SWAZI POLICE ILLEGALLY BAN MEETING

The Swaziland state is getting jittery following the student unrest that has swept the kingdom and attracted international attention.

A new clampdown on meetings has started and Swazi police have taken it upon themselves to ban gatherings.

This emerged this week as police, acting on no known authority, banned a youth group workshop. Police said the organisers Vulamehlo Youth Brigade were a banned political organisation.

Just who ‘banned’ them is not clear. Vulamehlo isn’t on the list of organisations Barnabas Dlamini, Swaziland’s illegally-appointed Prime Minister banned in November 2008.

Vulamehlo wanted to hold a workshop at the Lutheran Development Services (LDS), Mbabane, today (20 February 2010) but police visited LDS and said the workshop must be cancelled.

A source at LDS said, ‘It came as a shock to us that officers from the Mbabane Police Station stormed our centre and told the lady in charge of bookings that we should not dare allow the meeting to take place.’ The source said it wasn’t up to LDS to ban the meeting. If they wanted it banned, the police would have to do it themselves.

One of the workshop organizers said the meeting wasn’t ‘political’; it was for young people to meet and talk about ‘life skills’.

The police seem intent on banning anything they don’t understand. According to the Swazi News, an independent newspaper in Swaziland, assistant police public relations officer Steven Dlamini said police only ‘advised’ the owners of the building that it will be wise not to host the youth meeting ‘because their organisation was an illegal entity’.

He said, ‘As police we advised the owners of the building because information at our disposal was that their meeting was going to be held at night we did not understand the purpose of holding the meeting at night.’