Free Beko Campaign: An Appeal and A Journalist's Testimonial

[Mobolaji E. Aluko]

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FREE BEKO KUTI INTERNATIONAL CAMPAIGN COMMITTEE
"Beko Must Be Free"
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March 17, 1998

Dear Reader:

>From March 23-25, 1998, Pope John Paul II will be visiting his Catholic
and Christian flock in Nigeria, to re-acquaint himself with Nigeria in
general, but primarily to beatify Rev. Fr. Tansi of Onitsha, Nigeria. We
are sure that you all also wish His Holiness well.

But there are a number of political prisoners and prisoners of conscience
in Nigeria who wish him more than well: they wish that when the Pope
comes to Nigeria, he will ask for their freedom from the man who, as
military ruler, has made and unmade decrees to put them in prison. The
man is General Abacha, and the Pope will have a private audience with him.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of such prisoners. One of such is
Dr. Beko Ransome-Kuti, past chairman of the Nigerian Medical Association,
chairman of the Campaign for Democracy in Nigeria, etc. On Beko's behalf,
the Free Beko International Campaign Committee (of which Nike, Beko's
tireless daughter, is chairman), has written to the Pope about his case,
and we trust that he will take his case up with Abacha. We hope that,
like in Cuba, there will be a positive outcome. We so hope because the
case of Beko is the greatest example of outrage in the miscarriage of
justice in connection with that 1995 alleged coup plot.

But an evaluation of that heinous act is not our concern in this short
note. Our concern is to appeal to our readers for two things:

(1) a clear show of concern for Dr. Beko Ransome-Kuti
by donating money to the Free Beko Campaign so that
if and when Beko is released, he can be flown out
of Nigeria for medical care and rest from his wicked
incarceration. There are many Western organizations
prepared to do so, but quite frankly, Beko has been
doing what he is doing FOR US Nigerians, and not for the West.
There are SINGLE INDIVIDUALS who are Beko's friends
and family members who are willing and more than able to pay his way
out of Nigeria, but Beko has been doing this for
us CORPORATELY and not for his friends and family members.

(2) some pledges by medical doctors in our midst, individually or
corporately, to provide Beko with FREE MEDICAL
CARE if and when he arrives here in the United
States. We have already gotten a number of
pledges, but our conservative selves tell us that
we need more in order to cover Beko's multitudinous
ill-health conditions such as high fevers and chills,
macrocytic anemia and a peptic ulcer. His eyesight has
deteriorated, and the prison authorities refuse to issue him
corrective glasses for his blurred vision. He was sighted
recently in a military hospital close to his prison in northern
Nigeria unable to walk on his own feet.

That is our appeal. Please send your check, money order or cash (any
amount will do) in the name of the "Free Beko International Campaign" to
any of the addresses listed below, and your money will be used judiciously
for Beko. We will get him to write a personal letter of thanks whenever he
can. Also if you can, please pledge to give him free medical care.

Hope to hear from you soon.

Mobolaji E. Aluko, PhD
For and on behalf of the Free Beko International Campaign Committee

PS: A journalist's "testimonial" about Beko follows.

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[BEGIN QUOTE]:

"Three days before his arrest, Dr. Beko Ransome-Kuti was perched behind a
desk cluttered with papers and books, his high forehead bent down slightly
in a somber pose. The phone rang. His body heaved a light sigh of
fatigue. Limply cradling the receiver at such a distance from his face as
to suggest a faint fear that it might bite him, he muttered low at first,
then louder when no one on the other end responded. The line was dead.
Replacing the phone, he clicked his tongue in disgust.

Nigeria's telephone system brings new meaning to the word "awful."
Minutes later came another call, successful this time, and he sent the fax
machine humming into action to transmit to human rights groups letters
from political detainees that had been smuggled out by sympathetic prison
guards. The detainees were in secret jail cells on charges of plotting to
come to power the same way the current military regime did - by "coup
d'etat". Few believed the allegations. Among the prime suspects was
Olusegun Obasanjo, the only general in Nigeria's history to return power
from the military to a democratic government.

Throughout the afternoon, Dr. Ransome-Kuti alternated between transmitting
the letters and attending to relatives of the prisoners who stopped to see
about publicizing their cases to the local newspapers, to the foreign
press, to anyone who would listen. There was a special urgency in their
pleas. Just two days before, the military authorities publicly executed
forty-three armed robbers outside Lagos' notorious Kirikiri
maximum-security prison and disposed of their bodies in a garbage truck.
Now there was growing concern the firing squad was just warming up. "They
do not care about human life,' said Beko, as Dr. Ransome-Kuti is
universally known by friend and foe alike. "It just shows they would not
blink an eye if they killed the alleged coup plotters. This is a brutal
and very dangerous regime."

Another one of the military's periodic clampdowns against opponents, real
or imaginary, was in full flow, and as usual Beko was fighting from the
metaphorical trenches, his only weapon the spoken and written word. This
time the stakes had reached new heights. Obasanjo, the former head of
state, and thirty-nine other prominent personalities and military officers
were arrested and convicted by a secret tribunal of planning to overthrow
the regime of General Sani Abacha. No one knew who might be picked up
next. When one of Obasanjo's associates, Mrs. Titi Ajanaku, who was
detained for four months on suspicion of links to the alleged rebellion,
was finally released, she summed up the fleeting nature of individual
freedom in modern Nigeria. "Over four months incarceration over something
I know nothing abut. I was miraculously picked up on March 9 and was
miraculously released on July 13. God is wonderful."

It was a typical day in the life of Beko, an unassuming medical doctor who
was sucked into the maelstrom of NIgerian politics and emerged somewhat
reluctantly as a leader of the pro-democracy movement. A gentle, slender,
at times frail-looking man, Beko appears physically overmatched in the
contest of wills he has chosen to engage with the military. With a voice
so soft that it is often difficult to hear what he is saying, it seems
unfathomable that he poses a threat to the rulers of sub-Saharan Africa's
most populous nation. He has never been in the best of health, and the
months of detentions, the constant late-night arrests, the telephone
threats have taken their toll. As the years of his running confrontation
with Nigeria's military rulers pass the decade mark, he becomes thinner
and paler. In seventy-two hours from now, he would be behind bars once
again, but if he did not suspect his fate, it would not have surprised
him.

When his late brother, the Afro-beat superstar Fela Kuti who died of AIDS
on August 12, 1997, composed a song about standing up for one's beliefs,
about the man who refuses to run - "I no go run, Na man dey stand, Na goat
dey run" - he could have been singing about Beko. Since he threw himself
into the human rights campaigns and the pro-democracy movement in the
mid-1980s, Beko has never run. The military authorities have threatened
him, attempted to bribe him - a common practice in Nigerian parlance known
as "settling" - and repeatedly jailed him, but to no avail. They cannot
break him.. Beko remains standing, "Na man dey stand." He is the
president of the Campaign for Democracy, a pesky alliance of human rights
groups, women's associations, and student organizations that keeps
snapping relentlessly at the generals' heels no matter how much repression
it faces.

That day, though, as he sat in his office chain-smoking cigarettes, Beko
seemed distracted, from time to time rolling his huge brown eyes and
shaking his head at the chaos swirling around him. "They're crazy", he
said. "They won't stop until they destroy everything."......

Demonstrating, letterwriting, holding press conferences, mounting legal
challenges, engaging in debate - these are the tactics Beko learned, from
the time when his mother organized women against onerous taxes in
Abeokuta. Yet as Nigeria heads towards the millenium, its neck still
firmly under the boot of the generals, Beko's liberal agenda looks to be
frightenly irrelevant, and he knows it. "Trouble will eventually start
unless the problems are resolved peacefully. The people are so
desperate," he said sullenly. "If people want to get guns, they will find
them. I never could imagine thinking about guns, but at the stage we are
at now, I don't know anymore." In the back of his mind were the tragedies
that have unfolded in the southern African nations of Mozambique and
Angola, in the nearby West African states of Liberia and Sierra Leone, and
most worrying of all, in the Great Lakes region. "It is getting to the
point where people might just lash out. It would be anarchy, like the
Rwanda nightmare....."

It was late in the afternoon, and Beko readied his fax machine to send off
another set of statements from the detainees. He smiled and said, "I hope
the SSS [secret police] didn't follow you."

Three days later, the police came for him. After a fifteen-minute trial,
Beko was sentenced by the secret tribunal on August 2, 1995, his
fifty-fifth birthday, to life imprisonment for faxing defense statements
of the other detainees with, in the words of the court, "a view to having
the British and various governments invade Nigeria." Like Obasanjo and
many of the other alleged coup plotters, Beko's sentence was later reduced
to fifteen years in prison. He was sent to the far northern city of
Katsina and held in isolation.....

Beko Ransome Kuti celebrated his fifty-sixth birthday as he did the year
before: in jail. Odds are that he will celebrate his next one, too, in
Katsina prison. He could be there a long time. General Abacha has
announced a new transition to civilian rule program and refused to deny
rumors that he will be a candidate. Deprived of reading material, regular
visits by his family, and proper medical care, Beko's health continues to
deteriorate. The abiding image [is] of him sitting in his office,
comforting victims of human rights abuses and plotting to bring democracy
to his Nigeria..."

[END OF QUOTE.]
____
- by Karl Maier, an American journalist from his new book "Into
the House of the Ancestors: Inside the New Africa" (John Wiley &
Sons, Inc., 1998).

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For and on behalf of the Free Beko Kuti International Campaign Committee:

Ms. Morenike Kuti (Daughter) Dr. Mobolaji Aluko Dr.Kayode Fayemi
8, Imaria Street, P.O. Box 76682 P.O. Box 848
Anthony Village Washington, DC 20013 London SE1 4LL
P.O. Box 7247, Lagos, Nigeria USA United Kingdom
Tel: Lagos 01-4966555 Tel: 301/989-0016 Tel: 181-2448644
Fax: 01-4960363 Fax: 202/806-4635 Fax: 171-4070773

Mr. Osaren Igbinova
The Voice Forum
Furstengraben 30, 07743
Jena, Germany
Tel/Fax: 0049-3641-449304

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