OWN CORRESPONDENT, Brussels | Monday
A PROMINENT British gay rights campaigner who tried to make a citizen’s arrest of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe over his human rights record was knocked to the ground by the president’s bodyguards.
Peter Tatchell of the British gay rights group Outrage yelled “Arrest Mugabe, arrest the torturer” as the veteran African leader left the Hilton Hotel in Brussels.
Mugabe, who is on a one-day visit to Belgium for talks about the central African peace process, is a hate figure for many homosexuals, whom he has branded as “dogs”.
In the ensuing scuffle, Tatchell was pushed to the ground.
“I am OK, I fell down,” he told reporters afterwards.
“I said the president should be arrested for the crime of torture under the 1984 United Nations’ Convention on Torture of which Belgium is a signatory,” Tatchell said.
Tatchell and two other members of the Outrage group tried to effect a citizen’s arrest in October during a private visit by Mugabe to Britain.
After the incident in Brussels, Mugabe held talks with Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt and Foreign Minister Louis Michel about the peace process in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a former Belgian colony. Zimbabwe is a key ally of the DRC’s President Joseph Kabila, who is struggling to put an end to Africa’s biggest war.
Separately, European Development Commissioner Poul Nielson pressed the concerns of the European Union about human rights in Zimbabwe during a lunchtime meeting with Mugabe.
“It was a frank and very open discussion,” Commission representative Reijo Kemppinen said.
He said the two sides had agreed to open a “political dialogue” to examine the EU’s concerns, which include freedom of the press and of the judiciary in Zimbabwe and also Mugabe’s drive to seize white-owned farms without compensation.
Zimbabwe last week averted a constitutional crisis by reinstating Chief Justice Anthony Gubbay until July 1 and withdrawing allegations of bias against him.
For two days, Gubbay, 69, had defied a government order to take early retirement from March 1 while the government insisted he had retired and that would appoint a successor.
Mugabe’s supporters have threatened to chase some white judges out of courtrooms and to invade the homes of those seen as opposed to the government. – Reuters
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