Robert Mugabe’s government suspects that asylum seekers being sent back by Britain are spies, Zimbabwe’s main opposition claimed on Sunday.
The claim came as the row over the UK government’s policy of returning many refugees continued, with immigration detainees saying that they fear death or torture if deported.
Under pressure the home secretary, Charles Clarke, is staging a review of the policy this week, but has refused to end the deportations.
The government’s claim that no one returned to Zimbabwe had been harmed was dismissed by the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. An MDC spokesman, Paul Themba Nyathi, said: ”This is a paranoid state that views those deported from London as spies trained by the Blair government to carry out espionage.
”This is preposterous, but for a government like this, with its paranoid tendency it is very, very likely.”
In Britain, a Zimbabwean immigration detainee insisted on Sunday that those on hunger strike in protest at the deportation policy numbered more than the 41 the British Home Office admits to.
Meanwhile, detainees told of their fear of being returned.
Speaking from Yarl’s Wood detention centre, near Bedford, 24-year-old Ashley Tshabangu said she was on the sixth day of a hunger strike and that two other women at the centre had been refusing food for three weeks.
Tshabangu said that in 2001 her mother was burned to death at home by members of the ruling Zanu-PF party.
”My mother was a member of the MDC, that is why she was killed. The same thing will happen to me if I go back. That is why I am not eating. All the Zimbabwean women here feel the same way.”
A leader of the opposition, Crispen Kulinji, was spared from being deported this weekend at the last minute. Kulinji, in a wheelchair from beatings he says he suffered at the hands of Mugabe’s men, had said: ”I will be killed if I go home — it’s as black and white as that.”
Another ex-detainee, Noble Sibanda (29) who was released from detention three weeks ago, said: ”If the British government are sincere about wanting to get rid of Mugabe, they should be working with those of us who want the same thing. By imprisoning us and returning us to Zimbabwe, they are working against us.”
Amid reports of a cabinet split on the issue, Downing Street and the British Foreign Office on Sunday night threw their weight behind Clarke, who has been criticised by church leaders and civil liberty groups.
All three departments stressed that Britain examines each case on its merits and upholds the UN convention on refugees, rooted in the principle that no one whose life might be endangered should be sent back.
”[British Prime Minister] Tony Blair does not believe in an amnesty for Zimbabwe, he believes we should treat it the same as everywhere else and take every case on its merits,” said one No 10 official.
This week’s decision on the deportations will be taken by the Home Office, but the Foreign Office will provide advice on safety and other conditions in Zimbabwe.
An envoy for the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, flew to Zimbabwe on Sunday to investigate a so-called urban renewal campaign that has destroyed the homes and livelihoods of between 300 000 and 1,5 million-Zimbabweans. Hours before the arrival of Anna Tibaijuka, a state-run newspaper reported that the government was winding up the campaign. – Guardian Unlimited Â