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Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe reacts as he leaves after casting his vote in Highfields, outside Harare.
Embracing their tormentors would be out of the question for the people of Matabeleland, says Max du Preez.
I don’t know how much support Zanu-PF really has in Zimbabwe. But I’d be astonished if the survivors and families of victims of Robert Mugabe’s attempt at ethnic cleansing in Matabeleland overwhelmingly voted for them.
Shortly after independence, Mugabe’s North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade killed some 20 000 people during the Gukurahundi massacre in the 1980s.
No family was left untouched by this outrage.
When the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) was formed, the people of the region overwhelmingly rallied behind it.
According to the result of last week’s elections, most of these people had changed their minds and voted en masse for Mugabe’s party. If true, it would be most peculiar behaviour, rewriting the psychology handbooks. Zimbabwe’s Finance Minister, Tendai Biti, wrote last week: “I am afraid it’s real. The unbelievable is happening.
“The surreal is playing. The insanity rolls on. Now even those that they killed shamelessly during Gukurahundi have embraced them.
“Can you honestly tell the villagers of Matobo whose children were mercilessly thrown down mineshafts that they have now found peace with the devil? Go to Esigodini and ask them. What a load of rubbish!”
Petina Gappah, a Zimbabwean lawyer and award-winning author, was just as shocked: “Matabeleland has consistently voted MDC.
“But the results we were receiving suggested that the impossible had happened, that the people of Matabeleland had put aside Gukurahundi and found in themselves a new love for Zanu-PF.
“They had voted Zanu-PF, endorsed Zanu-PF, they had embraced the party of the people who had killed their loved ones.”
I worked closely with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for three years and interacted with dozens of victims and survivors of our horrors of the apartheid era.
Telling their stories to the nation, getting the truth out and facing some of their torturers and killers of their family members helped them a bit to find some kind of closure, but few were prepared to forgive so easily. Embracing their tormentors would be out of the question.
The people of Matabeleland never had an opportunity to take their trauma and truth to their nation and have their pain recognised. Mugabe still denies that the massacres took place.
What an act of extreme cruelty and contempt it would be if Mugabe had indeed, as it appears, fixed the votes in Matabeleland to pretend his victims love him.
I feel tainted by what happened in Zimbabwe.
The president of my country was the chief interlocutor to get Zimbabwe back on the road to a proper democracy and stability. He must have known what the situation on the ground in Zimbabwe was before and during the election.
We do know that his adviser and part of his Zimbabwe team, Lindiwe Zulu, had expressed serious reservations.
But she was shouted down and insulted by Mugabe and instead of standing by his adviser and protesting the insults, my president bowed before Mugabe’s wrath and rebuked her.
And after the election my president congratulated Mugabe and called the elections “harmonised” (?). I suppose it is possible that Zanu-PF could have drawn more votes than the MDC in the election.
The MDC’s leadership was divided and weak and allowed Zanu-PF to take credit for the improved conditions that were largely thanks to the MDC’s participation in the national unity government.
But it is also possible that some Zimbabweans that had given the MDC the majority in the 2008 elections could have switched allegiance because they were beneficiaries or potential beneficiaries of the violent land redistribution or indigenisation programmes.
Others suggest that many ordinary Zimbabweans were simply so shell-shocked and tired of conflict and poverty that they gave up on the MDC.
If that were true, why the need to cheat? Why not allow a few more weeks or months, as was demanded? Why would Zanu-PF blatantly break the rules by only releasing the voters roll on paper and only a day before the election?
Many people told me after my last column on Mugabe’s popularity here and elsewhere in Africa that his “restoration of African dignity” was the key explanation.
My feeling is that the way Zanu-PF had conducted itself and the way the AU and SADC condoned it so far undermines African dignity in a big way. It says to me that these organisations believe Africa is not capable of holding credible elections; that Africans are inherently unable to be proper democrats; that it is normal in Africa for political elites to act fraudulently and ignore the will of the people.
That is simply not true.
South Africa and many other African countries that had held elections the last few years proved that it is possible to do it in a way that can’t be questioned by anyone.
* Max du Preez is an author and columnist.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers.
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