Operation Lifeline-Tete Corridor
This corridor is a tarred 263-kilometre road running from Nyamapanda on the Zimbabwean border through the Mozambican city of Tete to Zobue on the Malawi border. After UDI in 1965, this route carried Rhodesian goods to and from Malawi, which had not applied United Nations sanctions against the Smith regime. After the independence of Mozambique in 1975, the bulk of Malawi's trade with South Africa went through Rhodesia by road via Tete. It was only in 1984 that trade via this route declined because of Renamo attacks.
It was in the wake of these developments that in June 1984 the governments of Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe formed a joint security committee 13. The aim of the committee was to monitor operations on a day-to-day basis and to attempt to remove all security threats along the Tete Corridor. Zimbabwe's First Mechanised Battalion was ordered to move into Mozambique and they established their headquarters in Tete thereby securing the strategic bridge crossing the Zambezi River. In 1985, President Samora Machel of Mozambique formally requested the governments of Tanzania and Zimbabwe to contribute troops for "the restoration of law and order" in Mozambique. This led to the deployment of Tanzanian troops north of the Zambezi river and Zimbabwean troops to the south.
The decision to send Zimbabwean troops to help restore law and order in Mozambique was partly influenced by Zimbabwe's close relationship with the Mozambican government which dates back to Frelimo's assistance during Zimbabwe's war of liberation. There was also the underlying fact that Frelimo and ZANU shared a common Marxist ideology of scientific socialism. The South Africa-backed Renamo professed to be an anti-communist movement, as did Jonas Savimbi's Unita movement, which was fighting against the Marxist MPLA government of Angola. There was thus an ideological alliance of the Maputo - Harare - Luanda axis, with support for these governments from the Soviet Union. The fact that the United States of America was providing covert and overt support to opposition movements such as Unita in Angola and Renamo in Mozambique reflected the extension of the Cold War to Southern Africa.
Read more about this topic: Zimbabwe National Army, Past Operations
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“Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.”
—Francis Bacon (1560–1626)
“And now in one hour’s time I’ll be out there again. I’ll raise my eyes and look down that corridor four feet wide with ten lonely seconds to justify my whole existence.”
—Colin Welland (b. 1934)