| The ZIMBABWE Situation | Our
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From The Mail & Guardian (SA), 5 February
40 years later, Bizos pleads a similar case
Johannesburg - Forty years after George Bizos argued Nelson Mandela's innocence in a high-profile treason trial, the top human rights lawyer now finds himself in a Zimbabwean court pleading a similar case. The Greek-South African attorney is probably best-known for his role in the Rivonia trial of 1963, which saw Mandela imprisoned in apartheid South Africa for 27 years, but saved him from the death penalty. Bizos (74) this week started defending Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) on charges of high treason laid by President Robert Mugabe's government. "However oppressive a regime might be, the court is the last forum in which an oppressed person has an opportunity to speak out," Bizos said in a recent television interview. He has been outspoken about a lack of rule of law in Zimbabwe, saying he believed the justice minister "does not distinguish between the rule of law and rule by law". Tsvangirai and his co-accused, two senior MDC members, face the death penalty.
In the past five decades Bizos has played a key role in defending apartheid activists in South Africa, including Mandela and his ex-wife Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. He first arrived in South Africa at the age of 13 after he and his father escaped the German occupation of Greece on a small sailing boat in 1941. They were picked up by a British passenger ship and made their way to South Africa to start a new life. Seven years later he enrolled into law school at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg where he first became politically active. "Particularly for a law student like myself ... I found myself arguing - not on the basis of law but emotionally - with my professor of constitutional law about the steps being taken by the government to disenfranchise coloured people. We felt those things strongly," he said. Bizos and Mandela met as law students in the 1950s and later often worked together as attorney and advocate. His track-record and commitment to upholding human rights led him to join the African National Congress defence team in the Rivonia trial where eight men, including Mandela, Govan Mbeki and Walter Sisulu, faced the death penalty.
Bizos, although a junior member of the defence team at the time, has been credited for proposing that Mandela make a statement from the dock rather than submit him to cross-examination. The decision has been described as a tactical move that may have saved Mandela from the death penalty. It resulted in his famous speech from the dock where he pledged his life for the ideal of a free and democratic society. Mandela later said of Bizos' defence: "People like George Bizos were there defending us. If we had been alone, or had not been defended, or had been defended by lawyers who were just carrying out their duty and without interest in the ideas in which we believed, our morale would have been very low." Bizos became renowned for fighting for basic human rights under apartheid, and since its collapse, worked to ensure that those rights, guaranteed under South Africa's new Constitution, were accorded to all citizens. He represented prominent families at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings into crimes committed during the apartheid era, and blocked amnesty applications from the killers of several activists.
Bizos also defended the family of Black Consciousness Movement leader Steve Biko, one of several militants whose deaths under police detention he questioned during inquest hearings. In his autobiography, "No One to Blame," Bizos wrote that the damning information and bad publicity for the regime that emerged during those hearings "probably hastened the rise of the (state) death squads." "George was a man who combined a sympathetic nature with an incisive mind," Mandela wrote in his autobiography. "Although he could have become prime minister of South Africa, he became one of the bravest and staunchest friends of the freedom struggle that I have ever known."
With the Cricket World Cup getting under way this weekend, Media Watch looks at what newspapers in host countries South Africa, Kenya and Zimbabwe have been saying about the controversy which has engulfed the tournament.
The long-running row between England and Zimbabwe has been compounded by New Zealand's continuing refusal to play in Nairobi against Kenya, and Australia's worries over travelling to Bulawayo.
On the eve of the tournament's opening, leader-writers and commentators hope the spirit of the contest will overcome the controversies.
Terror fears
The Kenya Times slams the New Zealand cricket team's decision to pull out of their first scheduled match in Kenya - the Kiwis cited concerns over terrorism - as "whimsical and at best absurd".
Kenya's leading Sunday paper, the Sunday Nation, says New Zealand would be no safer if they were playing at Lord's cricket ground in London where "they might need to worry that Osama [Bin Laden] could poison their soup."
If the New Zealand team insists on playing venues without a "hint of terrorism", the paper suggests they might like to consider playing "on the moon".
 The
organisers need to look carefully at the mistakes they made The Nation,
Kenya |
The Standard takes a similar line saying that terrorism can strike anwhere and any time.
"Kenya is not the first country to experience terrorism and it is not going to be the last," it says. It argues that the best approach to tackle terrorism is "not to run away from it but to fight it".
Popular independent daily The Nation says that there is "some sympathy for England's predicament, though relatively little for New Zealand".
"What must be hoped for now is that the World Cup gets off smoothly on Sunday, and that the matches go ahead in the best possible spirit thereafter."
"But the whole issue leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Politics and sport can never be entirely divorced and the organisers of the event need to look carefully at the mistakes they made," the paper says.
'Massive event'
An eve-of-tournament editorial in South Africa's The Star accentuates the positive, saying the tournament "will be a massive event for South Africa".
|
Let's really get into the spirit of what will be a special event. The Star, South
Africa |
"This World Cup provides us with so much to be positive about," the paper says.
"So let's really get into the spirit of what will be a special event."
But several columnists in the same paper rap the organisers.
"The original idea was a good one: calling it an 'African World Cup' and sharing some of the joy and prestige of hosting it with neighbours," writes prominent columnist Max du Preez.
"But picking Mugabe's Zimbabwe as a co-host could predictably diminish the success of the tournament and damage South Africa. Instead of gaining good PR for Africa, they have simply succeeded in broadcasting Africa's failures and problems to the world," he says.
Another commentator calls it "extraordinary" that the organisers of the tournament "did not have the sensitivity to consider the moral issues of playing matches in Zimbabwe".
World spotlight
Zimbabwe's pro-government The Herald is keen to see the contest "roar into life".
|
Let
the party begin The Herald,
Zimbabwe |
"After a countdown blighted by politics and boardroom disputes, the eighth Cricket World Cup finally comes alive tomorrow in Cape Town with focus rightly shifting to the players in a search for the Holy Grail that will spill across the Limpopo on Monday."
"Let the party begin," it urges.
But with the competition opening at the end of the same week that saw opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai put on trial for conspiring to murder President Mugabe, other papers continue to have misgivings.
Zimbabwe's Financial Gazette condemns the government's "heavy-handed tactics" in attempting to stop the media and international observers from monitoring the Tsvangirai trial proceedings in Harare.
"Far from leaving well enough alone at a time the country is under the world's spotlight ... the ruling Zanu-PF seems anxious to paint itself as the crude, dictatorial and fascist government the international community believes it to be," it says.
The Zimbabwe Independent meanwhile predicts a brutal response by the authorities to civic protesters who have threatened to disrupt the tournament by staging demonstrations.
"Police Commissioner Augustine Chihuri last month promised to "deal ruthlessly" with any group attempting to disrupt public peace by demonstrating during the staging of the Cricket World Cup," the paper recalls.
"Chihuri's threats," it says, "put into perspective the police's perception of crowd control - that any dissent must be crushed if it poses a challenge to its political masters."
BBC Monitoring, based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.