Zimbabwean opposition chief Morgan Tsvangirai and 49 other opposition activists were released from hospital into their lawyers’ custody late on Tuesday, one of the lawyers said.
”Tsvangirai and others were released from hospital into our custody last night [Tuesday] around 2300 hours [GMT],” defence lawyer Aleck Muchadehama told Agence France-Presse on Wednesday.
”They are expected to appear in court this morning [Wednesday] and they will face public violence charges.”
The agreement to release Tsvangirai was reached by defence attorneys and the attorney general’s office on Tuesday afternoon.
Tsvangirai was detained on Sunday, along with dozens of other activists, after a police crackdown on an opposition rally in which one member of his Movement for Democratic Change, Gift Tandure, was killed.
After allegedly being beaten in police custody, the defendants were given permission on Tuesday to go to hospital for treatment after appearing at a court in the capital Harare.
Defence and prosecution lawyers met on Tuesday afternoon to discuss how the case should proceed, but the meeting reached a stalemate when the defence team walked out after prosecutors insisted the case be heard in the absence of the 50 defendants.
An injured Tsvangirai was brought to court on Tuesday, two days after his arrest.
Tsvangirai had a swollen face and part of his hair had been shaved in order to treat a cut to his head.
‘Shamefully weak response’
South African trade unions and church leaders have called their government’s response to unrest in Zimbabwe shameful, while a United States envoy urged all Zimbabwe’s neighbours to do more to rein in Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe.
While leaders across the world including US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the United Nations and the European Union had strong denunciations of the Zimbabwean government, regional power centre South Africa maintained that Zimbabwe’s problems could only be resolved by Zimbabweans.
In a statement, Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Aziz Pahad urged the Zimbabwean government to ensure respect for the rule of law and the opposition to ”work towards a climate that is conducive to finding a lasting solution to the current challenges faced by the people of Zimbabwe”.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) said it deplored the government’s ”shamefully weak response”.
”Such a response is disgraceful, in the face of such massive attacks on democracy and human rights, especially coming from those who owed so much to international solidarity when South Africans were fighting for democracy and human rights against the apartheid regime,” the country’s largest federation of trade unions said in a statement.
South Africa has pursued what it calls a policy of ”quiet diplomacy,” arguing working behind the scenes would do more to encourage reform in Zimbabwe than isolating Mugabe.
Now concerns are being raised that South Africa’s silence has added to Zimbabwe’s woes and is tarnishing the country’s image as a beacon of human rights.
”The silence of the South African government is aggravating the situation. Our leaders must show that they are committed to helping the people of Zimbabwe to find rapid solutions to the many problems confronting them,” said the South African Council of Churches.
Eddie Makue, the organisation’s general secretary, said in a statement that the situation in Zimbabwe threatened to destabilise the region.
”One would hope that in the glaring light of the growing brutality of the Zimbabwean government those [neighbouring] states would finally feel moved to act,” the US ambassador to Zimbabwe, Christopher Dell, told the BBC on Tuesday.
South African Foreign Affairs spokesperson Ronnie Mamoepa said calls for the government to condemn Zimbabwe were misplaced while contact between the two governments continued.
But Steven Friedman, a researcher at the Institute for Democracy in South Africa, a pro-democracy think tank, said there was a sense South Africa was concerned about not being seen to be siding with white farmers against a black government and giving the opposition any undue credibility, than it was in ”defending people’s rights to protest, which is a basic right enshrined in our Constitution”.
Friedman said South Africa was damaging its reputation as a country with a strong record on human rights issues.
”What the government fails to understand is that we are not a very large country so the extent to which we have any leverage in the world arena comes from our past. A consistent human rights approach is our greatest asset and we are busy squandering it and this is particularly true with regard to Zimbabwe,” he said. – Sapa-AP, AFP