HARARE (AFP) – Zimbabwe police charged a top rights activist with a litany of offences Friday, her lawyer said, but the government denied a widespread crackdown just days before Zimbabweans vote on a new constitution.
“Police have charged her for allegedly operating an unregistered organisation,” Jestina Mukoko’s lawyer, Harrison Nkomo, told AFP.
Other charges against Mukoko included the smuggling of radio sets and mobile phones and broadcasting without a licence, Nkomo added.
“They have released her into our custody and said they will call us when they are ready to go to court.”
The allegations come ahead of a March 16 referendum on a new constitution and crunch elections later this year that will decide who will lead the country.
Alleged government harassment has spiked in the run-up to the referendum.
Police last month vowed to crack down on non-governmental organisations saying some pose a “serious security threat”.
But a top government minister told AFP there was no widespread crackdown, saying specific groups were targeted for peddling lies about the government.
Didymus Mutasa, Minister of State in President Robert Mugabe’s office, told AFP that some of the over 2,000 NGOs operating in the country had taken to unfairly criticising the government.
“We have established very good working relations with those that are not critical of us” but there are those that “provoke the crackdown they are talking about and it’s not all of the NGOs,” he said in Pretoria.
“Their complaints are unfounded, they provoke it,” said Mutasa.
“They say things that are totally untrue and they are being very dishonest.”
He singled out the Zimbabwe Peace Project, where Mukoko is the director.
Mutasa said Mukoko’s group had claimed “there is no peace in Zimbabwe, which is totally untrue”.
Mukoko handed herself over to police Friday morning accompanied by her lawyers and spent three hours with the authorities as the charges were read.
Nkomo described the meeting as “cordial”.
The charges against Mukoko come weeks after a raid at the Zimbabwe Peace Project.
In 2008, Mukoko was seized from her home and detained at an undisclosed location before being taken to the notorious Chikurubi prison, a maximum-security centre outside Harare.
Her lawyers claimed state agents severely tortured her and forced her to confess to banditry and treason.
She was charged in 2009 with plotting to overthrow long-ruling Mugabe, but the charges were later dismissed.
The prosecution also accused her of recruiting people for terror training in neighbouring Botswana, a claim rejected by Botswana and by Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change.
State media on Friday quoted police commissioner general Augustine Chihuri asking people who knew Mukoko’s whereabouts to report to any police station.
Amnesty International called a state television broadcast implying Mukoko was on the run “a new low in the recent crackdown on dissent.”
“This pattern of repressive behaviour by Zimbabwe’s security forces, and the use of underhand tactics to incriminate human rights defenders, must end,” said Amnesty’s Noel Kututwa.
Meanwhile on Friday, Mugabe visited South Africa for talks with ally President Jacob Zuma.
The 89-year-old attended a meeting of former liberation and struggle movements hosted by Zuma in Pretoria.
Both Mugabe and Zuma refused to answer questions on the constitutional referendum.
South Africa has long played a pivotal role in Zimbabwe, but has resisted pressure to publicly condemn rights abuses in the country.
“We share the same values, we went through the same route,” Zuma said after the meeting, flanked by Mugabe.
The secretary general of South Africa’s ruling ANC, Gwede Mantashe, told AFP that anything that happens in Zimbabwe gets exaggerated just “because it’s Zimbabwe”.