/ 29 October 2004

Zim MP sentenced to a year’s hard labour

A prominent white opposition lawmaker was jailed for a year on Thursday for allegedly assaulting two ministers in Parliament during a debate earlier this year over the seizures of white-owned farms by the government.

The Parliament voted 53 to 42 ballots for the immediate imprisonment of Roy Bennett, a lawmaker of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, whose farm in eastern Zimbabwe was seized by the government.

He is the first legislator in the nation’s history to be jailed by the Parliament.

Opposition officials described the imprisonment of Zimbabwe-born Bennett, an outspoken and fluent speaker of the local Shona language, as vindictive.

Before the vote ratified the sentence, a parliamentary panel, dominated by the ruling party, sentenced Bennett to a year in jail with hard labour for assaulting the two ministers.

The sentence was passed by the ruling party-dominated Parliamentary Privilege Committee, which has arrest and imprisonment powers under the rules of the legislature for beaches of conduct in the Parliament house.

Routine criminal assault cases normally carry small fines of less than Z$20 000.

Lawyers said the Parliament ordered Bennett’s immediate imprisonment to serve the sentence without the option of an appeal.

Earlier on Thursday, Bennett, in a 35-minute address to Parliament, said he was ”sorry for the disturbance” on May 18 in which he traded blows and knocked to the floor Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa and Didymus Mutasa, the minister responsible for fighting corruption.

He said he was formally apologising to House Speaker Emmerson Mnangagwa.

”I am ready to go to jail,” he said.

President Robert Mugabe’s ruling party holds majority of 99 of the 150 Parliament seats.

State radio earlier on Thursday reported that Bennett had been arrested at the Harare airport while apparently trying to flee the country.

But Arnold Tsunga, his lawyer, said Bennett was traveling to neighbouring South Africa for a business meeting on Thursday, and was to return home the same day.

He explained Bennett was to meet South African attorneys in a long-running dispute over coffee stolen from his plantation in eastern Zimbabwe. Bennett was seeking an international court order to stop a German coffee dealer paying for the coffee taken from his farm by ruling party militants, Tsunga said.

Ruling party militants occupied Bennett’s farm in the Chimanimani district of eastern Zimbabwe during the government’s often violent seizures of white-owned farms that began in 2000.

The scuffle occurred when Chinamasa said the seizure of Bennett’s farm was to punish him for the crimes of his ancestors, whom he claimed stole land and property from black Zimbabweans during the colonial era before independence in 1980.

Chinamasa described Bennett’s ancestors and other white settlers as ”thieves and murderers”. – Sapa-AP