Word: matabeleland
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Minister with the support of his ethnic group, the Shona, who make up about 80% of the population. Nkomo headed the main opposition party, composed of the Ndebele people. He was accused by the government of being behind Ndebele freedom fighters in the area of southwestern Zimbabwe known as Matabeleland. Since 1982 the rebels and the Shonas have waged a war that has claimed thousands of lives...
Mugabe's chief rival, Joshua Nkomo, fared well only in Matabeleland, the western homeland of his Ndebele tribe, where resentment of Mugabe's predominant Shona tribe runs high. Although Nkomo's party, the Zimbabwe African People's Union, won all 15 of the Matabeleland constituencies, redistricting had eliminated five seats that ZAPU held in the previous Parliament. Elsewhere, Mugabe's victory removed from Parliament three minority opposition parties, including pre-independence Prime Minister Abel Muzorewa's United African National Council, which had held three seats...
...seemed at one time that Nkomo and his followers were the major barrier to the once declared intention of Mugabe and ZANU to turn Zimbabwe into a one- party socialist state. But now Nkomo, ensconced in Matabeleland, his tribal home in the western part of the country, increasingly appears to many of his countrymen as more of a nuisance than the savior of Zimbabwe. There are several reasons for this, among them the fact that Zimbawe has begun to prosper economically. Also, Mugabe continues to court the country's influential white farmers, and he appears to be backing away from...
...between the two leaders continues, reinforced by the rivalry between Mugabe's 7 million-strong Shona tribe and Nkomo's 1.5 million-member Ndebele tribe. It flared again last week. More than 4,000 policemen and soldiers, including the Zimbabwean army's North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade, sealed off Matabeleland's main city, Bulawayo, and systematically flushed out so-called political agitators, criminals and dissidents. The soldiers arrested more than 1,300 people in house-to-house searches and at roadblocks...
Almost from the beginning of the ZANU-ZAPU dispute, the Mugabe government / maintained that heavily armed followers of Nkomo, remnants of his old guerrilla units, were making Matabeleland unsafe with a campaign of antigovernment violence and banditry. That contention was underlined last week when the government announced that its forces had discovered six unmarked graves in the Lupane area of Matabeleland and unearthed the corpses of six foreign tourists, including two Americans, who had disappeared in the region in July 1982. Mugabe said that the band of 22 dissidents allegedly responsible for the murders was identified as having connections with...