The trial for treason of the Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai opened yesterday amid scenes of violence and chaos with baton-wielding police preventing diplomats, MPs, lawyers and journalists from entering court.
Two journalists were arrested and police raised truncheons at several European Union diplomats who were brusquely shoved away from the court entrance.
”Is this the rule of law in Zimbabwe?” said Priscilla Misihairabwi, an opposition MP, as police threatened to arrest her. ”This is a public place. It is a public court. What have you got to hide?”
Tsvangirai, the leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and two senior party officials are charged with plotting to have President Robert Mugabe assassinated. If convicted they could face the death penalty.
Tsvangirai has dismissed the allegations as ”trumped-up charges” designed to smear him and his party. The charges were made in February last year, only a month before Tsvangirai ran in presidential elections which Mugabe narrowly won amid widespread state violence and evidence of massive voting fraud. The Commonwealth and western governments dismissed Mugabe’s election as illegitimate.
Tsvangirai (51) arrived to cheers from a crowd of 200 supporters, which apparently enraged the police who began angrily pushing people away with their batons.
His co-defendants, the MDC secretary-general, Welshman Ncube, and the MP Renson Gasela, were refused entry until it was pointed out that the trial could not take place without them.
The US ambassador, Joseph Sullivan, was pushed away but eventually was allowed to enter the court. ”It has important implications for the rule of law and democratic pluralism in Zimbabwe,” Sullivan said.
That meant little to the riot police who pushed the German deputy ambassador, Jan Hendrik van Thiel, when he presented his diplomatic card. ”Get away from here,” shouted a policeman. ”You are no longer a diplomat. We will get you.”
”Don’t allow anyone to enter,” ordered a plainclothes policeman.
”We don’t allow anyone to enter. This is not parliament,” he said to opposition MPs.
The heavy-handed police tactics are seen as a taste of what is to come at the World Cup cricket matches to be held in Zimbabwe, starting in Harare on February 10.
”This is not logical,” said an angry European envoy. ”The government has made so much about this treason trial that they should want the world to see that it is proceeding in an orderly fashion. But this kind of behaviour makes one question the entire process. It is crazy.”
Eventually the president of the high court judges, Paddington Garwe, issued an order that diplomats, journalists and interested members of the public should be allowed to enter. This allowed the British high commissioner and the German and Spanish ambassadors to attend the afternoon session.
But police continued to refuse entrance to several journalists working for the foreign press, saying the courtroom was filled to capacity. Lawyers inside, however, said the public galleries were nearly empty.
Bharat Patel, the deputy attorney general, opened the state’s case, saying: ”Their opposition and desire for political power is not criminal as such but it is their desire to overthrow a government and to occupy positions through undemocratic means which is criminal. It is their unlawful desire of seeking to attain political power that the state seeks to punish.”
The case centres on a secretly recorded videotape of a meeting between Tsvangirai and the Canadian consultant Ari Ben Menashe in which the opposition leader purportedly sought to hire assassins to eliminate Mugabe.
Menashe claims to be a former Israeli intelligence officer and arms dealer and now heads the Canadian consulting firm Dickens and Madson.
The firm is on record as being hired by the Mugabe government to improve its image, therefore its evidence against Tsvangirai will be questioned as unreliable.
Tsvangirai said the firm offered to help the MDC buff up its image in the west. But Ben Menashe, who is the main state witness, said that Tsvangirai wanted him to have Mugabe killed.
The renowned South African anti-apartheid lawyer George Bizos, who is leading Tsvangirai’s defence, said the government’s evidence has been ”heavily doctored” to implicate the three defendants.
”We agree that this is a trial with heavy political overtones and undertones,” said Bizos, giving an outline of the defence case. ”This was a trap. The accused are innocent as they have said.”
The case comes as Zimbabwe faces a deepening economic crisis with two-thirds of its 12-million population threatened with starvation, a crippling fuel shortage and inflation at 200%.
Tensions are high and it is feared by many that the trial of the popular Tsvangirai could set off an angry reaction. – Guardian Unlimited Â