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F²WF: Fight fire with fire
Rejoice Ngwenya
November 12, 2012

The barbaric detention of Zimbabwe National Students Union and Counselling Services Unit activists proves that ZANU-PF's blood-starved political vampires still lurk in our alleys. NewsDay reminds me not only of the fatal June 2008 petrol bomb attack on rural MDC-T offices but also quotes National Healing, Integration and Reconciliation co-minister Moses Mzila Ndlovu fingering ZANU-PF for suffocating debate on the 1980s Gukurahundi massacres. 20 000 innocent Zimbabweans were butchered in Matabeleland and Midlands provinces by members of President Robert Mugabe's venomous 5th Brigade. Now, ZANU-PF hounds us for merely expressing our thoughts!

For me, the only 'weapon of mass instruction' is my keyboard. In order to adequately pitch my literary emotions, let me activate my 'Rage Meter' with snippets of the Rwanda and Gukurahundi genocides. In 1994, almost one million Tutsis were massacred after the assassination of Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana. Like Zimbabwe's 1980s mass murders, the Rwanda genocide had ethnic overtones. Hutu 'Akazu' militias collaborated with security to 'exterminate' Tutsis and so-called 'collaborators'. While Gukurahundi perpetrators imported bayonets from North Korea, Hutus sourced half a million machetes from China.

We Zimbabweans mourn about 'militarisation of state institutions' for good reason. Rwanda genocide organisers were mainly retired army officers and members of the police. State-controlled Radio Rwanda, Television Libre des Mille Collines and Kangura newspapers fanned hatred by calling Tutsis inyenzi, cockroaches. AmaNdebele were labelled 'dissidents'. Today, ZANU-PF media refers to MDC cadres as sellouts, puppets and agents of the West. Gukurahundi and June 2008 saw innocent women abducted and murdered. In Rwanda, close to 500,000 females conveniently labelled 'gypsies' - were raped. Father Athanase Seromba oversaw the massacre of 2000 Tutsis in his church. The Catholic Church in Zimbabwe confronted Mugabe on Gukurahundi. 'Pentecostals' - and my own dear Seventh Day Adventists leaders - 'saw and heard no evil'. Pathological cowards! Were it not for the Bishops' Conference and Legal Resources Foundation, Gukurahundi massacres would have evaded accurate documentation.

Colonial Britain was a spectator as 5th Brigade drew innocent blood while USA, France, Belgium and the UN stood akimbo as Rwandese perished. Nonetheless, the Paul Kagame government - save for spasmodic lapses into autocracy - has mastered national reconciliation. ZANU-PF is marinated in sarcastic denial, drunken with contempt. In Rwanda, places like the Murambu Technical School are now genocide museums. Our very own Bhalagwe pales in the distant past.

Rwanda activated the Gacaca traditional court system and the International Criminal Tribunal for national reconciliation. ZANU-PF refuses to constitutionalise truth and reconciliation. Consequently, Mzila Ndlovu's 'peace battalion' will continue firing blanks. Gukurahundi perpetrators are still at large, some even playing 'patriarchs and prophets' in Zimbabwe's Government of National Unity. Not even a single film or documentary on the 1980s genocide has been aired on ZANU-TV. RW Johnson clearly lays it out: ". . . far, far more have died through more indirect consequences - from starvation, from exposure, from an acceleration of death from Aids due to deprivation of drugs, food and care, from death during migration . . . and simply from the collapse of almost everything else."

As we approach Election 2013, I dare say if ZANU-PF expects us to roll over like grateful kittens for our political bellies to be stroked, they had better think again. We shall treat their diamond money with contempt. Throw back every political granule at them. Rally for rally; SMS for SMS; ward for ward; constituency for constituency; ballot for ballot; broadcast for broadcast; editorial for editorial; poster for poster; manifesto for manifesto; vote for vote. In 2013, the struggle has new number plates: F²WF.

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