When a State Turns on its Citizens

When a State Turns on its Citizens

by Lloyd Sachikonye

(Jacana, R95)

This book sheds light on the violence that characterised the political landscape in Zimbabwe during the period 2000 to 2008, and how it affected the country's political culture.

It focuses on how violence has been institutionalised to the extent that it is organised by specific institutions, including those run by the state, political parties, militia and war veteran groups.

War veterans are men and women who participated in the country's liberation struggle against the minority regime of Ian Smith. When a state turns against its own citizens, it demonstrates that the political violence is not random, but planned and executed at particular junctures.

The author presents evidence which shows how the military, police, security agencies, ruling and opposition parties alike have engaged in violence. It also shows that civil society organisations have not been immune from the cancer of violence, both as victims and as perpetrators.

In Zimbabwe, violence was used, and largely tolerated, by the oppressed masses to liberate them from colonialism. However, the same kind of violence has now been institutionalised by what is supposed to be a democratic government, established after a protracted struggle against oppression and inequality.

Yet over the period under discussion, the government, which was supposed to have brought an era of democracy, has institutio-nalised violence to build an autho-ritarian state, contemptuous of its citizens' rights, including expression of political preferences through the ballot.

The author believes Zimbabwe, as a country, did not do enough at independence to rehabilitate itself from the habits of violence prevalent during the liberation war. As a result, some have come to believe in violence as a tool that can be relied upon to achieve their goals.

Sachikonye shows how dangerous the inculcation of values based on the use of political vio-lence for electoral advantage and for the accumulation of power has been, especially during the period under review.

The book consists of five chapters, which look at phases of violence, from the days of nationalist inter-party conflicts in the 1960s, to the present day, in which the ruling party Zanu-PF and its allies – youth militia, war veterans and state agencies – have resorted to the use of violence as their main tool to remain in power, contrary to the wishes of the majority.

The final chapter shows that the wider effects of violence in Zimbabwe are still unfolding. These include fear and withdrawal, stress and depression, which are spaw-ning a myriad of psychological disorders, whose prevalence and depth still need to be unravelled.

Sachikonye presents over-whelming evidence against the sanitised picture of President Robert Mugabe and his regime painted by the partisan state media and its coterie of sympathisers in the southern African region and the African continent as a whole.

The author clearly shows that not only has Mugabe turned against his people, but that he has also managed to turn the army, the police and the prison service against the very people they are supposed to serve.