{"content":[{"text":"Con�lict Studies Quarterly","bbox":{"left":0.398597,"top":0.047593,"width":0.20274000000000003,"height":0.016371000000000004}},{"text":"20 000 people between 1983 and 1987 in the Matabeleland and Midlands Provinces \n (Catholic Commission for Peace and Justice [CCJP], 1997; Auret, 1992; Phimister, 2008). \n The overwhelming majority of the Gukurahundi victims belonged to the Ndebele ethnic \n group while the North Korean trained the Fifth Brigade, a Shona people dominated \n military out�it, were the main perpetrators of the mass killings. The Zimbabwe African \n National Union-Patriotic Front – ZANU (PF) – led government ostensibly established \n the brigade to quell dissident activities being perpetrated by renegade soldiers from \n the national army who were allegedly af�iliated to the main opposition, the Patriotic \n Front-Zimbabwe African People’s Union – (PF) ZAPU.","bbox":{"left":0.117647,"top":0.080673,"width":0.764772,"height":0.18272100000000002}},{"text":"The Gukurahundi massacres ended with the signing of the Unity Accord between then \n Prime Minister Robert Mugabe and the (PF) ZAPU leader, Dr. Joshua Nkomo, on 22 \n December 1987. The government declared a blanket amnesty for the protagonists, espe- \n cially the armed combatants on both sides of the divide. The accord was an elite bargain \n that disregarded the wounded humanity of the constitutive political other. It side-lined \n the aspirations and ignored the pains of the ordinary Ndebele men and women in the \n villages who had borne the brunt of the Gukurahundi violence mainly because after the \n cessation of hostilities the government refused to have open and community initiated \n conversations on the massacres. Key state political actors implored society to let bygones \n be bygones by considering the Unity Accord to be an unimpeachable peace-building act.","bbox":{"left":0.117647,"top":0.274211,"width":0.764721,"height":0.203305}},{"text":"Subsequent to the Unity Accord, of�icial responses to the Gukurahundi massacres became \n an amalgam of silence and denial. Some state security establishment members that \n masterminded Gukuruhundi either downplayed the massacres by claiming the killings \n were an inevitable but unfortunate outcome of con�lict or out-rightly denied culpability \n for the killings. Thus what conversations on Gukurahundi that took place in the country \n between 1988 and the end of President Robert Mugabe’s rule in November 2017 were \n eclectic victims` monologues. The police regularly arrested artists that attempted to \n represent the Gukurahundi massacres through songs, paintings and plays for trying to \n disturb what the state arbitrarily de�ined as public peace and morality. These obstruc- \n tions disregarded survivors’ wounded humanity because in the aftermath of massacres \n harmed communities embolden themselves and coalesce their fractured senses of self \n by memorialising their collective suffering through commemorations, songs, dramas, \n paintings and the assembling of monuments. Halbwachs (quoted in Beristain, Paez, \n & González, 2000, p. 128) aptly argues that remembering is a normative process that \n allows people to have a personal and social identity. Thus by means of memorials, \n commemorations and rituals, reviving bonds with the deceased con�irms a person’s \n social identity and is a step towards re-appropriation of the past which supports a \n moral self-de�inition. The police and state security agencies also refused Gukurahundi \n survivors to properly inter their dead. These inhibitions disorient a people because \n “…participation in funeral rites and social sharing not only helps to enhance social","bbox":{"left":0.117647,"top":0.488335,"width":0.764745,"height":0.4090850000000001}},{"text":"4","bbox":{"left":0.508855,"top":0.92234,"width":0.011703000000000019,"height":0.018093999999999943}}],"images_bbox":[],"images_bbox_not_text_overlap":[]}