Zimbabwean official Joshua Malinga was ”removed” from Britain a day after he was detained here for violating a European Union travel ban, the British Home Office said.
”He was removed on the first available flight today,” a representative said.
Malinga, who is disabled, earlier told Britain’s Press
Association that he would leave London’s Gatwick airport at 7:00pm (1800 GMT) aboard an Air Zimbabwe flight bound for Harare.
The Home Office was unable to confirm whether his disabled wife, who had also been detained, was on the flight.
Malinga, a politburo member and the deputy secretary for the disabled and disadvantaged in President Robert Mugabe’s ruling Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) party was detained after he arrived at Gatwick on Friday on his way to New York for a conference.
Zimbabwe’s Information Minister Jonathan Moyo was quoted by the state-run Herald newspaper on Saturday as calling Malinga’s arrest ”madness”.
”This is the clearest example that the Brits have gone bananas and are harassing disabled people who should be assisted,” the paper quoted Moyo as saying.
”Perhaps the time has come for our own list of Brits who are not welcome in Zimbabwe… Now you can understand how and why Britain committed atrocities and other crimes against humanity during colonialism, and why Europe started the last two world wars,” Moyo said.
”These people are petty, mean and dangerous,” he said.
Britain is the former colonial power in the country and Mugabe has vilified the British government, blaming it for many of the troubled southern African country’s problems.
Malinga was held under a travel ban imposed by the European Union (EU) on close associates of Mugabe. The EU imposed ”targeted sanctions” against Zimbabwe after Mugabe refused to let European observers monitor the presidential elections in March.
The EU has barred 72 leading Zimbabweans from entering the union’s 15 member states to punish Mugabe’s government for human rights abuses and economic policies critics say are pushing the country into famine and chaos.
Malinga complained that British authorities detained him for nearly nine hours without telling him why.
”This is a violation of my rights as a handicapped person,” he protested.
Malinga was speaking on Saturday at a hotel near the airport where he and his wife, who is also disabled, were put up after they were detained.
He told British news agency the Press Association that he felt his detention was unjust.
”I was in transit for New York because I am chairman of an international humanitarian organisation, Disabled Peoples International … and as such I was travelling to a UN conference on the disabled,” he said.
British junior minister for Africa, Valerie Amos, told the BBC: ”Mr Malinga is a member of the Zanu-PF Politburo. They are the party which claim to be in government and it is their policies which are ruining the country.”
”As a member of the Politburo he has been appointed personally by Robert Mugabe. We are talking about collective responsibility,” she added, explaining the decision to bar Malinga from entering Britain.
Amos also rejected Mugabe’s claims that concern about his regime was a British preoccupation.
”You have the European Union, you have the United States, you have partner countries in Africa, we have others who are outside the European Union, who are saying exactly the same thing,” she said.
”Robert Mugabe, at the opening of parliament this week in Zimbabwe, talked about the action of donors in giving money to help the humanitarian situation as being ‘sinister’.
”What we are trying to do is to deal with a situation that that regime itself is not dealing with… Yes they will try to make this into a problem between Britain and Zimbabwe. It absolutely is not,” she said.
In other developments, Mugabe told lawmakers on Friday that his government would continue to ignore rulings by judges he deemed biased.
Mugabe’s increasingly authoritarian government has cracked down on the opposition, the independent press and the judiciary. The government has repeatedly ignored court orders, instructing police not to enforce them, and last year expanded the Supreme Court bench in an apparent bid to pack it with sympathetic judges.
”We will respect judges where the judgements are true judgements,” said Mugabe.
”Judges are human beings. They are not gods who have come from some planet, Venus or Mars,” said Mugabe, who has facilitated the ousting of several judges he has deemed a threat.
Mugabe also told lawmakers he would veto any attempt to legalise homosexual activities in Zimbabwe.
”When I said gays are worse than dogs and pigs, I really meant it because pigs don’t do unnatural things,” Mugabe said.
Mugabe is reviled by gay activists around the world for outlawing homosexuality and describing same-sex partners as worse than animals. – Sapa, AFP, AP