For more than 40 years, Bongani Ncube and Patricia Baleni have carried the pain of losing their fathers in the Matabeleland massacres in which thousands of Zimbabweans were murdered in the 1980s.

But neither believe village-level hearings launched by President Emmerson Mnangagwa in July as a "pilgrimage towards healing" will bring closure.

Ncube said he was three when soldiers shot his father a few metres from their home in Matabeleland North province in 1983, the year the then prime minister Robert Mugabe sent troops to crush dissent in the ethnic Ndebele heartland.

Mugabe had claimed Joshua Nkomo, his old ally in the fight against white rule who drew much of his support from Matabeleland, was plotting against him.

Ncube's father was a government veterinary worker and local leader of Nkomo's ZAPU party, the main target of the red-beret unit deployed by Mugabe, head of the mostly Shona ZANU party.

In his pyjamas

Baleni last saw her father, a school teacher, in 1983 when she was 19. Armed men dragged him from their home in Midlands in the dead of night, she told AFP.

"They took him in his pyjamas with no shoes... Just outside the house were some blood stains."

Relatives, other teachers and students scoured the bush but never found Clement Baleni, who was not known to be politically active. The family fled the area in fear, losing possessions and livestock.

No definitive death toll has been established but Mugabe's Fifth Brigade, trained by North Korean instructors, is estimated to have killed up to 20,000 people between 1983 and 1987.

Civilians were tortured, raped and forced from their homes in the operation named Gukurahundi, a Shona term that loosely translates as "the early rain that washes away the chaff".

Previous government attempts at addressing the killings have been feeble. The findings of two commissions of inquiry set up by Mugabe in the 1980s have never been made public.

There has never been a government apology and Mugabe did not acknowledge responsibility before he died in 2019.

Two months since the new process was announced, survivors have not been informed about them or invited to take part, Ncube said.

"For purposes of transparency and a show of sincerity, such a process should be centred on survivors and not be led by the state, because some of the actors were heavily involved in the massacres," he told AFP.

'Public relations'

Many question Mnangagwa's sincerity in announcing the new initiative. President since 2017, he was national security minister at the time.

A fierce critic is traditional leader Nhlanhla Ndiweni, exiled in Britain, for whom Gukurahundi was an attempted Ndebele genocide.

It is "a futile public relations exercise meant to hoodwink people into believing that something is being done". But in reality, "it's a nullity", he said.

The ZAPU party refuses to take part.

"The hearings can go ahead and those who wish to can participate in them, but the whole scheme is flawed and, as ZAPU, we won't take part," party secretary Mthulisi Hanana told AFP.

Midlands State University conflict resolution lecturer Arthur Chikerema said Mnangagwa may be trying to burnish his legacy and the announcement of hearings may be more "tactical than tactful".

It has not been made clear whether the process will result in justice or compensation, "both desirous aspects of reconciliation", he said.

"Instead of wanting to be a Father Christmas or knight in shining armour, the president should have allowed for the establishment of an independent truth-telling commission which would result in genuine reconciliation, not this façade," Chikerema said.

But a coalition of human rights organisations sees this new attempt to address Gukurahundi as a "noble cause".

"In transitional justice, there is a principle known as 'working with the grain', meaning that even if a process is flawed, it is a foundation which can be built upon," said National Transitional Justice Working Group (NTJWG) coordinator, Fortune Kuhudzebwe.

AFP