‘Britain aided Zim massacre cover-up’
A CAMPAIGN for justice by survivors of a series of massacres carried out by troops loyal to former Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe in the 1980s has cast renewed light on alleged British complicity in covering up the killings.
A conference of survivors and relatives of victims of the 1983-1987 Matabeleland massacres, also known as the Gukurahundi, called on Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa to launch a truth and reconciliation commission into the atrocities.
But a British academic who has studied UK archives says there is also evidence that Margaret Thatcher’s government deliberately ignored the killings and even tried to water down media reports about the atrocities.
Hazel Cameron, a lecturer in International Relations at the University of St Andrews and the only researcher to have seen the British documents, said there was no doubt officials were aware of the atrocities but failed to act.
“As early as February 17 1983, Western governments including the British government had access to information of shocking atrocities and suggestions from witnesses that this was similar to what the Nazis carried out against the Jews, but they were willing to turn a blind eye to it,” Cameron, who published a paper on Britain’s “Wilful Blindness” to the massacres last year, said.
She cites documents showing that a British military training mission to Zimbabwe trained officers from the Fifth Brigade after evidence of mass murder and rape came to light and that a Foreign Office official attempted to persuade BBC journalist Jeremy Paxman to moderate a Panorama documentary about the killings, she said.
“The rationale for naked realpolitik, which is what we saw taking place in the eighties, is multilayered, but what comes through is that economic and strategic concerns trumped concerns about human rights,” she said.
The Gukurahundi began as a conflict between Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party and Zapu, another nationalist party that had also fought against minority white rule before independence.
A campaign of violence by a North Korean-trained army unit called the Fifth Brigade saw thousands of people from Zimbabwe’s Ndebele minority, from which Zapu drew much of its support, murdered, raped and forced into exile.
Both Mugabe, who ruled Zimbabwe for 37 years, and Mnangagwa, who ousted him in November, are widely believed to have been instrumental in orchestrating the campaign.
Lawyers in Bulawayo filed an application for a court order to force British Prime Minister Theresa May to release the documents on Tuesday. – The Telegraph