Govt fails to stop "terrorist" meeting

An international conference of NGOs dedicated to social change took place in Swaziland despite the government banning the meeting on grounds of public safety; it had alleged some of the delegates were supporters of terrorism.

The Southern African Social Forum (SASF) holds its annual meeting in a different country each year. The greatest attendance was achieved in 2005, when the forum convened in Zimbabwe and 4,000 people participated.

This year only about 200 delegates convened in Manzini, Swaziland's commercial hub, from 16 to 19 October, after a High Court ruling overturned the government's ban.

The low attendance was attributed to confusion by foreign delegates over the government's original restriction, announced by Acting Prime Minister Bheki Dlamini, and the reluctance of local groups to attend a function officially disallowed by their political leaders.

The first day of the forum also conflicted with King Mswati's summoning of Swazis to a meeting at the traditional royal village at Ludzidzini, where he angrily denounced political radicals, alleging that they had vowed a campaign of bombings to press for democratic reform. He said such elements would be "strangled". Mswati is sub-Saharan Africa's last absolute monarch.

No political group has claimed responsibility for a bomb blast last month at a road bridge close to King Mswati's Lozitha palace, in which two of the bombers died and one was wounded in the premature explosion.

One of the deceased was a member of the People's United Democratic Movement (PUDEMO), one of the country's banned political parties, but PUDEMO denied any organisational involvement. At least two South African nationals were among the bombers.

Acting Prime Minister Dlamini, a member of the royal clan and regarded as a hardliner, ordered the SASF meeting to be banned on the grounds that participating labour groups - South Africa's Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the Swaziland Federation of Trade Unions (SFTU) - had approved of the 21 September explosion.

Bombing campaign

Dlamini alleged that a campaign of bombings was sanctioned to press for political reform at an August 2008 meeting of labour groups in South Africa. "Soon after the [highway bombing] incident, supporters of the bombers came out, congratulating the bombers for their so-called 'heroic' act. Some of the formations are the very ones that will be participating in the Southern African Social Forum," he told a press conference.

"The Swaziland government is not aware of any government in the world that would sit and fold its arms, and allow strategies that would negatively affect the peace and security of the country concerned to be developed within its own borders."

Dlamini told the forum's Swaziland sponsor, the Coordinating Assembly of Non-Government Organisations (CANGO), an umbrella body of the country's NGOs, to inform SASF delegates that the conference was cancelled.

Instead, CANGO's director, Emmanuel Ndlangamandla, along with the SFTU and the Swaziland Federation of Labour, successfully petitioned the High Court to overturn the prohibition. The court declared that the government had acted beyond its power by imposing the ban, which was unconstitutional.

However, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs revoked an agreement with CANGO allowing them to use Manzini's International Trade Fair, which the ministry runs, for the SASF meeting. The delegates convened in marquees on the sports ground of a Manzini high school, where they discussed poverty alleviation strategies, HIV/AIDS issues and other humanitarian matters.

The forum's historic anti-capitalism thrust, established at its outset, was fuelled by the current global economic crisis, which delegates said would negatively impact on the poor in African nations.

"We were told that your coming would cause anarchy in the Kingdom of Swaziland," Comfort Mabuza, chairman of the CANGO board of directors, said in his address to the delegates. "We were told that bombs would explode, but no bombs exploded and there was no anarchy."

However, the police reported that a bomb was discovered and removed on Friday beneath a highway bridge in Ezulwini, five kilometres east of the capital, Mbabane. SASF officials said they had no knowledge of the incident.

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