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Ray defends US silence on Gukurahundi

Politics
United States Ambassador to Zimbabwe, Charles Ray, has attributed his country and the Western world’s silence on Gukurahundi issues to the news blackout that characterised the period 1982-87 when an estimated 20 000 civilians were killed during the armed dissident era. Addressing Bulawayo residents at a meeting organised by a local civic group, Bulawayo Agenda, […]

United States Ambassador to Zimbabwe, Charles Ray, has attributed his country and the Western world’s silence on Gukurahundi issues to the news blackout that characterised the period 1982-87 when an estimated 20 000 civilians were killed during the armed dissident era.

Addressing Bulawayo residents at a meeting organised by a local civic group, Bulawayo Agenda, this week, Ray said the massacres coincided with the Cold War period and most Western countries were preoccupied with the global phenomenon, hence their lack of appreciation of the genocide.

Gukurahundi is now slowly being recognised as a genocide and the only one in southern Africa. Activists from Matabeleland have accused the US and its Western allies of keeping mum over period.

“The period of the 1980s, I only know of it from what I have read from a number of sources. You have to keep in mind that that period was the Cold War and a lot of decisions were made by a lot of governments based on the war,” he said.

But, activists in Matabeleland accused the West of treating President Robert Mugabe as their “blue-eyed boy” hence their silence over the genocide.

In 1994, President Mugabe was awarded the Knight Grand Cross in the Order of the Bath by Queen Elizabeth II.

The knighthood was only revoked on June 25 2008 for his alleged “the abuse of human rights and abject disregard for the democratic process in Zimbabwe”.

The Gukurahundi genocide has hogged the limelight during public discussions in southern Matabeleland, which bore the brunt of the massacres.