World Notes ZIMBABWE

They were armed with rifles, but the 20 black rebels who descended on two white missionary farms in western Zimbabwe one night last week chose not to use them. Instead, the bandits rounded up 16 inhabitants, including seven women and five children ranging in age from six weeks to 16 years, tied them with barbed wire and then hacked them to death with machetes. According to horrified farm workers, the rebels chanted revolutionary songs before burning the bodies of the victims. It was the worst episode of antiwhite violence since the former rebel colony of Rhodesia gained black-ruled independence from Britain in 1980.

The attackers, who oppose the regime of Prime Minister Robert Mugabe, spared the life of a 13-year-old girl so that she could deliver a note explaining the massacre as an assault on "capitalist oriented" values. The victims, two of them Americans, belonged to a Pentecostal community engaged in agricultural production.