Archive for the ‘Traitors’ Category

Mandela unmasked, by Jaap Marais

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

How liberal puppet-masters created a false saint..!

The number of the beast

 

Many thanks to Citizen Kane for bringing this very eloquently written letter to our attention.   I very much doubt that Clinton read a word of it, but  may the truth never die !   The  original letter was published on http://afrikanervolksparty.org/  

A decently balanced biography of Jaap Marais (1923-1990) can be read here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaap_Marais]  

One important additional point that is rarely if ever made is that, by being in jail, Mandela was able to remain aloof and saintly.    No doubt after  being ordered gently encouraged by his white liberal puppet-masters – who were aware of the damage it could do to their hero’s carefully engineered media image as a man of peace and reconciliation – from the safety of his holiday home jail Mandela issued a half-hearted stateMUNT disassociating himself from the reign of terror and torture killings enthusiastically led by his then wife – Winnie (matches) Mandela.  

The truth is that jail saved mandela’s black soul..!  

January 14th 1999
 
The President of the USA
The White House
Fax: 091 202 456 2883
WASHINGTON, DC
 
Mr President
 
In South African newspapers you are reported to have said in a speech at the White House that the present South African President, Nelson Mandela, had taught you not to hate your political enemies. Mandela is said to have told you that he harboured no grudge against his enemies who “cast him into jail”. And you, in the speech concerned, said that your (present) crisis could be compared to Mandela’s suffering in jail.
 
You seem to be under some misapprehension about the circumstances of Mandela’s incarceration and the crimes for which he was sentenced to imprisonment, otherwise you may not be desirous to identify with him. And you evidently have been given a distorted idea of how the African National Congress (ANC) under direction of its leader, Nelson Mandela, is vengeantly acting against their political enemies and opponents.
 
Your remark about Mandela’s having been “cast into jail” creates a wrong impression. Mr President, he was not “cast into jail”: he was charged for acts of sabotage and sentenced to life imprisonment by the Judge President of the then Transvaal Division of the South African Supreme Court after a protacted hearing in which he had had representation and every opportunity to defend himself. He, however, refused to take the oath and testify, and could consequently not be taken under cross-examination. Finding him guilty, the Judge said that he had been wrongly charged for acts of sabotage instead of for treason, in which case the sentence would not have been imprisonment but the death penalty. The trial was attended by journalists, jurists and others from all over the world. None could find fault with the proceedings and the findings of the Court.
 
Even The Rand Daily Mail, the most outspoken liberal newspaper at the time in South Africa, and in many ways a supporter of Mandela and the ANC, wrote about the sentences passed by the judge, “The sentences pronounced by Judge De Wet at the close of the Rivonia trial are both wise and just. The law is best served when there is firmness tinged with mercy, and this was the case yesterday. The sentences could not have been less severe than those imposed. The men found guilty had planned sabotage on a wide scale and had conspired for armed revolution. As the judge pointed out yesterday, the crime of which they were found guilty was really high treason. The death penalty would have been justified.”
 
These are the facts of history. Sentencing Mandela to imprisonment instead of letting him be hanged was an act of mercy on the part of his political enemies. Mandela has, therefore, every reason to be grateful and not the least reason to harbour a grudge against them. He owes his life to them. You will agree that this puts a completely different complexion on your statement that “he was cast into jail”.
 
This is by no means all of which Mandela should be grateful for. In the time of PW Botha’s prime ministership in the ‘eighties Mandela was moved from the Robben Island prison to the Pollsmoor prison near Cape Town, where he received VIP treatment. PW Botha was in this way making the first instalments in Mandela’s release on the pretext that he would not wish “an old man to die in prison”.
 
From Pollsmoor prison Mandela was moved to the residence of a senior officer on the staff of the Prisons Department in the town of Paarl in the Western Cape. There he had every convenience at his disposal to play a political rôle, including the use of a fax machine. And he was attended to day and night by a white policeman.
 
After a carefully orchestrated campaign inside and outside South Africa he was released by the FW de Klerk government to a stage-managed reception in Cape Town, receiving prime coverage from the South African Broadcasting Corporation and providing him with a launching pad for political initiatives. Thereafter the De Klerk government in a treasonable series of acts started peace negotiations with the ANC and moved on to draw up a new constitution on the basis of one man, one vote in an undivided South Africa, which in essence meant surrendering to the ANC and enabling Mandela to become the president of South Africa.
 
The essence of this political move was spelt out by Paul Johnson, well-known British intellectual, in The Spectator in April 1994. “South Africa under F W de Klerk”, he said, “Made a suicidal leap to universal suffrage”. He predicted that within ten years the country could be the theatre of Africa’s endless civil wars. “In any case it would become an industrial rubble heap, beastly, bloody and bankrupt (…) There is not the slightest hope that it (South Africa) will continue to exist on a system of universal suffrage – it is one of the most divided societies on earth: racially, ethnically, linguistically, as well as economically”.
 
This is De Klerk’s achievement. You may recall that you at one stage telephoned him and told him that you “marvelled” at what he was achieving in pushing South Africa along this disastrous course.
 
Some ten months later (February 1995) The Spectator published another article on South Africa in which its readers were told, “A country ravaged by crime and corruption, with plummeting standards and a people condemned to a sordid and brutal life”. The article describes the ANC government as “corrupt and incompetent”. This is Nelson Mandela’s government.     

(Note: only 10 months after “liberation” the Spectator could see the writing on the wall.  How many sanctimonious liberal rags saw this?  B.E.)
 
What is revealing is that while De Klerk was treacherously steering the country towards this national misery, newspapers reported: “Britain fights fervently for FW in UN debate”. And later: “Brits full of praise for FW as architect of peaceful change”. And eventually: “Brits bear De Klerk, their hero, on their hands”. Only an Afrikaner who is a traitor to his own people would be regarded by Brits as their hero. And De Klerk became the hero of Brits by letting loose the man who, according to Judge De Wet, should have been hanged for high treason.
 
You may sense the degree of loathing on the part of Afrikaners like myself, who had a father who fought, was wounded and kept a prisoner-of-war on St Helena Island by the British for more than two years while they devastated the country and caused the death of over 22 000 children under the age of 16 years and who, a few generations thereafter sees De Klerk being treated as a hero by Brits for having “irreversibly” destroyed White South Africa (as in foolish vanity he said his aim was).
 
As Mr Tony Blair, Prime Minister of Britain, said in January 1998 that the British “never forget the past even when addressing the future”, so we naturally also do not forget the past – also the recent past when the ANC and the South African Communist Party (SACP) had their headquarters in London from where with British moral and other support they conducted their terrorism against South Africa.
 
In the period September 1984 to August 1989 no fewer than 1770 schools were destroyed or extensively damaged, as were 7187 private homes of Blacks, 10318 buses, 152 trains, 12188 private vehicles, 1265 shops and factories, 60 post offices, 47 churches and 30 health clinics. And, what is even worse, there were 300 cold-blooded murders by the barbarous necklace method and 372 deaths of people trapped in homes set alight by terrorist gangs.
 
These were the means employed in “the struggle” to bring to power, under Mandela, a Communist-controlled organisation, which Peter Younghusband, in the London Daily Mail in November 1994, described as follows, “The ANC never was worth much as a liberation movement – and apart from a few random urban terrorist acts, its military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, was equally worth little as a fighting force (…) the ANC very conveniently sat in exile waiting for the world to bring the White regime to its knees”. And, he said, Mandela is unable to run the country, and he and the ANC is steadily reducing South Africa to yet another Third World plodder.
 
It is one thing to say that Mandela bears his political enemies no grudge, but it is another thing to judge him by what he does, by what he allows, and by what he neglects to do.
 
To consider this one must see it in its historical perspective. When Mandela and his Communist cohorts at their Rivonia hide-out were planning bloody revolution in the early ’sixties, the Afrikaner Nationalist Government (ANG) was under the leadership of Dr HF Verwoerd. And it was under the direction of Dr Verwoerd that this Communist conspiracy to violently overthrow the South African government was stamped out, Mandela and his collaborators landing in jail and the organisation of the Communist Party of South Africa being destroyed shortly thereafter through the efficient action of the security police in infiltrating the Communist cells.
 
Verwoerd frustrated and humiliatingly defeated Mandela’s plans. And for Mandela there is consequently one political enemy not to be forgiven for saving South Africa from a bloody Communist revolution. That is Hendrik Verwoerd. He and his ghost are haunting those who are destroying the results of his unequalled successful statecraft.
 
Verwoerd was not only the man under whose direction a Communist-led revolution was prevented. He also became the towering South African statesman of this century, and he was equal, if not superior, to any of his contemporaries in the Western World, a statement that may be evaluated on the ground of his achievements in the face of international enmity from the Anglo-American block, the Communist block and the Afro-Asian block.
 
He not only secured South Africa’s survival against this many-sided onslaught: he, more-over lifted the country to a level of stability, well-being and prosperity seldom, if ever equalled in history anywhere under similar circumstances.
 
To support this remark let me call opponents and enemies of Verwoerd to testify in this regard. Jan Botha, an outspoken liberal, in his book, Verwoerd is dead, refers to “the threats from the United Nations and the arms boycott by the United States and Britain”. Then he writes: “By the time he died, Dr Verwoerd had built his own monument which was there for all to see: the Republic of South Africa. The White people had been forged together in unity, the country was militarily strong and resilient, the police and security forces were effectively dealing with all attempts at subversion and infiltration, the country’s economy was dynamic, expanding and had become largely self-sufficient.
 
“… in the history of South Africa his name will live for ever as the leader who, when his country was threatened with internal disorders and with economic sanctions, boycotts and open aggression from overseas, stood as a symbol of defiance, and the will and determination to survive”.
 
He not only frustrated the objectives of the great power blocks, but he also defeated the ANC’s plans to create internal disorder.
 
That Jan Botha’s was not a lone voice, can be shown by quotations from other sources. Paul Barrow in The Statist shortly before Verwoerd was assassinated on 6 September 1966 by the Communist Tsafendas wrote, “At the rate at which South Africa is now expanding, the term ‘miracle’ is likely to be appropriate to its development in the next few years”.
 
And on 31 July 1966 the unofficial mouthpiece of the South African liberal establishment The Rand Daily Mail, wrote: “At the age of nearly 65 Dr Verwoerd has reached the peak of a remarkable career. No other South African prime minister has ever been in such a powerful position in the country. He is at the head of a massive majority after a resounding victory at the polls. The nation is suffering from a surfeit of prosperity and he can command almost unlimited funds for all that he needs at present in the way of military defence. He can claim that South Africa is a shining example of peace in a troubled continent, if only because overwhelming domestic power can always command peace. Finally, as if that were not enough, he can face the session with the knowledge that, short of an unthinkable show of force by people whom South Africans are rapidly being taught to regard as their enemies, he can snap his fingers at the United Nations. Thanks to the recent judgment of the Hague Court he can afford to condescend to the world body, graciously remaining a member as long as it suits him”.
 
These are the achievements of the man against whose memory a vendetta is being conducted under the direction of Mandela and his comrades. His name was ordered to be removed from the Verwoerd Building, the Verwoerd Dam, the Verwoerd Hospital, and under Mandela’s leadership his statue at the Free State provincial headquarters was pulled down in an act bristling with hatred and vengeance.
 
Of course, Verwoerd as leader of the Afrikaners being a symbol of his people, the attacks on him have been indirect attacks on the Afrikaners themselves, so that Mandela’s followers – never rebuked – felt free to shout: “Kill a farmer, kill a Boer”, instigating the killing of hundreds of Afrikaner farmers and their families, 431 in 1997 and 104 from 1 January to 31 August 1998 in 590 attacks. In the Mau-Mau uprising in Kenya in the ’sixties only 39 White farmers were killed and in the terrorist war against Rhodesia only 300 were killed in the course of 14 years. Among those who have had as their battle cry “Kill a farmer, Kill a Boer” is Peter Mokaba, promoted by Mandela to Deputy Minister. Other appointments of identified Communists as Ministers and Deputy Ministers tell the same story, highlighted by the appointment of the Communist Mboweni as President of the SA Reserve Bank in a move to further impoverish Afrikaners in the name of “affirmative action”. These are ways in which Mandela has been allowing his grudge against the Afrikaners, as his political enemies, to be exploited, while he goes around pretending that he has no grievance against his enemies.
 
Even more unmistakable are his appointments to the so-called Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the way in which this commission has conducted its business. It was packed by him with enemies and opponents of the former government. The two Afrikaners, De Jager and Malan, who were included among the 15 other, were in different ways opponents of the previous government. However, De Jager resigned in disappointment, if not disgust, and Malan eventually showed his dissension from the majority by writing a minority report on the Commission’s findings.
 
This commission appointed by Mandela has little to do with truth and nothing with reconciliation. It is a hybridization between the Nuremberg trials of German war leaders and Stalin’s Moscow Show Trials of the nineteen thirties. Its prime objective was to place Afrikaners on the bench of the accused to be prosecuted, tried and convicted by their enemies, and to treat the ANC terrorists on a completely different basis, which resulted in some amazing events.
 
In flagrant violation of the provisions of the relevant act it, for example, granted amnesty to a bunch of 37 top level ANC leaders for crimes associated with political motives, without specifying the various acts, which is in conflict with the requirements of the law. In this group there are among others, Thabo Mbeki, Leader of the ANC, Minister of Foreign Affairs Nzo, Minister of Justice Omar and Minister of Defence Modise. Although this decision has been nullified by a judicial verdict, nothing has been done to rectify the situation.
 
In such cases, the Commission’s concern was not seeking and revealing the truth, but suppressing and stifling it – a procedure that would not have been countenanced when it concerned Afrikaners of the Security services who fought against the terrorists. They were paraded as criminals who individually under severe pressure had to confess in detail for whatever amnesty was asked for.
 
In these various ways Mandela created outlets for his grudges against the Afrikaners — the very people whose representatives saved him from the gallows and later gave him all the help to become the President of South Africa.
 
Against this background it is dismaying to read that this man has every reason to hate his enemies, yet does not think of retribution! And while allowing a vendetta to be conducted against the Afrikaners, he is presiding over the decay of this country, which the Afrikaners wrestled from the wilderness, fought wars for against imperial powers and, under Dr Verwoerd, was developing into the industrial giant of Africa.
 
Where under Verwoerd, “the nation was suffering from a surfeit of prosperity”, and South Africa “was a shining example of peace on a troubled continent”, under Mandela the nation is suffering from a surfeit of poverty and the country has become the crime capital of the world – 137 reported rapes, 63 murders, 73 attempted murders, 176 robberies, 670 housebreakings and 35 highjackings on an average every day of the year. It is common cause that a government that cannot secure the lives and properties of its civilians is unfit to rule.
 
“South Africa”, read a newspaper report on 29 November 1998, “occupies the first or second spot in all forms of crime on the world list for crime, and it is the young people and the homeless who pay the price”. Of the thousands who passed the matric examinations in 1998 less than one in 10 will get a job in the formal sector. In the four years of ANC government the national debt more than doubled – from R194 billion ($34 billion) In 1994 to over R400 billion ($70 billion) presently, the interest on which accounts for 21 per cent of the budget.
 
In the same period the South African rand lost 80 per cent of its value. And in the first ten months of 1998 more than 2,8 million man-days were lost to a wave of industrial strikes. 
 
 This is a picture of the country which under Verwoerd had the second highest economic growth rate in the world (7,9% per year), an average inflation rate of 2 per cent, was accommodating new labour in the formal sector at 73,6 per cent per year, and enabled the living standards of Blacks in the industrial sector to rise at 5,3 per cent per year as against those of Whites at 3,9 per cent per year. The Financial Mail published a special survey entitled “The fabulous years: 1961-66″. And as the previously mentioned Jan Botha wrote, Verwoerd “had launched the greatest programme of socio-economic upliftment for the non-Whites that South Africa had ever seen”. 
 
This, Verwoerd achieved in the face of fierce diplomatic and economic opposition from the United States, Britain, Soviet Russia and others. Mandela, on the other hand, has the blessing and support of these powers, yet under his hand the country is disintegrating and has sunk to a state of lawlessness, joblessness and futurelessness unprecedented in South African history. Yet, Mandela is not struggling to emulate Verwoerd, but to denigrate him and his people.
 
Perhaps you will reconsider your emotional identification with Mandela in the light of historical truth.
 
Yours sincerely
 
J A MARAIS 

Posted by Bantu Education

Black South Africans owe De Klerk nothing

Monday, February 8th, 2010

Also, some revisionist history by the ANC for your enjoyment. Barf!

If only that was Fuckwit

Magnus, one of our regulars sent this in for our consideration.Thanks guy!

Article by: Thami ka Plaatjie who is an ignoramous and a director of the Pan African Foundation. Isn’t “Plaatjie” a hotnot name?

Black South Africans owe De Klerk nothing

IT HAS become fashionable to accord and heap all manner of praises, eulogies and felicitations on FW de Klerk for the so-called emancipation of our people with the unbanning of political parties and the release of political prisoners on February 2, 1990.

De Klerk has earned international acclaim and was bestowed with the much coveted Noble Peace prize.

Twenty years later, he still receives unending accolades for the “sterling role” that he played to free the Africans from bondage.

I wish to argue that we don’t owe De Klerk praise, nor accolades, nor any other form of expression of gratitude.

The apartheid regime was the most heinous and devious oppressive regime known to mankind.

The catalogue of its monstrous activities exceeded the atrocious bestial level of psychopaths, bandits and war criminals.

De Klerk’s so-called historical announcement on February 2, 1990, was an act of conceding defeat. His regime could no longer sustain the war that his forebears started in 1652.

The forces of progress were marching buoyant, determined to make the last and final stand against the racist regime that had been declared a crime against humanity by the United Nations.

The liberation of Mozambique left the apartheid regime shell-shocked since it meant new adversarial neighbours.

The liberation of Zimbabwe, through revolutionary means, ushered into power Zanu with the installation of a new flag and the return of the ancient name of Zimbabwe.

In a desperate attempt to forestall the inevitable, the apartheid regime sponsored insurgencies and bandits like Renamo and Unita but their efforts proved to have no effect.

Attempts to repel and destroy the Cuban forces from Angola proved futile.

In the air space of Angola the South African airpower of Impalas, Mirages and Cheetahs were a poor match for the ferocious might of the Cuban MiG23.

The sheer imposing sound of the Cuban aircraft sent apartheid soldiers screaming for their mothers. The buoyant and gallant forces of Umkhonto we Sizwe and the Cubans witnessed the desperate fleeing of apartheid soldiers with tails between their shaking legs.

Cuban fighter aircraft

Apartheid power surrendered and an armistice resulted in the UN sponsored Resolution 435 which paved the way for the independence of Namibia.

Boog chimpout

The apartheid regime was faced with immense challenges on virtually all fronts. At the home front it faced incessant labour unrest under the aegis of Cosatu and Nactu. Civil disobedience crippled the local government sector since the Vaal 1984 rent uprising.

International pressure was mounting with the impending hanging of the Sharpeville Six. Schools were rendered battle fields with clashes, led by groups like Cosas, between pupils and soldiers.

Azapo’s Muntu Myeza, Thami Mcwera, Lybon Mabaso and Ishmael Mkhabela gave the regime sleepless nights with lucid articles laced with Steve Biko’s ideologies, mass action and targeted boycotts.

The African ecumenical community, led by the feisty Desmond Tutu Archbishop Emeritus, and the African business community led by the pondering Nthato Motlana, gave the regime little rest.

The imposition of the State of Emergency escalated violence further.

On May 5, 1987, The Rand Daily Mail reported that in 1986 alone there were 76 hand grenade attacks, 64 limpet mine explosions, one RPG7 explosion, 12 landmine explosions and 76 cases recorded of the use of Russian AK47s.

The Azanian Peoples Liberation Army (Apla) had been reconstituted with new impetus by the arrival of Sabelo Phama in exile which saw fresh attacks launched.

In a desperate attempt to undercut the growing urban resistance and defiance, the regime sponsored vigilante groups but with no success.

The forces of progress were marching gallantly towards victory.

The people’s resistance was organised up to street level, with street committees and self-defence units manned by militant youth who responded to Oliver Tambo’s call to render the country ungovernable.

Economic sanctions, sports isolation, coupled with the ever-increasing militant activities of the mass democratic movement, left the regime gasping for air.

Faced with a country that was engulfed in a tumultuous urban warfare, the white community no longer trusted the regime with their future and safety.

Open defiance from the white populace increased which further erroded the Nationalists’ grip on power.

The insistence by Stellenbosch students to visit the ANC was embarrassing for the National Party.

An increase in the membership for the End Conscription Campaign, and increased militancy and the open defiance of conscientised white youth and white academics such as Sampie Terreblance against the futility of defending apartheid’s decadence, embarrassed the regime further.

Organised business was becoming apprehensive of operating in a volatile environment whose businesses were targets of attacks and mass looting.

It soon became a public relations disaster to justify or excuse apartheid. Apartheid was nearing its sell-by date and its decaying smell was evident to all.

The regime was no longer capable of defending itself. The regime began a process of gradual surrender to give an impression of bravery.

The government released a number of ANC and PAC prisoners from Robben Island in 1987, including Sello Matsobane, Zifozonke Tshikila and John Nkosi.

In November, 1987, it released Govan Mbeki and in 1988 Harry Gwala and Zeph Mothopeng were released. Soon Japhta Masemola and Walter Sisulu were also free.

De Klerk was buying time and accruing concessions especially from the international community which was beginning to ease sanctions.

The African people have earned their freedom themselves and due regard, esteem and glory belongs to them. Praise belongs to the many buried cadres, it belongs to the many maimed and injured, and to the many countless who are now forgotten.

Umkhonto we Sizwe anti-aircraft battery

February 2 marks the date of surrender of the racist regime. Before the nation and the world they hoisted a white flag of defeat and capitulation. Why must we praise them for accepting defeat?

A boxer does not give his crown to the opponent that he has defeated. Such a thing only takes place in the world of phantasmagoria.

De Klerk’s speech on February 2 was made out of exasperation, raising the blood pressure of his inner cabals and securocrats. Their nightmarish fears of the ultimate Armageddon were based on unfounded notions of the annihilation of the white race on a scale far greater than the Afrikaners’ killings at Dingaan’s kraal.

The regime was for the first time afraid; it was very afraid and was frantically and desperately in search of an escape hatch.

Heaping praise on De Klerk is sheer profligacy, hypocrisy, silly and selling out. He did not wake up loving Africans any more than he did on February 1, 1990.

That is why he now wants to create an Afrikaners-only university. We owe him nothing.

a Serious error of Judgement

Sunday, January 3rd, 2010


“How could so serious an error of judgement have been made by so many people?”

No, not true. The caption should read “Professing ourselves to be wise, we became fools”. The Bible, Romans 1:22. Any person that took Mugabe at his word deserves to be ridiculed. This same Auret was one of the chief architects that contributed to the downfall of Rhodesia, and took great pride in portraying  the Smith government as an instrument of oppression on the black populace to the world’s media. Now that the wheels have fallen off, he is the first to run to sanctuary. No amount of apologies will change what’s happened. All the apologies, sorries and grovelling in the world are not going to get Mugabe out of power. He was, in fact, played for a fool by Mugabe, and because of his liberal ideas, thought that a new dawn had arrived in Zimbabwe.

The exact same situation is unfolding in South Africa. A classic example is the case of Breyten Breytenbach. Here is a man that went into exile while South Africa was at relative peace, and did his utmost to get the ANC into power. He did his utmost to get the attention of the world’s media focused on the imaginary atrocities that the Apartheid government committed. Now that the ANC are in the process of devastating the country through corruption, brutality, nepotism and just plain incompetence, he decided that his life is in danger, and moved to a nation of safety.

The chaos that he helped put into place is conveniently forgotten. The catastrophic scenario that is unfolding in the country is left to other people to sort out. While he now sits in exile and in luxury, the remaining White citizens of South Africa live under seige. In which other nation that is not at war do the citizens live behind electrified fences, with a herd of Rottweilers outside the front door? Where are there security companies protecting the police stations? How is it that the president of the largest economy in Africa can have in the region of 783 corruption charges against him dropped. Which president boldy proclaims that a shower prevents AIDS?

This is the president that Breytenbach helped put into power. This is the Black government that he wanted the White government replaced with. After 16 years of ANC rule, the promised new dawn is fast turning into the blackness of night, with the worst yet to come.

_________________________

A Catholic human rights activist who denounced the atrocities of white minority rule in the country then called Rhodesia, has charted what he describes as the “descent to tyranny” of Zimbabwe’s post-independence ruler Robert Mugabe – writes Trevor Grundy. For more than 20 years until 1999, Mike Auret worked for Zimbabwe’s Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace, set up by the country’s Catholic bishops. In his new book, “From Liberator to Dictator: An Insider’s Account of Robert Mugabe’s Descent into Tyranny”, Auret records how he met Mugabe several times and was captivated by the man’s intelligence and apparent sincerity. “My admiration for him grew with each contact and in the months ahead I found myself putting him on a pedestal – a position from which I found it most difficult to displace him in the years that followed, despite everything that happened,” said Auret.

But Auret was shattered when he discovered what happened in the Matabeleland and Midlands regions of Zimbabwe between 1983 and 1987. More than 20 000 men, women and children accused of being “dissidents” were killed to wipe out the power base of Mugabe’s main rival in the liberation struggle, Joshua Nkomo. Almost all of those killed were Ndebeles, members of Nkomo’s ethnic group. They were killed by a North Korean trained branch of the military called the Fifth Brigade. Its members were Shona, who belonged to Mugabe’s ethnic group. Zimbabwe’s 11.4 million population is divided roughly into two main “tribal” groups, the Shonas (80 percent) and the Ndebeles (nearly 18 percent). “Part of the reason for writing this book was for me to try to gain some understanding of how so many of us so gravely misconstrued the situation in Zimbabwe once independence had been achieved,” writes Auret. “How was it possible that so serious an error of judgement could have been made by so many people, in the world, not only in Zimbabwe?”

The son of white settlers, Auret had a career in Africa that spanned the heyday of white rule in the 1950s to Zimbabwe’s political and economic chaos at the beginning of the 21st century. He joined the army in 1956 but resigned after Ian Smith declared Southern Rhodesia’s illegal Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain in November 1965. Auret joined the CCJP in the 1970s and was active in investigating atrocities committed by the Rhodesian army, an offshoot of the force in which he was once an officer. He left the country in 1979 to avoid being conscripted, and went to Britain with his wife Diana only to return home after independence in 1980, when Rhodesia was renamed Zimbabwe. In his book, Auret recalls how he was among those who were moved by Mugabe’s statements of the need for “reconciliation” after seven years of war from 1972 to 1979 which had led to 30 000 deaths. “Everything he said impressed me tremendously. As he spoke I experienced a growing respect for him, for his intellect and his humanity … I was impressed by his sincerity and by what he seemed to be an obvious respect for the Church,” Auret writes.

However, “In the second decade, disillusionment began and the drive for development became a drive for democracy and the protection of human rights … I remembered the reasonable man and wondered if he had changed or if indeed he had always been so evil, but simply more adept at hiding it.” Auret resigned as the justice group’s director in 1999, when the Catholic Church refused to publish a report drawn up by the commission and the Legal Resources Foundation, a human rights group, into the atrocities committed by the Fifth Brigade in Matabeleland. He was then elected as a member of parliament from Harare for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change party, but left Zimbabwe after he resigned his seat in 2003. Auret presently lives in Ireland but maintains close contact with Zimbabwean exiles.

See: Michael Auret: From Liberator to Dictator: An Insider’s Account of Robert Mugabe’s Descent into Tyranny, David Philip, Publishers

Posted by Grumbleguts