The only way forward for a country such as Zimbabwe with a history full of victims, perpetrators, secretly buried bodies, pervasive fear and official denial of massacres even by national newspapers such as the Mail, is to set up a truth commission as soon as the dictator goes in order to unite a hugely divided society.

My question to the Sunday Mail and those behind this sad but shallow story is: can a society build a democratic future on a foundation of blind, denied, or forgotten history? What the Sunday Mail must know is that from 1948, virtually every country emerging from a dark past has directly confronted such issues in the form of truth commissions.

The damage caused by Mugabe’s government on civilians goes far beyond the immediate pain of loss. Where there was torture, there are walking, wounded victims who can never identify themselves as part of the nation as they feel victims of the same nation they want to belong to.

Where there were systematic killings, or wholesale massacres such as those of the 5 Brigade in Matabeleland, there are orphans and witnesses to the carnage, and other family members too terrified to fully grieve. Where there are persons who disappeared, kidnapped by the 5 Brigade or CIOs without a trace, there are loved ones desperate for information.

Where there are years of unspoken pain and enforced silence (as what the Sunday Mail would want), there is often a pervasive, debilitating fear. I can predict that as soon as Robert Mugabe finally goes there will be a need for a Truth Commission for people to be able to once again trust the government, the police, and the army, including the secret service. That need is inevitable, and I am sure whoever takes over from Mugabe whether Zanu PF, MDC, NDA or NGA will make Mugabe and his gang legally accountable for their sins just as what happened to Saddam Hussein in Iraq. That way, a new Zimbabwe will emerge.

Whoever takes the presidential position, whether Zanu PF or MDC will need to recreate a habitable space of national peace, build some form of reconciliation between former enemies, and secure these events in the past.

I must say I was particularly horrified by the Sunday Mail story which seeks to deny the horrors suffered by people of Matabeland in the hands of the Mugabe’s notorious 5 Brigade.

People who think the 5 brigade issue should be consigned to history are probably those who know that they were accomplices to the massacres in many ways.

Evidence in countries that have experienced similar gross violations of human rights show that the best way to close the wounds is to open them up again, clean them out in order to close them permanently.

The trouble with the 5 Brigade massacres is that they were carried out with a flagrant disregard of the Geneva Conventions of 1948 and 1949. It is no exaggeration to say the conventions were intended to establish, even in war, a firebreak between civilisation and barbarism. The Genocide Convention of 1948 gave legal meaning and force to the worst crime in the lexicon. The 1949 Geneva Conventions codified and advanced the rules governing the deployment of an army within a state or outside the state differentiating legal conduct from illegal and criminal acts in war.

The same Additional Protocols of 1977 clearly state that if a government deploys an army to a troubled area… and that army happens to target non-combatants, the head of state and those who assisted in the deployment of the army have committed a crime against humanity.

The Geneva Conventions, in my view, are among the great achievements of civilisations which separated the modern human race from pre-modern society.

In reference to Zimbabwe, I am sure that the victims of the 5 Brigade massacres are prepared to forgive and move forward only if the perpetrators admitted the full truth on what happened in Matabeleland.

On this note, I propose the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission which should be led by religious leaders. The Sunday Mail story smacks of those many stories penned by Mugabe’s Secretary George Charamba and then, as usual, bulldozed into Mail's pages.

As a scholar of transitional justice, I have travelled to South Africa, El Salvador, Rwanda, Chile and Argentina to try and understand how a country and its people might recover from a period of widespread atrocities such as those of the Gukurahundi in Matabeleland.

I found that in Argentina they tried to prosecute only military leaders equivalent to Perence Shiri, in Chile they tried to cover up, it was the same thing with El Salvador – but South Africa got it right because the massacres were revisited, perpetrators and victims faced each other in public hearings.

Up to 21 000 victims of human rights violations in South Africa testified before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Because of that, there is scientific evidence to prove that South Africa is less divided today that it was before independence in 1994. The first ever scientific research carried out by Prof James L Gibson of Harvard University concluded recently that 42 percent of South Africans, black, white, Indian, coloured etc have reconciled as a result of the TRC’s activities.