The horrors of Gukurahundi and complicity of World Bank and IMF

📅 Published: August 17, 2025

📰 Source: thestandard

Curated by AllZimNews.com

While thecontroversial role of the IMF and the World Bank in countries such as Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Sudan and elsewhere in the world, have been raised and reified, sadly,in Zimbabwe,theirnefarious role in the Gukurahundi atrocities remains largely invisibilised, unacknowledged and hidden.

To put it into perspective, Gukurahundi was characterised by inversion of human rights violations, including torture, disappearances, abductions, sexual molestation, rape, ethnic profiling and arbitrary arrests, detainment in concentration camps, and callous murders that claimed over 20,000 innocent civilians.

The principal victims of the 3,500 North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade battalion were treated as Frantz Fanon’s ‘Wretched of the Earth’, Mahmood Mandan’s ‘subjects’, and Walter Mignolo’s ‘bare lives’ – subalterns whose lives were deemed worthless, dispensable, and expendable.

What is routinely ignored in the Gukurahundi reportages and narratives is the fact that the thenRobert Mugabe government enjoyed support from the multilateral donors including the twin Bretton Woods institutions-theWorld Bank and the IMF as well as the majority of the Euro-Western bilateral donors.

In particular, the duo of the World Bank and the IMF doled out substantial financial resources ostensibly in support of post-conflict reconstruction following the war of liberation that ended in 1980.

To be precise, the World Bank provided a total of US$646 million to Zimbabwe in official grants and loans between 1980 and 1987, while the IMF offered more than US$80 million.

For the avoidance of any doubt, the international financial institutions and the bilateral donors at the time,did not specifically offer loans, grants, and official development assistance (ODA) for the purposes of Gukurahundi operations.

However, their support gave the then government a fiscal space to finance callous, cruel and criminal activities as well as extra-judicial killings of innocent citizens.

As noted, the World Bank and the IMF were not alone in this generous support of the genocidal government of Robert Mugabe.

Most bilateral lenders and creditors also used their “dollar diplomacy” to offerfinancial and technical support to Zimbabwe as part of the geopolitics of the Cold War, a reward for Mugabe’s reconciliation policy, as well as part of the geostrategic approach to use Zimbabwe as a potential example foradesired post-apartheid South Africa.

The logic of the Cold War at the time demanded the continued tutelage of Mugabe to ensure that he did not fall into the communist camp.

In this context, the lives of thepeople of Matabeleland and Midlands were used as collateral damage.