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Who should be sanctioned?
A P Reeler
Former Director, Amani Trust
Executive Committee Member, The International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims
January 31, 2003

Provinces and Constituencies
Many of the reports on the elections, as well as the human rights reports, make the observation that there was a curious association between the violence and the areas in which ZanuPF would have been expected to have done well in elections.⁶

Table 4.
Provinces in rank order of gross human rights violations reported.

PROVINCE	2000	2002	Total
MASHONALAND EAST	281	229	510
MASHONALAND WEST	194	118	312
MANICALAND	40	201	241
MIDLANDS NORTH	80	154	234
MIDLANDS SOUTH	199	25	224
MASHONALAND CENTRAL	84	114	198
HARARE	45	73	140
MASVINGO	13	48	61
MATABELELAND SOUTH	6	21	27
BULAWAYO	0	5	5
MATABELELAND NORTH	0	2	2

It is curious that so much torture was reported from areas in which ZanuPF would expect to be strong, and it is tempting to merely conclude that the organized violence and torture from both elections was merely to ensure demand for ZanuPF and abandonment of the MDC. This was undoubtedly part of the purpose, but it should also be noted that the Provinces that rank highly are also those Provinces in which there reside large numbers of commercial farm workers, and particularly plantation workers. Some Zimbabwean Provinces have very high numbers of farm workers, whilst others do not, and the difference lies in whether the climate allows cropping, which involves large manpower, or livestock, which requires only small numbers of people.

This links directly to the so-called land reform process, which, while it was clearly a major propaganda issue for the ZanuPF government, it was also a pretext for eliminating the support in an enormous constituency for the MDC. The union representing the plantation workers, the General Agricultural and Plantation Workers Union of Zimbabwe (GAPWUZ), had been part of the trade union support for the NCA, and the rejection of the draft Constitution in February 2000. It is very clear in retrospect that the votes from this sector would have wholly overcome the advantage that ZanuPF held in the agricultural, as opposed to the livestock, Provinces. Whatever else the land reform campaign was, it was also a pretext for attacking the support for the MDC in the commercial farm worker population. Here it is argued that the attacks upon the commercial farmers was a pretext to the attacks upon there workers. Here all reports, both local and international, have commented upon the support, both manpower and logistical, that the government gave to the land invasions.

Table 5.

The 20 worst constituencies in the Parliamentary and Presidential Elections based on the total number of human rights violations reported per constituency.

Table 5 shows the 20 worst constituencies for the Parliamentary and Presidential elections combined. The total picture is shown in Appendix 3, but the "top twenty" are shown for illustrative purposes.

As can be seen from Table 5, some constituencies show consistent patterns for both elections; for example, Gokwe, Harare, and Murehwa North had relatively consistent patterns for both elections. Hurungwe, Mberengwa East Mudzi, and Zvishavane show higher violence for the Parliamentary elections, whilst Bindura, Buhera, Guruve, and UMP show much higher violence for the Presidential Elections.

There is obviously an association between the worst constituencies and the worst Provinces, and also between both of these and the officials involved. For example, most of the MPs mentioned are those from constituencies in Mashonaland Central, East and West, whilst the remainder come from constituencies where the reported violence and torture was high. In Mashonaland Central, Border Gezi, Mark Madiro, Elliot Manyika, and Saviour Kasukawere were all frequently mentioned: it takes no rocket science to discern the pattern, nor to conclude that this was not random but organized, and organized with the connivance of the government.

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