Members of the former Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) have urged the Government to declare a national holiday in remembrance of the young men and women who were massacred by the Rhodesian army in Zambia in the 1970s.
ZIPRA was the military wing of ZAPU, one of the major nationalist political parties during the armed struggle.
Mkushi, a camp for female ZIPRA combatants in Zambia, was ambushed and bombed by Rhodesian forces on 19 October 1978. Thousands of young women were either killed or injured.
The Rhodesian forces also launched an assault on Freedom Camp in Zambia, just at the same time as the Mkushi attack.
Speaking to the Southern Eye, ZIPRA War Veterans Association secretary Petros Sibanda called upon the Government to facilitate reburials for the victims. He said:
The government should declare memorial dates for such painful days like these where a lot of girls and boys were bombed in Mkushi and Freedom camps, respectively in these transit camps.
There should be an activity to commemorate such painful events.
The government should facilitate reburials or establish museums so that people can go there and do rituals.
Some may want to go and pray there.
Former Nampundwe camp instructor Cetshwayo Sithole said the bombing of the camps showed the Rhodesians’ callousness. He said:
What is so painful is that these were refugee camps declared by the United Nations, the Rhodesian forces had decided to deliberately abandon the war at the front and targeted soft targets to dislodge us.
These were boys and adults who were not eligible for war doing agricultural activities to feed those in the front.
The camps were established to prepare people for what was going to happen after the war; that the nation was supposed to do farming to sustain themselves.
Former ZIPRA combatants often complain that the Government is deliberately trying to erase their contributions during the armed struggle.
A few years after independence in 1980, the Government confiscated properties and war records belonging to ZIPRA, accusing the former combatants of fomenting an insurrection.
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