Recently documents were made public revealing
President Robert Mugabe’s of Zimbabwe role in
slaughtering 20,000 of his own people. The
massacre known as the Gukurahundi Massacre
began in 1983 and targeted ethnic Ndebele
civilians in western Zimbabwe.

The Gukurahundi Massacre was one of
Mugabe’s first efforts to eliminate political
opposition to what would be his 35 year reign
as President of Zimbabwe. Mugabe famously
said of the political opposition in the
predominant Ndebele area as “needing to be re-
educated.”
According to Stuart Doran, of the Daily Maverick
newspaper in South Africa, “thousands of
historical documents that appear to expose the
perpetrators are now becoming available in a
raft of foreign archival collections. The
documents are wide-ranging and include, among
others, diplomatic correspondence, intelligence
assessments and raw intelligence garnered by
spies recruited from within the Zimbabwean
government. These papers—augmented by the
testimony of Zimbabwean witnesses finding
courage in old age—appear to substantiate what
survivors and scholars have always suspected
but never been able to validate: Mugabe, then
Prime Minister, was the prime architect of mass
killings that were well-planned and
systematically executed.

The most recent documents reinforce previous
investigations and reports that President
Mugabe and “the [ZANU-PF] 20-member-policy-
making group spoke of a decision of the central
committee that there had to be a massacre of
the Ndebels,” according to Eddison Zvobgo, who
spoke to the Guardian UK and was a member of
this group.
This reign of terror was carried out by the
Zimbabwean Army’s Fifth Brigade, which
ravaged communities in western Zimbabwe and
conservatively saw 20,000 Ndebele murdered.
However, scholars and activists believe the
number dead could go as high as 80,000 dead.
Most significantly, these documents also reveal
that these murders were not orchestrated by
outsiders and were “one component of a
sustained and strategic effort to remove all
political opposition within five years of
independence. ZANU-PF leaders were
determined to secure a victory against a non-
existent opposition in elections scheduled for
1985,” according to the Guardian.

Mugabe is the current President of Zimbabwe,
and he has been Head of the Zimbabwe state
since 1980. Mugabe refused to accept his loss
during against opposition leader Morgan
Tsvangirai in 2008, which provoked violence,
hyperinflation, a destruction of infrastructure
across the country, and international sanctions.

saharareporters.com/2015/06/02/explosive-documents-reveal-mugabe’s-hand-murdering-20-thousand-zimbabweans

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