1624 Zimbabwe 5th Brigade arm patch (C518)

Name: 1624 Zimbabwe 5th Brigade arm patch (C518)
SKU: 1624
Price: 45.00 USD
Availability: InStock

$45.00

1624 : Zimbabwe 5th Brigade arm patch

1981 – To Date

Zimbabwe | Army | Badges | Arm patch

Fixture:
Material: Cloth, embroidered
Near mint

Zimbabwe 5th ‘Gukurahundi’ Infantry Brigade Leopard arm patch, scarce.

From Wikipedia: The 5th Brigade is an infantry brigade of the Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA). The 5th Brigade was created in 1981 from three former battalions of the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA). It later incorporated over 3,000 ex-ZANLA guerrillas from various units. The brigade was based in Gweru and participated in the Mozambican Civil War as well as a genocide known as the Gukurahundi which targeted Ndebele civilians and Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) guerrillas.

The 5th Brigade was reactivated in 2006 following a prolonged period of inactivity.

Unlike the ZNA’s other four brigades, this unit was to be armed and trained by a special North Korean military mission, which was chosen to train the newly-formed brigade because of Mugabe’s admiration for North Korea’s dictatorial regime. The 5th Brigade was not structured for conventional military operations but rather as a specialized counter-insurgency unit. Ex-ZIPRA and Rhodesian troops resented the brigade for its apparent exclusiveness and the fact that it was permitted to operate independently from the ZNA’s normal command structure, being subordinate only to the Chief of the Army. The 5th Brigade was trained from August 1981, when the first North Korean military advisers arrived in Zimbabwe, to June 1982 at Inyanga, an isolated mountain base near the Zimbabwean-Mozambican border. It was then moved to its permanent base in Gweru.

Operation Gukurahundi (1982-1987) commenced and endured within the Midlands and two Matabeleland Provinces of Zimbabwe through a Fifth Brigade army – trained by the North Koreans, and which was accountable to former President Robert Mugabe. This army sought to find 400 armed dissidents, but their excessively violent actions ultimately resulted in 20 000 civilians being killed, thousands being tortured and/or disappearing as well as 400 000 persons brought to the brink of starvation due to targeted food limitations within these regions.

1 in stock