ZIMBABWE-POLITICS: Alleged Assassination Plot Shrouded in Secrecy

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Charles Mtetwa

HARARE, Oct 10 1995 (IPS) - An alleged plot to assissinate President Robert Mugabe has been shrouded in near-secrecy here, unreported by Zimbabwe’s government-controlled dailies, state radio and TV.

But two men appeared in an in-camera court Tuesday, charged with conspiring to stage a coup against the government less than six months before presidential elections due in March.

Shadreck Paul Chiworeso (42) and Graham Hill (36) were arrested last week. According to the police, they are believed to be members of ‘Chimwenje’ (beacon), a shadowy group of Zimbabwean dissidents reportedly based in Mozambique and estimated to be about 1,000 strong.

Chiworeso and Hill were allegedly found in possession of boxes containing Zimbabwe national army kits destined for South Africa from where unidentified Zimbabwean military elements were to plan an overthrow of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union- Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), according to a police document.

A third accused, William Nhamakonha, was detained in August. He appeared at an in-camera hearing on August 21 on charges of smuggling weapons into Zimbabwe with the intention of attempting to assassinate Mugabe, who has been president since independence in 1980.

Nhamakona was reportedly found in possession of a Claymore mine, an AK-47 assault rifle, two fully loaded AK-47 magazines and 146 rounds of machine-gun ammunition.

If convicted the three face the death sentence.

Officials remain tight-lipped. “The issue is state security and we would not want to raise the political temperature,” police spokesman Mario Dube said. “More are still being arrested and the minister (Dumiso Dabengwa-Home Affairs) has ordered that we do not talk about it to avoid prejudicing investigations.”

A stony silence from the country’s only two daily newspapers — both government controlled — has surrounded the case and Dabengwa Monday ordered the retraction of a story on the alleged coup, filed Sunday by the national news agency, ZIANA.

“We have also been given orders not to cover the story by the Minister,” said a reporter at ‘The Herald’, one of the two dailies. “Until further notice we cannot write anything.”

Zimbabweans have been starved of independent news since the demise of the country’s first privately-owned daily, ‘The Daily Gazette,’ in December last year and few people here know of the reported coup plot.

The Mozambican media have periodically carried reports on the Chimwenje, who allegedly operate in bases controlled by the Mozambican Resistance Movement (RENAMO), a former rebel group, in Dombo, a district in the central Mozambican province of Manica, which borders on Zimbabwe.

In public statements here the Zimbabwean authorities has played down the Chimwenje issue and Defence Minister Moven Mahachi has repeatedly said the government had no information on the group.

Nevertheless, the interior ministers of Zimbabwe and Mozambique are said to have given high priority to the issue at a mid-April meeting in the Manica provincial capital of Chimoio, agreeing that the Chimwenje posed a possible threat to regional peace and stability.

The last armed uprising by dissidents here was staged in the mid-1980s by members of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), one of two groups that participated in the armed struggle against white minority rule, the other being ZANU-PF.

Concentrated in the southwest of the country, the uprising pitted members of Zimbabwe’s Ndebele minority (17 percent of the population) against an army which, like ZANU-PF, is made up mainly of Shonas, who form 80 percent of the country’s 10 million people.

It was brutally stamped out by the military but, on the political front, a coalition agreement between the ruling ZANU-PF and ZAPU in 1987 sealed the peace between the two groups.

Reports from Mozambique have linked the Chimwenje to two opposition politicians, Edgar Tekere and Ndabaningi Sithole, both of whom come from the Manicaland region, along the border with Mozambique.

Tekere, a former liberation war commander and post-independence parliamentarian who broke with ZANU-PF in 1989, leads the Zimbabwe Unity Movement (ZUM), which boycotted the April 8-9 parliamentary elections this year after claiming that they would be rigged.

Sithole heads the ZANU-Ndonga party, which split with ZANU-PF in the late 1970s, and is the only opposition group represented in the 150-member parliament, where it has two seats.

Both politicians deny any association with the Chimwenje.

“I do not want to comment on anything to do with that movement as I do not know anything about it,” Tekere, who had threatened to stage a coup after losing elections held in 1990, told the local press earlier this year.

RENAMO leader Afonso Dhlakama has also repeatedly denied the existence of the Chimwenjes. “You can travel throughout the Dombe and not find one chimwenje. We read about them in the national press only,” he said on one occasion.

Dombe residents admit in secret that the Chimwenje are in the area, but say they feared they will be punished by RENAMO if they speak publicly about the group, a Mozambican journalist told IPS.

“These Zimbabweans are there I can assure you. I don’t know how many of them are about but I do know that RENAMO is protecting them, helping them with food and logistics,” said the reporter.

“Everyone in Dombe is frightened of what RENAMO will do to them if they talk about these guys. Of course they deny the Zimbabweans are there, that is what RENAMO tells them to do,” he said.