THE above were Rhodesian Hunters diving to bomb Camp C at Tembwe, Mozambique, on November 25 1977 with flechette bombs.
Tembwe was a refugee camp in Mozambique that accommodated Zimbabweans during the liberation war.
The 18 000 six-inch steel darts were meant to pierce human bodies.
They were targeted at the parade ground at Camp C, Tembwe, to ravage the bodies of refugees at this rear base.
It is not hard to imagine the cruelty of condemning anyone to such a fate.
There would be no survivors.
If anyone survived, he/she would be so terribly injured he/she would be better off dead.
Fortunately, this was on November 25, two days after the Chimoio raid and so those at Tembwe had vacated the camp.
As at Chimoio, Rhodesians avoided the Tembwe Operations Base.
Such a terrible weapon of mass of destruction was targeted defenceless refugees and not the over 1 000 commandos at the Tembwe Operations Base.
Fletchette bombs are an internationally banned weapon of mass destruction.
It would be harsh enough to use these against the military but to unleash these on civilians was genocidal.
In the Chimoio-Tembwe raid, which the Rhodesians codenamed ‘Operation Dingo’, the soldiers committed atrocious crimes.
Not only did the Rhodesians attack defenceless women and children, the sick and amputees, which in itself constitutes a war crime, but they also used weapons of mass destruction against them which is an additional crime against humanity.
To the Rhodesians, therefore, questions of morality and ethics did not arise.
They wanted to keep Zimbabwe and all its wealth exclusively for themselves — and no other consideration mattered.
They used weapons of mass destruction such as 20mm French matra cannons, alpha bombs, 68 mm rockets, 1000lb bombs, banned weapons such as the 303 Browning machine gun, 37mm rockets, frantan and napalm bombs.
Their Hunters, Vampires, Canberras, Lynxes, DCs and Alloutte helicopters unleashed these lethal weapons of mass destruction indiscriminately on defenceless civilians, refugees, women, children, the sick and amputees.
Just as it was immoral and unethical for the British to wrestle our country from us using force of arms in their greed, the same immorality and lack of ethics was manifest at Chimoio and Tembwe.
They were illiterate of human rights.
The British were never morally justified to rob us of our country through murder and bloodshed, thus it was reprehensible that they should have pursued an unjust war with utter criminality when we were fighting to get our country back from them. They were never justified to plunder and loot our wealth for 90 years, having robbed us in the first place.
They should not have dragged us into further bloodshed. The murders and massacres of the First Chimurenga were travesty enough.
Detailed war crimes
The effect of dreadful weapons of mass destruction was devastating as Cde Muchemwa records:
“The carnage was worse than Nyadzonia.
The majority, over 1 000 had died on the parade grounds from high velocity shrapnel, from the bombs.
The bodies were mangled, with injuries to the head, neck, chest and abdomen resulting in blown out chests and eviscerated bowels.
Ghastly traumatic amputations of limp were also common among the dead and almost all survivors of the bombing had shrapnel injuries to the limbs.
The effect of napalm bombs was also devastating.”
Thus it is not possible to imagine the pain the victims went through as the bomb fragments tore through their bodies, tore apart and splintered and shredded their bodies. The horror and shock of it all – it is nothing less than horrendous.
For those who were not caught up in the bombing or survived this holocaust, the worst was yet to come.
At Percy Ntini base, the amputees who had survived the morning’s bombing, were ambushed and killed by the SAS.
At the ZANLA HQ Base, five comrades who had been cooking porridge were not shot by the SAS, instead they buried them alive in drums of boiling porridge.
Twenty other comrades whom they captured were executed with their hands tied to their backs.
At Parirenyatwa, patients who were in an ambulance clearly marked with the red-cross emblem were executed, and so were others who were hiding beneath the ambulance, while hundreds others had perished in fire resulting from the bombs and from napalm.
Napalm burns at at least 4 000 degrees celcius. It is not possible to imagine the agony they went through.
At Nehanda Base, hundreds of girls and women were executed by the SAS, one-by-one: “For almost an hour, from about 2pm, their M16 Rifles had been heard firing non- stop.
The hallowed air filled war heads, of the 5.5mm M16 rounds, yawed on impact so that the entry wounds appeared ghastly and bigger than those made by ordinary rifle bullets and the exit wounds were worse.” (Muchemwa: 2015).
The Rhodesians pursued their genocidal mission to conclusion without any compunction, with such utter cruelty for what was never theirs in the first place.
At the medical stores they poisoned vials of medicines, injecting the vials with various types of poisons including cyanide, resulting in the death of survivors who were treated with these medicines.
At the food stores, tinned foods were injected with poisons by the SAS and survivors of the massacre who ate this food perished.
Water Sources: They poisoned all dams and water sources around the Chimoio camp. In all, it is estimated over 2 000 people were killed, the majority of whom were defenceless women and children.
Corpses were booby-trapped so that those who would collect them for burial would also be killed.
The cruelty of the Rhodesians is incomprehensible. The utter disregard for human life, the utter rejection of the humanity of a people because you covet what is theirs reveals the depth of the evil visited upon us by British greed and lust.
Our crime – we refused to be regarded as part of the natural resources of our country to be exploited by them and rather stood up to claim what is ours.
These are the war crimes of the Rhodesians which they committed from November 23 to November 25 1977 at the ZANLA rear bases of Chimoio and Tembwe.
The cruelty of the Rhodesians was, and still is, incomprehensible!