Catholic priest who exposed Zim massacre

The Sunday Independent

By Peta Thornycroft

11 November 2012

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe once called former Archbishop Henry Karlen a “sanctimonious prelate,” after he and other Catholic bishops had protested about the massacres by Mugabe’s troops of thousands of opposition supporters in Zimbabwe shortly after independence.

Unsurprisingly, Mugabe, an occasional Catholic, did not show up for Karlen’s funeral in Bulawayo last week, as Swiss born Karlen, was the first to gather information about a notorious brigade of soldiers sent to the Matabeleland and Midlands provinces to kill mostly Ndebele-speaking people who were supporters of liberation war hero, Joshua Nkomo.

Karlen died aged 90 in a Bulawayo hospital after a short illness. Karlen had seen his predecessor and dozens of Catholic missionaries murdered in the Rhodesian civil war and was devastated when he learned, two years after 1980 independence, that another, more secret war had begun. Reports filtered in to him from colleagues at rural churches, hospitals and mission stations in the two Matabeleland provinces, of which Bulawayo was the capital, about the slaughter of opposition supporters loyal to the flamboyant struggle leader, Nkomo, also widely known at that time as ‘Father Zimbabwe.’

Karlen knew who was doing the killing. It was a new, North Korean-trained brigade, formed outside of the Zimbabwe National Army, which was ordered into Matabeleland by Mugabe and two cabinet ministers, Sidney Sekeramayi, in charge of defence, and Emmerson Mnangagwa, who held the security portfolio. Shaken but courageous Catholic clergy, and medical staff from a key mission hospital, St Lukes, along the road to Victoria Falls, reported to Karlen about this new war, which was in many ways even more devastating than the war to end white rule. He made notes of what he was told and his ghastly file grew with each harrowing account. Like many at that time, Karlen presumed Mugabe did not know what was going on and that if he did know, he would stop it. So he tried to contact the prime minister, as he then was, but his calls were not returned. In anguish Karlen decided, in February 1983, to call Garfield Todd, the former liberal prime minster of what was then called Southern Rhodesia.

Todd had lived most of his life in Matabeleland and had many close friends and colleagues in the new Zimbabwe government.He was reviled by most whites, and his movements were restricted by Ian Smith during the civil war, but Todd, the man who had a non-racial vision for Rhodesia, was honoured by Mugabe after independence, and made a senator. (Mugabe revoked Todd’s Zimbabwe citizenship in 2001.) Karlen told Todd that “the state was perpetrating atrocities….that people were being terrorised, starved, and butchered, and their property destroyed,” his daughter Judith Todd recalled in her 2007 post-independence history, ‘“Through the Darkness”. Karlen asked Todd to secure an appointment for him with Mugabe. Garfield Todd was aghast at what he heard. At Todd’s request Karlen sent  his file to Judith in Harare who read it and forwarded it to senior members of Mugabe’s government.

In March 1983, Karlen and Mike Auret, director of the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace met Mugabe for several hours ahead of the Bishop’s Conference and handed him a report largely based on Karlen’s notes. In his report to Mugabe on the atrocities Karlen wrote: “Your own soldiers are saying, ‘We are sent by Mugabe to kill.’’ The bishops then issued a strongly worded pastoral letter headlined, “Peace is still possible,” which estimated that “tens of hundreds” had been killed. This was a difficult moment for the bishops. Some senior Catholic clergy had opposed white minority rule, and came to know and respect Mugabe when he went into exile in Mozambique to become president of Zanu, and commander of its military wing.

Karlen and his colleagues had celebrated when the civil war ended and had gone out of their way to support the new government. The shock of learning about state-ordered massacres and the torture of Nkomo’s supporters profoundly affected Karlen and his fellow bishops. News of the atrocities broke in The Star and other newspapers of its group in South Africa and in the Guardian in London later in 1983. With increasing domestic and international outrage at what many believed was a genocide against Nkomo’s supporters, and following statements by Zimbabwe’s Bishops Conference, Mugabe retaliated by issuing the words “sanctimonious prelates” to describe Karlen and his colleagues.

But he did appoint a commission of inquiry into the deaths, estimated by Mugabe’s officials at “1500 people.’” The commission was chaired by Harare lawyer, Simplicius Chihambakwe, still in practice in Harare, Karlen was relieved that the commission had been formed and went to give evidence using the mass of information he had collected. The commission completed its work in 1984 but Mugabe withheld its findings. The Legal Resources Foundation, a non-governmental organisation, went to court seeking its release, but its application was refused.With no public document available, the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace and the Legal Resources Foundation began a long and difficult investigation into the appalling events in Matabeleland, and the origins of the enmity between Mugabe’s wartime forces and those loyal to Nkomo. Karlen’s file and his memory were a starting point for the investigators. Mugabe’s intelligence agents hindered their work at every level, and the investigators were also hampered by lack of resources and fear among
survivors about coming forward to give information. And many eye witnesses to the horrors had fled to South Africa during the height of the slaughter.

Eventually the two organisations produced a long, detailed report called “Breaking the Silence – Building true peace” which estimated that about 20 000 people had been killed in Matabeleland and in parts of the Midlands province from late 1982 until Nkomo, by then exhausted, went into an inclusive government with Mugabe in 1987. When Auret released the report in 1997 only Karlen and a second bishop endorsed its publication for general distribution. For the rest of his life Karlen, who became Archbishop in 1994, would say he  could never understand why the new government chose to murder its citizens. Henry Karlen was born in Torbel,Switzerland in 1922, joined the Mariannhill Missionaries at 20 and was ordained in 1947. Four years later he was sent on his first mission to St Peter’s Seminary in Kwa Zulu Natal and became Bishop of Umtata in 1968. He moved to his new position, Bishop of Bulawayo in 1974 and retired as Archbishop in 1998. In 2007 Karlen was given the freedom of the City of Bulawayo by a Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) city government, then still in opposition to Mugabe’s ZanuPF nationally but now working with it in a very uneasy coalition government. Thousands turned up at his funeral including three MDC cabinet ministers, Moses Mzila, Gordon Moyo, and David Coltart.

Mzila, a liberation war veteran who was jailed by the Rhodesian administration was arrested last year for attending a memorial service for the victims of the 1980s massacres which Mugabe once called a “moment of madness.” As a child, Gordon Moyo watched one of Mugabe’s inner circle burn down his  parents’ home. Education minister David Coltart, a lawyer by profession, was a director of the operational arm of the Legal Resources Foundation in Bulawayo and one of the main movers and authors of the “Breaking the Silence” report. Retired Archbishop Karlen was buried at Bulawayo’s Athlone Cemetery. Independent Foreign Service