Regards, Ivan
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Posted on 02/15/2003 3:45:52 PM PST by MadIvan
PETER TATCHELL, the campaigner beaten up when he attempted a citizen’s arrest on Robert Mugabe, is planning a fresh confrontation during the Zimbabwean leader’s visit to Paris this week.
Tatchell — dubbed the British government’s “gay gangster” by Mugabe — will apply for a warrant in a Paris magistrates’ court tomorrow demanding the Zimbabwean leader be arrested under the United Nations torture convention. His claim is backed by affidavits from victims of the regime.
“If Slobodan Milosevic (the former Serbian leader) can be put on trial for human rights abuses, why not Robert Mugabe?” said Tatchell.
Britain last week backed the European Union’s approval of the trip as the price for Jacques Chirac, the French president, agreeing to sanctions against the Mugabe regime being continued. The row has added to tension between Britain and France over how to deal with Saddam Hussein.
During his visit to Paris, Mugabe is due to meet Chirac at the Elysée Palace and attend the Franco-African summit at the Palais des Congrès.
Under EU sanctions imposed last year in response to the Zimbabwean leader’s repression of his opponents and violent programme of land confiscations, he and leading officials are not allowed to travel to Europe and have had their assets frozen. In addition, the country is subject to an arms embargo.
France, however, pressed for an exception to be made for this week’s summit, fearing African leaders would boycott the event if Mugabe were excluded. The sanctions were due to expire on Tuesday, the day before the start of the Paris summit, making France’s agreement to prolong them essential.
“We have no wish to see Mugabe in Europe,” said a Downing Street spokesman. “But either the sanctions lapsed, in which case Mugabe would have been able to come anyway, or they continued with some kind of exceptional arrangement made to allow him to go to Paris.”
In addition to his court move, Tatchell will participate in anti-Mugabe protests being planned by Zimbabwean exiles and members of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, who will travel from London and Brussels to Paris.
Further evidence of Mugabe’s repression came last Friday when more than 80 people — reportedly including a blind nun — were arrested as baton-wielding police broke up Valentine’s Day “peace and love” protests by women in Harare and Bulawayo. Police said the protests risked interfering with traffic flow and could be “hijacked by political groups and street vagrants”.
Derrick Arlett-Johnson, a dispossessed Zimbabwean farmer now working as a lorry driver in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, said: “It’s disgusting Mugabe’s being let in. He is in the same category as Saddam Hussein in terms of world tyrants. I don’t know what the French agenda is. It sends the message that he’s all right.”
The application for the arrest is based on affidavits from Zimbabweans including: oRay Choto, a Harare journalist who, according to Amnesty International, was beaten and given electric shocks. Choto’s statement says his interrogators told him “the president had signed my death warrant”. oTom Spicer, 18, who alleges he received similar torture last year at Harare central police station. “My body convulsed so violently that the handcuffs on my wrists tightened, causing my wrists to swell out of all proportion to their size,” says Spicer’s affidavit.
Human rights groups believe Tatchell’s application has little chance of success because of the “sovereign immunity” from prosecution enjoyed by serving leaders under international law.
His move is the latest in a series of confrontations between Tatchell and Mugabe. In 1999 Tatchell attempted a citizen’s arrest on the Zimbabwean leader in London, accusing him of torture.
Mugabe in return called Tatchell the government’s “gay gangster”. “Peter Hain (Welsh secretary and former Foreign Office minister) is reputed to be gay and to be the wife of Tatchell,” he claimed in one of his more eccentric interviews. “If the following morning the husband ambushed me and the previous night I had had discussions with the wife, the conclusion I come to is that the two had discussed it.”
Tatchell was later beaten by Mugabe’s guards when he tried to repeat his arrest attempt outside a Brussels hotel in 2001.
The new confrontation comes as Britain’s attempts to maintain Zimbabwe’s isolation by the EU and the Commonwealth become increasingly frayed. Of the three countries charged with monitoring Commonwealth sanctions against Mugabe, Nigeria and South Africa believe they should be ended. Australia, the third,believes, however, that they should continue.
Regards, Ivan
Flag of Rhodesia
Well, that would be racist.
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