With 50% of Rhodesia's entire border - from the north east corner with Mozambique as far south as the Beit Bridge road and rail crossing to South Africa - now subject to guerilla incursions, and the strong possibility of a third front, centred on Wankie and Victoria Falls, being opened in the north-west, further stringent controls are being imposed on the movements of African civilians. A number of warnings have recently been issued by the authorities, reminding members of the public of the dusk-to-dawn curfew in force throughout the border zone and operational areas, particularly Tribal Trust and African Purchase Lands. Virtually every official communique, issued every few days by Security Force Headquarters, admits to one or more African civilians being shot or killed in the curfew zone. On 4 April, it was announced that "a civilian African was killed while attempting to flee after being challenged by security forces"; on 15 April, "two curfew-breakers have been killed by security forces". An IANA report of 26 March stated that 11 curfew-breakers had been shot in the border areas in the previous fortnight alone.
In the protected and consolidated villages, conditions for the half million or so Africans who have been removed from their homes are becoming more regimented. Recruiting and training are now under way for the newly created Guard Force, due to take over administrative responsibility for protected villages in July 1976. The Force, which will ultimately number 1,000 men and comes under the Ministry of Defence, is being built up largely from Africans who have previously served in the police or the army. They are, it appears, soliders rather than administrators and are headed by a former Lieutenant-Colonel in the Rhodesian Army with experience, under the British, of counter-guerilla warfare in Africa and Malaya. Putting men of the Guard Force in charge of the protected villages will also release white Ministry of Internal Affairs officials, and regular troops currently on sentry duty in some villages, for more active military service elsewhere.
Despite strict security on the part of the regime, information on the living conditions of the residents of protected villages has recently been published in the form of a report by Mathias Chitauro, Chairman of the Chiweshe Residents Association. 50,000 Africans in Chiweshe Tribal Trust Land, 65 km north of Salisbury, are being forced to live, according to the report, in overcrowded, insanitary conditions in which stomach troubles, diarrhoea and dysentry are rife. In one village 14 people, six of them children, died during the period 29 January to 3 March 1976, out of a total population of 300 to 400 families.
Evidence of the sadistic and brutal attitude adopted by the Rhodesian security forces towards African civilians in the operational areas has also been provided by a former school inspector who served for five years with the Rhodesian Ministry of African Education. His descriptions of assaults on teachers and pupils suspected of withholding information about guerillas in the Mtoko area of north-eastern Rhodesia, were published in the London Sunday Times. Mr. Waters was eventually forced to flee the country for Botswana after making numerous protests to his superiors.
Recent legislation enacted by the Smith regime will severely restrict the work of welfare agencies attempting to provide assistance to Africans in the operational areas. (The Chiweshe Residents Association, for example, is an organization of Chiweshe workers in Salisbury, acting on behalf of relatives in the protected villages). The Emergency Powers (Maintenance of Law and Order) Regulations 1976, published in a Government Notice on 19 March, empower the Minister to prohibit any welfare organization from making payments to residents of the operational area "when it is known or suspected that the money, or things bought with it, have been made available to terrorists". Their enforcement will be one step further towards cutting the protected villages off from contact with the outside world.
Plans have also been announced by the regime, in the shape of the National Registration Act 1976, to require all Rhodesian residents, regardless of race, to carry identity documents at all times and to produce them on demand on penalty of a R$250 fine or 6 months imprisonment. The new Act, due to be introduced at the July Parliamentary session, will replace the existing Africans (Registration and Identification) Act.
