Talk:Gukurahundi

Revert of RobinClay edit

Reverted because citation needed, unsourced info, misleading info, conflicting info with sources, too much detail in the lead and info in lead doesn't appear in rest of article per Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lead section# Introductory_text.

• Citation needed: There is no citation that "in Zimbabwe it has the particular reference" nor that it was against just the Ndebele people, or that the term refers just to the attacks by the Fifth Brigade.
• Unsourced info: There is no citation that "perhaps as many as 100,000" died, citations need to be given when adding info per WP:PROVEIT.
• Misleading info: The consensus is not that "tens of thousands were killed", The Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe documented at least 3,750 killings, and journalist Heidi Holland referenced a death toll of 8,000.
• Conflicting info with sources: Sources say that the conflict ended in 1987- unclear if Gukurahundi ended at that year- but also imply that involvement of the Fifth Brigade ended in 1984 (see "The 1987 Zimbabwe National Unity Accord and its Aftermath"), so stating that Gukurahundi was an operation just by the Fifth Brigade is conflictive info.
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lead section# Introductory_text: "The lead section should briefly summarize the most important points covered in an article", "Editors should avoid... over-specific descriptions – greater detail is saved for the body of the article." And according to Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lead section, "Apart from basic facts, significant information should not appear in the lead if it is not covered in the remainder of the article." Information about Emmerson Mnangagwa is over-specific, because then you would have to put also info about the chief of the armed forces, the chief of police, the prime minister, the president and related officials, it also is not part of a summary because it doesn't appear in the rest of the article, and it seems to be not a basic fact of the article so it shouldn't be included in the lead because it does not appear in the remainder of the article. Thinker78 (talk) 20:20, 16 November 2017 (UTC)

What is Gukurahundi?

The current explanation of the term by Wikipedia seems to be at odds with the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe, who says that Gukurahundi was the name Mugabe gave to the 5 Brigade . Thinker78 (talk) 00:30, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

It's both. "Gukurahundi" has multiple meanings in Zimbabwe depending on the context. The literal translation of the word is a reference to the spring storms which occur during the rainy season. In 1978 or 1979, Robert Mugabe defined Gukurahundi as a military strategy of total war, which emphasized carrying ZANU's war effort into towns and civilian homes as opposed to focusing strictly on Rhodesian military targets in the countryside. In fact, he even wrote a booklet describing the strategy of Gukurahundi in great detail. This was entitled "Gore Re Gukurahundi" (Year of Gukurahundi in Shona). When Fifth Brigade was formed, it received the semi-formal nickname "Gukurahundi", which hinted at what its stated goal as a unit was: to attack the roots of political subversion in the civilian populace rather than function as a conventional military unit per se. So at this point we have three different meanings for the word: the unit, the strategy, and the weather phenomenon. Then in 1983 when the purges of civilians in Matabeland began happening, people started calling that "Gukurahundi" too, since that was an example of said strategy being implemented by the brigade of the same name. Today, the latter is the most commonly accepted meaning of the word, and its usage in other contexts has gradually fallen off. --Katangais (talk) 03:09, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

References

Error in The Guardian article

I was working on the article Gukurahundi and another editor, RobinClay, wrote or added the figure that "the consensus is that more than twenty thousand were killed", in a revision, citing a The Guardian article titled "New documents claim to prove Mugabe ordered Gukurahundi killings". I went to check the news article and found that it had a link under the statement "when more than 20,000 civilians were killed by Robert Mugabe’s feared Fifth Brigade" that pointed to apparently the source of the claim of the 20,000 figure. I clicked on it and found out that the link was broken (although more recently it seems to point to an unrelated website). So I went to the internet archives to see if I managed to get it. After getting an "account suspended" notice I looked for an older capture, and I was able to find that the site was successfully archived, so I went through it. I failed to find a 20,000 dead figure; instead, I found that it said in page 27 under "Results -all areas", "Deaths: Confirmed dead number over 2 000: almost certain dead numbers between 3000 and 4 000: possible dead could be double this or more". In conclusion I think that the article erroneously claims that there were 20,000 deaths according to its linked information. Thinker78 (talk) 01:24, 26 November 2017 (UTC) Edited 04:49, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

This appears to be the result of some confusion on the Guardian's part. The link you posted (and apparently the Guardian cited) is a summary report - or an excerpt - from a much larger report entitled Breaking the Silence, Building True Peace: A Report on the disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands, 1980-1988, published in 1997. This excerpt does not contain the nationwide estimate of 20,000 deaths, but the full report it's taken from most certainly does. Someone apparently confused the summary report with the full report. --Katangais (talk) 17:16, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

But I wonder why the summary would say "Deaths: Confirmed dead number over 2 000: almost certain dead numbers between 3000 and 4 000" if the full report says 20,000. Makes no sense. Are you saying that the summary report has an error in the number of deaths that don't match with the full report? What does "Results -all areas" refer to? Why wouldn't the summary report state a nationwide estimate of 20,000 deaths due to Gukurahundi if it is stated in the full report? Thinker78 (talk) 06:53, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

This is not the first time I've had this discussion. In the past, we've had contributors who read the same summary report and erroneously cited it as a source which states Gukurahundi accounted for >4,000 deaths.

I would not dispute that if the source in question gave a figure of 3,000-4,000 as the total estimated civilian death toll between 1980 and 1987. It does not, however, do so. Nowhere in the report does the Commission state that figure is an estimate of such. To claim that's what it represents is deliberately misleading. Rather, it was the number of deaths reported specifically to the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe and its interviewers, who were affiliated with the Bulawayo Legal Project Centre (formerly the Legal Aid Clinic) during a limited microstudy.

Let's put this in perspective. The Commission arrived at this number by interviewing people in two districts: the Tsholotsho area (Matabeleland North) and the Matobo area (Matabeleland South). The figure does not include the deaths that went unreported to the Commission, since nowhere near a majority of people in either of those two provinces were interviewed (Matabeleland North and Matabeleland South were both home to well over a million residents, and the Commmission interviewed a grand total of several hundred). It does not include the deaths that occurred outside the Tsholotsho and Matobo districts.

The summary report specifically states: "In order to try and get a more complete idea of what it was like to be a civilian in a rural area in the 1980s, the Bulawayo Legal Project Centre (BLPC) sent interviewers into two chosen districts to collect more information. It was only possible to reach a few hundred people in this way, and it was only possible to go to these two areas. We know there are thousands of others who suffered and who did not speak to us. We also know that districts such as Lupane, Nkayi, Silobela, Gokwe, Bulilimamangwe, Gwanda, Beitbridge and others also suffered violence in the 1980s. It would have been too expensive and have taken too long to try to speak to everyone. But by choosing one district in each province we hoped to give everyone some idea of how things were in these years." Again, to reiterate: they chose one district apiece in Matabeleland North and Matabeleland South to interview people. That's only two out of thirteen districts, and excludes the Midlands, which was also covered in the report and incidentally, is a much more populous province. The interviews in Matobo were also incomplete, because as the report states, "BLPC also interviewed people in Matobo. However, they did not speak to as many people as they had in Tsholotsho. This was partly because there was not enough time and partly because people were afraid to talk..."

Regarding the figure of between 3,000 to 4,000 deceased individuals (only 2,000 named victims could be identified and confirmed dead), the report also notes, "These figures are very low compared to what seems to have really happened, but they do give an indication of events, and of which areas suffered." Two paragraphs down, the report reiterates this point for their readers, although you seemed to have missed it: "An effort was made to add up all the information to say how many people we now know to have suffered various offences. The numbers are much lower than what really happened, but they provide a starting point to which future information can add. The full report shows where these figures have come from..."

A much more comprehensive breakdown of the 2,000 confirmed deaths, including type of death and how the information about which deaths was acquired, as well as a much more general nationwide estimate - extrapolated from the two districts in which this study was conducted - of the total death toll can be found in the full report. Since making a concise estimate of a nationwide figure was not the objective of the full report to begin with (as I mentioned, it's a microstudy of two individual districts), it's easy to see why it wasn't included in the summary report. One of the authors of the study, Joseph Nkatazo, confirmed the 20,000 estimate arrived at by the Catholic Commission here. Thanks, --Katangais (talk) 21:44, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

I appreciate the detailed response. It makes sense, and other sources talk about 20,000, but this still doesn't explain why The Guardian cited the summary report instead of the full report if in the summary report there was no 20,000 figure. Thinker78 (talk) 06:22, 11 December 2017 (UTC)

It appears to be an editorial mistake made by a journalist who received secondhand information that the 20,000 figure was cited in the full report, then took that at face value and mistakenly cited the summary report - the only part of the full report available online - without actually reading it and realizing it wasn't the whole thing.

On another, related note the Catholic Commission's report is freely available in book form. Any Wikipedian who owns a copy should cite that as the primary source for the 20,000 figure in the future. --Katangais (talk) 07:00, 11 December 2017 (UTC)

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