Harare | Monday
THREE South African spies jailed in Zimbabwe have revealed that the former apartheid South Africa government sponsored a small dissident group that sparked the 1980’s civil strife that left thousands of civilians killed in Zimbabwe’s western Matabeleland province.
In an exclusive interview granted to the state-run Sunday Mail, the former South African intelligence agents, who are now languishing in a Zimbabwe jail, said the blame for the massacres should not lie squarely on the Zimbabwe government but also on South Africa.
Kevin Woods, Phillip Conjwayo and Michael Smith now in their 13th year of life terms for a fatal raid on a house belonging to South Africa’s then outlawed African National Congress (ANC) in Zimbabwe’s second city of Bulawayo, say South Africa should also take responsibility.
President Robert Mugabe’s government sent troops of the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade to crush the uprising in Matebeleland.
A detailed report published by Zimbabwe’s Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace details harrowing accounts of the brutality committed by military squads, including the bayonetting of pregnant women and families being forced to dance on the graves of their dead.
The former members of Rhodesian security forces were in 1988 working as South African military agents hired to sabotage and spy against Zimbabwe as part of the Pretoria regime’s destabilisation activities in the region.
As part of the plan, the three alleged that South Africa helped create a dissident group out of the then Zimbabwe African People’s Union (Zapu) party led by the late nationalist and state vice president leader Joshua Nkomo.
Report details harrowing accounts of the brutality committed by military squads, including the bayonetting of pregnant women and families being forced to dance on the graves of their dead. A small number of the Super Zapu guerrillas became active in Nkomo’s home province of Matabeleland thousands of people were brutally killed in the conflict which began around the same time that Mugabe sacked Nkomo from his coalition government.
“(Zimbabwe) government was blamed for atrocities that they did not commit,” Conjwayo told the paper.
“In fact Super Zapu elements did more murders than the Fifth Brigade and the whole episode is blamed solely on the government when South Africa should also be blamed,” he said.
“South Africa recruited, trained and funded Super Zapu elements to carry out murders while camouflaged as members of the Fifth Brigade and the blame was laid on government,” said Woods.
Mugabe first expressed regret for the Matabeleland violence at Nkomo’s funeral in 1999. Last year he admitted the killings were “wrong” and amounted to “madness.”
“It was wrong and both sides (government and the rival Zapu) were to blame. We have had a difference, a quarrel. We engaged ourselves in a reckless and unprincipled fight,” he said last year. – AFP