Gukurahundists running scared as SA actors pile up pressure on them

South African performing arts group, Siphesakhe will stage another show that exposes the Zimbabwe government's post independence ethnic cleansing campaign now referred to as "Gukurahundi Genocide."

The blood cuddling play will be held at Athlone hall in the coloured township of Cape Town on August 26. However some posters advertising the controversial play were removed by unknown people at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT).

One of the Siphesakhe actors said he suspected the posters were removed by Shona speaking students at the institution who wanted to protect their leader, Robert Mugabe.

This is a clear sign that the Shona will always support and protect Mugabe on Gukurahundi genocide. The Shona, regardless of their political affiliations, have never condemned Mugabe or the Fifth Brigade for the massacres in Matabeleland and Midlands.

They have praised Mugabe in private for killing the Ndebele and their allies.

Some MDC-T supporters in the diaspora have refused to join exiles from Matabeleland in anti-Gukurahundi protests.

Some of the Shona students abroad have been denying that the massacres took place saying the government was dealing with dissidents-some of whom proved to have been trained and armed by the government.

The majority of Zimbabwean students at the CPUT are Shona and are on a presidential scholarship while those from Matabeleland are private students. The Matabeleland Genocide took place between 1983 and 1985.

During that time the killings were on a massive scale. But in 1985 when there was an international outcry, the government changed tactics. Operatives from the spy agency,the Central Intelligence Organisation(CIO) and those from Police Internal Security and Intelligence(PISI) resorted to abductions instead of public executions.

The ethnic groups targetted for extinction under the Zanu-PF "master plan" were the Ndebele, Kalanga, Venda, Xhosa and Sotho.The ethnic cleansing campaign-a form of genocide was carried out by Zimbabwe's notorious army unit, the Fifth Brigade.

The brigade, trained by North Koreans, was a Zanu killing machine. Its recruits were exclusively drawn from Mugabe's Shona tribe. At their training camps in Nyanga, the young soldiers were taught to hate the Ndebele

The Fifth Brigade campaign included mass murder of villagers, rape, sexual assaults, torture of those accused of being dissidents, illegal detention centres and concentration camps, abductions and deliberate targetting of Ndebele, Kalanga, Sotho and Venda speaking professionals.

The ethnic cleansing campaign also included the destruction of Ndebele homes and starving of villagers-often referred to by Zanu leaders as cockroaches.

The word cockroache was the same term used by leaders of Rwanda's Hutu Power to describe their Tutsi victims. The Hutu Power leaders were accused of planning the 1993 genocide in Rwanda where the French and Belgians turned a blind eye.

The Matabeleland massacres which were declared genocide by Genocide Watch, left more than 20 000 civillians dead, thousands disappeared without trace and now presumed dead. More than 200 000 people fled into Botswana.