SUMMARY
Shortly after the first free elections, Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF (Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front) began to move in the direction of marginalizing the opposition and strengthening their hold on power. In the 1980s, following tensions between ZANU-PF and ZAPU, violence broke out in Matabeleland, and supporters of ZAPU and people belonging to the Ndebele group became targets of army massacres (read more about the group respectively: ZANU and Patriotic Front). The Government of Zimbabwe and its supporters also increasingly began to use violence and intimidation to ensure victory in elections.
The harassment of the opposition and the manipulation of elections through violent means increased in the early 2000s when two interconnected developments gave the ZANU-PF leadership cause for concern about its future. One was the emergence of the MDC (Movement for Democratic Change), the first opposition party able to challenge the government, and the other the rejection through a referendum of a draft constitution proposed by the government. Furthermore, 2000 saw the start of a land seizure program and farm invasions that were often violent. To a large extent, the government has relied on war veterans from the liberation struggle, reinforced by youth militias, in carrying out the campaigns against white farmers and opposition supporters. Due to this fact, it has often been impossible to establish with certainty that the government has been behind the killings of civilians. It is likely that much of the one-sided violence in connection to elections and farm seizures since 2000 has been more or less directly sanctioned by the ZANU-PF leadership. Usually, police and security forces have failed to intervene and perpetrators have not been prosecuted. The government has usually denied accusations of one-sided violence, either denying events had taken place or blaming them on the opposition. However, it has been convincingly documented that most of the violence in connection to the 2008 elections was directed by the security forces.
In 2006 large diamond assets were discovered in Marange, a district located in the eastern region of Zimbabwe. Initially, ZANU-PF effectively encouraged a diamond rush by declaring the fields open to anyone to mine. In 2008, the extensive diamond trade was mainly handled by illegal miners and out of control of the government. In late October 2008, the government launched a “clean up” operation to gain control over the diamond fields and mines in Marange. This operation resulted in over 200 civilians being killed.
The Government of Zimbabwe first became active as a one-sided actor in UCDP data in 2008, when the one-sided violence resulted in over 25 civilian deaths. The threshold was reached in mid-June when government-sponsored election violence between the 29 March election and the 27 June presidential run-off resulted in more than 25 deaths.
