Editor's note

New light has been shed on the British government’s willful blindness to the atrocities carried out by the Zimbabwean government in Matabeleland in the 1980s. The new information comes from previously unpublished official communication between the British and American governments. Hazel Cameron sets out how Margaret Thatcher’s government chose not to intervene because doing so was seen as being against Britain’s interests.

Thousands of Myanmar’s Rohingya people are being driven from their homes, rounded up into camps, and forced to flee across the border into Bangladesh or take their chances with people smugglers. And more frighteningly still, the world has seen this pattern of events many times before in the run-up to mass killing. Alicia de la Cour Venning explains why it’s time to call the crisis what it is: a genocide.

Thabo Leshilo

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Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s clampdown on dissent in Matabeleland claimed up to 20 000 lives. EPA/Aaron Ufumeli/ Pool

British policy towards Zimbabwe during Matabeleland massacre: licence to kill

Hazel Cameron, University of St Andrews

The effects of President Mugabe's post-independence security clampdown that led to the murder of between 10 000 and 20 000 Zimbabweans, known as the Matabeleland massacre, continue to be felt.

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