South Africa May 2006 |
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| Bennett ruling, (Witness, 2006-05-27):-The government’s decision not to grant refugee status to Zimbabwean politician Roy Bennett is appalling… There is, of course, some warped diplomatic logic to it. Bennett is a high-profile member of the Zimbabwean opposition, alleged by the regime to be implicated in a treasonous plot against Robert Mugabe. As Bennett himself observes, granting asylum to a person of his status would be a tacit admission by South Africa that there are serious problems in Zimbabwe and this admission the government is unwilling to make. The reality is that things are very seriously wrong in Zimbabwe. There can be no doubt that the charges against Bennett are sheer trumpery. Harare has not produced a shred of evidence to support them and recent history shows that discrediting opponents with false accusations is a tactic frequently exploited by that government. Nor does intimidation stop there. Great numbers of Zimbabweans have fled abroad, and continue to do so, not only to escape the economic dislocation and hunger that Mugabe has engineered for his people, but also because they fear the violence of the Zanu-PF security forces. There is every reason to suppose that Bennett, like them, would be victimised, assaulted and even killed if he returns there. That certainly is the opinion of Amnesty International, which assesses such risks from a global perspective and can compare the situation in Zimbabwe with that in other states where human rights are seriously abused. The South African government’s decision to ignore an opinion of such weight and to continue with its pretence that all is acceptably normal north of the Limpopo is curious indeed. Nor can it sustain the fiction that it did not accord special attention to Bennett’s case. When the application was first lodged in March, government stated that he must wait in line like everybody else, while the Home Affairs Department claimed to have a backlog of 110 000 such applications. The speed with which this decision has been reached is so remarkable as to give the lie to one or the other of those official pronouncements — or perhaps Home Affairs deals a lot more expeditiously with foreign refugees than it does with local citizens seeking identity documents and passports. It looks, therefore, very much as if there must have been political intervention to bring the matter to a quick and specific outcome. Throughout the Zimbabwe debacle, there have been accusations that the Thabo Mbeki administration has bent over backwards to accommodate and even appease Mugabe. This episode again raises that suspicion, with speculation that South Africa wants to distance itself from growing international criticism of the Mugabe regime. It may well be true that Pretoria is reluctant to make the overt gesture of granting asylum to Bennett, but there have recently been indications of disquiet in government ranks about what is going on in the neighbourhood. South Africa cannot remain blinkered to the realities of Zimbabwe forever, but the passage of time is making things worse, not better. Bennett, meanwhile, remains the victim of false accusations capped by a heartless decision. | |
South African Migration Project (SAMP) - Queen's University - http://www.queensu.ca/samp |