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Andr
ew Makoni, one of Zimbabwe’s most prominent human rights lawyers, has fled to South Africa after receiving several credible threats that Zimbabwean security officials have been instructed to kill him, according to the Southern Africa Litigation Centre (SALC). Several other high-profile human rights lawyers are also said to be targeted.
Makoni’s sources indicate that the strategy is to eliminate at least one prominent human rights lawyer to deter others from publicising and providing defence to the victims of the escalating political violence. Information he received was that the plan to kill him had been put into action and that a special team of security agents had been assigned to the police station nearest his home in order to execute the assassination.
This is not the first time that Zimbabwean human rights lawyers are the target of these types of threats. In March 2007, Mr Makoni and his law partner, Alec Muchadehama, acting for political activists tortured in detention, were themselves unlawfully detained. Several of the lawyers, including Beatrice Mtetwa, who protested against this unlawful detention were forced into police vehicles and driven to a secluded area where they were beaten.
And in 2006, lawyers at ZLHR, including its then head, Arnold Tsunga, were subject to a systematic campaign of intimidation, including death threats.
The recent threats are cause for heightened concern, however, following as they do the orchestrated violence unleashed by Zimbabwean security agents in the wake of the March elections and specifically the murders in the past two weeks of at least four of Mr Makoni’s clients: Better Chokururama, Godfrey Kauzani, Cain Nyere and Shepherd Jani.
Said SALC Director, Nicole Fritz: “When the most prominent, the most active and the most courageous human rights lawyers are targeted and forced to flee, you know that you’re dealing with the most grotesque forms of impunity.
“South African and regional leaders need to put human rights monitors on the ground now because the Zimbabwean authorities who refuse to relinquish power can not be trusted to secure the lives, let alone the interests, of their citizens.”
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