The director of Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR), Arnold Tsunga is speaking out again against the Mugabe dictatorship:
Zimbabwe Lawyer Decries Intimidation (Weissenstein, AP)
Friday, May 11, 2007
AP
By Michael Weissenstein
Zimbabwe's government is intimidating, arresting and beating lawyers in an attempt to destroy the beleaguered political opposition's last line of defense, one of the country's leading attorneys said Wednesday.
Although President Robert Mugabe's security forces have roughed up lawyers for years, the mistreatment has increased in recent weeks with the arrests of four prominent attorneys, said Arnold Tsunga, the executive director of Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights.
Lawyers who protested two of the arrests by demonstrating outside the country's high court on Tuesday were manhandled and struck with riot batons, according to witnesses and the Zimbabwe Law Society. Some were forced into a truck, taken to a suburban field and beaten, they said.
"It's to send a very clear message that there is no lawyer in Zimbabwe who is safe," Tsunga told The Associated Press in an interview.
A spokesman for Zimbabwe's mission to the United Nations referred questions to Ambassador Guwa Chidyausiku, who was not immediately available for comment.
Tsunga said the violence was a reaction to his group's success in slowing Mugabe's persecution of the political opposition. Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights has taken the cases of about 1,000 political defendants a year since 2003, he said. It has managed to win acquittals in every case and the release of many defendants within two days, a stark change from a time when political defendants were held incommunicado indefinitely and abused with impunity in jail, he said.
"It gave the political activists a lot of hope that they are not alone in the struggle for greater democracy of our country," he said. As a result, he said, "there has been a deliberate effort to clamp down on members of the legal profession. ... The government is now showing desperation."
Tsunga, who also helps lead Zimbabwe's bar association and heads a group of 350 reform-minded civil society groups, spoke in a Manhattan hotel room on his way to Washington, where he was finishing his work for a 10-month human rights fellowship at the University of Minnesota.
He left Zimbabwe for the United States last year with his wife and three children after receiving what he described as credible reports that his name was on a list of people targeted for death by a government hit squad.
Tsunga, 40, said he will return to Zimbabwe next month despite continuing fears for his life, because he feels obligated to help other lawyers putting themselves at risk to aid Mugabe's opponents. Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights counts nearly 200 of the country's approximately 700 private lawyers as members.
"It would be highly irresponsible of me to abandon them," he said. "We have to be part of the group that creates hope for our country."
He decried what he called the silence of Zimbabwe's neighboring countries, particularly South Africa, whose President Thabo Mbeki has been appointed by nations in the region as a facilitator charged with helping to resolve the standoff between the government and the opposition.
The South African government insists that its policy of quiet diplomacy is more effective than Western-style criticism. A South African government spokesman did not immediately return a phone call seeking a response to Tsunga's comments.
Mugabe, an 83-year-old former anti-colonial rebel who has ruled Zimbabwe since it gained independence from Britain in 1980, has acknowledged that police used violent methods against opposition supporters and killed at least one activist. He has warned alleged perpetrators of unrest that they would be "bashed" again if violence continued.
Zimbabwe's ruling party has endorsed Mugabe as its candidate in next year's presidential election. Victory would allow him to stay in power until 2013, when he would be nearly 90.
