Word: nkomo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...almost a decade, they fought against Rhodesia's white minority regime. The alliance lasted through independence in 1980 and the renaming of Rhodesia as Zimbabwe. But then Prime Minister Robert Mugabe, 61, and his former comrade-in-arms, Joshua Nkomo, 67, began to quarrel over the political spoils. Today Nkomo and his Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) are locked in a bitter struggle for control of the country's future with Mugabe and his dominant Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU). Says a Western diplomat in Harare, the capital: "Mugabe must often wish that Nkomo would just retire...
...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...
However, the political feud 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...
...Nkomo was nowhere to be found. Having heard in advance of the government action, he had left Bulawayo to drive to Harare, 250 miles away. At a press conference he denounced "the siege of Bulawayo" and accused the government of pursuing a deliberate policy of intimidation. To his chagrin, Nkomo discovered on his return to Bulawayo that during the crackdown, government forces had confiscated his bulletproof Mercedes-Benz sedan...
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...