In this article, the first of a two part series, Southern Africa defence analyst, Paul Sorenson uses the testimony of ex-servicemen to provide a unique insight into Zimbabwe’s security architecture. The country’s war veterans – many only in their early twenties at independence – are still firmly embedded in the status quo, and remain ideologically committed to Zanu-PF. Sorenson says while junior officers may be disillusioned, a coup is nevertheless unlikely unless Mugabe loses control of the country’s carefully constructed system of fear, nepotism and loyalty.
DURING the 1960s and 1970s, as the struggle against white rule assumed a military complexion, Zanu effectively became a politico-military alliance whereby guerrillas and politicians co-operated with each other against internal and external enemies.
Coercion and violence became key tools for achieving political objectives.
The emergence of violence as standard practice was driven not only by white intransigence and the physical proximity of politicians and fighters but – of more long-term significance – by a quasi-nationalist ideology that proved unable to conceptualise a legitimate opposition or institutions capable of managing competition.
Independence in 1980 brought the ascendancy of Zanu-PF as a militarized political entity driven by an intense desire for hegemony, but the transition to black rule did not deliver a one-party state or political subservience on the part of Zimbabweans.
As a result, the nation’s security services were politicised in the 1980s by Zanu’s war veterans – principally through a process of affirmative action that discriminated against whites and the nationalist opposition, Zapu.
They were deployed against the latter and its supporters in the brutal Gukurahundi operation of 1983–84.
Today, war veterans continue to form the basis of the party’s coercive machinery, and remain dominant in the security services, despite the passage of time.
Former members of the Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA) and Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP) are categorical on this point and reveal that the special status granted to war veterans operates at a number of levels.
Veterans are well known within their units by virtue of their force numbers – reflecting their length of service – and by their overt support for Zanu-PF.
War veterans are also distinguished by the strong and exclusive bonds they have with each other, both formal and informal.
They have regular meetings that cut across official lines of seniority
More formally, the system accords veterans a range of privileges.
Aside from receiving superior material benefits, including monthly war service allowances in addition to regular pay, they are given preference in terms of promotion.
The ZNA promotion board looks favourably on candidates with a chimurenga (struggle) background and a history of strong support for Zanu-PF, commonly overlooking better-qualified applicants, while Mugabe appears to take a personal interest in the promotion of army personnel down to the middle ranks, as he has in the past.
It follows that “it is rare to find a war veteran who is holding a junior (rank) unless that person has been … demoted due to misconduct or indiscipline’.
They (war veterans) dominate the officer corps from non-commissioned officers upward.
Since 1999 – when Zanu believed it should move to a war footing with the emergence of the MDC – this loyal and motivated nucleus has been mobilized through the Joint Operations Command (JOC), based on a Rhodesian military structure and staffed by the heads of the security services, all of whom are veterans of the independence war.
JOC has played a pivotal role in campaign violence from 2000 onward, providing tactical direction, human resources and logistical support to large militia groups.
While the Western media has stereotyped ‘war vets’ as youthful impostors, far too young to have fought in the (liberation) war, this has overlooked the key role played by genuine war veterans in organising these groups – not only in planning, but also in execution – even if most of the foot soldiers are Zanu-PF youth, junior soldiers and others who have been press-ganged into service.
On the ground, veterans serving in ZNA, the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) or the air force have co-ordinated operations with non-serving ex-combatants or joined them in undercover roles.
Former members of the forces confirm these connections.
An ex-soldier from the Presidential Guard commented that veterans inside and outside the forces “always come together towards or before elections to campaign”, while many former servicemen – when identifying the most brutal members of ZRP and ZNA – place responsibility for political violence directly on the shoulders of their commanding officers; Brigadier Generals, Lt Colonels, Colonels, Majors and senior NCOs.
The traditional linkages between war veterans even extend to the point of replicating tasks for personnel who have proved to be ‘specialists’ in various roles.
For example, in 2000 there were credible reports that Perence Shiri – the former commander of the Gukuruhundi unit who is now head of the air force and a member of JOC – played a pivotal role in recruiting 1500 ex-guerrillas to lead the invasion of commercial farms and organise Zanu-PF ‘re-education’ camps.
Other sources indicate that Shiri was intimately involved in the implementation of JOC’s Operation Makavhoterapapi, which sought to deliver victory to Mugabe in the presidential run-off of June 2008.
The use of hardened killers like Shiri and their rise through the ranks is not anomalous; one former soldier observes that preference is shown to veterans “according (to) how they have contributed to the struggle of Zanu PF, e.g. those who participated in Gukurahundi and their election campaigns”.
Armed forces strength
Zimbabwe has spent a large percentage of GDP on its defence and security organs since 1980 and, on paper, their strength is still impressive in regional terms.
The army has five infantry brigades, plus parachute, special forces and mechanised brigades (one of each).
It can reportedly call on 25 000 soldiers, supported by an array of hardware including around forty main battle tanks, eighty armoured infantry fighting vehicles, eighty armoured personnel carriers, 240 artillery pieces and Chinese and NATO-style small arms.
The air force has around 4 000 personnel and forty-five combat-capable aircraft.
Officially, the ZRP has around 30 000 officers, though many of these are youth militia; more are apparently being added through a major recruitment drive that began in 2009.
The Zimbabwean government claims that the police force’s target strength is 50 000.
The strength and condition of the CIO is concealed beneath the rubric of the president’s office.
These army and air force figures reflect declared strength and quantities of hardware that are known to have been sold to Zimbabwe over the last three decades, but the real operating strength of the services is much weaker.
Economic decay has meant that large portions of equipment on the inventory have not been maintained and that working conditions have deteriorated in equal measure.
This in turn has meant that thousands of experienced personnel have deserted or resigned since 2000.
But the corrosion of the country’s external defensive capability and ZRP’s competence is not of primary concern to Zanu-PF.
The nation does not face a credible threat from outside, nor is conventional law enforcement a key consideration; the party’s focus has always been to retain domestic power.
Here, the imperatives of control and coercion are less expensive and less complex.
Hardware requirements have been met by stockpiling large quantities of riot gear, small arms and ammunition – equipment that has been sourced from a number of countries, but principally from South Africa and China.
Auxiliary transport and fuel requirements are generally purchased at the onset of election campaigns.
Meanwhile, Zanu continues to rely on war veterans inside and outside the services as its human resources backbone, augmented by the youth militia, 29 000 of whom are still formally on the government payroll.
These contingencies mean that the party retains confidence in the raw physical element that has always underwritten its power – government officials regularly assure regional partners that the prospects of mass violence in Zimbabwe are slim.
Yet there is one exception to this self-assurance: poor morale among the rank-and-file of the services and its possible impact.
Security services morale
Senior members of the security services have been cushioned against the deteriorating economic climate in Zimbabwe by their integration into an elaborate system of patronage.
This has incorporated preferential access to state finance, which has been used directly for personal expenses as well as a means of establishing and running businesses.
Regular visits to the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe by members of JOC are a visible demonstration of this reality.
Senior officers have also benefited from the use of state resources within their professional ambit and from manipulations – or outright disregard – of the legal system.
Since Zimbabwean involvement in the 1990s war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, these abuses have often shown in partnerships with corrupt entrepreneurs, collaborations which synergise state protection and leverage the expertise and capital of the private sector.
With the demise of the Zimbabwe dollar in early 2009, the upper echelons of Zanu-PF have suffered from a decline in liquidity, given that control of the printing press allowed for the purchase of hard currency and a multiplicity of goods on both the retail and parallel markets.
Economic pressures have therefore impinged on senior members of the services and created discomfort.
However, the most senior are given priority in terms of direct assistance and their business interests remain largely intact.
The situation among the rank-and file is clearly different.
More directly impacted by the state of the fiscus and resentful of their second-class status in the services, this group is less attached to Zanu-PF and has become increasingly disorderly.
Desertions and mass resignations have been a feature for many years, although open indiscipline was not marked until late 2008 when soldiers rioted in Harare after failing to receive their pay.
These disturbances were quickly suppressed, but tensions continue to simmer.
Early in 2009, a group of Zanu-PF politicians and activists – including at least one cabinet minister – felt obliged to remove party T-shirts after their bus broke down outside an army barracks.
An abnormally tight rein is also kept on the distribution of weapons and there are reports that senior officers fear being assassinated on parade.
Inclusive government
Low morale in the security services appears to have been a key consideration in Zanu-PF’s decision to consummate its marriage of convenience with MDC in February 2009.
The timing of Mugabe’s reluctant shift from prevarication to partial implementation of the so-called Global Political Agreement (GPA), closely following violent indiscipline in the forces, is unlikely to have been coincidental.
As such, the GPA does not indicate recognition of the need to depoliticise and professionalise the security services, but rather the opposite; it is prompted by a desire to tighten control and ensure that the source of Zanu-PF’s power is not destabilised.
These motives were already on display during the negotiating phase – when Zanu-PF was unbending in its determination to keep all security ministries for itself – and subsequent events have provided repeated confirmation.
MDC has not been allowed to acquire any purchase on the services, notwithstanding a number of hollow gestures designed to satisfy regional public relations requirements.
The party’s Giles Mutsekwa, who until recently shared formal responsibility for the police with Zanu-PF’s Kembo Mohadi, was manifestly impotent, as shown by the divergence between MDC’s demand for an immediate end to land invasions and the intensification of seizures since the signing of the GPA.
Other examples include the politically motivated arrests of many MDC members of parliament, beginning with the abduction of ministerial nominee Roy Bennett at the very moment the cabinet was being sworn in.
Similarly, the saluting of MDC President Morgan Tsvangirai by some of the generals on Defence Forces’ Day 2009 and the convening of a new security body, the Zimbabwe National Security Council (ZNSC), are political manoeuvres, not substantive concessions.
According to legislation passed by parliament in February 2009, ZNSC – chaired by the president and including cabinet ministers and the security chiefs – is meant to be responsible for ‘reviewing national policies on security, defence, law and order and recommending or directing appropriate action’, as well as ‘ensuring that the operations of the security services comply with the Constitution and any other law’.
Privately, senior security personnel have rubbished the ZNSC as a confused concept, one driven by MDC’s desire to supplant JOC’s day-today co-ordinating role while usurping the president’s rightful function as the executor of national security.
Party politics dressed in nationalist and patriotic garb, certainly, but it places naïve expectations of security sector reform in their place.
Prospects of MDC building genuine trust with the upper levels of the security establishment are minimal, even were it to capitulate completely and form a unity government with Zanu- PF.
Former members of Zapu and its armed wing, Zipra – who, unlike most in MDC, contributed to the chimurenga and have not excited suspicion as‘agents of imperialism’ – have remained subordinate within Zanu-PF since a unityaccord of 1987, regardless of their often zealous advocacy of the Zanu cause.
For instance, ex-Zipras in ZNA are still subject to political and ethnic discrimination; survey respondents consistently pointed to the paucity of Ndebele officers in the senior ranks: as one described it bluntly, they ‘don’t like Matabele people’.
Among politicians, former members of Zapu complained that they were not given ‘due and fair recognition’ in Zanu-PF and that Zapu had ‘lost its identity’.
These realities serve as yet another reminder that Zanu-PF is fundamentally a politico-military alliance grounded on a supremacist ideology, a phenomenon whose historical depth will not be loosened by Machiavellian necessities, still less the rhetoric of unity.
Coup Prospects
The possibility of a coup or conflict between factions of the security forces has been widely discussed by observers and participants in the Zimbabwe crisis.
Aside from frequent speculation that the generals might make a pre-emptive strike against Tsvangirai and MDC – a not unreasonable supposition – it has become conventional wisdom that failure to find and maintain a political compromise will lead to factional anarchy; the words ‘chaos’ and ‘Somalia’ have become the clichés used to express this new orthodoxy.
This hypothesis focuses on tensions among senior military personnel and the Zanu-PF hierarchy.
But there has been little attempt to determine attitudes among the rank-and-file and consider how these might affect the direction of events in an unstable environment.
The views of ex-servicemen do not exclude schismatic violence, yet they paint a more nuanced picture.
First, it seems clear that the factional politics which so dominate the life of Zanu-PF are of scant interest to younger members of the forces.
There are regular – and often intimidatory – attempts to push members toward one or other of the groupings, but these appear to have little impact on most.
As a corporal from 3 Brigade put it: “they are no longer loyal to any of the two factions (headed by Emmerson Mnangagwa and Solomon Mujuru) thus … they have been deserting the army. There is a huge influence with(in) ZNA for people to support these factions but … lower ranks ignore the call by the generals”.
In light of these attitudes, it appears likely that much – perhaps the bulk – of the forces would be unwilling to become involved in armed conflict between Zanu-PF factions in the military.
This does not render such violence impossible.
As noted above, the officer corps of ZNA is stacked with war veterans and is therefore intrinsically political.
Former servicemen also point out that nepotism and regionalism are factors: “the generals, commissioners recruited their relatives and deployed them across the country”, commented a lance-corporal, while another solider observed that factional loyalties are not universal in the forces but “it depends (on) where you come from”.
A third felt that factional fighting was “likely because … there are tribal grounds”.
Yet one of the most obvious possibilities implicit in the responses of servicemen is the potential for inter-generational violence – and, indeed, they were quick to raise this themselves: “There are high chances (of factional fighting) due to intolerance of junior officers by senior officers. It is very likely because of generation(al) dimensions. Some officers … know their roles are oppressed”.
Likewise, a private noted succinctly that: “junior officers and senior officers have different agendas”.
Of course, these assertions beg the question as to why such a scenario has not played out already.
Fear, lack of initiative and practical problems have been the key inhibitors, according to ex-servicemen.
A typical and predictable sentiment was that Mugabe had formed structures and methods designed to overawe the rank-and-file, principally through war veterans, informants and swift retribution.
Junior elements, wrote one, are “afraid of the so-called CIOs who are planted in each and every corner of Zim”.
Others concur: “there are intelligence officers within the forces … In the security forces one can not trust anyone. If you’re suspected of inciting mutiny you disappear without a
trace.
“They fear for their lives … in Zimbabwe it’s not allowed to (go) up against your (commanding officers) or you will face death. The senior officers instil fear (in) junior officers … they are always said to be MDC candidates”.
Beyond this, “no-one has planned it” argued a corporal from the Presidential Guard – and logistical obstacles include the fact that “they are disarmed and do not have full control of armouries, weapons and important information”.
For some, these problems mean a rebellion led by junior officers is highly unlikely: “fear and other forms of intimidation has made it practically impossible for (junior) officers to stage a coup”; “chances are very slim because the juniors are so afraid of their … generals so they take orders as they come”.
But opinion is divided. “They need planning and leadership before they can do it”, maintains one, yet he insists “they are willing to do it”.
Another says insubordination “was there but on a lower profile and the junior officers need support from outside”.
These differences of opinion should not be overstated.
Two elements emerge with clarity.
First, the strength of the bonds between Zanu and war veterans, combined with the inertia of thirty years’ of incumbency, mean that the bulwarks of the status quo are formidable.
Second, the junior ranks are nevertheless deeply disgruntled.
It seems fair to conclude, then, that Zanu-PF is in a strong position to retain control within the military over the short to medium term, but that a serious breakdown or weakening of internal controls – or the emergence of a group of charismatic risk-takers – could quickly unleash a violent backlash.
To be continued. This is an abridged version of the article published in the August/September 2010 edition of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) journal.