(Johannesburg, November 3, 2009) – The three heads of state from the Southern African Development Community (SADC) scheduled to meet in Maputo, Mozambique on November 5, 2009, to discuss the deteriorating political situation in Zimbabwe should press ZANU-PF, the party that still controls many functions of the power-sharing government, to end ongoing human rights abuses, Human Rights Watch said today.
President Armando Guebuza of Mozambique, King Mswati of Swaziland, and President Rupiah Banda of Zambia will meet with Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe to address the current political standoff.
On October 16, the Tsvangirai-led Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), one of three parties to the power-sharing government in Zimbabwe, announced that it was boycotting cabinet meetings to protest the continued flouting of the Global Political Agreement (GPA) by the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), led by Mugabe.
ZANU-PF wields significantly more power than the MDC, and ZANU-PF supporters continue to commit abuses freely against their perceived political opponents.
On November 2, for example, a prominent human rights and media lawyer, Mordecai Mahlangu, was arrested by detectives from the Criminal Investigations Department in Harare for writing a letter protesting the use of testimony extracted through torture in a trial. Two weeks earlier, government intelligence agents assaulted and arrested and detained two journalists for Al-Jazeera who were covering the cabinet boycott. In addition, two civil-society leaders meeting in Victoria Falls on October 25 were arrested after issuing a statement calling for the intervention of the Southern African Development Community and the African Union to ensure that the power-sharing agreement is fully implemented. They were allegedly arrested under the Public Order and Security Act, which ZANU-PF continues to use to quash peaceful dissent.
"Recent reports that ZANU-PF continues to arrest and harass human rights and civil society activists should act as a warning to the regional leaders that Zimbabwe may slide back into violence and chaos if they do not take decisive action," said Georgette Gagnon, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. "Regional leaders should set concrete benchmarks and consider targeted sanctions if any of Zimbabwe's parties do not comply with the provisions of the power-sharing agreement."
Read the August 2009 Human Rights Watch report, "False Dawn: The Zimbabwe Power-Sharing Government's Failure to Deliver Human Rights Improvements"
For more Human Rights Watch reporting on Zimbabwe, please visit:
http://www.hrw.org/en/africa/zimbabwe
© Copyright, Human Rights Watch 350 Fifth Avenue, 34th Floor New York, NY 10118-3299 USA
