Rhodesia
Sir: The purpose of Mr P. F. Scott (January 10). writing from Salisbury to criticise Judith Acton's 'Deaths behind bars' (December 19), seems particularly to offer the grisly bit in the middle of his letter — about marauders chopping off an African's ears, nose and lips, and making his wife fry and eat them. Yes, we heard this report. But others declare the culprits were one of the groups of African criminals released from prison, armed and sent out by the Government to terrorise, torture, rape, loot and kill peasant Africans and help themselves to everything, while pretending to be guerrillas — all under promise of not being hunted by the army and punished. Other Rhodesian Government African employees are reportedly dressed in guerrilla uniforms, going into villages to befriend and entrap sympathisers, taking their names back for the army to come and seize them.
Mr Scott persists in the happy description 'protected villages' for the barbed-wire Auschwitz 'cages' into which hundreds of thousands of helpless evicted villagers are herded, their homes burnt and cattle stolen by the military. African mothers: children or men daring to look askance at their 'cage guards or officials can be flogged, and are shot on the spot if they try to get out. Mr Scott calls this `prOtection'. Hundreds of these brutal open-.ait prisons now stretch for hundreds of miles, devouring the African areas from the north-west through the north and north-east, and today pointing south-west, parallel to the Mozambique border.
Mrs Acton's words stand undiminished. Indeed while her article was going to press the news reached. London of another detainee victim, Obadiah mbirimi, who died mysteriously in Marandellas Prison and was buried on December 1. for success fervently agree with Mr Scott in hoping or success of the talks. But how can Mr Ian Smith
succeed while defiantly repeating his challenge 'Majority Rule over my dead body!' , and .wh ilef deliberately excluding the massive representation o Bishop Muzorewa from the talks, fully aware of thke guerrilla army behind the Bishop waiting to brea
over from Mozambique?
Leonard W. Newman
25 Mount Pleasant, St Albans, Herts.
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