ZIMBABWE’S BEATRICE MTETWA, ARRESTED BUT NOT STOPPED
The Washington Post just wrote an article on Beatrice, check it out by clicking on the link below: Zimbabwe’s Beatrice Mtetwa, Arrested But Not Stopped
The most damning part of a new documentary about Beatrice Mtetwa, a lawyer who’s spent decades fighting human rights abuses in Zimbabwe, comes from the mouth of President Robert Mugabe’s former minister of information.
“All countries are ruled by men and women,” Jonathan Moyo tells filmmaker Lorie Conway, “and the law becomes what they say it is.” Mtetwa agrees, in a way: “Unlike a lot of other dictators, Robert Mugabe doesn’t just go out and do what he wants,” she says in the film, ‘Beatrice Mtetwa and the Rule of Law.’ “He first goes to parliament and passes a law and says it’s now legal to punch somebody in the nose.”
For the same three decades that Mugabe has been doing that with such impunity, Mtetwa has been trying to use the constitution to defend people such as peace activist Jestina Mukoko, who was detained and tortured for 89 days in ’08. Or Andrew Meldrum, the last resident foreign correspondent in Zimbabwe, who was arrested for practicing journalism, essentially, then thrown in a car with a hood over his head and deported straight from the courtroom where he’d been found not guilty of any crime.