses to gain
restitution2, thus leaving out the vast majority; secondly, those
from whom land was taken were not the original perpetrators, even
though they may have been indirect beneficiaries; thirdly, and perhaps
most importantly, the violence with which it took place created
more victims with open wounds; furthermore, the destruction of the
entire economy which ensued erased the livelihoods and social supports
of literally millions, producing a nation of impoverished destitutes.
Evidence from the redistribution patterns shows that we have in
addition perpetuated the social divisions between those with more
land and those with less,3 and inevitably those with ZANU PF connections
were the main beneficiaries.
Those who still
claim that national healing must take account of wounds suffered
as far back as the 19th century must explain what wounds they want
to heal, and how, if their stance is not simply to be dismissed
as political posturing. Those who insisted that all appropriated
land must be reclaimed have shown no interest in the wounds of the
Tonga people; their lands cannot be reclaimed, but surely some material
restitution could have been considered. In addition to those crimes
of colonial expropriation, atrocities by both sides in the liberation
war have never been dealt with, and yet they left deep spiritual
and material wounds. If anyone has a workable plan for the just
handling of these problems, and the genuine healing of those wounds,
let them come forward.
What we all
know is that far more recent wounds are still festering and need
attention if we are to progress as a nation. These are the wounds
inflicted over the past thirty years by our own sovereign government
and its party and security institutions, against fellow citizens
who sought to exercise their constitutional right to hold a different
political allegiance. Many of the perpetrators as well as direct
victims are still alive, and healing can indeed be achieved if we
have the moral and political will. For years, survivors of the atrocities
committed during Gukurahundi have been denied any form of healing
by the flimsy excuse that to talk about their pain will simply “open
old wounds”. Those who still feel the hurt and the losses
thirty years later would not consider these to be “old”
wounds. They are both fresh and unhealed and hence remain to some
extent “ ;open”. Furthermore their perpetrators are
in many cases known, and even prominent within government and its
institutions. Isn’t it ironic that some of the same people
who refuse to acknowledge these wounds want to talk about healing
for wounds suffered generations ago? It is indeed difficult to take
them seriously.
A survivor of
Gukurahundi cannot be healed when he sees the chief perpetrator
of those atrocities enjoying high rank in Zimbabwe’s military
hierarchy, completely unmoved by the wounds he inflicted and completely
free of any opprobrium, let alone punishment for his crimes. A survivor
of election violence
of 2008 cannot be healed when her torturer or the murderer of
her husband walks free in the community, even taunting his victim’s
family about the impunity he enjoys, being protected by powerful
individuals. Both these survivors face material losses, often having
been deprived of property, employment, physical health, integrity
of family and access to any economic resources, not to mention their
civil rights to freedom of expression and association. And their
tormentors even appear to have been rewarded for what they have
done. Healing in our nation can only become a reality when those
who inflicted recent wounds, both government and identified individuals,
acknowledge that what they did was wrong; individuals must be publicly
called to account, and some form of justice must be seen to be done.
Murderers, whether of masses or of individuals, cannot be allowed
to remain walking within communities, enjoying impunity and even
affluent lifestyles while their victims’ families wallow in
poverty or languish in enforced exile. And following on from the
acknowledgement and the accounting of the perpetrators must come
some form of material restitution to enable survivors to pursue
lives of dignity. Then we will know that healing is taking place
and the wounds will not come back to create new discords for future
generations.
Our national
healing organ has never been able, since its formation after the
creation of the Government
of National Unity, to promote any genuine healing. Resistance
is created by those who perpetrated much of the post-Independence
violence and who are failing to take the first step of acknowledging
their own wrong-doing, seeking rather to deflect attention to wounds
inflicted before Independence. They believe they will avoid responsibility
because they can, by inflicting more wounds, remain in control of
government for an indefinite period. They could be right, but they
may be wrong. The desperate need for genuine healing may continue,
and if it does, those perpetrators should know that the grievances
being nursed by those with open wounds may generate a new cycle
of violence fuelled by hatred and resentment, in which they themselves
will become the victims. They may not all di e in power. It is then
to be hoped that those who replace them as the rulers of this nation
do not venture on any new road of revenge violence, but rather initiate
a genuine process, through which all can be healed, both victims
and perpetrators. Only then can we map a road to a future free of
more violence and national decay.
Healing remains
a distant dream as we enter an election year which heralds fear
of new atrocities, new wrongs and new wounds which would add to
the already heavy burden of the past. We long for the day when perpetrators
will admit they have offended, when they will be held accountable
for their deeds, and even spiritual wounds can be healed as material
restitution takes place. But that can only occur when perpetrators
are no longer in control of government, are no longer granted impunity,
can no longer hide behind state institutions but are forced to see
and admit the horror of what they have done to their fellow human
beings.
References
1 For example,
in Argentina, where it took close to thirty years for mechanisms
of justice and healing to be put in place.
2 Matondi estimates
that 151,000 individuals (and by extension their families) out of
a population of near 12 million gained access to land. Matondi,
P, Zimbabwe’s Fast Track land Reform, Zed Books, London, 2012,
p.56
3 The whole
programme of land reform proceeded with parallel but unequal mechanisms
for giving large farms (A2 model) to those already with means and
smaller plots (A1 model) to those without.
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