New documents have come to light that implicate Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe in mass killings of Ndebele people in western Zimbabwe in January 1983.
Thousands of recently declassified 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 killings that were well-planned and systematically executed.
The documents appear to show that the massacres were closely associated with an effort by Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party to eliminate opposition groups in the aftermath of Zimbabwe’s independence. Zapu, a party led by nationalist rival Joshua Nkomo, represented the main obstacle to that objective. Given that Zapu enjoyed overwhelming support among Ndebele, the Ndebele as a whole came to be seen as an impediment. In the words of Mugabe, the people of Matabeleland needed to be “re-educated”.
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