Wednesday - July 02, 2008

Zimbabwe: Battered white farmers vow to battle on.

Zimbabwe: Battered white farmers vow to battle on against Robert Mugabe
By Louis Weston in Harare
Last Updated: 12:54AM BST 02/07/2008

Battered and bruised, his face covered in cuts and his ear grossly swollen, an elderly farmer still swore not to abandon his legal fight against Robert Mugabe, despite the beating from his thugs.

Mike Campbell [left] and wife Angela Campbell who were abducted by a gang of Zanu-PF supporters and savagely beaten for several hours

Mike Campbell, 75, is the lead plaintiff out of a group of 77 suing Mr Mugabe at the regional Southern African Development Community tribunal in the Namibian capital Windhoek, seeking to have Zimbabwe’s seizures of white-owned land illegal.

The proceedings, known as Campbell v Mugabe, are a clear challenge to the Zimbabwean leader.

As Mugabe’s ‘re-election’ in a one-candidate race was announced Mr Campbell, along with his wife Angela and son-in-law Ben Freeth, was abducted by a gang of Zanu-PF supporters and all three savagely beaten for several hours.

“It just makes me want to go more,” he said defiantly in his hospital bed in Harare, where he is being treated for concussion, a broken collarbone, and broken fingers.

“I know that our case is a thorn in the government’s flesh. It’s an embarrassment to the president. Anything that’s an embarrassment to the president pleases me greatly.

“What option have we got? We can choose two ways of handling it, either run away or you stick it out. I think we have got to the stage where we are very close to the turning point on the sticking it out bit.”

Mr Campbell, who arrived in Zimbabwe 34 years ago from South Africa, where an ancestor of his, a captain in the Dutch East Indies Company settled in 1713, described the country’s decline as “such a tragedy”.

“Mugabe has used his position to remain in power in a racialist way,” he said. “Mugabe keeps on playing this race card, he knows it’s a good one. He wasn’t like that at the beginning. There are some good guys in Zanu-PF but they have been horribly misled.

“He has turned the whole thing around and turned them into a bunch of thugs.”

Mr Campbell has no memory of the assault, but Mr Freeth, 38, described how when the three were dumped tied up on the ground at a militia camp, there were “probably 50 or 60 people all singing Chimurenga songs and kicking us”, referring to the war against Ian Smith’s regime.

Over and over again, they were told they would be killed. “They seemed to be pretty serious about it,” he said. “I was thinking, ‘well if they are going to kill me then we all have to die at some stage. I know where I’m going, I’m a child of God and Jesus by His blood has saved me, so I will be with Him today’. So I wasn’t actually fearful, the fear was taken out of me, amazingly.

“We just carried on praying though this whole thing. When they didn’t kill me in some ways it was quite a relief, I have got three young children and a wife to look after.”

Nonetheless he has a seriously injured eye, bruising, and a large bandage around his head is testament to the severe concussion he suffered.

As they were driven away from the camp, the gang demanded that Mr Campbell sign a declaration he was abandoning the SADC tribunal case, he added. “His fingers were broken so he couldn’t do anything so they got my mother-in-law to sign a thing withdrawing the case,” he said.

“They said if she did it then they wouldn’t kill us, so under extreme duress she signed it.”

But he too will continue with the case. “We’re obviously concerned about what’s happened but we feel it’s important to try and bring law and order back into Zimbabwe,” he said.

“As Zimbabweans all we want to do is be able to live in peace, it doesn’t matter who we are, whether white farmers, black farmers, people in town, we all just want to be able to live in peace. What’s happening at the moment is not peaceful.”

http://tinyurl.com/4uvkrz

Posted by Drew458     on 07/02/2008 at 02:25 PM   
Filed Under: • Miscellaneous •  
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