‘Brutality’ File On Rhodesia

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30977, 5 February 1966, Page 15

‘Brutality’ File On Rhodesia

(N.Z, Press Association—Copyright)

LONDON, Feb. 4.

The Right Rev. Kenneth Skelton, Bishop of Matabeleland, is collecting a dossier on alleged brutality by Rhodesian officials against Africans in his diocese, the “Church Times” said today.

A front page story, under the headline “Brutal Actions by Rhodesian Police,” says the Bishop intends to publicise his report as widely as he can as soon as it is completed. The report, says the “Church Times,” is expected to reveal how men have been beaten up by police officers, how the contents of their homes have been smashed, how, in a drought season, water boreholes have been disconnected, and how water containers have been punctured by bullets so the people have been left without means of storing water. A mission priest who visited areas where some of the incidents occurred the “Church Times” withheld has name—referred to what he called “Smith’s effrontery in claiming to the world there was no unrest in Rhodesia.” “The real position is that beatings now appear to be a usual part of police action,”

he is quoted as saying. In one area, the priest claimed troops of African policemen from the Shona tribe were made responsible for law enforcement over peoples from the Ndebele tribe. “It is difficult not to think that this is a deliberate attempt to foster tribal animosity,” he said. “Certainly this is the interpretation put on it by the local people, and it is justified by the attitude and brutality of the policemen." When he took pictures of two African policemen beating up a man on the ground, the film was confiscated and he was taken to European police for interrogation, he said. “They stoutly justified violence, without the slightest attempt to conceal what they were doing,” the priest said, He claimed they told him violence was the only language these people understood.