Shari Eppel Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by Jane Scherr

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Doing Human Rights Work

So you started as a psychologist, is that fair to say?

Yes.

What was the step towards human rights work?

I was involved with human rights work in the anti-apartheid movement in the late seventies and early eighties during my university training. I belonged to the Detainees Parent Support Committee through the Psychology Department, where we used to offer psychological support to the parents of people in physical detention. I'd been doing the sort of ... zealous, putting a lot of time into being a mother, and also continued my human rights interest to do freelance journalism and write about development issues. Then I was offered the job to research the atrocities of the 1980s by the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace and the Legal Resources Foundation.

Before we talk about that, could you give us a little brief political background about Zimbabwe after independence? You've already talked about the movement against colonialism. But what configuration emerged that has had such an impact?

During the 1970s, two guerrilla armies fought to independence. The one was Zanu, and their armed forces were called Zani. And the other was Zapu, and their armed forces are called Zipra. So Zani and Zipra were the two armies that fought. In our region, Zapu and Zipra were the most widely supported group, under Joshua Nkomo, and the other part of the country supported Mugabe and Zani. At independence, Zani won most of the seats in the first election, but Zapu retained all the seats in our part of the country. It's quite clear, retrospectively, that Robert Mugabe, coming from a tiny Marxist framework, had set his heart on a one-party state. And so what he saw was his desire to cut Zapu as soon as he came into power in 1980.

So that the workings of the government led to a particular set of policies toward this area of Zimbabwe. Give us the contours of those policies.

Sure. There was a difficult situation post-independence, where basically the new government had to integrate three armies -- the Rhodesian army, Zipra, and Zani -- into one army. It was a very difficult task. The Zipras became very nervous. There were widespread talks of being "disappeared" from army barracks and this kind of thing. This affected back to the bush with weapons, and there began to be a bit of an arms problem, with bandits holding up shops and things like that in rural areas. This provided Mugabe with a pretext to send in a hit squad, called the Fifth Brigade, who were trained by the North Koreans and who were basically Mugabe's hit squad -- they were not part of the normal army structure. They were deployed to terrorize the local population.

And that terrorizing took what forms? Destruction of property, indiscriminate killing, and so on?

Yes, all of those things. There were two periods of epidemic violence, and both coincided with curfews. The government introduced curfews, which meant there was no movement in or out of the curfew areas for a period of about three months. The first one was in 1983, in Matabeland, north. In the space of six weeks or so, thousands of people were massacred -- men, women, and children. And it was blatant, it was very crude. People were just rounded up to schools, bore holes, they were beaten, they were forced to dig their own graves, and then they were shot into the graves. This included women; at times, children. People were put in a hut, thirty, forty people in a hut, and then the hut would be set on fire and burnt down. So there were widespread massacres, but the curfew was so effective that very little news of this actually leaked out. And when it did, the international community played it down. They didn't want to believe that Mugabe, who was very well respected internationally at that time, could be capable of such a thing.

Earlier you spoke about your rage at governments lying. So this, in essence, becomes part of the process of your education. You started to say that you were asked to do a report, a historical report. Tell us a little about that. It's called Breaking the Silence, Building True Peace, commissioned by the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe and the Legal Resources Foundation. So tell us a little about this work.

I had known that there were problems during the 1980s, but I, like most Zimbabweans, had no idea of the scale of it. The level of fear and silence was still so immense that even to this day, I think the majority of Zimbabweans have no idea of the scale of those massacres and the impact in our region, because we're the Ndebele-speaking part of the country. The Shona-speaking part of the country doesn't have any idea of the suffering that took part in this region. So for me, it was an eye-opener. I can remember, when we first started to collect statements, just being overwhelmed with pain and anger. I used to walk around the house at 3:00 in the morning and think, "How didn't we know? How come we didn't know that this was happening?" I think it's very important that everybody in the country, and wider, should know what happened.

What was the evidence that you wound up gathering, and how did you find it?

I was the sole researcher; I was the only person working on this report. I had an Ndebele interviewer, who was very brave because he was the one who had to go out into the rural areas and set his desk up and say, "If you have anything to report about the 1980s, come here." So it was a very selective collection process. We had three months of collection in one district and a month or so in another. The information we got was voluntary, so it wasn't a random survey, which means that it was very difficult to extrapolate from that, in terms of the how big the consequences of the massacres might really have been. But we did get a lot of information coming in about these massacres. And because nothing was out there, I had to put this together in terms of time scale and say, "Well, we have an epidemic [of violence] during these months, and then a year later, the strategy changed in certain ways." To put that together from about a thousand individual testaments which we took during those years was a real challenge.

What numbers are we talking about over this period, that is, of atrocities and so on? What is your best guess about what occurred?

I still get very nervous when people ask that, because figures around this tends to come back to me because there hasn't been much research done. But what the Breaking the Silence reports, I would only commit myself to 4,000 dead, because those were the known dead, which we could absolutely be sure about after this data collection process. But that was clearly the tip of the iceberg, because this was a very small voluntary data collection process. I would now say probably at least between 10,000 and 20,000 dead, massacred.

So one uses the term "human rights work," part of the problem for somebody outside is to understand what is the work that is involved. In the first stage, it was chronicling what had happened, gathering the evidence, and being affected, outraged, as you said, by what you had learned. Now, I guess, the next step is to communicate that information.

That's right. And that wasn't a reckoning, because this report is obviously going to antagonize the government. And not just the government, but, of course, the split within the Catholic Church, because the Catholic Church in Zimbabwe is very divided. Many of the Shona bishops -- Mugabe is Shona and Zanu is basically a Shona party -- wanted to suppress the reports, and other bishops wanted them to come out. So this report actually threatened to divide the Catholic Church. And, in fact, it does. This report was released in 1997, and to date, it's never been officially acknowledged and released by the Catholic bishops. It was in the end released unilaterally by the Legal Resources Foundation. So it was going to be a very controversial report, and it has remained so.

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