Vorster, the South African Prime Minister, to confront Ian Smith. On that day in Pretoria, South Africa, Henry Kissinger, then the US Secretary of State, combined with B.J. The conference (destined to be abortive) was the consequence of events around 23 September 1976. Adhering to the dictum of Mao Tse Tung that 'You cannot win at the conference table what you have not won on the battlefield', ZANLA was attempting to strengthen Robert Mugabe's hand at the Rhodesian settlement conference which opened on 28 October in Geneva, Switzerland. This guerrilla influx coincided not just with the start of the rainy season and the rapid spring growth of vegetation to cover ZANLA's operations. October 1976 saw the heaviest fighting of the war: 26 Rhodesian servicemen, 144 insurgents, and 84 civilians caught in between, died in the action. The Rhodesian security forces counter-punched with a series of intensive operations within the country. These claims were largely true and incidents, including attacks on vital railway lines and trains, had doubled in October. The British pressmen claimed that there were 2 000 insurgents operating inside Rhodesia by the end of October, and that another 8 000 were poised to enter from Mozambique. They were reinforcing the armed cadres of the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) - the military wing of Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) - who had been waging guerrilla warfare in the eastern half of Rhodesia with varying intensity since late 1972. Firstly The Daily Telegraph of London, on 28 October 1976, and then the Observer of 31 October reported the infiltration that month of hundreds of African nationalist fighters into Rhodesia from Mozambique.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |