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>>>>This is an urgent message for Dave, Jenny Coltart in Zimbabwe and their three children. For those of you who may not know him: David Coltart is a human rights activist/lawyer, who won a seat in Zimbabwe parliament last year despite Mugabes desperate attempts to terrorise the people. Dave, has been a very constructive force during parliamentary debates. Because of his outspokenness on human rights abuses, especially during Mugabe's genocide in the early 80's in Matabeleland where Mugabe had thousands of Matabeles men women and children slaughtered by the Red Brigade.!!!!!!!!<<<<<<<

Firstly Zimbabwe never had a red brigade though we did have the Fifth Brigade which was responsible for the massacres. Secondly the 1980s rampage was directed upon then PF-ZAPU supporters the majority of whom happened to be Ndebele. However PF-ZAPU supporters in other parts of the country were targeted as well and I personally witnessed houses of PF-ZAPU and UANC being trashed in Harare right in the middle of Mashonaland.

White people's pre-occupation with the suffering of the Ndebele supporters of PF-ZAPU while ignoring the suffering of PF-ZAPU supporters who were not Ndebele is callous, and I don't think it comes out of genuine sympathy for the victims but rather from a desire to drive a wedge between the people of Zimbabwe based upon ethnic lines.

Such attempts to emphasize the ethnic character of the 1980s disturbances, come out of ignorance of the history of the nationalist parties. None of the two major ethnic parties ever had a pure ethnic composition although PF-ZAPU was supported mainly by the Ndebele and ZANU-PF mainly by the rest of Zimbabwe's seven other tribes the majority of whom happen to be the Shona. Indeed during part of the 1980s disturbances the minister of defence in the ZANU-PF government was a pure ethnic Ndebele, Enos Nkala while the vice president of PF-ZAPU was Chinamano (husband of Ruth Chinamano) an ethnic Shona and prominent members of PF-ZAPU included Willie Musarurwa (ethnic Shona) who was fired as editor of the Sunday Mail by the government during the 1980s.

Also the ruthless supression of political opponents by Robert Mugabe-led ZANU-PF did not start with the murderous onslaught against PF-ZAPU in the 1980s but with a ruthless purge of opponents within ZANU-PF itself in the late 1970s. Some of the survivors of that purge include Wilfred Mhanda (a.k.a Dzinashe Macingura) who was recently interviewed by a South African newspaper detailing the ordeal they went through including being detained under inhuman conditions by Mugabe's ally Samora Machel. Several hundred of anti-Mugabe guerillas also died during those purges.

David Coltart is unpopular with Mugabe not simply because he is an MDC MP from Matebeleland but - because he is a lawyer - he is seen as being the mastermind behind MDC's legal campaigns which have embarrassed Mugabe's government to the extend that it resorted to harrassing the judiciary as you may very well know.

I would urge people to be thoughtful and try to understand the real context behind happenings in Zimbabwe instead of simply trying to superimpose their own prejudices as genuine intepretations of events. The very same thing of imposing prejudices on events happened at colonisation when European settlers claimed that the Shona were about to be exterminated by the Ndebele (therefore elevating themselves to rescuers of the Shona) when in fact Ndebele raids affected less than 20% of the Shona. The reason for that is simple, the territory occupied by the Shona (from Manica Province in Mozambique to the south-western regions of Masvingo province) was simply too vast to be subjected to raids by the Ndebele who always set out from Bulawayo on raiding missions rarely lasting more than a month.

However the colonialists perpetuated the myth that the Shona were about to be exterminated by the Ndebele despite the fact that the Shona and the Ndebele actually cooperated in trying to drive them of the land during First Chimurenga.

Similarly today attempts to view happenings purely in Ndebele/Shona shades totally ignore the fact that over 70% of Ndebele speakers in today's Zimbabwe are actually the descendants of Shona young men who were capture and incorporated into Ndebele raiding parties. They also ignore the fact that there has been so much inter-marriage among the two tribes that even today it is extremely difficult to find someone in Harare with no relatives in Bulawayo or vice-versa. Probably up-to 50% of under 40s in Zimbabwe are what I would call mixed-tribe (for lack of a better term) people resulting from Ndebele-Shona marriages, even if we ignore the fact the majority of the Ndebele are originally Shona anyway.