Guerrillas get Govt training

Press, 27 February 1980, Page 8

Guerrillas get Govt training

NZPA-Reuter Salisbury Joshua Nkomo’s nationalist guerrillas yesterday took a first step towards integrating with their longtime foes in the Rhodesian Government forces by reporting to the High Acres battle camp for retraining as conventional soldiers. New Zealand monitoring forces will patrol the camp while British troops train the guerrillas in Western warfare techniques. Some 610 of Mr Nkomo’s Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army forces left their cease-fire assembly points near the Botswana border to drive to this rain-

swept training camp south of Bulawayo. For the first time in years, many of them will be giving up their Soviet-type guns when they report to be retrained on Rhodesian-issue G 3 rifles and to be drilled as a conventional battalion. Major Richard Hatton, of the British Royal Artillery, is in charge of a 30-man British training squad, supported by 16 New Zealand troops who will patrol the perimeter of the guerrilla camp.

Integration of the rival forces that fought the sevenyear bush war is seen as a crucial step to avoid civil strife in a newly indepen-

dent Zimbabwe after this week’s General Election. The commander of Mr Nkomo’s forces, Dumiso Dabemgwa, said he was 99.9 per cent sure the largest of the guerrilla armies, Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, would also join the integration operation.

“They don’t wish it to break down. It won’t,” he added.

The guerrilla commander said he was prepared to serve under a white officer if required. “I am a soldier. I will serve under anybody, no matter what colour he is.” In Salisbury, the British

spokesman, Nicholas Fenn, told reporters a similar offer to rebase and retrain a battalion of Mugabe men had been made and welcomed and practical arrangements were being made for this to be done shortly. The Nkomo guerrillas drove to High Acres from the Lima cease-fire assembly point north of Plumtree on the Botswana border.

Some 22,000 guerrillas, three-quarters of them Mugabe men and the rest from Mr Nkomo’s army, have congregated in the assembly places under the terms of the December 28 cease-fire agreement.