Why all the focus on Dyck in Mozambique terror?

In the dust at the side of the main road between Bulawayo and Victoria Falls, the maroon-bereted Zimbabwe soldiers were beating a young man with thick sticks.

They didn’t care that they were doing it in front of us, the media.A BBC cameraman filmed while his correspondent, between blows, stuck his microphone in the face of a soldier and asked: “Why are you doing this?”

The soldier didn’t look up from his victim,. “These people…” Thud. Scream. “… Are such f***ing liars…”

The soldiers were members of the elite Parachute Battalion, comprised of mainly black soldiers of the former Rhodesia African Rifles, and commanded by ex-Rhodesian war veteran Lieutenant-Colonel Lionel Dyck.

He wasn’t there, he was somewhere in the teak forests of Lupane directing his other units as they searched for a  group of heavily-armed “dissidents” who had, a few days earlier, kidnapped six foreign tourists.

We journalists had seen Dyck the previous day, alighting from an Air Force of Zimbabwe (AFZ) helicopter. Hiding their faces in the back of the chopper were two British Special Air Service (SAS) members who had been seconded to help in the hunt for the tourists.

In the end, Dyck and the SAS had no success. And for us hacks, the story moved on rapidly when saboteurs blew up AFZ jets at the Thornhill airbase a day later.

Dyck and his troops were removed from the Matabeleland and Midlands provinces not long afterwards and little was heard of him until he led a highly-successful air and ground assault on the “Casa Banana” headquarters of Mozambican resistance movement Renamo in the mid-1980s.

However, the beating on the side of the road has had many sequels. The freelance photographer who accompanied me on the assignment, Alexander Joe, had got a fantastic black-and white picture of the beating, which appeared on
the front pages of Argus company newspapers in South Africa. I did the caption and made it clear the troops were Zim paratroops.

Decades later, that picture is still being used as an illustration of the brutality of the Zimbabwe National Army North Korean-trained Five Brigade, which went on a killing, rape and assault rampage across the south of the country, specifically targeting Ndebele people who they believed were supporting Zimbabwe African
People’s Union president Joshua Nkomo.

The difference: 5Bde would never have beaten people. They simple killed.

Dyck has been subsequently identified by many Ndebele activists and being part of the 5Bde slaughter.

That he was nowhere near the affected areas has done nothing to dim that false legend.

I wonder whether now Dyck is again in the firing line because, as a white-soldier – a “mercenary” – he is an obvious target.

Most journalists who have read the recent Amnesty International report on killings in Mozambique have focused on Dyck’s private military company, which is accused of deliberately targeting civilians.

Little has been said about the horrific brutality of the Islamic jihadists insurgents or of the untrained and trigger-happy Mozambique army who are responsible for the vast majority of the human rights abuses.

Some questions haven’t been asked. Dyck’s people have succeeded in liberating towns and villages from the  insurgents … so who wants him out and why?

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