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This article participates on the following special index pages:
Treason charges against Munyaradzi Gwisai & others - Index of articles
Zimbabwe
discourages interest in Arab uprisings
Fazila Mahomed, Women's eNews
March 08, 2011
http://www.womensenews.org/story/law/110307/zimbabwe-discourages-interest-in-arab-uprisings
People here talk about
the political events in North Africa in supermarkets, pubs, schools,
markets, hospitals, on the soccer fields and in our homes.
But a trial of 45 people
that started Feb. 19 and ended in treason charges against six on
Monday, signals the danger of doing so in any organized fashion
in a country with what the Committee to Protect Journalists describes
as some of the world's most restrictive media laws.
President Robert
Mugabe's security forces rounded up the group of 45 - which included
11 women - while they were gathered in an office building for a
meeting organized by the International Socialist Organization to
meet and watch recordings of the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt.
On Monday, 39 of the
accused were released and allowed to return home.
Six remaining
- including one woman - now await a trial date at the High Court
on treason charges, which carry the death sentence in Zimbabwe.
The local magistrate
said the group could apply for bail.
The most prominent member
of the group is Munyaradzi Gwisai, a former member of Parliament
for the Movement for Democratic Change.
The group is accused
of plotting a government overthrow, something human rights workers
have said could not be ascribed to the circumstances of their arrest.
"It was
nothing different to what many other Zimbabweans watched also,"
Roselyn Hanzi, head of the Human Rights Defender Project for the
Zimbabwe
Lawyers for Human Rights, was quoted in an article on the Africa
section of the Web site of the New York-based Committee to Protect
Journalists. State
Department spokesman Philip J. Crowley has expressed U.S. concern
about the situation, according to press reports.
Mugabe has held power
since 1980 and has faced charges of vote-rigging and security restrictions
to maintain his hold.
The country's
two leading women's right organizations - the Women's
Coalition and Zimbabwe
Women Lawyers Association - have declined to comment on the
case.
Some onlookers feared
for the women's safety while they were in police custody.
Women
of Zimbabwe Arise, a rights group based in the second largest
city of Bulawayo, has documented cases of police abuse of women
in the past. In 2007, the group published
a report finding that of 1,983 members who had been held by
the police after participating in various types of streets protests
42 percent reported sexual assault and torture, 33 percent reported
physical torture, 64 percent reported humiliating and degrading
treatment and 78 percent reported political threats. Violations
were perpetrated by police during protests and in custody.
Female members
of the National
Constitutional Assembly have reported
similar violations.
One of the most
notorious cases involves Jestina Mukoko, director of the Zimbabwe
Peace Project, based in Harare.
Mukoko was abducted
from her home on Dec. 3, 2008, and held in police custody for
several weeks, where she was brutally beaten, tortured, forced to
confess to an alleged plot to mount a terrorist incursion from neighboring
Botswana, and subsequently imprisoned before being brought to court,
where she was eventually granted bail in February 2009.
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