So, Edinburgh University has finally stripped Robert Mugabe of the honorary degree it awarded him in 1984. It is the first time in the university’s 425-year history that it has revoked an honorary degree - and Mugabe will be afforded a right of appeal.
The university’s sanction came about after a sustained anti-Mugabe campaign by its student body and alumni, local newspapers and MPs. In order to carry it out, the university’s senate first had to alter its rules and then empanelled three professors to examine whether there were grounds to penalise Mugabe.
On June 6, the senate duly announced that there were such grounds. Not a difficult decision to arrive at, I’m sure, if 23 years late. More troubling than the time lag is that the university has been less than honest about the circumstances under which it conferred the honour.
Edinburgh’s recent official announcement read: “After examining evidence relating to the situation in Zimbabwe in the early 1980s - evidence that was not available to the university at the time the degree was conferred [my bold] - the group recommended that the degree should be withdrawn.”
One of the “three wise men” on the investigating panel, Professor Sir Neil MacCormick, emphasised that the university’s offer of the honorary degree had been made “in good faith” and that evidence of Mugabe’s human rights abuses - namely, the massacres in Matabeleland, in which as many as 20,000 civilians are believed to have been murdered - only came to light later, and “was not known to the senate when in 1984 it confirmed its decision to proceed and award the degree”.
Indeed? Let’s look at the timeline: Edinburgh University conferred the degree (at the initial suggestion of Lord Carrington, the former foreign secretary) upon Mugabe on July 20, 1984. But more than three months previously, on April 8, I had started reporting the massacre. The Sunday Times ran my first piece (to which we appended two other bylines to protect me) under the headline, “Mass murder in Matabeleland: the evidence”.
The first line read: “Robert Mugabe’s government in Zimbabwe has launched a new campaign of extraordinary brutality in Matabeleland, in the south of the country.” I reported from inside the curfew area (from which journalists were banned) using my own testimony and other eyewitness accounts of the Balaghwe “death camp”, run by the fearsome 5th Brigade, a North Korean-trained army unit fiercely loyal to Mugabe.
These reports were backed up by local priests - at least one of whom was already openly calling the killings “genocide” - and by the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission.
On April 15, I followed this with a report on the front page, headlined “Zimbabwe massacre bodies found in mine”. I interviewed dozens of eyewitnesses and went to the abandoned Antelope mineshaft, where victims from Balaghwe were being dumped. My reporting (and that of others) continued into mid-May, when the Catholic church had already submitted to Mugabe a list of 629 names of those killed by the army in Matabeleland.
At that point I was forced to leave Zimbabwe, having been warned that my life was in danger. The police surrounded my family home looking for me and I was denounced as an enemy of the state.
For Edinburgh University to say that information on the killings was unavailable in July 1984 is a travesty. Just such information was paraded under banner headlines in a national broadsheet Sunday paper with a large circulation. Yet academics proceeded to dignify the architect of genocidal massacre, giving him, in the words of a Foreign Office cable, “a flattering laudation”.
I find it almost impossible to believe they could genuinely have been unaware of these reports. In which case, what we have here is a breathtaking disregard for the truth back in July 1984, followed by a shameful cover-up now, in claiming these facts “were not available at the time”.
Subsequently, more and more information came out. More than a decade ago, the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission published its detailed report on the Matabeleland massacres. Yet still, nothing was done to strip Mugabe of his honour.
To make matters worse, in 1994 the Queen, acting on the advice of the Foreign Office and the then prime minister, John Major, conferred an honorary knighthood on Mugabe for his “important contribution to relations between Zimbabwe and Britain”. When questioned about it in parliament in 2003, Tony Blair agreed to consider stripping Mugabe of the knighthood. He still hasn’t got round to doing so.
Such action would not be unprecedented; a bunch of foreign royals, including the Emperor Franz Joseph I, had their honorary knighthoods rescinded in 1915. Mussolini had his taken back in 1940, Emperor Hirohito had his rescinded in 1941 and restored 30 years later, and Ceausescu had his withdrawn in 1989, in the nick of time - a week before his people rose up and executed him.
The government has no business allowing Mugabe to retain his honorary knighthood and the dons of Edinburgh, before basking in our approval for withdrawing Mugabe’s honorary degree, need to come clean about the circumstances in which they conferred it.
Peter Godwin