The government is set to roll out community consultative meetings early next month to engage victims of Gukurahundi, a programme to be led by traditional chiefs.
Gukurahundi is a brutal series which occurred in the early 1980s where an estimated 20 000 Ndebele civilians were brutally tortured, murdered and women raped by the North Korean trained Zimbabwe National Army’s 5th Brigade.
President of the Council of Chiefs, Chief Mtshane Khumalo said the program will target Matabeleland North and Matabelenad South.
In 2021, the President Emmerson Mnangagwa assigned chiefs the arduous task of resolving Gukurahundi in the affected communities.
The move was met with a lot of criticism and anger with critics accusing the president of using traditional leaders to appease the affected communities.
Addressing journalists in Bulawayo on Monday, Chief Khumalo said the government has availed resources and conducted training for the various people who will be involved in conducting the outreach programs.
Chief Khumalo said the program will be victim-centered and they will allow the victims an opportunity to tell their side of the story and state who the perpetrators were, and possible recommendations will be made.
“As we go out to the people to with our panels as chiefs, we don’t know the perpetrators of Gukurahundi. We can only hear from the people that were affected and who the perpetrators were. We shall record that and maybe make recommendations to the president as to what we believe should be done to those perpetrators. But as it stands now, we don’t know who the perpetrators were,” he said.
Deputy President of the National Chiefs Council, Chief Fortune Charumbira reiterated that the outreach will be conducted in a culture-sensitive manner which is why it is being spearheaded by the chiefs.
He said as a nation, they believe in restorative justice, where someone who was wronged must state how they were wronged and how they want to be compensated.
“The point of departure in this unique way of doing things, you will know from our departure that we are for restorative justice. That is where we differ from the West. We believe in restoration. If someone loses something, they need to be restored. That is the Zimbabwean way of doing things. To restore the person,” Chief Charumbira said.
“We have dialogues, with the affected people, ask them how they want to be restored and they tell us not the Western system which we say is rich in the procedure, yet very poor in restorative justice. Our way of doing things is not to make people fight further but to build peace. The government is saying, for those who will submit credible evidence, and can state what they want, the government is willing to compensate them.
“The reason why we want this to be handled by chiefs is because such issues are culture-sensitive. We want the chiefs to be directly involved so that they can deal with matters because they are culture-specific. The chiefs will know how to deal with missing persons or those who were affected in any way during Gukurahundi. We want to deal with this in a way that is peculiar to Zimbabwe. This is why we do not want to nationalise and internationalise this issue. The problem with generalising this is we may lose the cultural aspect of things.”
