Zimbabwe’s Mnangagwa taking flak over the ‘Gukurahundi’ massacre
Johannesburg — Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa is urging the country to put behind it one of its most painful episodes: the army’s massacre of as many as 20,000 people from the minority Ndebele ethnic group in the 1980s. Mnangagwa, who replaced Robert Mugabe as president in November, was minister of state security at the time of the killings that started in 1983, three years after independence from the UK. Opposition leaders, former ruling party members and civil-rights groups say he and other members of his new administration bear some responsibility for the atrocities. Mugabe has previously described the episode as a "moment of madness." "We should look into the future," Mnangagwa said in an interview in his office in the capital, Harare, last week. "The thrust should not be for us, in this new dispensation, to go and engage in the past." Mugabe ordered the military action after sporadic attacks on civilians by so-called dissidents said to be linked to the Ndebele-dominate...
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