The whereabouts of Tendai Biti, secretary general of Zimbabwe’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), are still unknown a day after his arrest on treason charges on his return to Zimbabwe, lawyers said on Friday.
At the same time, lawyers applied to the high court in Harare for commissioner-general of police Augustine Chihuri to be jailed for contempt of court for disobeying earlier court orders to release MDC member of Parliament and senior advocate Eric Matinenga.
”We have not been given access to Mr Biti,” his lawyer, Lewis Uriri, said on Friday. We have tried to find him in police stations all over Harare, but we don’t know where he is.”
He was speaking shortly after Harare High Court judge Ben Hlatshwayo gave police until 10am on Saturday to present him in court.
Biti was seized and handcuffed by five men in plainclothes on Thursday at Harare airport as he returned from South Africa after two months abroad, mostly spent lobbying support against President Robert Mugabe’s regime.
Police said he was charged with treason over a controversial document said to have been an MDC policy paper, but police did not indicate why treason charges were brought. The MDC dismissed the document as a fraud immediately after it was circulated in April.
The document claimed that the MDC would return to white farmers all land seized by Mugabe since 2000, and that all police and army officers would lose their jobs in a new MDC government.
The last time the government invoked charges of treason was in 2002, against MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai, over a meeting with a Canadian ”consultant” where he was alleged to have called for Mugabe to be overthrown and killed.
At the end of the two-year trial, the ”treason plot” charges were dismissed and shown to be a deliberate plot by a notorious Iraqi-born conman who was paid $500 000 by Mugabe’s government.
Biti is also charged with making a statement ”prejudicial to the security of the state”, for announcing the day after presidential and parliamentary elections on March 29, that party leader Morgan Tsvangirai had won 50,4% of votes cast and was the outright winner of parliamentary elections. Police claim that only the state-run election commission is allowed to announce election results.
The commission took five more weeks to announce the result, and gave Tsvangirai 48% over Mugabe’s 43%, so that the former national labour leader failed to win more than 50% needed for victory.
Five days have expired since the high court ordered that Matinenga, MP for a constituency in south-east Zimbabwe, be released ”immediately”.
He was arrested on allegations of ”inciting violence” in his Buhera South constituency on May 31, only for a magistrate to throw out the charges five days later. Police then arrested him a second time, at dawn at his Harare home, on the same charges the magistrate had dismissed.
Uriri said Matinenga was still in police custody. ”We went to court today to seek the committal of the commissioner of police for contempt of court,” he said.
Lawyers say Matinenga aroused the ire of senior figures in Mugabe’s regime, after he won a court order against the army who had deployed soldiers into his constituency and were attacking MDC supporters.
Dignitaries in appeal
Meanwhile, a group of former African presidents, two former heads of the United Nations, African Nobel laureates and some of the continent’s top artists and business leaders have called for an end to violence and intimidation ahead of the election run-off.
In an open letter published on Friday, they also called on the Zimbabwean government to restore full access to the country for humanitarian and aid agencies helping the country’s people.
”We are deeply troubled by the current reports of intimidation, harassment and violence,” the leaders said.
”It is vital that the appropriate conditions are created so that the presidential run-off is conducted in a peaceful, free and fair manner.
”Only then can the political parties conduct their election campaigning in a way that enables the citizens to express freely their political will.”
The signatories to the letter include former UN secretaries general Kofi Annan and Boutros Boutros-Ghali and former presidents Jerry Rawlings of Ghana, Abdusalami Abubakar of Nigeria, Joaquim Chissano of Mozambique, Benjamin Mkapa of Tanzania, Ketumile Masire.
South African Minister in the Presidency Essop Pahad insisted that free and fair elections in Zimbabwe were still possible despite the deteriorating political situation there.
Speaking to reporters in Cape Town, Pahad cited several countries where the elections were declared free and fair despite outbreaks of violence before the polls.
”The important thing is — if it is held — those who are going to monitor the elections have to make a determination on whether they were free and fair.”
This was presently difficult to determine, he said. It was the role of the South African government to ensure that the violence currently gripping Zimbabwe was stopped. – Sapa-DPA