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THE PLANS: QUARTZ AND HECTIC

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The overarching mission was to utterly destroy the military

capacity of ZANU's armed wing (ZANLA) and assassinate its

political leadership in one swift blow.



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OPERATION QUARTZ

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This was the main conventional military strike. Under the

Lancaster House Agreement, thousands of ZANLA and ZIPRA (Joshua

Nkomo's wing) guerrilla fighters had gathered at designated,

highly exposed Assembly Points (APs) monitored by a small

British-led Commonwealth monitoring force. Operation Quartz

planned for the Rhodesian Army, Air Force, and armored units to

simultaneously attack these assembly points, trapping and wiping

out the massed ZANLA forces.



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OPERATION HECTIC

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This was the specific "decapitation" plan nested inside Quartz.

It tasked the Rhodesian SAS (Special Air Service) with launching

a massive assault on the ZANU-PF headquarters in Salisbury (now

Harare) at the Audio-Visual Arts building of the University of

Rhodesia. The primary goal was to assassinate Robert Mugabe, Rex

Nhongo (the ZANLA military commander), Simon Muzenda, and other

top leaders.



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WHY WERE THEY CANCELLED?

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General Peter Walls realized that launching a coup against an

overwhelming, internationally recognized democratic result would

lead to absolute isolation, a total cutoff of South African

backing, and an immediate escalation into an unwinnable total

war.