Harare - Senior members of Zimbabwe’s Zanu-PF party confirm that President Robert Mugabe ordered mass killings of opposition supporters in the first uneasy years of independence, Australian researcher Stuart Doran says.
Mugabe has never acknowledged any role in the massacres beyond saying that the 1983 to 1987 atrocities were “a moment of madness”.
With a PhD in diplomatic history from the Australian National University, Doran was a historian for Australian Foreign Affairs from 2001, where he first saw cables between Harare and Canberra, which also quoted conversations between British diplomats in Zimbabwe and several members of Mugabe’s cabinet.
“Thousands of historical documents that expose the perpetrators are now becoming available in a raft of foreign archival collections and include diplomatic correspondence, intelligence assessments and raw intelligence garnered by spies recruited from within the Zimbabwean government.
“These papers substantiate… (that) Mugabe was the prime architect of mass killings that were well-planned and systematically executed.”
He says many observers long wondered how much of the massacres, in which about 20 000 are believed to have died, were known to western governments.
“It is clear that they knew a great deal… Nevertheless, Western governments did little once the massacres were brought down to a lower, but still savage intensity.
Independent Foreign Service