Zimbabwe link ‘hypocrisy’

Press, 9 July 1986, Page 20

Zimbabwe link ‘hypocrisy’

NZPA-AAP London A British author has said the New Zealand Prime Minister, Mr Lange, had been guilty of hypocrisy in his visit to Zimbabwe last year.

Mr William Spring, a former freelance foreign correspondent in Zimbabwe and religious writer, was appealing to Commonwealth leaders — particularly the former Australian Prime Minister, Mr Malcolm Fraser — to help stop the murder, detention, and torture of political dissidents in Zimbabwe.

He alleged that Zimbabewe’s Prime Minister, Mr Robert Mugabe, had “at least eight concentration camps” in the country where opponents of his Zimbabwe African

National Union-Patriotic Front were held, often without charge. Mr Spring, who said he opposed the Smith’regime in Rhodesia and went to an independent Zimbabwe in 1981 as a freelance correspondent for the “Spectator” and the “Sunday Times” said Mr Lange mirrored the "hypocrisy” of the British Foreign Office when he visited Harare.

“I believe it is wrong for the New Zealand Prime Minister, for example, to pillory Sou*b Africa for its human rights violations when he is prepared to receive hospitality from, and provide endorsement and respectability to, a regime guilty of equally or even more serious crimes against humanity than

South Africa. “Because it is black, Zimbabwe escaped his Methodist moral censure.” Mr Spring was launching his book on postindependence, “Zimbabwe: The Long Fields.” He said the release of Mr Mugabe’s oponents could be achieved only by pressure, “particularly from the Commonwealth and some of the friends of Zimbabwe, such as Malcolm Fraser.” “Fraser could do some good by writing to Mugabe and asking that he .elease two Britons being hid and to stop torturing, shooting, and eliminating people simply because they are from another tribe.”

Mr Spring said two British passport-holders, Philip Hartlebury and

Colin Evans — Zimbabwe Central Intelligence Office investigators — were still being held in prison in spite of their acquittal on espionage charges in February, 1982. “Hartlebury and Evans are only two of the forgotten men languishing in the jails of a 'New Commonwealth’ country, totally innocent of any crime,” he said.

"Had they been black and suspected of not carrying Z.A.N.U.-P.F. party cards, they would probably be dead.

"I have never visited South Africa and totally oppose apartheid, but I think the Zimbabwe episode holds stark lessons about the realities of ‘majority rule’ in an African context.”