ON August 22, a day before the watershed 2023 elections in Zimbabwe, we launched the policy and practice brief titled Facing the Fear: Confronting threats to personal security and peace in Zimbabwe.
The policy and practice brief extracts key policy and practice findings and recommendations from the State of Peace Report that was launched on September 21, 2022. We decided to produce this brief and release it due to the prevailing atmosphere. As the election day drew closer, we started recording an increase in incidents of violence, threats of violence and disinformation.
These developments validated what we had found in the 2022 State of Peace Report. That fear plays an important role in people’s ability to express themselves through a democratic process and how they exercise the rights provided for in the Bill of Rights.
In the State of Peace Report, 2022, we delve deeper into the social fabric of Zimbabwean societies, looking beyond the cases of direct violence to discern the subtle and covert forms of violence that have imprisoned most Zimbabweans in a perpetual state of insecurity.
The report makes the finding that the semblance of peace in Zimbabwe is, in fact, a manifestation of “authoritarian peace”.
This form of “peace” sometimes allows for the absence of direct violence but is almost always enforced by structural and cultural violence that disempowers citizens, turning them into subservient and apathetic subjects. It is a state where even if no bullets are fired, fingers remain on the trigger — perpetrators of past acts of gross human rights violations still wield the instruments of violence and enjoy impunity, while victims are denied reparation.
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This type of “peace” is a facade, and it is fragile. As highlighted in the report, the fault lines of the authoritarian peace become apparent each time electoral processes beckon.
In 2022, the cracks were already showing as the country geared up for the August 23 and 24, 2023 elections in 2023. Now we are seeing everything we feared coming to pass. In unpacking the policy brief, a few issues came to the fore. First is indeed the “transgenerational fear” as one participant called it, that keeps us all prisoners, paralysing us from expressing ourselves in democratic processes as so wished by the Constitution when it says, “We the people…”
As the 2022 State of Peace Report takes us back through a litany of cases of violence and threats of violence, the victimisation of such prominent politicians as lawmaker Job Sikhala, the murder of Moreblessing Ali and the harassment of her family that followed, the case of the Glen View 22, the torture of the Citizens Coalition for Change trio, send a chilling message.
As Jestina Mukoko put it in the facing fear panel discussion: “If we can do this to these prominent people, what about you?”
This is exactly designed to instil fear in people so that they do not participate according to their free will.
In our analysis, we have seen that this fear plays out differently depending on where one is located. In the urban areas, it causes a hopelessness and mistrust in the system with some people electing to stay away from the polls. In the rural areas where the violence is more pronounced, the fear does not only discourage participation but rather may lead to submission when people end up voting under duress for persons they fear rather than those they love.
The result is that what we then have is not a democracy but rather just a costly performance that gives no expression to the will of the people as envisaged by the Constitution. But this fear, as the panel went on to note, is not only confined to the electorate. It is also in the leadership which chooses violence as a tool for electoral mobilisation.
Indeed, those, who go to the extremes of deploying fear to influence political outcomes, act out of fear of a life without political power. This then creates a vicious cycle, in which both citizens and leaders, are locked in a state of perpetual insecurity, a situation that is desirable to none and can never be called peace. The Facing Fear Policy and Practice Brief makes some important recommendations, which among others, include not only policy reforms, but also behavioural changes as a way of confronting and breaking the transgenerational culture of fear.
Ultimately, the message delivered by the brief is clear: to achieve genuine peace, we must confront the fear that cripples our people from freely exercising their fundamental rights and freedoms.
We must not separate peace from justice, equality and the rule of law. Zimbabwe can only be peaceful when its people live without fear and when those deemed weak are as secure as those who claim to be strong.
The fear that we speak about has become institutionalised using security institutions and laws that instead of promoting the security of citizens, advocates the opposite.
These include such laws as the Maintenance of Peace and Order Act and the Patriot Act. Even institutions that are supposed to play a supportive role to the people, like the Judiciary, have become so compromised that they act like an extension of the security sector. The Judiciary now plays a more prominent role in elections almost competing with the electoral management body, disqualifying candidates and announcing winners.
And yet the confidence of the people in the Judiciary as an electoral dispute resolution mechanism is rock bottom.
Fear rules the Judiciary, as we have seen in the past about what happens to judges who pass rulings that are contrary to the wishes of the ruling elite.
Without the Executive making certain behavioural changes and being held accountable for interfering with judicial decisions or amending the Constitution to decide who hears the next electoral petition, we can never expect justice to emerge from our courts.
Underpinning all the recommendations that we have made, which aim to ensure sustainable peace in Zimbabwe, is political will. Although every related actor in Zimbabwe echoes the peace rhetoric, there is limited evidence of genuine commitment to it.
Fear is still prevalent among citizens and violence, in its different manifestations, continues to be the preferred tool used by those in power to maintain their position by silencing dissenting voices.
Dzikamai Bere is a Zimbabwean human rights activist, a peace worker and a transitional justice expert.