HARARE – Police on Monday slapped two members of the Gays and Lesbians Association of Zimbabwe (GALZ) with a new charge of undermining President Robert Mugabe, one of their lawyers said last night.
The GALZ members, Ellen Chademana and Ignatius Muhambi, were arrested last Friday by police who stormed the organisation’s Harare offices claiming they were looking for dangerous drugs and pornographic material.
The lawyer, David Hofisi, said in addition to formally charging the GALZ employees with possessing drugs and pornographic material, the police had also charged the two with undermining Mugabe by allegedly displaying a plaque in their office showing former San Francisco Mayor Willie Lewis Brown Jr denouncing the President’s homophobia.
“They have now been formally charged and a fresh charge of undermining President Mugabe has now been added,” said Hofisi, who is from the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR) that is helping defend the two GALZ workers.
According to Hofisi the two were likely to appear in court tomorrow after today’s Africa Day holiday.
Mugabe is known for his dislike for gay and lesbian people who he has described as “worse than dogs and pigs” and the President’s supporters and government agencies have fought to keep the country's small homosexual community away from the public view most notably by barring them from participating at the Zimbabwe International Book Fair.
Earlier this year Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai publicly spoke out against homosexuality and said an exercise underway to write a new constitution for Zimbabwe should not be used to smuggle the rights of gay and lesbian people into the country’s fundamental law.
In a sign that the anti-homosexual tendency is probably common across the region, a Malawian judge last week sentenced a gay couple Tiwonge Chimbalanga and Steven Monjeza to a maximum of 14 years in prison with hard labor under that country’s anti-gay legislation.
– ZimOnline.
No comments:
Post a Comment