Mugabe: No gay rights in Zim
2010-03-26 13:40
Special Report
A classical music presenter for the BBC has been arrested and is in custody in Zimbabwe.
Harare - President Robert Mugabe says the issue of gay rights being written into the country's pending constitution "cannot be discussed," Zimbabwean media reported Friday.
The country's power-sharing government headed by Mugabe and former opposition leader, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, is shortly to embark on nationwide public hearings about the drafting of a new constitution.
The drafting of a new people-driven constitution is part of a series of democratic reforms aimed at ending the repressive laws and policies of the nearly 30-year Mugabe era.
The Herald newspaper, which is controlled by Mugabe's information ministry, on Friday quoted the elderly leader as saying there had been suggestions that gay rights should be included in the new constitution.
"This cannot be discussed," he said. "Those who want to discuss this are mad. If we do, the dead will rise against us."
On a continent where homosexuality is widely tabooed, the 86-year- old autocrat is one of Africa's most outspoken opponents, once having described gays as "worse than dogs and pigs."
Gay rights body
Friday's report quoted him as saying he had heard that recently in Britain and the United States an archbishop had solemnised marriages between men. "What is that?" he asked. "I want to see how they will procreate. If they manage, then I will admit I do not know."
Despite Mugabe's rhetoric, Zimbabwe has no laws banning same-sex relationships. Sodomy is a crime, but cases between consenting adults are seldom prosecuted. The country's gay rights body, Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe, operates relatively openly and without the harassment suffered by general civil liberties organisations.
Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change holds that homosexuality is a private issue and cannot be criminalised.
In 1999, Canaan Banana, the country's non-executive president at independence in 1980, was sentenced to 10 years in jail on 11 counts of sodomy, attempted sodomy and indecent assault after a trial which heard how he had drugged his aide-de-camp and raped him when he was unconscious on the library floor of his official residence.
The trial heard that the top officials in Mugabe's government, the army, police and secret police knew of Banana's proclivities, but took no action.
- SAPA