In South Africa, the disgust with Swaziland’s King Mswati III, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch, is spreading.
A trade union-led campaign to condemn and isolate the Swazi regime is now getting wider support, including from the Church and the ruling ANC, the Afrol News agency reports.
The Congress of South Africa Trade Unions (COSATU) has increasingly sought provocation. It hosts and finances the Swaziland Solidarity Network, a main source of international information about rights abuses in the kingdom. But the union also assists underground Swazi unionists; organises protests inside and outside Swaziland; sends in protesters; and even has blocked the Swazi border.
Only last month (September 2010), South African trade unionists streamed into Swaziland to participate in a pro-democracy protest. Several were stopped at the border and sent back. Others were detained by Swazi police and some report being beaten up. COSATU, it seems, is as war with the Swazi regime.
The death of Swaziland democracy activist Siho Jele ‘is threatening to become a scandal shaking the foundations of the kingdom’, according to this report by Afrol news agency in Norway. It reports on how Swazi police wrecked Jele’s funeral yesterday (16 May 2010). and ‘stormed towards the coffin. The Jele case has developed into the most discussed issue in the kingdom, it says.
afrol News, 17 May 2010 - The Sipho Jele saga went on on Sunday, as relatives and friends tried to bury the trade unionist that had died in police detention. Around 500 armed police officers disrupted the funeral and arrested more Swazi civil society leaders.
In the totalitarian kingdom of Swaziland, the case of trade unionist and opposition activist Sipho Jele is causing increased public uproar. Mr Jele was detained on a 1 May labour event for wearing a T-shirt with the symbols of Swaziland's main opposition party PUDEMO, which is banned.
The activist died while in police detention, with security officers claiming Mr Jele had committed suicide while unions and the opposition claim he was killed. Contradictions and a growing public outrage over the circumstances of Mr Jele's death led Swaziland's Prime Minister to promise an inquiry into the case.
Last week, Mr Jele's case took another turn as the traditional chief in the dead activist's home village of Ncabaneni - standing in a feudal relation to Swaziland's King Mswati III - refused Mr Jele's family permission to bury his body in the area. The burial lands, owned by the King, would not accommodate for a person who stood in direct opposition to Swaziland's feudal traditions, the family was told.
In response to this refusal, the family filed an urgent application to the high-court seeking permission to go bury Mr Jele. This application was later abandoned after the chief and the police gave the family their word that the funeral would not be stopped.
This weekend, the family organised for a memorial service in the town of Mazini and Mr Jele's funeral in Ncabaneni. Family, friends and political allies of the diseased prepared their participation.
But already on Saturday's memorial service in Mazini, police outnumbered mourners. About 100 uniformed police were present, according to local sources. Swazi trade union sources say police at the service "began to harass well known members of the country's various political formations," including leaders of a youth league, the teachers' trade union and student association of Swaziland.
"The three, fearing that their comrades would be attending their own three different funerals next week, had no other option but to hide from the police. They were so desperate to elude the police that they had to endure the journey to Ncabaneni hidden next to Jele's coffin inside the hearse," local sources report.
When the coffin got to Ncabaneni, mourners were given the impression the funeral would proceed orderly, despite the presence of an estimated 500 heavily armed police officers. But Swazi authorities had other plans.
Mourners were shocked when at the early hours of Sunday morning, just before the actual burial, police stormed towards the coffin and ripped the PUDEMO flag from it and told the large crowd that the funeral would not be held in the area as had been earlier ordered.
The three political leaders, who had narrowly escaped detention in Manzini the day before, were finally apprehended and taken into custody on the same charges that the late Mr Jele had been arrested for, which is wearing PUDEMO T-shirts. Nothing has been heard of the three activists since then.
Mr Jele thus still has not been buried and three more activists are now detained in the case. Meanwhile, the Jele case has caused international alarm over the poor human rights standards in Swaziland.
Equally important, the Jele case has developed into the most discussed issue in the kingdom, with the otherwise careful Swazi press thoroughly covering every detail in the case in an increasingly outspoken manner. Mr Jele's death thus is threatening to become a scandal shaking the foundations of the kingdom.
Sipho Jele, an oppositional trade unionist dying under suspicious conditions while in detention earlier this month, has been denied a traditional burial in his home area. Burial lands belong to King Mswati III.
The local chief in Sipho Jele's home area, eNcabaneni, has refused to allow his family to bury him there. The reasons given for this denial are that Mr Jele was opposed to the Tinkhundla system of government and hence cannot be buried on land owned by the supreme authority within that system, the King.
A further claim by the local chief - who stands in a direct feudal dependency to King Mswati, is that Mr Jele does not belong to that area. "This is despite the fact that he was a well known member of the community," according to information gathered by the Swaziland Solidarity Network.
The Swazi King in 2008 speech made a statement that can loosely translated to mean that, "families should keep watch of their dogs." This, opposition sources hold, meant that any Swazi citizen would bear the wrath of family members who dare to criticise his rule.
Denying a family the right to bury a relative, in Swazi culture, is an abomination.
According to the Swaziland Solidarity Network, the family of Mr Jele "has been extremely brave and unwavering in its quest to unravel the truth about the death of its beloved son. This has not gone down well with the country's rulers."
The activists at Swaziland Solidarity Network in a statement also express shock. "It is taken for granted that oppression in the banana kingdom of Swaziland lasts from the cradle to the mortuary. However, in the case of the fallen comrade, Sipho Jele, the king and his feudal henchmen have decided to take it beyond the mortuary and even beyond the grave," spokesman Lucky Lukhele comments.
Mr Jele, a trade unionists, was arrested on 1 May for wearing a T-shirt with the symbols of Swaziland's main opposition party PUDEMO, which is banned by the King. A few days after his arrest, Mr Jele died while in detention.
The government of Swaziland claims Mr Jele had committed suicide while in detention, but his family, trade unions and PUDEMO claim he must have been killed by police officers. "We know this is incorrect," PUDEMO says in a statement commenting the "suicide" reports. "A lot of people in Swaziland have died in the hands of the police and fictitious stories fabricated," the party adds.
Swazi citizens do not put much belief into the government version. "We can not be fooled into believing that Jele committed suicide; that will never convince even the stupidest citizen of this country," Mr Vilakati writes.
The case of the death of trade union activist Sipho Jele is gaining increased attention in Swaziland, and even the cautious media in the kingdom are daring to report on the case. Reacting to the increased pressure, the Prime Minister of Swaziland has promised an independent inquest into the cause of death of Mr Jele
Swaziland has the worst record on workers’ rights in southern Africa.
Things are so bad there is child labour and forced labour throughout the kingdom.
A report just published by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) says the law in Swaziland restricts workers’’ rights to organise and restricts trade union rights to collective bargaining. Freedom of association is also severely restricted.
‘In Swaziland, the law does not allow strikes, and the police use excessive violence to repress any strikes that take place, arresting unionists and their leaders and using torture to obtain information,' the ITUC found.
The trade union leadership faces civil liability for damages or income losses caused during a strike and the police have made excessive use of violence to repress strikes, the report says.
The ITUC studied all countries in the Southern African Customs Union (Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa and Swaziland) and found Swaziland stood out as the ‘worst offender’ by a long way.
The Afrol news agency from Norway says the ITUC found the exploitation of child labour in all the SACU members remains an unrecognised problem, largely due to social norms that tolerate and foster it. Except for South Africa, governments are insufficiently active in addressing the problem. Child labour is found chiefly in informal economic activities and in agriculture, while child prostitution and trafficking are also reported in the entire region.
The report says there has been some progress on the issue of forced labour in SACU countries, with the exception of Swaziland where the government has institutionalised forced labour on the ‘grounds of tradition’ in order to build infrastructure or undertake cultivation at no cost [for example, weeding the gardens of King Mswati III, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch]. Current laws provide for the duty of Swazis to ‘obey orders and participate in compulsory works.’ Participation is enforceable with severe penalties for non-compliance.
While all of the SACU member states are found to violate core labour rights, the ITUC team was especially shocked by standards in Swaziland, whose government seemed to categorically violate all labour rights.
King Mswati III of Swaziland, sub-Saharan Africa's last absolute monarch, is clearly rattled that news about his purchase of up to 20 state-of-the-art armoured Mercedes-Benz cars for himself and his (many) wives has become public knowledge.
It was reported that the Mercedes Benz S600 Pullman Guard cars that can resist an attack with small arms projectiles, a grenade or other explosive and include high-end audio, an intercom, 19-inch flat screen display, DVD player, refrigerator and wood trim as standard, cost E25 million (250,000 US dollars) each.
The Times Sunday reported this news that has also been all over the Internet.
Now, the Times of Swaziland, the kingdom’s only independent newspaper group, has been forced to make a front page apology. It seems Times’ publisher Paul Loffler was summoned to see the king and as a result the following appeared on the front page of the Times.
APOLOGY
The TImes Group of Newspapers wishes to bring to the attention of its readers and the public at large that an article published in the April 19, 2009 edition of the Times SUNDAY entitled 'E25m cars at Ludzidzini' was not entirely correct and could have misled the public into believing that his was an amount actually spent on the cars. It has been brought to our attention that the cars referred to in the article were not purchased at a cost of E25 million but at a highly reduced figure due to them being ordered directly from the manufacturers in Germany. We therefore would like to unreservedly apologize to His Majesty the King and all affected parties for the misleading information. We wish to state that the Times Group of Newspapers remains committed in its endeavour to provide information accurate and balanced content in a respectful and unbiased manner and that it shares a common vision for peace and development of this country with the people of Swaziland.
By the publisher on behalf of the Times Group of Newspapers.
Keen readers will note that King Mswati is not denying that he bought the cars, but only that they didn’t cost as much as E25 million, because he got a discount. As I said in my blogpost on Thursday (30 April 2009), when reporting the king’s denial in the Swazi Observer, the newspaper in effect owned by the king, nobody has actually said how much the cars did cost.
If King Mswati doesn’t feel the cost of the cars is any big deal, let him tell us how much he paid for them and where he got the money from.
There are sinister overtones to the Times’ apology. King Mswati has form when it comes to bullying the media in Swaziland. In March 2007 the Times Sunday published a report from the international news agency Afro (click here to read it) that criticised King Mswati and included a reference to the king’s spending, ‘Swaziland is increasingly paralysed by poor governance, corruption and the private spending of authoritarian King Mswati III and his large royal family.’
The article went on to say, ‘The growing social crisis in the country and the lessening interest of donors to support King Mswati’s regime has also created escalating needs for social services beyond the scale of national budgets.’
The news about the king’s new cars will not go away. I suspect he may have scored an own goal by forcing an apology from the Times over a report that was essentially true. Expect to see more international attention focused on the king who is said to have a wealth of 200 million US dollars (E2 billion) when 70 percent of his subjects live in abject poverty earning less than one US dollar a day, Swaziland has the highest rate of HIV AIDS and tuberculosis in the world and last year six in ten people needed some form of international food aid to avoid hunger.
