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(NEWZIMBABWE) Uprising ... Munyaradzi Gwisai and some of the activists accused of plotting Mugabe overthrow

Uprising ... Munyaradzi Gwisai and some of the activists accused of plotting Mugabe overthrow
by Staff Reporter/AP
23/02/2011 00:00:00

FORTY-SIX opposition activists will spend a fifth night in jail on allegations they attended a lecture about the mass uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt.

Prosecutors have accused the group, including former MDC MP Munyaradzi Gwisai, of treason, saying they intended to plot the overthrow of longtime President Robert Mugabe’s government.

At a hearing late Wednesday, Harare magistrate Munamato Mutevedzi rescheduled the detainees to reappear Thursday.

Treason in Zimbabwe carries a possible death sentence.

Defence lawyer Alec Muchadehama said he has been denied free access to the detainees since their arrest on Saturday with the meeting organiser, Gwisai – a country representative for the International Socialist Organisation.

The 46 – who include students, trade unionists and political activists – were arrested when they gathered in Harare to watch Al Jazeera and BBC news reports on the uprisings that brought down autocrats in Tunisia and Egypt.

Police accused them of participating in an illegal political meeting where they watched videos “as a way of motivating them to subvert a constitutionally elected government.”

The evidence seized by the police included a video projector, two DVD discs and a laptop.

“The illegal meeting’s agenda, police said, was ‘Revolt in Egypt and Tunisia: What lessons can be learnt by Zimbabwe and Africa?’

Police found the topic incriminating, but many Zimbabweans have been asking themselves that very question as democratic revolutions have swept Arab nations.

Mugabe, who turned 87 on Monday, and his Zanu PF party ruled Zimbabwe single-handedly from 1980 until 2009, when regional leaders pressured him into forming a power-sharing government with his opposition rivals.

Gwisai, a socialist and iconoclast whose wife said he was expelled from Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change in 2002 for supporting an aggressive land reform programme at a time when Zanu PF was encouraging violent seizures of white-owned commercial farms, has like many of his countrymen been watching the unrest in Arab nations.

His wife, Shantha Bloemen, who works for the United Nations in Johannesburg, said: “Obviously, all the happenings in Egypt and Tunisia have been taking center stage. The meeting was an opportunity to discuss what’s happened, especially for people who don’t have access to the internet or cable TV, both to express solidarity and to discuss the implications for Zimbabwe.”

Said lawyer Muchadehama: “This is a message that ‘If you attempt anything, we’re going to arrest you, assault you, incarcerate you, lay false charges against you, deny you bail, and occupy you with false trials. That’s the message — ‘Don’t attempt this, it can’t be done here’.”

Labels: EGYPT, MUNYARADZI GWISAI, TREASON

posted by MrK @ 3:58 PM