http://www.thezimbabwean.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3...:gukurahundi-was-genocide--world-expert&catid=35:opinion-a-analysis&Itemid=31
Gukurahundi was genocide – world expert
Written by The Zimbabwean
Tuesday, 21 September 2010 16:56
A leading authority on crimes against humanity says there “is nothing to debate” when labelling the 1980s massacres in Matabeleland as a genocide. (Dr Greg Stanton: “There is nothing to debate: Gukurahundi was a genocide”)
Dr Gregory Stanton who heads Genocide Watch in Washington DC, said that the Rome Statute, which set up the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague, had established a clear set of definitions. “Genocide is a special category and we have both the ICC description of this crime, along with many examples from history,” Stanton told The Zimbabwean. "Gukurahundi meets the criteria," he said.
"If you look at the slaughter of Armenians by Turkish forces during the First World War or the murder of Tutsis in Rwanda, these were committed against people based on ethnicity, and that is a key element of genocide.” Stanton said that where people were persecuted or murdered based on the language they spoke or their tribal or ethnic background, it constituted one of the gravest crimes on the planet.
“Gukurahundi cannot be defined as anything else,” he said. Now a research professor at a university in Arlington, Virginia, Stanton wrote the United Nations Security Council paper that created the International Criminal Tribunal currently trying suspects from the Rwanda genocide, and initiated the process that has seen the first trials in Cambodia after the massacres carried out more than 30 years ago by former dictator Pol Pot.
He also drafted the U.N. Peacekeeping resolutions that helped bring about an end to the Mozambique civil war in 1994, and has travelled widely in Africa. Stanton recently published a list of elements present in Matabeleland which, he says, prove the case for officially classifying it as a genocide: intentional killing of a significant part of an ethnic groupmass murder and mass rape no legal protection for victims (police actually tortured and killed some of those who registered complaints)
government soldiers acting on orders that were illegal under Zimbabwe’s own constitution and under international law, including the Genocide Convention The professor warned that there was no "statute of limitations," where such crimes are concerned.
"We are now seeing trials in Cambodia more than three decades since Pol Pot was driven from power. And 65 years after Adolf Hitler committed suicide, the hunt goes on for surviving Nazi war criminals. "No one who stands accused of genocide should ever feel they cannot be arrested and brought to justice, regardless of how much time has passed" he said. There have been growing calls for the government in Harare to accept that a crime against humanity was committed in Matabeleland.
Zimbabwe writer, Geoff Hill, who has campaigned widely for Gukurahundi to be declared a genocide, said he welcomed the statements made by Stanton. “Greg is a professor of law and has a lifetime of experience in these matters,” he said. “One can only hope that more voices will be raised on this issue because it is hard to imagine lasting peace in Zimbabwe until survivors and families of those who died truly feel that justice has been done.”
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