ZANU PF urged to respect remains of liberation fighters

By Alex Bell
22 June 2011

The Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) Veteran’s Trust has urged ZANU PF to respect the remains of former liberation fighters and other villagers buried in mass graves across the country.

The Veterans’ Trust deputy chairman and retired army colonel, Buster Magwizi, said ZANU PF needs to engage the international community and human rights groups in the exhumations of the bodies. Magwizi said proper scientific methods were needed to help identify the bodies.

Since March the state’s ZBC televisions news has reported on the exhumations of hundreds of bodies from a site in Chibondo Mine in the Mount Darwin area. ZBC has claimed that the bodies are those of people killed by the Rhodesian forces in the 1970s. This is despite many pictures of the bodies clearly showing that some of the remains are fresh. Some of the bodies still had remnants of flesh and were still in stages of decomposition, suggesting the deaths were more recent.

The exhumations of the bodies from the disused mine, an operation conducted by the ZANU PF fronted Fallen Heroes’ Trust, has prompted calls for the exhumation of all mass graves around the country. The state media the Fallen Heroes’ Trust have insisted that thousands of Zimbabwe’s liberation war fighters were buried at the site, despite contradictory evidence over the age of the corpses.

ZIPRA earlier this year sought the court’s intervention to have the exhumations stopped, amid growing international outcry over the how the bodies were handled. Leading human rights group, Amnesty International, said in April that this treatment of the remains was increasing the risk that evidence of serious human violations could be lost.

SW Radio Africa correspondent Lionel Saungweme reported on Wednesday that the focus of ZIPRA’s fight now is to ensure the respectful preservation of the bodies. He said that what ZANU PF is doing is being widely condemned as disrespectful of the dead and of African culture.

Saungweme explained that The ZBC footage of the exhumations was last week shown to an exhumation workshop in South Africa, where experts from Argentina condemned how ZANU PF has conducted the removal of the bodies.

ZIPRA’s Magwizi, who was also at that meeting, meanwhile said the archaic methods applied at Chibondo Mine were ‘erroneous’.

“Scientific methods have to be implemented rather than look up to amadlozi (ancestral spirits) to detect origins of the deceased. Victims whose origins have not yet been identified and whose death has still not been declared are regarded as missing and this is a scourge to their relatives,” he said.