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Ex Chimoio supremo says he would kill all MDC supporters
Emmanuel Mungoshi, The Standard (Zimbabwe)
October 31, 2004

http://www.thestandard.co.zw/read.php?st_id=897

A former top liberation war commander says if he had his way, he would kill supporters of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

Major Midson Mupasu, who says he was the camp commander at Chimoio when the Rhodesian army swooped on refugee bases and massacred civilians in the late 1970s, claimed the MDC was there to negate the gains of the liberation struggle.

Speaking recently on a ZTV programme Face the Nation, Mupasu who says he was also responsible for 12 Zanla bases in the area from 1976 to 1977 said: "If it were up to me, I would kill them (MDC supporters). What MDC is doing hudzvanyiriri, husveta simba (repression, exploitation). They want to bring back the colonial system, that will never happen."

Mupasu said: "MDC should be thankful that Zanu PF is a people's party and a very fair organisation. In my opinion MDC is not supposed to operate in Zimbabwe. They should all be arrested."

Mupasu, who is now attached to the Zimbabwe Military Academy, also said he despised white Zimbabweans. "Even today when I see whites I spit on the ground. I don't want to see whites. I don't even want to talk to them, I don't want to see them on the farms that we have occupied," declared Mupasu.

The programme, presented by Masimba Musarira, began with a video clip showing decapitated bodies, burning houses and the freedom fighters in action.

This was then followed by a group of war veterans who recently visited the shrine erected in honour of the war heroes who died at Chimoio.

Mupasu addressed the group and gave a description of the pre-independence massacres that were perpetrated by the Rhodesian forces.

Mupasu said he survived the raid although he sustained some injuries.

Several Zimbabweans have complained about the "hate language" that is increasingly gaining currency at the national public broadcaster's, ZBC radio and television. They point out that in Rwanda by mid-April 1994, Radio Television Libres des Mille Collines RTLM had effectively become the genocide's coordinating body, broadcasting lists of "death-worthy" Tutsis. It also broadcast names of other "enemies of the (Hutu) republic," urged militiamen and citizens to seek them out, and congratulated lynch mobs for "a job well done."

In December, 2003 the Rwanda Tribunal in Arusha sentenced RTLM director Ferdinand Nahimana to life imprisonment, Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza to 35 years, reduced to 27 years, and a third for 35 years, for fanning the flames of the 1994 genocide, in which an estimated 800 000 people were killed.

On June 1, the Tribunal sentenced Belgian-born Georges Ruggiu to two concurrent 12-year prison terms for broadcasts that fanned the 1994 genocide.

Survivors remember RTLM, the rabidly nationalist Hutu radio station, as "Radio Tele La Mort (Radio Death).

At the end of last year, a radio station calling itself Voice of the Patriot was heard broadcasting in the Bukavu region, in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, near the borders with Rwanda and Burundi station.

The radio, thought to be using a mobile transmitter in the mountains above Bukavu town, issued warnings that Tutsi soldiers from Rwanda and Burundi were coming to massacre local residents.

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