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Tsvangirai counting hours until D-Day
By
Agencies
ZIMBABWEAN
opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai awaits a verdict on treason charges
which could carry the death sentence, a penalty President Robert Mugabe
vowed to abolish at the time of independence in 1980.
The last executions in Zimbabwe were carried out in June last year when four convicted murderers were hanged. In the same month the previous year, three others were executed.
However, nobody convicted of treason has been sentenced to death since 1980, when President Mugabe took over the reins of the southern African country from British colonisers. Mugabe had then vowed to outlaw capital punishment.
Over the last two decades three politicians have been charged with treason.
In 1997, opposition leader Reverend Ndabaningi Sithole was convicted of conspiring to kill Mugabe and sentenced to two-and-a-half years in jail.
He was granted the right to appeal but it was never heard and Sithole died of ill health three years later.
Two other political rivals of Mugabe were charged but later acquitted and then joined the president's party.
Charges against Tsvangirai, the leader of the five-year-old opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), arose from a secretly taped meeting he held with a Canadian-based political consultant Ari Ben Menashe in 2001.
Tsvangirai allegedly sought help to organise Mugabe's "elimination" and a military coup.
The MDC leader denied the charges saying his party had engaged Menashe to carry out an international public relations campaign and help raise funds for the party in the United States.
But Tsvangirai's defence claimed that Menashe was hired by the government to frame the opposition ahead of the 2002 presidential polls.
According to London-based rights watchdog Amnesty International, half the countries in Africa have outlawed the death sentence.
In the last 14 years, five countries in the 14-member Southern Africa Development Community of which Zimbabwe is a member have abolished the death penalty. They are Angola, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia and South Africa.
Rights activist John Dzvinamurungu, citing Zimbabwe Prisons Service figures, said of the total 244 people sentenced to death by the country's High Court between 1980 and 2001, 76 were executed.
The rest had their sentences either commuted to life terms or quashed by the Supreme Court.
In a paper he presented at a recent anti-death penalty campaign, Dzvinamurungu said in some countries capital punishment was used to "eliminate" opposition members.
"The death penalty has been used in some instances to suppress political dissent and to consolidate power especially after coups and counter-coups," he said.
A lawyer Obert Gutu said: "During the colonial era, the death penalty was deliberately provided for to curtail the activities of nationalist movements that were advocating and fighting for black majority rule."
"The colonial system was brutally vicious and the death penalty was unashamedly resorted to with impunity," he said.
"But, 24 years down the line, Zimbabwe remains retentionist, a sad reflection that has cast a dark shadow over our human rights record," said Dzvinamurungu.
In a statement, the MDC said it was democracy in Zimbabwe, and not their leader, which was on trial.
"The president
of the MDC is being persecuted for leading the fight of the people who
need jobs and food," the MDC said. - Sapa-AFP
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