Jan. 7
ZIMBABWE:
Zimbabwe opposition activists face death penalty over bombings ---- 7
members of Zimbabwe's opposition could face the death penalty after being
charged with involvement in bombings last year.
The 7 members of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), who were
formally charged and pleaded not guilty, are among rights activists and
opponents of President Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF party detained in recent
weeks on what the opposition has said are trumped up charges designed to
crack down on dissent.
The 7 accused were charged with terrorism, banditry and insurgency, and
could face the death penalty if convicted.
They include Gandi Mudzingwa, an adviser to the MDC leader Morgan
Tsvangirai, and Chris Dhlamini, the MDC's head of security.
Their lawyer, Alec Muchadehama, told the judge that the charges were
"ridiculous and scandalous".
He also called 2 doctors who testified that the accused had been beaten
while in police custody and had serious injuries.
Mr Muchadehama asked the judge to allow the defendants to be further
examined outside jail to determine whether they had been tortured.
Prosecutors argued that the two doctors' testimony was not credible. The
judge is expected to rule on Thursday on the request for further medical
examination.
The charges stem from 2 minor blasts in the main Harare police station and
a botched bombing of a highway bridge and railroad line west of Harare
last year.
Several opposition activists accused of involvement had been acquitted
earlier, and police have said the bombs at the police station may have
been planted by disgruntled officers, possibly to destroy incriminating
evidence.
In a separate case, another group of detainees has been accused - but so
far not formally charged - of attempting to recruit fighters to train in
neighbouring Botswana to overthrow Mr Mugabe's regime.
Leaders of neighbouring countries and international rights groups have
said the charges are baseless.
The opposition says the various plot allegations have been fabricated amid
an increasing clampdown on dissent, and could be used as an excuse to
declare a state of emergency.
(source: Daily Telegraph)
NIGERIA:
Drawn from experience----A man wrongly sentenced to death has become
celebrated artist.
The doomed man's eyes stare blankly as he shuffles down a dark corridor,
spreading a hush through the death-row cells. The hangman pushes a black
hood over the convict's head and tightens a noose around his neck. The
trapdoor opens beneath his feet with a clang that reverberates around the
stone walls. A gurgle, one last rattle of chains, then silence.
Through the iron bars of his cell near the gallows of this Nigerian
prison, Arthur Judah Angel watched the hangman do his morbid work for
almost a decade, witnessing the hangings of more than 450 of his fellow
convicts. He committed their names to memory and many of their images to
paper.
Now, 51 drawings that survived Angel's incarceration are attracting the
attention of human rights activists and art lovers alike, allowing the
artist to turn his years of horror into activism against the death
penalty.
"I had to document our ugly world," said Angel, 46, who spent a total of
16 years in prison for a murder he says he didn't commit before being
freed in 2000. "It was drawing that kept me going in there. It gave me a
purpose."
Angel was beaten and thrown behind bars in January 1984 when he went to
visit a friend who had been taken into custody at a neighborhood police
station. He was 21 then and planned to begin university that year.
Five days later he was charged with murdering a policeman. Police asked
for a bribe to free him, but his mother was too poor to pay, he says. So
Angel was held for 2 years until his case went to court. After a 6-day
trial in which police were both the complainants and only witnesses, he
was sentenced to hang.
On death row, he lived in a seven-foot-square cell with up to 13 other
condemned criminals. A bucket in the corner was the toilet. At night the
cellmates had to lie down side-by-side to sleep. If one wanted to turn in
the night, he would have to stand and then squeeze himself back in.
The cell was one of 18 which housed over 200 condemned men in Enugu prison
one of Nigeria's largest.
A detailed pencil drawing by Angel on rough pink cardboard shows the
semi-naked prisoners hunched in awkward positions. Scrawled across the
grimy walls are the names of previous occupants and the dates of their
execution. Angel named the drawing "Sleeping in Limbo."
"That existence is one between life and death. You don't belong to either
world," Angel explains.
Condemned criminals were not allowed to keep pens or paper so Angel's 1st
prison drawing was done on a cell wall with charcoal smuggled from the
kitchen. It was a cartoon cowboy designed to cheer up his cellmates, but
it also caught the eye of the wardens.
"They started coming to me and asking me to do drawings for them," he
recalled. "I would draw cards or portraits for them and in return they
would allow me a pencil and a spare piece of paper."
By night, Angel turned his artistic focus from the images he was
commissioned to do, to the macabre sights around him.
The cell's concrete roof had a small hole in the center that provided a
circle of light when the moon shone. Angel would jostle for position
beneath the hole and squat with a sheet of paper on his knees to do his
secret drawings.
Some of his pictures are scrawled on book pages, others on faded
cardboard. Many are rough at the edges, slightly torn or damaged by damp.
Most of these dark artworks did not survive.
The 51 that endured were smuggled out by his parents when they visited.
These now provide a unique insight into daily life on death row: from the
shuffling, chained and hooded figures driven by the guards' clubs toward
the gallows, to the stooped heads and empty expressions of the other
inmates, a captive audience at the execution.
"You don't know if next time it will be your time to go," Angel says.
"From Monday to Friday you expect executions in the morning. When the
gallows are prepared, we all got nervous. You hear the chains clanking,
and the trap door banging. You see the hangman walk past the cells. Most
inmates don't have the strength to eat before midday."
Angel was prepared for execution once fed his last meal with his legs
chained but at the end of the day his name was removed from the list.
"I once saw 58 executed in one day," he says. "But I wasn't meant to die
in there."
In October, Amnesty International asked the Nigerian government to declare
a moratorium on executions, saying the country's criminal justice system
was "riddled with corruption, negligence and a nearly criminal lack of
resources."
The London-based rights group said over half of the 736 inmates facing
death were convicted on the basis of written confessions that many said
were extracted under torture.
Angel's luck changed when a representative of the British Council, the
British government-funded cultural organization, got one of his drawings.
He visited Angel on death row and organized two exhibitions of his work in
Enugu town in 1993 and 1994.
The exhibitions were well attended and widely covered by the media, and
soon petition drives were organized to demand Angel's release. In 1995, a
prominent human rights lawyer took his case and after a series of appeals
he was released in February 2000.
Angel now works as an artist and a human rights activist, painting in a
small studio in a rundown suburb of Lagos, Nigeria's biggest city. He has
married and has 3 small children.
He sells the portraits and landscapes he now paints, but his real passion
remains the works depicting what he saw in prison. Rights groups from
around the world have used his 51 death row works to lobby for the
abolition of the death sentence, and Angel says he could never sell them.
"These works represent the 16 years that were taken from my life," and
even if Nigeria abolishes the death penalty, the pictures "will remind the
government that we mustn't go back to such a time," he says. "These are
works that price tags cannot be attached to."
(source: Orange County Register)
