Ben Freeth speech to Royal Geographical Society
This is the text of a speech presented by Ben Freeth at the Royal
Geographical Society in London on Wednesday 14 March for the launch of the
Mike Campbell Foundation, together with a photo.
His co-presenters were Dr John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York who, as a
High Court judge in Uganda, was beaten up by the Idi Amin regime, and Dr
Paul Negrut, President of the Emmanuel University of Oradea, Romania. Dr
Negrut is respected internationally for his stand against the repressive
communist regime.
14 March 2012
Presentation at the Royal Geographical Society
London
Dictatorship in Zimbabwe: What stands in its way?
By Ben Freeth
It is a great honour and a privilege to be here tonight and talking to you
all with Archbishop Sentamu, [the Archbishop of York], and Dr. Paul Negrut
[of Rumania]. I have such a deep respect for them. Thank you, Kate Hoey
[Labour MP for Vauxhall, South London], for chairing. Thank you all for
being here in this place – this place from which missionary explorers like
David Livingstone set out on his explorations into the African interior all
those years ago.
Many of you here tonight will know my story. I will not dwell on it. There
is a book for you to read and a film for you to watch. In the sustained
attacks against us by the state machinery in Zimbabwe I have been beaten
with whips; beaten with sticks; beaten with rifle butts. I have been kicked
around on the ground and had bones broken and my skull fractured. I have
been shot at. I have been abducted. I have been tied up. I have had guns
put to my head. I have been arrested. I have had our home surrounded by
men with guns. I have had our home broken into by men dragging burning
tires through it and threatening rape and death – and threatening to eat our
children. We have had everything stolen and everything burnt and when we
got off the farm we did not even have a toothbrush between us. It is only
by the amazing grace of God that I stand here today.
But I wish to talk tonight about something from long ago that I have come to
hold very precious – something more precious in holding societies and
nations and peoples together than anything else. It is something that 12
years ago I knew almost nothing about; but which now, only when it was taken
away, I have come to value so greatly.
There is a story about a place by a river in Africa. One day a crying baby
came floating down the river in a little basket and one of the women of that
place heard the baby crying and rescued it and looked after it. The next
day a woman came floating down the river holding onto a log and she was
emaciated and had been raped. The people in that place took her in and they
gave her food and looked after her. The day after that a man who had been
mutilated came floating down the river. He had had his hands chopped off
and he was also very thin. The people of that place bandaged him up and fed
him and looked after him.
The days went by; and then the weeks; and then the years. All the time
desperate people carried on coming down the river – mostly in waves.
Sometimes very few people would come down and it was thought that everything
must now be OK upstream. At other times great numbers of people desperately
needing help would come down. The people of that place carried on helping
where they could; but they couldn’t help everyone and the suffering was very
great.
Over the years so many people came down needing food and medicine that the
people of that place began to suffer themselves – and many of them didn’t
want to help any more.
And so it is so often under dictatorship. We used to come to Harare
sometimes and talk to the people there about what was happening in the rural
areas and the people would often say: “Is that still happening?” And mostly
they would try to change the subject.
When the film Mugabe and the White African first came out, I met an elderly
gentleman here in London who said to me after watching it: “You know, I have
never met an evil man.” It was clear to me that this man had never tried to
go upstream. You see people generally do not like to go upstream. They are
afraid of what they might meet. They are afraid of what might happen to
them.
In Zimbabwe there are some influential people that have tried to go
upstream. The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture tried to come in but he was
turned around at the border and deported. Unfortunately the UN did nothing
about it.
When Zwelinzima Vavi, the Secretary General of COSATU, the trade union
movement in South Africa, flew up to Zimbabwe in 2005, he was put in a
minibus and deported. He tried to come back a second time but after that
the trade unions have failed so far to do anything effective about the melt
down taking place on their northern border.
When the Prime Minister of Zimbabwe, [Morgan Tsvangirai], wanted to go to
the [Marange] diamond fields in his own country where some estimate that 25
percent of the world’s diamonds lie, and where a military massacre had taken
place, he was turned around too – and was unable to go back.
I asked various senior people in the Zimbabwe Government to come out and see
with their own eyes what was happening on Mount Carmel Farm where we lived.
When we eventually got them to come they assured us we could farm on; but
when, within hours of their leaving, there was further brutalisation of our
workers and all of our crops and tractors and everything else was stolen
and eventually our houses burnt down, they never tried to come again or to
say anything about it.
When we went to the Southern African Development Community’s highest court,
the SADC Tribunal, about the racial discrimination in taking our homes and
livelihoods, the complete lack of any compensation and the flat denial of
even giving us or our workers a hearing in our own courts regarding our
criminalization for living in our own homes and trying to produce food in a
nation that is starving, we won.
But what did the southern African states do to enforce that? After the
Zimbabwe Government had been found to be in contempt of the highest court in
southern Africa three times, the southern African leaders at their last
summit [May 2011] closed the doors of that court and sent their judges
packing. To this day – to the best of my knowledge – no outside government
has said or done anything about the Zimbabwe Government’s continued contempt
of court!
When the British Government was asked in parliament recently to write to the
Secretary General of the UN to activate the UN Committee on the Elimination
of all Forms of Racial Discrimination, they refused. Rather, they
subsequently lifted the travel ban and unfroze the assets of some of the
people that they had formerly deemed responsible for being involved in
aiding and abetting the break-down of human rights and the rule of law in
Zimbabwe.
It is a long and sorry story of people with influence refusing to really go
upstream. We could be here all night if I carried on.
I want to go back to the river in Africa and talk about that precious thing.
There was another baby in a basket once. He was rescued from where he had
been hidden near the delta of the longest river in the world about 3,500
years ago – the same river that David Livingstone went to try to find the
source of. The same river from the same country [Uganda] from which
Archbishop Sentamu also sprang. This baby grew up in the household of those
that had ordered the killing of all the other male babies.
When he grew up, he had a strong sense of what injustice and the abuse of
power was. He tried to protect one of his people from being flogged once –
and was so incensed that he killed one of the Pharaoh’s men – and had to run
away. When he eventually came back he went to the Pharaoh to ask him to let
his people go. Pharaoh refused and there were severe consequences for each
refusal. Eventually on the tenth request to let his people go we read that
Pharaoh let Moses’ people go. Moses walked with his people through the Red
Sea and they came out the other side as a free people – a free nation for
the first time.
They were in the Sinai desert then and before they had gone more than a few
miles this man Moses went up Mount Sinai. On Mount Sinai something very
significant happened in the history of the world. Moses was given the Law –
inscribed by God’s finger on two tablets of stone.
Around those two tablets the Ark of the Covenant was made and they were
carried in the front of the nation. The first thing to cross the Jordan
River was the Ark with the law inside it – and the river dried up in front
of it to allow safe passage.
We then read through history and we see how precious the law was to those
people and how when the people upheld the law they flourished in the land
and they became the superpower of the day, set as they were in the centre of
the world between Africa, Europe and Asia. In the centre of their kingdom
was built the temple with all its gold – but at the centre of the temple was
the most precious thing – those two plain tablets of ordinary stone.
I am honoured to have had a father-in-law, [Mike Campbell], who understood
the importance of standing for the law. You see, when the law is taken
away, when there is nothing left protecting people and their property from
the abuse of power, poverty and suffering immediately result. Over a
trillion dollars has poured into post independent Africa. Much has been
done to bind up the wounds and to feed the starving – but still there are
more and more wounds and more and more starving people coming down the
river.
Unless we go courageously to the source; unless we try to hold people
accountable; unless we boldly bring out the truth and do not let it be a
casualty, unless we strengthen those institutions and those people that are
trying to help build houses of justice in Africa so that people and their
property are protected from corrupt and evil leaders, the suffering will
continue – and the trillions will continue to be needed to try to alleviate
the severe poverty that Africans are in.
Ladies and gentleman, I come from the richest continent on earth in terms of
natural resources. I come from a continent with more agricultural potential
than any other. I come from a country that used to be the bread basket of
Africa – but when I go to the rural areas where that food was produced I
find only desolation, hunger, suffering and extreme poverty.
When the rule of law was usurped by the dictatorial rule by law, the
collapse happened very quickly. We became the fastest shrinking economy in
history in a peace time situation. GDP per capita income more than halved.
While in Zambia it grew from US$3bn to US$3.8 bn; in Kenya from US$4bn to
US$5.2bn; in Lesotho it grew from US$4 bn to US$5.5 bn; in Tanzania it grew
from US$2.6bn to US$4.7bn; in Zimbabwe it dropped from US$6.8bn to US$3.2bn
in the same period [2000-2008].
Production plummeted – our wheat crop last year was a paltry 10,000 tons –
from over 300,000 tons 10 years ago – less than 5 percent of former times
and the lowest crop since 1907. Our maize crop this year will result in
massive starvation for the tenth year in a row unless the world feeds us yet
again. Our health and education systems are shadows of what they were.
Nearly a third of the population of our country has left – teachers,
doctors, nurses, artisans, business men, farmers.
The rule by dictatorial law continues and so long as it does – so long as
there are not enough people prepared to risk going upstream to try to change
that, the suffering will continue.
I wish to show you a disturbing picture of Joshua Bakacheza.
Those of you that saw the film Mugabe and the White African will remember
Mike Campbell patching up a group of people in his dining room who had been
stoned by militia and shot at by police. One of them was Joshua. Two
months later Joshua was abducted with another activist by 16 state security
agents with AK 47s while he was helping the widow and children of another
murdered activist move house.
After 3 weeks he was eventually found on a farm taken by an army colonel.
He had been tortured and then shot and left in the bush. I show you this
picture not because it is a picture just of what was but because it is a
picture of what is to come if good men and good women do nothing.
Like Joshua, Mike was a man who went upstream. He stood for the rule of law
and property rights and ultimately he died for what he stood for. His death
was not in vain though. Today we honour what he has done in taking a
dictator to court on fundamental justice issues – and winning; and we want
to build on the foundations he has laid. In that vein the African
Commission on Human and People’s Rights – as an arm of the African Union –
last week took the unprecedented step of registering our case regarding 14
African Governments disbanding the SADC Tribunal, and breaking the SADC
Treaty and international law without any consultation with the people of
Southern Africa.
So today we treasure what Mike held dear and we want to take responsibility
for those things and help regenerate the rule of law and respect for human
rights in our land. We need men and women of courage – a courage that
overcomes the fear of evil – a courage that is underpinned by the values and
the faith encapsulated in what God wrote on the two tablets of stone – a
courage to stand for was written, written now on our hearts in love.
Today we say: “For the sake of the next generation of suffering children
that will otherwise come down the river – by God’s grace we too will go
upstream – either in person or as supporters – and thereby stand boldly in
the way of dictatorship and poverty with the rod of justice and truth in our
hands.”
I thank you all.
Ben Freeth, MBE
Executive Director
The Mike Campbell Foundation
http://www.mikecampbellfoundation.com/
Contact details
E-mail: [email protected]
Mobile: +263 773 929 138 (Zimbabwe)
Award-winning documentary film: “Mugabe and the White African”
http://www.mugabeandthewhiteafrican.com