Zim cops seize pictures of repression
2010-03-24 08:27
Special Report
A classical music presenter for the BBC has been arrested and is in custody in Zimbabwe.
Harare - Zimbabwe police on Tuesday seized all the photographs from an exhibition depicting repression under President Robert Mugabe, and arrested the chief of the human rights body that organized the show, officials confirmed.
The incident is another instance of the harassment of human rights groups by Mugabe's police, which has continued despite the formation of a power-sharing government between the 86-year-old autocrat and his former opponent, pro-democracy leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who is now prime minister.
Tsvangirai was due to open the exhibition on Wednesday at the capital's well-known, private Delta Gallery of 62 framed photographs that showed Mugabe's brutal crackdown on Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
A spokesperson for Tsvangirai's office said the prime minister was "adamant that the exhibition will go ahead", and that he would be opening it as scheduled. "What these people (Mugabe's Zanu-PF party) don't understand is that by showing these photographs you are not reopening wounds, you are trying to heal wounds," Tsvangirai said.
The images showed victims of violence, Tsvangirai with head injuries from an assault, police breaking up peace demonstrations, as well as Mugabe praying, and ended with pictures of members of the coalition government, said Cynthia Manjoro, spokesperson for the Zimbabwe Human Rights Organisation (Zimrights) that was holding the exhibition.
Violent intimidation
"The aim was to make people look at where we have been, and to try to make sure we don't go there again," she said. "It is about national healing, and that we are begging for a truth and reconciliation commission."
Manjoro said police first arrived and took photographs of all the pictures. Later about 20 officers, including riot police, removed the pictures from the walls and dumped them in a police pick-up truck. Zimrights director Okay Machisa tried to intervene and was arrested.
Lawyers later said Machisa had been released, but it was not clear what, if any, charges had been pressed against him. Manjoro said police gave no reason for removing the pictures.
In the last 10 years of harassment since Tsvangirai's MDC emerged as the first real threat to Mugabe's nearly 30 years in power, police have regularly closed down theatres featuring critical and satirical drama, arresting actors, producers and audiences, and shut down music concerts with a political theme. Observers say it is the first time they have interfered with an art exhibition.
The show coincided with a swell of demands for acknowledgement, particularly by Mugabe's side of the coalition government, of a decade of violent intimidation, with murders, rapes, torture, assault, arson, looting and destruction of homes on a vast scale, which human rights organisations claim have been committed almost entirely by Mugabe's security forces and party vigilantes.
- SAPA