Harare, Zimbabwe — The United Nations' Human Rights Office has joined calls for Zimbabwe's government to release more than 100 activists detained ahead of the Southern African Development Community summit on Saturday.
Speaking to VOA from Nairobi on Thursday, U.N. Human Rights Office spokesperson Seif Magango said his organization is monitoring the situation.
"We at the U.N. Human Rights Office are concerned by reports of arrest, harassment and intimidation of human rights defenders and political activists in Zimbabwe, in the lead up to the SADC summit," Magango said via WhatsApp. "We call for the immediate release of all those arbitrarily detained and for protection of civic space."
Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights said that since mid-June, there has been a "wave" of arrests of pro-democracy activists nationwide. Other activists reportedly are in hiding.
The government said the people arrested were planning to protest at this weekend's SADC summit, where 16 heads of state and government are expected in Harare.
"While freedom of expression is a fundamental right, it's paramount to observe that the enjoyment of that freedom should not be at the expense of the freedom of your fellow citizens," said Kazembe Kazembe, Zimbabwe's home affairs minister. "Freedom of expression does not and cannot mean the right to remove a democratically elected government from office and to replace it with people or [a] party elected by nobody. The opposition has never held any peaceful demonstrations."
Kazembe added that the country's focus should be on hosting the upcoming summit and not on the "misplaced priorities" of an opposition hoping to stir up civil unrest.
Promise Mkwananzi, the spokesman for Zimbabwe's main opposition party, the Citizens Coalition for Change, welcomed the statement by the U.N. Human Rights Office as proof that the "crisis" in the country had transcended its borders.
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"It is the prerogative of the international institutions like the U.N. to hold Zimbabwe to account and to call for the halt of harassment and arrest of activists in Zimbabwe," Mkwananzi said. "Welcome the statement indeed, we ratify the statement and indeed it is true: Zimbabwe must release all political prisoners and SADC must not be party to the persecution of Zimbabwe for the sake of hosting this summit."
Alexander Rusero, a professor of politics at Africa University in Zimbabwe, offered advice to both the ruling ZANU-PF party and civic society groups.
"Civic society organizations, they also ought to change their game, in as much as confronting ZANU-PF is concerned. And on the other hand, ZANU-PF should also realize that confrontation with civic society ... at the end of the day, the civic society has nothing to lose, but ZANU-PF, they have a country to run," Rusero said. "Now we have an SADC summit and it does not give a good picture, to have the state always at loggerheads with certain protagonists in the opposition and in the civil society."
At the Saturday summit, Zimbabwe will assume SADC's chairmanship for the first time since the 16-nation bloc became a development community in 1992.
