BLAZING HYPOCRITE
She’s the UN ‘expert’ lionised by the Left after saying (without a shred of evidence) that Brexit’s made Britain more racist. But we reveal how she supported Mugabe’s racist policy of torching and stealing white families’ homes
TeN years ago, an elderly Zimbabwean farmer called Mike Campbell went to court to stop robert Mugabe’s thuggish government stealing his family home.
Campbell grew mangoes, oranges and potatoes on 3,000 acres of land he’d owned since the Seventies.
But, suddenly, he was one of around 4,000 unfortunate citizens told their land was being confiscated — without financial compensation — simply because they were white.
These ruthless seizures were part of Mugabe’s controversial ‘land reform’ policy which saw him try to compensate his country’s black majority population for the ‘sins’ of white, 19th- century rhodesian colonialism.
In practice, it meant Mugabe’s violent henchmen were given free - dom to grab properties and valuable agricultural land for themselves.
Mr Campbell’s home, Mount Carmel, in particular , had been coveted by the Zimbabwean despot’s senior aide, Nathan Shamuyarira. Following his forced eviction, the 73-year- old farmer challenged the move at a tribunal of the South African Development Community, a 14-nation organisation charged with protecting human rights.
Surprisingly, given Mugabe’s malign influence, the tribunal ruled that the Zimbabwean government’s patently racist farm- seizure policy was illegal.
Sadly, of course, this wasn’t the end of the matter. Campbell was widely hated and targeted for challenging Mugabe so publicly. So his home was raided by a gang of Mugabe supporters who subjected him to a sevenhour assault. He was beaten with rifle butts, suffering broken ribs, a fractured skull and brain damage, before being forced to leave his farm which had also been torched.
Displaying characteristic disdain for human rights and the rule of law, the Zimbabwean government then refused over the ensuing years to comply with multiple injunctions by the independent tribunal which had ruled against Mugabe’s large -scale farm evictions.
In due course, Campbell’s ordeal was chronicled in an award-winning film called Mugabe And The White African, which critics described as ‘a moving account of one family’s extraordinary courage in the face of overwhelming injustice and brutality’.
Meanwhile, this ugly saga was also examined in a research paper by a legal scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Its author , Zambian- born Tendayi Achiume, argued in a 36- page essay , titled Socio - political Dissonance And The Authority Of International Courts, that the tribunal which ruled in Campbell’s favour had made a big mistake in saying that seizing property on the basis of the colour of the owner’s skin constituted ‘ unlawful racial discrimination’.
The tribunal’s decision in Campbell’s favour, she claimed, was ‘socio-politically dissonant’, saying that it had failed to take into account the feeling of local people — who may have wished to steal land from white people and beat them up.
AS A reSUL T, she argued, in typical Leftwing jargon, that the three tribunal judges had ‘poorly adjudicated the issue of race-conscious remedies in post-colonial land reform’.
It follows that, in her opinion, violent state -sponsored racism can sometimes be legally acceptable, so long as the victims are of european descent.
This is, at best, morally very questionable.
Yet Tendayi Achiume isn’t just a minor academic working in one of the more crazy corners of Left-wing academia.
Today, she is a powerful figure in the world of international diplomacy, working as the United Nations’ ‘special rapporteur’ on the issue of racism.
She is spending five years travelling the world — unpaid, but with expenses — with a brief to ‘ examine, monitor , advise and publicly report ’ on areas where there are xeno - phobia and discrimination.
A few weeks ago, Achiume reported on the results of her first mission.
No, it wasn ’t to one of the world’s most notorious trouble spots, where there is abuse of human rights, widespread racism and state brutality.
No, not to Myanmar (the former Burma) where tens of thousands of minority rohingya Muslims have been raped, murdered or forced to flee their home - land. Or Bahrain, where the Shia community lives in conditions akin to apartheid. Or even to America, where last year there were violent clashes between white supremacists and antiracist demonstrators in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Instead, Achiume decided to tour the United Kingdom.
Specifically, she came here promising to examine what she called ‘structural forms of discrimination and exclusion that may have been exacer - bated by Brexit ’. Such an approach feels like her mind was made up in advance.
Whatever the case, last week she delivered a stern ‘end- ofmission statement’, declaring that Britain is a hotbed of state- sponsored xenophobia, where austerity policies have been used as a ‘prime instrument of racial subordination’.
This country, she went on to write, is so deeply racist that pregnant women from ethnic minorities are afraid to give birth in hospitals for fear that the police might be told they are illegal immigrants and remove them from the country.
Significantly, she also alleged that the 2016 vote to leave the eU had made minorities ‘more vulnerable to racial discrimina - tion and intolerance’.
Achiume’s 20-page statement cited no statistics in support of these conclusions, but her findings nonetheless made predictable headlines in Left-leaning newspapers — they were the main story on the front page of last Saturday’s Guardian — and were given prominent coverage by the BBC.
All of which raises an obvious question: how exactly did this UN ‘rapporteur’ reach such a worrying verdict?
The answer is very revealing — and demonstrates very flawed methodology for someone who is an assistant professor at UCLA School Of Law , and a research associate with the African Centre F or Migration And Society at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa.
Achiume’s fact-finding mission took 11 days and included visits to London, Bristol, Birmingham, Cardiff, edinburgh, Glasgow and Belfast.
She didn ’ t visit the many northern towns where large minority communities live, or any market towns such as Boston in Lincolnshire, which is home to an estimated 18,000 eU migrants. r ural areas were completely ignored.
It appears that the informa - tion Achiume gleaned on this whistle-stop tour was selectively filtered. In each city, her research appears largely to have been based on meetings with lobby groups and race relation charities, along with a selection of Left-leaning politicians.
While no full list of her meet - ings has been made available, she’s known to have met the National Union Of Students, the Northern Ireland Human rights Commission, a selection of academics, a gipsy-rights lobby group called roma V oice
and a Welsh race equality council. She also met Jenny Rathbone, a Labour member of the Welsh Assembly, and Monica Lennon, who represents Labour in the Scottish parliament.
It’s unclear whether Achiume spoke to any Tory politician, or what interaction (if any) she had with the Government. Neither is it known how the people she met were selected. As methods of impartial research go, this hardly seems ideal.
So (at risk of being accused of using a xenophobic metaphor) it’s perhaps inevitable that her ‘endofstatement’ contains more holes than a Swiss cheese.
They range from the mundane (she spells Warwick ‘Warrick’) to the extraordinary: in reference to the Government’s decision to scrap its Prevent counter-terror programme, which seeks to combat radicalisation, Achiume blithely denies any ‘link between extremism and terrorism’.
Try telling that to the victims of the Manchester bombing, or London Bridge attack, or anyone affected by the three terrorist attacks in the UK last year.
ELSeWheRe, Achiume made sweeping generalisations about social attitudes in Britain, without citing any evidence.
She claimed the Brexit vote had led to a ‘normalisation of hateful stigmatising discourse among high-ranking officials’ in the public sector. She failed to provide a single example.
She blamed a rise in anti-Semitism on ‘far-Right groups’ (ignoring the poisonous anti-Semitism that has been prevalent in the far-Left of the Labour Party) and declared the British court system to be biased against minorities, despite the fact that statistics show no particular link between ethnicity and jury conviction rates.
Despite levelling such damaging allegations, Achiume’s report concedes she didn’t meet a single representative of the police or judiciary. It doesn’t explain why.
Perhaps she felt no need as a long-standing supporter of Dignity And Power Now, a California-based pressure group which campaigns to shut down prisons and ‘ to build a Black and Brown led abolitionist movement’.
Most predictably, her UN document blames the Brexit vote for an increase in hate crime.
Yet it fails to point out that reports of such offences have become more common, due, in part, to the ever-widening definition of what constitutes a ‘hate’ crime. Indeed, the fastest growing official category of this offence since the vote to leave the eU has nothing to do with racism, but involves verbal abuse of disabled and transgender people.
Achiume’s one-sided report also fails to acknowledge that opinion polls consistently show Britain to be one of the most racially tolerant countries in europe, with attitudes towards immigration becoming less, rather than more, hostile since the Brexit vote.
No wonder Achiume’s findings have been condemned — most notably by the former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith.
‘This report ought to be taken to a large metal bin and dropped into it with a slow hand- clap and a raspberry,’ he tells me.
‘It is utter rubbish. A classic case of someone starting with a conclusion that they want to reach and then trying to work backwards towards it.’
As he points out, Achiume is just the latest in a series of UN ‘rapporteurs’ who have visited the UK and published contentious reports.
‘ These UN rapporteurs have become just another way for people opposed to Britain’s government, or to Brexit, to get publicity. They are a complete joke, and are becoming vexatious.’
Indeed, over recent years, UN ‘rapporteurs’ have visited the UK to research several charged issues. In 2011, one demanded that travellers ought not to be removed from an illegal caravan site at Dale Farm in essex.
Another, a feminist academic from South Africa called Rashida Manjoo, who was a UN investigator looking at violence against women, claimed in 2014 that there was a ‘boys’ club sexist culture’ in this country which was worse than elsewhere (including, one assumes, in such bastions of sexual liberation as Saudi Arabia).
Later that year, Francis Crepeau, the ‘rapporteur’ on migrant issues, crudely claimed Britain’s attitude to migration to be “utter bull****’, arguing that we have a culture ‘probably created 2,000 years ago and carried on, and now it’s being threatened by all those barbarians that are coming to our gate’.
Meanwhile, in 2016, a Costa Rican UN representative accused the UK of being guilty of ‘grave or systematic violations’ of the rights of disabled people.
Perhaps these shores’ most notorious ‘rapporteur’ visitor was Raquel Rolnik, a hard- Left academic from Brazil, where millions live in favelas, who had the gall to visit the UK to prepare a report on our ‘housing crisis’.
Britain’s then housing minister, Kris hopkins, dismissed her report as a ‘misleading Marxist diatribe’.
Rolnik (who stayed in a £300-anight hotel during her visit) became a figure of public ridicule — earning the nickname ‘the Brazil nut’ — when it emerged that, as a follower of the African-Brazilian religion Candomble, she had once offered an animal sacrifice to her political hero Karl Marx.
Such ridiculous episodes were, perhaps, an inevitable result of the politicisation, over several decades, of the United Nations human Rights Council (UNhRC). Its ‘rapporteurs’ monitor how human rights are protected or violated — covering issues ranging from the treatment of albinos to discrimination against leprosy victims.
however, there is concern that they seem more inclined to scrutinise Western democracies than countries such as China and Cuba (where there is no free Press), Saudi Arabia (where women are only now gaining the right to drive), Qatar (where migrant workers are kept in conditions akin to slavery), Afghanistan and Venezuela.
Indeed, ‘rapporteurs’ have visited Britain 24 times since 1995, looking at issues such as toxic waste, education, ‘the promotion of truth’ and racism. The UN sent roughly the same number to China, a oneparty state of 1.8 billion citizens, in the same period.
ONe factor behind this emphasis on Western nations may be that the ‘rapporteurs’ largely hail from Left-wing academia or the legal profession, and have politicised their role accordingly.
Of course, this brings us back to Tendayi Achiume.
Born in Zambia in 1982 and raised from the age of 12 in Zimbabwe, she undoubtedly owes much of her subsequent success to the fact that she was invited as a teenager on a scholarship to study at United World College, a boarding school at St Donat’s Castle in Wales.
Back then, she was known as emily, the Westernised name given to her as a baby but which she appears to have dropped as her career as an expert in human rights law took off.
Four years ago, she wrote an article claiming that ‘brutal attacks against foreign nationals threaten the lives of refugees’ in a list of countries including Britain.
No evidence was presented — nor for a suggestion that refugees in the UK live in shanty towns and ‘ struggle to meet physical necessities (housing, food, clean water) and to access education and healthcare’.
But who needs evidence, when you have Left-wing dogma?
For, as her attitude towards Mike Campbell (who died in 2011, never having recovered from the injuries he received from the attack by Mugabe’s thugs) shows, this UN expert only seems to call out racism when it reinforces her own narrow world view.