Troops ‘stopped food supply’

Press, 26 April 1984, Page 4

Troops ‘stopped food supply’

By

NEAL ASCHERSON

in Harare

A Catholic bishop in Zimbabwe is accusing the Army of preventing food being distributed to faminestricken mothers.

He complains that the Matabele people, in southwest Zimbabwe, have been the target of “punitive collective measures” inflicted on the pretext of suppressing armed rebels and their supporters. Bishop Henry Karlen Bulawayo says that on a visit to missions in southern Matabeleland he saw troops forbidding mothers receiving relief food for themselves, while allowing their children to be fed. “The soldiers won’t allow us to feed mothers. There is no human feeling in certain people, something shattering when you see it,” the bishop said. “Their commanders say

they are acting on orders from Harare,” he said. “Whether that is true, we do not know.”

Bishop Karlen alleges that the Army’s fifth brigade and the Presidential guard, both operating against Matabele “dissidents,” were “inhuman to some extent.” But he contrasts them to the parachutists who are “very disciplined.” Almost the whole of southern Matabeleland has been declared a closed zone, which can be entered only with a pass, and there is a dusk-to-dawn curfew. All shops in the area were shut from February 3 to March 10, and may now open only twice a week. In a period of disastrous drought, crop failure, and famine, the Army is closely controlling food supplies into the region in case they fall into the hands of “dissidents.”

The Bishop insists that the Catholic Church fully supports the purpose of overcoming the “dissidents,” whose motives were mostly criminal rather than political. But he asked: “Why should so many people suffer? We don’t know if these measures have any effect against the ‘dissidents,’ but we do know their effect on the population, which is starvation.”

There was no grass and no crops in the regions, tens of thousands of cattle had died, and children were fainting from hunger in the schools.

“These measures imply somehow that the people are feeding and protecting the ‘dissidents.’ We are certain that the vast majority have never protected them.” Colonel Magama, an officer of the first brigade at Bulawayo, said last week that “to a certain extent we try to control the dissidents by food. But we would not withhold food as a punishment, nor try to cut it off.”

He said that the rebels were supplied with arms by South Africa, “which will go on infiltrating dissidents until they make us sign some agreement like the March 16 Nkomati Accord between Mozambique and South Africa.”

Copyright, London Observer Service.