Harare-Brigadier General Emile Munemo a former Commander of the ruthless Fifth Brigade which is responsible for the murdering and maiming of more than 20 000 people during the Gukurahundi genocide in the early 80’s has died.
He was in his late 60s.
Father to William Mutumanje aka Acie Lumumba, Munemo died on monday following a long illness.
Before his death Munemo had confessed to KP Yap, a doctoral student at the University of Amsterdam that Civilians had been brutally murdered during Gukurahundi.
There was no way the civilians were not aware, not part of it. The farm boy you see during the day is the guerrilla at night. It would not have been possible for any military operation to be conducted sorely against armed bandits.
He also admitted that the Fifth Brigade was overwhelmingly a ‘Shona’ tribal military unit which saw as part of its mission “settling old scores” with the largely Zapu-supporting Ndebele population in Matabeleland and the Midlands over historic Ndebele raids on the Shonas.
The blunt truth is that we are dealing with a situation in which there was a forced feeling of superiority and inferiority complexes between the two tribes. That is the truth. A subsequent explanation was that it was a clear question of settling old scores between the two tribes,” Munemo recalled
Brigadier General Emile Munemo was among the first students to graduate from the National Defence College in 2013. He had been promoted to the rank of Brigadier-General by former President Robert Mugabe in 2010.
Munemo was the Director General Civil-Military Relations in the Zimbabwe Defence Forces.
