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Zimbabwe War Vets Say Abduction Reports Part of West, MDC Propaganda for Regime Change


FILE: A protester lies unconsciously on the ground after being beaten by police near Unity Square in Harare on August 16, 2019.
FILE: A protester lies unconsciously on the ground after being beaten by police near Unity Square in Harare on August 16, 2019.

Zimbabwe’s war veterans of the liberation struggle of the 1960s have dismissed as cheap political propaganda reports of nationwide abductions and beatings of civic society leaders and other activists, which government opponents say are being perpetrated by suspected state security agents.

Douglas Mahiya, spokesperson of the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans’ Association, claimed that the abductions are being created by non-governmental organizations, the European Union and their allies “with a regime change agenda”.

The EU, America, Britain, Australia, Canada, France, the Netherlands, Greece and others last week condemned the abduction and torture of political activists linked to the Movement for Democratic Change led by Nelson Chamisa, which recently called for nationwide protests over the deteriorating economic situation in Zimbabwe.

Mahiya said former freedom fighters are ready to defend the country’s sovereignty as indications are that some nations are working in conjunction with opposition parties to unseat President Emmerson Mnangagwa.

“All this is the work of the whites and their surrogates that include opposition parties. Don’t forget that these opposition parties are part of the white people’s agenda. They are capable of just displaying coffins and then claiming that they contain corpses of people that were killed by state security agents. How do we tell that the dead people were killed in a certain manner? The person may even have died in the mortuary.

“We know everything about this kind of propaganda because we once used that propaganda during the liberation struggle. We would capture a white person and then pretend as if we were burning him while we were just seating around the fire. This forced whites to come to us and when they did that we would leave the place and what followed is that they used to think that we ate people. Those were propaganda tactics we used to deceive our opponents …”

Responding to Mahiya’s remarks, the MDC led by Chamisa said the war veterans were day-dreaming as over 22 party members and other activists have been abducted by suspected state security agents in the past few weeks.

“What the war veterans are saying is an insult to Zimbabweans whose relatives are being abducted and tortured everyday. This is sickening,” said Maureen Kademaunga, MDC Secretary for Public Service and Social Welfare.

Police recently blocked public protests that were supposed to be staged by the MDC in various towns and cities over the high cost of living in Zimbabwe.

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