Once they moved onto the farms, the core of ex-combatants were joined by ZANU-PF youths, along with unemployed urban people who were attracted by the daily allowance and, in a few instances, by some communal farmers enticed by the prospect of being awarded a piece of land. They soon formed a ragtag militia known as “War Vets,” which perpetrated most of the atrocities of 2000 and 2001. Some MDC supporters were forced into joining the militia and taking part in violent campaigning to avoid being beaten up themselves.76 Initially the War Vets and party youths were paid for their performance, fed (although they often demanded food from the white farmers whose farms they occupied), and given free alcoholic beverages—in some places they took mbanje (marijuana)—and they often went out beating people while drunk or high on drugs. They were confident that Mugabe had granted them impunity as long as they obeyed the directives of the central command. Their leader, Hunzvi, who toured the invaded farms to keep the militias on the upbeat, fast became a central figure of the regime, whose word would take precedence over the vice presidents or Cabinet ministers, even though he had never held office in the party or the government, other than by becoming an MP. Hunzvi’s lack of a war record and his original affiliation to ZIPRA rather than ZANLA made him more malleable by Mugabe, who always feared high-profile former guerrillas with an independent power base. Contending factions in ZANU-PF courted Hunzvi, and Solomon Mujuru offered him the Chikomba constituency that the retired general had held in a previous Parliament. No one dared oppose Hunzvi’s nomination in the ZANU-PF primaries. The MDC was not allowed to campaign in that area and Hunzvi was elected by a large majority. He had hoped for a junior Cabinet position in the July 2000 reshuffle but was still more useful to Mugabe outside government, propping up ZANU-PF campaigns—for example, against the independent judges. When Hunzvi died suddenly on 4 June 2001, officially of cerebral malaria but most probably of AIDS, he was buried in Heroes’ Acre—the national monument for liberation war heroes—and Mugabe read his eulogy, with all the ruling elite behind him, posing as grief-stricken comrades. Though dispensable as an individual, Hunzvi was a useful pawn in the autocrat’s power game. No other ZNLWVA leader since has displayed his skillful and charismatic demagoguery.
“Green Bombers”
The death in a car accident in May 2001 of Border Gezi, minister of youth development, gender, and employment creation, whose role in the 2000 election campaign had been decisive, was another important setback for Mugabe. But Gezi was replaced in the redundant Cabinet position—a means to channel public resources to the ruling party—by Elliot Manyika, also a young Turk from Mashonaland Central, where he had succeeded Gezi as governor, and whose violent campaign in the Bindura by-election had been hailed as a model by ZANU-PF hardliners. Manyika went on with Gezi’s plan to establish the “green bombers” militia under the guise of a six-month National Youth Service. The first battalion of approximately 1,000 volunteers completed training in the Border Gezi Training Center (a militia camp established at Mount Darwin, near Bindura) by the end of November 2001 and was deployed in the rural and suburban areas in December and January 2002. They were placed under the local War Vets’ command to bolster ZANU-PF’s campaign effort. The rationale for the creation of such paramilitary units lay in the fact that ZANU-PF youths and ZNLWVA elements originally mobilized in the farm invasions and the 2000 parliamentary elections were too few to cover the whole country and were poorly organized. Although in September 2000 the War Vets became a “reserve force” of the national army, in a move to instill some discipline into their ranks, on the ground they remained uncontrolled and dangerous.
The new force was summarily trained by CIO and military officers in military discipline, drilling, counterinsurgency, and terror tactics, and duly brainwashed to regard the MDC, whites, and Western countries as enemies of Zimbabwe.77 Initially ZANU-PF supporters joined the “green bombers” en masse, but some other youths, with no particular political affiliation, were lured into the force by promises of cash and future jobs in the police and the army. As time went on some were forcibly drafted into the militia especially as a means to destroy support for the MDC among the rural youth. These units were equipped with olive green uniforms—hence the popular nickname alluding to the containers of an insect-killer spray—fed and paid with the taxpayers’ money, which was particularly attractive for ZANU-PF leaders at a time when the ruling party’s coffers were empty. Although this ostensible National Youth Service was inaugurated to provide community services countrywide (to give credibility to the official stance some did sweep the streets and public squares with much publicity provided by the government press in December 2001), the militia inflicted the worst violence before and after the March 2002 presidential election as noted by the Commonwealth Observer Group.78 Being de facto a branch of the state, they could operate in broad daylight with every pretense of legality.
With these two militia forces used in tandem, the regime militarized the rural areas, establishing illegal roadblocks to stop “undesirable” people, confiscating ID cards (which were needed to be able to vote) from real or alleged opposition supporters, rounding up and beating villagers and raping or killing at will. Their camps, which were scattered around the countryside, became feared centers of torture, the practice of which intensified as the presidential election drew to a close. In Matabeleland their behavior reminded people of Gukurahundi. The “green bombers” tried to emulate the abuses of the ZANU-PF youth brigades of the 1980s. They were “fighting the enemy” again with a similar excuse of protecting national sovereignty. There were no limits because impunity was guaranteed. Abducted young women and girls, supporters or relatives of MDC supporters, were gang raped and reduced to the status of sex slaves by the militias, often contracting AIDS in the process in a country where 20 percent of the adult population is HIV positive. As in the liberation war, when rape and abduction of teenage girls for sexual services were sometimes perpetrated by the guerrillas, these are another feature of the culture of violence. The Zimbabwe Women Lawyers’ Association estimated in mid-2002 that some 1,000 of these women had been held in militia camps.79
As a result of this policy, many districts became “no go areas” for the opposition in late 2001 and early 2002, and people were effectively intimidated into voting for Mugabe at the presidential election. Although the ruling party had managed to retain the majority in Parliament in June 2000 and win subsequent parliamentary by-elections, it had lost the towns to the MDC in the mayoral elections in Masvingo in mid-May 2001 and in Bulawayo—the second largest city in Zimbabwe—in early September. With Zvobgo’s influence, Masvingo Province was no longer secure and ZANU-PF’s full control was only assured in rural Mashonaland where the MDC had been eradicated in May–June 2000. Therefore, in a national ballot such as the presidential election, a total control of rural areas was necessary to counterbalance the numbers of mobilized MDC voters in urban areas. It was the militias’ task to create a permanent climate of fear among rural communities, and they thoroughly succeeded.
Collapse of the Rule of Law
Besides its immediate impact on the political opposition and civil society, the long-term disruptive effect of state-sponsored violence should not be ignored. Two years of systematic violence singling out specific groups of people had already transformed the postcolonial state. The Police Support Unit (notably in the repression of various demonstrations in the mid-1990s and of the food riots in January 1998) and the CIO and the Police Law and Order Section have been used in partisan ways since 1980. Previously the uniformed police, the Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP), were seen generally as a professional and politically neutral force but this is no longer the case. The commissioner of police, Augustine Chihuri, himself a former combatant in the liberation war, claimed in January 2001 that he was a ZANU-PF member and later in the same year that he would not obey the orders of an MDC president. Police station commanding officers were under instructions not to assist assaulted MDC members and not to act against ZANU-PF supporters acting violently.80 In the few instances when police officers tried to protect MDC people from ZANU-PF’s thugs, they themselves were assaulted. One constable was murdered by War Vets when conducting an inquiry on an invaded farm, and his superiors made no attempt to arrest the culprits. Members of the force feared the ZANU-PF militias that enjoyed such political