Word: nkomo
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...have beaten the odds for 13 years, and they are doing their darndest to stay in power. True, Rhodesia is closer to a change in rule--either through the domestic process outlined by an "interim agreement" signed in March, or by the intervention of Front troops led by Joseph Nkomo and Robert Mugabe--than it has ever been. But it is likely that Smith and his cohorts will hang on a while longer, both by holding off the guerrilla forces and by poking enough loopholes in plans for "transition to black majority rule" to make them more nominal than real...
...Rhodesia's governing Executive Council had agreed to their terms for an all-parties conference dealing with the country's future. That conference-the basis of Anglo-American plans for a peaceful settlement-would also have to include leaders of the black nationalist Patriotic Front, Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe, who are Smith's bitter enemies...
Even as Smith was consenting to the conference, U.S. officials conceded that "a serious complication" made it very uncertain whether Nkomo and Mugabe-not to mention their allies in the five front-line states of Angola, Mozambique, Zambia, Tanzania and Botswana-would attend. While Smith was promoting the cause of his internal settlement in Houston, Texas, the Rhodesian armed forces carried out a devastating series of raids on military bases of Nkomo's Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) deep inside Zambia. In all, Salisbury claimed, its air and paratroop forces hit 12 different ZAPU camps and killed...
...biggest raid at Chikumbi, 14 miles north of Lusaka, caused political problems along with casualties. Flying out of the morning sun, Rhodesian fighter-bombers circled over Chikumbi for nearly 45 minutes. According to Nkomo, 226 men were killed and 629 were wounded in the attack on the base, which housed nearly 3,000 unarmed civilians as well as ZAPU fighters. Two hours later, Rhodesian forces struck another camp at Mkushi, northeast of Lusaka, killing at least 50 guerrillas...
...Nkomo insisted that the Rhodesians had hit a refugee center for young, old and ill Zimbabweans at Chikumbi. "We even had some blind people there," he said after the raid. Medical teams in Lusaka who treated the casualties said most of the injured were young men of military age wearing green fatigue uniforms...