Mike Auret

Michael Theodore Hayes Auret (14 December 1936 – 10 April 2020) was a Zimbabwean farmer, politician, and activist.

Michael Theodore Hayes Auret was born on 14 December 1936 in Umtali, Southern Rhodesia.

The descendant of Huguenot settlers in South Africa, he came from a family of farmers who had settled in eastern Southern Rhodesia.

His father, Smiley Auret, farmed in Belingwe District, where Auret would later also farm.

Auret began his education at a Dominican convent school in Umtali, and then studied from 1947 to 1955 at the Jesuit-run St. George's College in the capital, Salisbury, where he father had been one of the first students in 1898.

After leaving St. George's College in 1955, he served in the armies of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland and Southern Rhodesia for ten years.

In 1956, he joined the army of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland and was stationed in Ndola, Northern Rhodesia.

He initially planned to become a Catholic priest until he met and married his wife, Diana Doherty, in 1958.

When the Federation dissolved in 1963, he returned home and joined the Southern Rhodesian Army.

He took up cattle farming in Mberengwa from 1966 to 1978, after which he joined the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace.

Soon after, he received a conscription notice from the Rhodesian Security Forces and rather than enlisting, fled with his family to the United Kingdom.

He resigned as a captain in 1966, shortly after Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence.

After leaving the army in 1966, Auret went on to manage a 27,000-acre cattle farm in Belingwe, about 200 km from Bulawayo.

In the leadup to the 1969 constitutional referendum, Auret campaigned against the adoption of a republican form of government that would end Rhodesia's ties to the British monarchy.

The proposed constitution was supported overwhelming by the country's white voters, and Rhodesia became a republic in 1970.

In 1974, Auret unsuccessfully ran for Parliament for the Bulawayo District constituency.

Representing the moderate Rhodesia Party, he lost with 22.5 percent of the vote to the incumbent MP, Alec Moseley of the Rhodesian Front, who received 77.5 percent of the 1,613 votes cast.

In early 1977, during the Rhodesian Bush War, black guerrillas burned down the house of Auret's assistant farm manager, but spared Auret's home and his farm equipment.

The guerrillas left two notes, one of which said, "We don't hate whites. We left your property because you are a friend of the people."

A devout Catholic, he served as chairman and later director of the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe (CCJP) from 1978 until 1999.

In 1978, Auret abandoned farming and began working for the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Rhodesia (CCJP), a human rights organization putting him at odds with the government.

He was motivated by a desire to expose war atrocities by Rhodesian forces, who had tortured some of his farm workers.

Not long after, he received a conscription notice from the Rhodesian Security Forces.

Auret was in Rome with two Rhodesian bishops on a CCJP trip to meet Pope John Paul II, and was advised not to return to Rhodesia.

His wife and children discreetly packed their things and left the country.

After reuniting in Rome, the family went to Switzerland and then the United Kingdom, where they were eventually granted refugee status.

There, Auret worked Part-time jobs to support his family.

In 1979, while still in exile, he was part of a delegation of Rhodesians to the United States seeking assistance in facilitating the start of peace talks.

Later that year, negotiations did occur, resulting in the Lancaster House Agreement, which ended the war and set the stage for Rhodesia's reconstitution as the internationally recognized, independent Zimbabwe.

He returned to the independent Zimbabwe in 1980 and resumed work with the CCJP.

During the 1980s, he led the organizations effort's to document and put and end to the Gukurahundi massacres, perpetrated in Matabeleland by forces directed by Prime Minister Robert Mugabe's government.

Auret returned to Zimbabwe soon after the 1980 general election that determined the country's first government and Parliament.

He started work training small-scale black farmers.

He became chairman of the renamed Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe, and began documenting atrocities committed by Zimbabwean forces during the Gukurahundi massacres in the Matabeleland region.

Auret arranged a 16 March 1983 meeting at State House in Harare between himself, a delegation of Catholic bishops, and Prime Minister Robert Mugabe, in an effort to stop the killings.

Auret left the commission in 1999 and became involved in the political opposition to Mugabe and his ruling ZANU–PF party.

He also served as a member of Parliament for Harare Central from 2000 to 2003, when he resigned and emigrated to Ireland.

Born in Mutare, Southern Rhodesia, and raised in the Mberengwa area, Auret came from a family of farmers.

In 2000, he was elected to Parliament for the newly formed Movement for Democratic Change.

Amid escalating political violence and reportedly due to ill health, he resigned in 2003 and emigrated, first to Cape Town, South Africa, and then to County Offaly, Ireland, where he remained until his death in 2020.