Word: matabeleland
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...initially styled himself a democrat committed to market economics and black-white reconciliation, within a few years Mugabe began repressing internal opposition. Elections, in particular were accompanied by state terror. During the mid-1980s, he unleashed his army's North Korean-trained 5th Brigade on the ethnic Ndebeles of Matabeleland in central Zimbabwe, killing more than 10,000 for their support of Mugabe's rival during the liberation struggle, ZAPU leader Joshua Nkomo...
Ncube: Mugabe is extremely power conscious. He's obsessed. Anything that disturbs his power base, he immediately reacts. In the 1980s, he sent the [North-Korean trained Zimbabwean Army] Fifth Brigade into Matabeleland to kill 20,000 people. It was crazy. It was his own people. It's absolutely diabolical. Atrocious...
...journalists are routinely refused permission to travel to Zimbabwe, so I entered the country as a tourist and drove south from Bulawayo to the goldfields of the Great Dyke. I was following tens of thousands of Zimbabweans who, as the economy collapsed, headed to the gold-mining region of Matabeleland, hoping the red hills might give up something to live on. My goal was to get a firsthand look at the misery facing ordinary people in Zimbabwe today. But I had little notion of just how close I would...
...MAINTAIN MY PRETENSE AS A TOURIST, I would have been safer staying north, near the game parks and Victoria Falls. But Matabeleland is a microcosm of Zimbabwe's implosion. Thousands in the region are dying of malnutrition. Hundreds of thousands survive by trapping wild animals or bare-handed mining. When I arrived in the gold-rush town of West Nicholson, I met with a local miner in his bungalow. Several times during our 10-minute chat, he would step out for a few moments. It soon became clear why. When I emerged from his house, two plainclothes officers were waiting...
...than outsiders' disdain. The area's 500-plus orphans know why the choristers wrote Iwe AIDS: "You killed my father, you killed my mother ... I remain all alone." Dry, cracked streambeds are evidence of the unbroken drought. Some villagers are eating tree bark. More than 150,000 in the Matabeleland North province rely on foreign food aid. Here, as elsewhere, hardship is linked to politics. In the 2000 parliamentary elections, the mdc swept all eight seats in the province, its rural heartland. Last year, 61% of Matabeleland North voters chose Tsvangirai over Mugabe for President. Suffrage isn't supposed...