Jonathan Samkange is a member of his local Neighbourhood Watch Association. Police officers from the under-resourced local police unit frequently go to his house to ask him to drive them to a crime scene. So when police knocked on his door at 10.15pm on Monday night, he assumed they needed transport.
But this time the police officer had his own car and was accompanied by two officials from Harare’s Serious Fraud Squad. ”We’re here for you,” he said.
The police drove Samkange — the defence lawyer in the high-profile extradition trial of mercenary suspect Simon Mann — to Avondale Police Station and booked him in on allegations that he had violated the Immigration Act while acting for Mann. On Tuesday afternoon he was taken to the Harare Magistrate’s Court, where he was to be charged. In court, charges against him were withdrawn without any explanation.
”All lawyers are being arrested,” he said, as he drove home from court. ”I’m the seventh or eighth lawyer to be arrested in the past two weeks. I did nothing wrong. They dropped the charges because they had no case against me. I won’t be intimidated. I’ll pursue my profession with vigour.”
Reports of arrests, beatings and the harassment of lawyers in Zimbabwe have assumed a woeful monotony in recent days. Ten lawyers were arrested in Mutare on the day of Samkange’s release. Late on May 8, four lawyers were brutally assaulted by a gang of police officers in a quiet Harare street. On the same day, half a dozen other lawyers were beaten outside the high court as the police dispersed the group of Law Society of Zimbabwe members who had gathered there to protest the arrest of two of their colleagues, Alec Muchadehama and Andrew Makoni. While the group of 70 lawyers fled the high court, Muchadehama and Makoni, who had been arrested late on a Friday afternoon as they finished work in the high court, were remanded on Z$500 000 bail for allegedly violating a section of Zimbabwe’s penal code.
”They won’t kill us. Not here, in such a public place,” said Beatrice Mtetwa, the president of the ZimÂÂbabwe Law Society. She was describing what went through her mind as one police officer held her down in the dirt while others struck her with truncheons and kicked her with booted feet.
Mtetwa, an unflappable human rights lawyer, was one of the four lawyers assaulted by police last week. After being dragged out of the Attorney General’s office, they were bundled into the back of a police van, ordered to sit on the floor and driven to the end of Cumberland Road in Harare’s middle-class Eastlea suburb.
Mtetwa thinks she and two others got off lightly. ”As they started to hit us, Chris bolted off, so half of them stopped, gave chase and focused on him.”
Undeterred, Mtetwa was back in her office two hours after being beaten. But, by the time she got home that evening, her arms and buttocks were swollen.
When asked about the impact of the beating on her family life, 49year-old Mtetwa, a mother of two, said: ”The children were unhappy to see their mom coming home bruised and battered, but they know I work in a difficult environment and I hope that I am passing good values on to them — that it is important to stand up for what is right.”
The surge of attacks on lawyers does not surprise Muchadehama, whose wife received threatening phone calls while he was held for three nights last week. He and Makoni continue to represent clients — many of whom are Movement for Democratic Change activists — while they await their own trial, which is scheduled for June.
”We were warned in March by sympathetic officials that the police had orders to deal ruthlessly with lawyers. They say they were told to deal with us in the same way they deal with political activists. Some say they have a timetable to wipe out all political opposition in the country by August. Lawyers are just caught in a high-stakes political game,” said Muchadehama.
Since 2000, he has witnessed a steady breakdown in the rule of law, but in his 16 years of practice he has never felt more in danger for practising his profession. ”Bring me a press cutting that shows that this sort of thing has happened before in the history of this country,” he said.
Having spent three nights in the grimy, overcrowded Matapi Police cell, which was condemned as ”uninhabitable” by Zimbabwe’s Supreme Court in 2005, Muchadehama said he intends to work harder for his clients. ”Conditions are so bad in there. I had heard this from my clients, but now I’ve seen it for myself. I feel that perhaps we do not try hard enough to get them out of there. In future I will do more,” he said.
Lawyers across the globe have condemned the attacks, but the ZimbabÂÂwean government’s chief lawyer, Attorney General Sobuza Gula-Ndebele, has not made any public statements about the attacks on lawyers.
When asked about the assault of the lawyers who were dragged out of his office, he said: ”As a lawyer, I’m concerned when I hear that my colleagues have been beaten up. But I do not know the facts. The police officers responsible will be prosecuted when I know what happened.”
Lawyer Norman Tjombe, the director of the Legal Assistance Centre in Namibia who, together with five other lawyers from the Southern African Development Community Lawyers Association, met with Gula-Ndebele, is sceptical. The Attorney General said they did not know that court orders to release detained lawyers had been defied by the police over the weekend and that lawyers had been assaulted outside the high court. ”If I was Chief Justice or Attorney General, I would take it upon myself to find out what had happened and take remedial action,” said Tjombe.
He worries that fewer lawyers will want to represent political activists if they are targeted by the state. ”These lawyers need help and protection from the international community now,” he said. ”Otherwise there will not be a single person left to defend freedoms in Zimbabwe.”