January 21, 2005
Harare - Zimbabwe authorities have resuscitated a three-year-old charge for a minor misdemeanour against the wife of a jailed opposition MP, her lawyer said on Wednesday. Heather Bennett, whose campaign for the release of her husband, Roy, has aroused international condemnation against President Robert Mugabe's regime, was summoned to appear in court Tuesday on charges of possessing two-way radios without a licence, said lawyer Beatrice Mtetwa. The radios were discovered during a police raid on a farm that Bennett, MP for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, was living on in 2003, she said, and the summons that arrived last week was the first sign of official action since the raid. "One wonders why they are resuscitating this now," said Mtetwa. Said Mrs Bennett: "It's just harassment. It's definitely a political thing." On October 28 last year, Zimbabwe's Parliament, dominated by Mugabe's ruling Zanu PF MPs, voted to send the Bennett to jail for a year for shoving justice minister Patrick Chinamasa to the ground during a debate in chamber in which the minister called Bennett's ancestors thieves and murderers. The 47-year-old white MP, one of the most popular political figures in the country, said Chinamasa's insults were the final straw in a four-year campaign of lawless intimidation against him, his family and the workers on his farm in south-east Zimbabwe. Two of his staff have been murdered by security forces and scores of others were tortured and driven from their homes as the state illegally seized his farm and soldiers and police stole his cattle and crops.
The MDC says the imprisonment of Bennett was deliberate victimisation. Lawyers say that his assault on Chinamasa, which did not injure the minister, would earn the equivalent of a US$10 fine in a magistrate's court. Judges in the generally pro-Mugabe judiciary have refused him permission to appeal. Bennett said the radios were seized by police in one of several police searches of the property they were living in after they had been driven from their farm. "We bought them for our security guards," she said. "I had applied for a licence, but it hadn't come through when the police arrived." The offence of possession of an unlicensed radio carries a low fine. She was ordered to appear in court again on May 18. Observers say Bennett's campaign for her husband's release has won support all over the world, and its success has angered Mugabe's government. Bennett, who speaks fluent Shona and has been accorded status as a tribal elder, won his seat in the Chimanimani district in south-east Zimbabwe with overwhelming support from the black peasant farmers who live there.
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