Harare | Wednesday
ZIMBABWE’S Supreme Court on Tuesday threw out charges of terrorism against opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, declaring that the law under which he was charged was unconstitutional, his lawyer said.
The ruling paves the way for Tsvangirai to contest in next year’s presidential elections, where he is expected to pose the greatest challenge yet to President Robert Mugabe’s uninterrupted 21-year stay in power.
“I think it is a judgement which most lawyers in this country have been hoping would be struck down,” said Tsvangirai’s lawyer Innocent Chagonda.
Tsvangirai was charged under the notorious Law and Order Maintenance Act (Loma), which had been introduced by former colonial rebel prime minister Ian Smith’s Rhodesian regime.
Had he been tried and convicted under Loma’s sections which deal with terrorism and sabotage, Tsvangirai would have been liable to be sentenced to life in jail.
The charges stemmed from a speech Tsvangirai, leader of the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), made at a rally in September last year calling for the violent removal of Mugabe from power.
The decision to declare Loma unconstitutional was unanimously made by the Court now headed by a new chief justice largely seen to be pro-government. The newly appointed chief justice Godfrey Chidyausiku was part of the five-member bench that was party to the decision.
Four of the judges, in their remarks in the judgement described Loma as having “an unsavoury history”.
The four, who are all from the previous bench headed by former chief justice Antony Gubbay, said the law was promulgated in 1960 “to suppress the legitimate aspirations of the majority of the population of this country”.
“It was bitterly criticised by the leaders of the nationalist movement, many of who are in leadership in present day Zimbabwe,” the judges said.
Tsvangirai, Mugabe’s only serious rival at the polls, had told last year’s MDC rally: “What we would like to tell Mugabe today is ‘please go peacefully, and if you don’t want to go peacefully we will remove you violently’.”
Chagonda said the two sections of Loma under which Tsvangirai was being charged were struck down as being unconstitutional by the five Supreme Court judges who heard the case.
But some members of Tsvangirai’s party, including a lawmaker, are still in jail accused of terrorism, following the murder of a pro-government war veterans’ leader, Cain Nkala, a fortnight ago.
And Mugabe has seen an international plot against his government, singling out the former colonial power, Britain, for sponsoring terrorist activities in his country.
Mugabe said the war veteran’s “murder was a bloody outcome of an orchestrated much wider and carefully planned terrorist plot by internal and external enemy forces with plenty of funding from some commercial farmers and organisations.”
But Britain has denied any involvement in terrorist activities in Zimbabwe.
“The suggestion that the British government or British political parties are financing terrorist activities in Zimbabwe is absolutely wrong,” the British High Commission in Harare said in a statement. -AFP
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