Gukurahundi: Protocol of the forgotten

On January 27 2015, the world marked the International Holocaust Remembrance Day which coincides with the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Auschwitz was a Nazi concentration camp in Poland in which some 1,1 million Jews were killed between 1940 and 1945. In marking the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, one of the survivors of the Holocaust, Roman Kent said, "We the survivors do not want our past to be our children's future."

World leaders and survivors converged in Poland to mark this holocaust centre which CNN's Amanpour described as "the horror against which all horrors are judged." Speaking prior to the memorial activities, the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum Piotr Cywinski said; "On this day, we must understand that the survivors, the former prisoners, did everything they could to make us realise that the road to the most terrible tragedies is startlingly simple. All you need is social frustration, a bit of demagoguery, an imaginary enemy, a moment of madness… "
Here in Zimbabwe we happen to be too familiar with such moments of madness.

Speaking at the Yad Vashem Memorial in Israel, in 2009, Pope Benedict XVI said of the victims of the holocaust:
"They lost their lives, but they will never lose their names: these are indelibly etched in the hearts of their loved ones, their surviving fellow prisoners, and all those determined never to allow such an atrocity to disgrace mankind again."

Back home here in Zimbabwe, on January 24 2015, police swooped on worshippers who were gathering at Stanley Hall in Bulawayo to remember the victims of Gukurahundi. A local daily paper reported that this was the third consecutive year police had stopped the Gukurahundi memorial prayer service. According to the report produced by the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace (CCJP) and the Legal Resource Foundation (LRF), over 20 000 people were killed in the Midlands and Matebeleland by the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade.

The events in Zimbabwe and Poland referred above bring to the core issues of truth, acknowledgement and the right to remember. For our dearly departed, it is the right not to be forgotten. There has been a concerted effort to engineer national amnesia regarding the Gukurahundi massacres without addressing them and responding to the just needs of the victims.

International law now carries the right to know, imposing on states the obligation to investigate all human rights violations and assist victims to obtain full truth and access to justice and remedy. In the light of these developments in international law, it is disturbing there is such a deliberate effort to force everyone to forget and the departed to be forgotten. The right to know as enshrined in international law includes the right to memory, or simply put, the right to remember.

There are many reasons why survivors refuse to forget, simply because they cannot forget.

Roberto Cabrera, a human rights activist from Guatemala once said, "When considering the question; should we remember? It is very important to firstly ask; has any victim forgotten? Could they ever forget? Secondly, we should ask; who wants to forget? Who benefits when all the atrocities stay silent in the past?"
One only needs to watch ZTV around the Heroes holidays to know that them who want others to forget, have not forgotten the evil things done against them.

If we want to build peace, then we must not forget. The survivor at Auschwitz said that we do not want our past to be our children's future. The only way to avoid that history repeating itself is to confront that past and dealing with it.

Judging by the behaviour of the police last week, and the ban on the Gukurahundi memorial activities in the last consecutive three years, it is clear that our leadership believe that we all must forget.

One leader, sometime in 2011 is quoted in one of the reports as having said, "We don't want to undermine efforts by our national leaders to reunite the people. If we try to open healed wounds by discussing such issues, we will be undermining and failing to recognise the statesmanship exhibited by the Unity Accord of 1987."

How can a society simply forget the murder of 20 000 innocent civilians and move on like it has never happened? And why should those thousands lying in unnamed shallow graves agree to be forgotten away from their families? How can all the affected families be asked to simply forget their loved ones? How can we do that and still maintain our humanity? If anything, the opposite must happen. We must remember!

"However painful the experience, the wounds of the past must not be allowed to fester. They must be opened," Archbishop Desmond Tutu, said, "They must be cleansed. And balm must be poured on them so they can heal. This is not to be obsessed with the past. It is to take care that the past is properly dealt with for the sake of the future."

The leadership must know that not only do we have the right to remember, but also the right to know the truth. On the eve of the National Peace and Reconciliation Commission (NPRC), the conversation on our violent past must now commence and gather momentum. Memorials and monuments must now be built.

Victims must now get ready to speak and laws must be crafted to ensure their safety. Truth must now come home. Our dearly departed must receive decent burials and the missing remains must find their way home. They too must refuse to be forgotten. Widows and orphans must now exercise the right to mourn, and all of us must mourn with them and wage a middle finger at that despicable past and give it a decent burial to make sure that it returns no more to haunt our children.

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