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Zim asylum shock - Youth leader flees as ex-MP loses
Michael Schmidt, The Saturday Star (SA)
May 27, 2006

http://www.star.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=3265395

A top Zimbabwean student leader has fled to South Africa, within hours of dissident Zimbabwean Roy Bennett losing his bid to win asylum in South Africa this week.

Givemore Chira, the president of the Bindura University of Science Education students' representative council and one of the leaders of the recent student protests, told the Saturday Star he feared being tortured like Bennett and countless other Zimbabweans.

Chira, who will apply today for the same status that was denied to Bennett, said other students had already been tortured by the Zimbabwean police.

"Their lawyers visited them in prison and told me they had been forced to spend the night with their feet in buckets of water and in the morning the bottoms of their feet were beaten so badly they could not stand," Chira said.

Zimbabwean anti-government activists fear Bennett will be sentenced to death if he is deported to Zimbabwe, where he will be tried for treason, a charge that still carries the death penalty in Zimbabwe.

They believe his case has become a test case not only for the South African constitution but also a watershed in the government's attitude towards the Zimbabwe government.

Nelson Chamisa, the national spokesperson for the Zimbabwean opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), said yesterday that Bennett's asylum hearing and subsequent appeal would be "a test case for the African continent on how we deal with dictatorships and black-on-black repression".

J J Sibanda, president of Concerned Zimbabweans Abroad, said Bennett's failure to win asylum showed "Thabo Mbeki and Robert Mugabe sleep under the same blanket".

He said he would prefer to see Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi running the country.

Vavi, who was recently refused entry to Zimbabwe to attend its trade union congress, warned on Thursday that South Africa " may be on our way to (mimicking) the Zimbabwean crisis …"

Rodgers Modarikwa, former bodyguard to MDC head Morgan Tsvangirai and now the MDC's deputy organising secretary in the "South African province", said that for the South African government to grant Bennett asylum status it would have to acknowledge that there was a crisis in Zimbabwe, which it appeared not prepared to do.

"And if you deny a high-profile person like Roy Bennett - who we will defend even until Thabo Mbeki's office - what about the person on the ground who has no profile?"

Bennett yesterday declined to comment on whether he feared for his life should he be deported, saying he would not discuss the details of his appeal before his press conference on Tuesday.

Sibanda said that of the estimated 3-million Zimbabweans in South Africa, "just under 70% are genuine asylum-seekers" - but very few were granted asylum status. Thousands of them had their homes destroyed a year ago in Operation Murambatsvima (Drive Out the Trash).

"They are prepared to sleep in the streets in the cold to escape Mugabe's terror," he said, though many Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) agents trawled the exile community in South Africa, beating and sometimes abducting opponents of the government.

Modarikwa said the current upsurge of resistance in Zimbabwe was not party political, but widespread throughout Zimbawean society.

Simon Khaya Moyo, the Zimbabwean High Commissioner to South Africa, could not be reached for comment. Attempts to obtain a full explanation from Home Affairs were also unsuccessful.

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