الأثنية والإيديولجية ليست سببان أساسيان فى جرائم الحرب: الرئيس البشير وموغابى مثالان

Quote: From Sandra Chait's review of Yvonne Vera's "The Stone Virgins" in Africa Today: Vera, Yvonne. 2003. The Stone Virgins. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 184 pp., $18.00 (cloth). The little-known "Gukurahundi Massacres" took place in Zimbabwe between 1980 and 1986, when rivalry between Robert Mugabe's ZANLA and Joshua Nkomo's ZIPRA forces spurred Mugabe to send the North Korean-trained 5 Brigade to Matabeleland, Nkomo's ethnic home, to flush out Ndebele dissidents. In 1987, by the time amnesty was declared, the army had found a mere 100 dissidents living in the bushes. However, twenty-thousand unarmed villagers, many of them women, had lost their lives. Yvonne Vera has chosen to air this shameful period of postindependence Zimbabwe in her novel The Stone Virgins, in which she focuses on the story of two young female victims of the massacre in the Matoba (Kezi) district of South Matabeleland. National amnesia about the atrocities visited on these villagers has been fueled by fear of repercussions from Robert Mugabe's ruling party. Historical documents have been lost, and the perpetrators of the crimes pensioned. Selective forgetting has served to reinforce the silencing of women's voices that female veterans of the Chimurenga, or War of Independence, were already suffering. Mugabe's government, reluctant to tarnish the heroic reputation of the Liberation Army, has consistently ignored female fighters' complaints of rape and abuse, and when British filmmaker Ingrid Sinclair attempted to expose the women's situation in her movie Flame, the government threw endless roadblocks in her path ...