Therefore, everything was done in the first two years to push ZAPU leaders to err and give Mugabe the excuse to strike mercilessly. The coalition government was an astutely deceptive maneuver to prepare the final annihilation of ZAPU. Joshua Nkomo, having called before the elections for a united front that he too hoped to dominate, was not in a position to decline the offer. Nkomo was first offered the ceremonial presidency—a golden cage—and refused it, only to land in Home Affairs in a Cabinet where his party was blatantly underrepresented. He was further humiliated at the Independence ceremony, where Mugabe was in the spotlight while the “father of the Nation” was left in the anonymity of a back seat. These were the first steps of the strategy of tension, with repeated inflammatory statements and clashes between ZIPRA and ZANLA elements. In the same vein, Nkomo was demoted to a junior Cabinet position of minister for the public service in January 1981. This was the first cycle of a pattern of inclusion-subjugation that Mugabe has consistently practiced with his opponents.
ZANU strategists (in particular Emmerson Mnangagwa, security minister and former head of ZANLA’s intelligence, Enos Nkala, who had a long-standing score to settle with Nkomo, and Edgar Tekere, then a ZANU firebrand) found favorable ground in the outbreaks of armed violence in the assembly camps, where guerrillas were cantoned after the ceasefire.53 These incidents were linked to the conditions of the protracted process of demobilization and integration in the new national army (ZNA).54 In fact, the government favored its own guerrillas from ZANLA, and numerous military personnel affiliated with ZAPU were humiliated, beaten, or even murdered by their ZANLA colleagues. Many of these ZIPRA elements later defected from the ZNA and became “dissidents” to protect their own lives and out of desperation.55 Mugabe later alleged with his usual cynicism that their behavior proved that ZAPU had plotted an insurgency.
In February 1982, the government claimed to have uncovered arms caches on ZAPU properties in Matabeleland and former ZIPRA assembly points and used it against ZAPU leaders as evidence of a plot in preparation. This was a weak excuse since government heads had prior knowledge of these arms caches and an ad hoc committee, including Mugabe and Mnangagwa on ZANU’s side, met in early 1982 to discuss the matter.56 Besides, the discovery of arms caches belonging to former guerrilla armies—or to the South African ANC with which ZAPU had strong ties—was routine in the years following the end of the war and ZAPU alone was not to be blamed. Both guerrilla armies had concealed weapons near the assembly points in the eventuality of their party losing the 1980 elections—to resume war if need be. Nevertheless the two most senior former ZIPRA commanders (Dumiso Dabengwa and Lookout Masuku) were arrested in March and detained until the end of 1986.57 Most ZAPU Cabinet members then dramatically resigned. Mugabe called the ZAPU ministers in the government, especially Joshua Nkomo, “a cobra in the house.”58 The party’s farms and properties were seized by the state—most of them never to be returned, even after the 1987 Unity Accord, which sanctioned ZAPU’s defeat. Fearing for his life after a raid on his home, Joshua Nkomo left for exile in March 1983, to return only in 1985.
ZAPU leaders were apparently caught by surprise by the crisis unraveling. They refused to endorse the activities of the “dissidents” and the government never established that a direct connection existed between the unrest in Matabeleland and ZAPU’s leadership. Nkomo himself did not believe that these “dissidents” had anything to do with his party. ZAPU leaders knew too well what the balance of forces in the country was; launching a new guerrilla insurgency once the ZIPRA forces had been disarmed and largely demobilized—hence the timing of Mugabe’s attack—was nonsensical. In any case, verbal attacks and threats by ZANU-PF leaders against ZAPU began long before February 1982. A unit called the Fifth Brigade was tasked to perform scorched earth tactics in Matabeleland (see Chapter 2); it was in reality a political army operating outside the normal chain of command, led by a ZANU cadre, Perence Shiri, who owed his fast promotion not to his abilities but to his personal allegiance to Mugabe to whom he reported directly. The Fifth Brigade began training as early as August 1981, purportedly to deal with the then nonexistent “dissidents.” An agreement with North Korea to train the brigade was signed as early as October 1980 and kept secret: Mugabe made his preparations for the brawl long before any “dissident” problem arose.
One of the benefits of “reconciliation” for Mugabe was the crucial role played by white civil servants in ZANU-PF’s takeover of the state apparatus in all sectors, including security. Although General Peter Walls (former head of the Rhodesian army) took early retirement in July 1980 and was sent into exile in September the same year—after he revealed his distrust of Mugabe—some white commanding officers in the army, the police, and even the CIO were retained for a while. Thus, when fighting broke out among rival guerrilla armies, former Rhodesian army units under white officers’ command dutifully moved into the camps at Mugabe’s request and assaulted the ZIPRA forces—whom the government blamed for the violence. Later on, military operations against the alleged ZAPU “dissidents” in Matabeleland began with some units of the integrated national army under the command of white officers willing to demonstrate their loyalty, such as Lt. Colonel Lionel Dyke,59 until the partisan Fifth Brigade was ready for deployment in January 1983. As Mugabe hinted to Smith once, professional soldiers led by Rhodesian officers loyal to the new constitutional government played a central role in his security.
By late 1982, several hundred former ZAPU guerrillas had taken refuge in the bush, thus giving the government the excuse it was looking for to violently attack Matabeleland. State violence targeted not only the former ZAPU guerrillas but the whole Ndebele community, which was accused without proof of helping and supporting the “dissidents”—and this was made painfully clear by numerous statements from top government officials. In the ensuing military operations, the Fifth Brigade terrorized civilians by committing countless war crimes but made no serious effort to chase and capture the “dissidents,”60 in spite of the disproportion of forces: only 122 “dissidents” turned themselves in countrywide to benefit from the 1988 amnesty. At the peak of the phenomenon, there must have been no more than a few hundred in all of Matabeleland. What government propaganda presented as banditry, and many observers analyzed as an undeclared civil war, was in fact a premeditated mass political purge intended to uproot ZAPU and isolate its leaders from their popular support base. The modus operandi of the killings suggests that they were not excesses perpetrated by some unruly soldiers, but a planned policy of terror.61 ZAPU’s representation in Parliament was to be severely reduced if not totally annihilated. Prior to the 1985 elections, party branches were dismantled, party officials arrested, and ZAPU supporters intimidated both in Matabeleland and in areas outside Matabeleland where the party had received a significant share of the vote in the 1980 elections: north of Mashonaland West, southern Midlands, and some Harare townships. It worked there, but not in Matabeleland, where massive violence was counterproductive as the people voted nevertheless for Nkomo’s party.62
The regime brushed aside criticisms of its brutal treatment of innocent civilians and alleged the existence of threats to its national security, pointing to South Africa’s destabilization activities. As always in effective propaganda there was an element of truth. Small South African army units perpetrated raids on Zimbabwean territory. Saboteurs sent by the apartheid regime bombed an arsenal at Inkomo Barracks near Harare in August 1981, attempted to kill Mugabe in December the same year, and managed to destroy several aircrafts of the Zimbabwe Air Force in July 1982 at Thornhill Air Base in Gweru.63 However, there was no link whatsoever between pro-ANC ZAPU and the then South African government. The South African Special Forces recruited among Matabeleland refugees in Botswana and trained them in Transvaal as a guerrilla unit called “Super-ZAPU,” which operated intermittently in Matabeleland South and North.64 However, Super-ZAPU was not recognized as genuine by other “dissidents” and ceased to operate in mid-1984. In any case, government security agency atrocities were by far the most compelling factor