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Agents of violence unleashed
Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition
April 03, 2008

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 can't tell who is a dissident and who is not." President Robert Mugabe (1983)

Yesterday, Wednesday 02 April 2008, the Catalyst received information from a Zanu PF insider outlining how the party intends to resuscitate the notorious and marauding war veterans, Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) operatives and the National Youth Service, infamous for its graduates who are still traumatizing civilians and opposition supporters across the country, to unleash a wave of violence and intimidation in the rural areas as the party prepares for a presidential run off.

The source alleges that the funding of the crude operation is being mobilised by the esteemed Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) governor, Gideon Gono. According to the source, the country must prepare itself for the ugly scenes of state sponsored violence witnessed in 2000 and 2002 parliamentary and presidential elections respectively.

The deployment comes at a time when the incompetent Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) is holding the nation at ransom by withholding the outcome of the 29 March 2008 elections which indicates that Zanu PF was thumped for the first time as the ruling party failed to reach a two thirds majority. However, ZEC whose impartiality is highly questionable has failed to pronounce the presidential and senatorial winners five days after the election raising high fears of rigging and fraudulent activities on the ruling party's side.

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, known as Gukurahundi, in Matebeleland and Midlands in the ruling party's bid to establish a 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 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. Fuelling 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 165,000%.

The militia, war veterans and CIO will become an infrastructure, whose strength emanates not from the quality of ideas and decisions but the pace at which they replicate violence on perceived state enemies. We therefore note with grave concern the impending reprisal in the rural areas which voted for the opposition such as Zaka, Bikita and Gutu constituencies in Masvingo. Equally the same a wave of terror is pending in the Manicaland province which experienced what has come to be known as a 'new tsunami' of giant killing act, which led to the majority of ZANU PF old guard losing to the MDC.

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 20000 people, the majority of which were opposition supporters

On the same note, the Coalition calls upon the observers not to return to their respective countries to mitigate the pending disaster of thuggery from taking off. The foreign media should brave the state brutality and expose the ruling party's attempts to retain power through shedding blood.

Equally the same, the RBZ governor should stop performing the mid wife role in the Zanu PF grand rigging ploy. The RBZ's roles should be confined to the narrow technical domain of managing the monetary policy through the use of interests rates, exchange controls and fighting inflation which has just shot up to a record high of 165 000%

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