Ministers visit mutilated teachers

Press, 1 March 1984, Page 11

Ministers visit mutilated teachers

NZPA-AFP Harare Four Zimbabwean teachers who had their ears and noses cut off by antiGovernment dissidents last week were visited in a Harare hospital yesterday by two Government Ministers. The men taught in a school in the Mwenezi area of Masvingo province in south-eastern Zimbabwe. They said that they had been woken up at 10 p.m. on February 21 by five dissidents armed with AK automatic rifles. The dissidents had at-

tacked and mutilated the teachers, who could not speak Ndebele, because they had thought they were Government supporters, said the Minister of Health, Dr Sydney Sekeramayi. The dissidents cut off the ears and noses of two teachers, the ears, nose,and upper lip of another teacher, and the ears of a fourth teacher. A fifth teacher suffered a chest injury. The incident is one of the first in Masvingo, a stronghold of Zimbabwe’s Shonaspeaking majority and

Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union. The dissidents generally attack Government targets in Matabeleland, south-west-ern Zimbabwe, centre of the country’s Ndebele-speaking population who largely support Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union. The dissidents are generally former guerillas of Mr Nkomo’s wartime force who are now protesting violently against what they feel is unfair Government treatment of Mr Nkomo,

Z.A.P.U., and the Ndebelespeaking people. Mr Nkomo has disowned the dissidents and has repeatedly called for an end to the violence in Matabeleland. He said that Z.A.P.U. did not support the dissidents. “This is hideous,” said Dr Sekeramayi after visiting the injured teachers at Harare’s Parirenyatwa Hospital. “It is quite incredible that people in cold blood can mutilate innocent schoolteachers in the interests of Z.A.P.U.”