Protesters called for sanctions against the Swazi king and the Swazi government at a demonstration outside the Swaziland embassy in Pretoria on Wednesday.
Nearly 1 000 members of the Young Communist League (YCL) and the Swaziland Solidarity Movement (SSM) called on ”democracy-loving people of the world” and governments to impose sanctions on the Swazi government and to isolate King Mswati III and his ”lavish family”.
The monarch recently came under scrutiny for purchasing a number of luxury vehicles for himself and his ten wives while poverty and HIV/Aids were rife in the small kingdom.
Mswati and the Swazi government had been misleading the world by claiming to be engaged in constitutional reform over the past decade, SSM spokesperson Lucky Lukhele said.
The multimillion rand constitutional reform project, the SSM said, was predetermined to retain all the executive, judicial and legislative powers of the king.
The protesters demanded democracy in Zimbabwe and Swaziland. The YCL earlier delivered a memorandum of demands to the Zimbabwean embassy, throwing it through the embassy gate as no embassy official had come to collect it.
The protesters listed the following demands for ”the struggle for freedom in Swaziland”:
- the unbanning of all political parties in Swaziland and the cessation of all intimidation and cessation of hostilities against political leaders and activists,
- the unconditional end of arbitrary arrests, torture and victimisation of political leaders, trade unionist and activists and
- an all-inclusive process of constitutional transformation.
The organisations appealed to the international community for support for ”the genuine cause of freedom for the people of the world”, and urged the African Union, the Southern African Development Community and all multilateral bodies to intervene against human rights abuses in Swaziland. — Sapa