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Cosatu Zim team vanishes
Hans Pienaar and Peta Thornycroft , The Star (SA)
October 27, 2004

http://www.thestar.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=128&fArticleId=2276462

Harare - The whereabouts of a top-level, fact-finding Cosatu team was unknown for several hours after a stand-off at Harare airport, a threat by Cosatu to block the Beit Bridge border post and a court order against their immediate deportation. Cosatu spokesperson Patrick Craven said last night that all they knew was that the team was on a bus, but that its members had no idea where they were going. Fears were expressed that they were either being driven to the South African border or to a secret place in order to be put on an early morning Air Zimbabwe flight today. Union officials had received a tip-off that the team had reached the town of Chivhu - a six-hour drive from the border - by 11pm, but this could not be confirmed. The 13-member team had been holed up in the international lounge of Harare International Airport after Zimbabwean intelligence officials tried to deport them yesterday morning. By midnight, contact with the team had been lost.

The team's busy day started yesterday morning when intelligence officials swooped on their hotel and ferried them to the airport. A stand-off with police followed, and after Zimbabwe riot squad members began arriving in numbers, Cosatu issued a threat from Johannesburg to block the border."Cosatu warns that if any members of the mission are arrested, attacked or injured, the federation will organise a blockade of the South Africa-Zimbabwe border within 48 hours," Craven said. Meanwhile Cosatu's counterparts from the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) launched an urgent High Court application yesterday. The court ordered that the Zimbabwean government must show before 2pm today why the delegation should be deported. By the time of going to press early this morning, the court order had not yet been served on a senior government official.

Earlier in the day, before he was shoved towards the SAA check-in counter, Simon Boshielo, Cosatu's international affairs secretary, shouted: "Take us to prison, we will sit in prison, we are not frightened of jail. We will come back to Zimbabwe." The international departure lounge in the airport's transit section was swamped with riot squad members. A squad of ZCTU leaders were then delegated to "keep watch" over their Cosatu "comrades". On Monday evening, the delegation were held up at immigration counters at the airport for an hour and were asked to sign a guarantee that they would not meet civil rights activists during their visit to Zimbabwe. They refused. Their passports were stamped for a day's visit, and as the South Africans were meeting their ZCTU counterparts, immigration officials and police stormed into their Harare hotel and ordered them to leave Zimbabwe immediately.

Violet Seboni, deputy president of Cosatu and head of the delegation, said last night they were unable to return to SA as Zimbabwean officials had failed to provide them with plane tickets as promised. "When we arrived here yesterday, people who identified themselves as the Central Intelligence Organisation confiscated our passports and promised to issue us tickets to return back home today. They failed to give us those tickets and we ended up missing the flight." The Zimbabwe government said in a statement yesterday: "Some dubious individuals claiming association with Cosatu, and working with Tony Blair's well-known anti-Zimbabwe, pro-Western interests opposed to Zimbabwe's land reforms, last night flew into the country in utter disregard of objections of the Zimbabwean government. This visit ... constitutes a direct and most frontal challenge to the sovereignty of the republic of Zimbabwe." Information Minister Jonathan Moyo continued the attack against Cosatu on Zimbabwe's TV news last night. He claimed the Cosatu officials were "dubious individuals" with "treacherous" intentions. The Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation said the 13 Cosatu leaders supported "lawless regimes" and had come to Zimbabwe as latter-day "aristocrats who are pro-capitalist".

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