Roy Bennett, a close aide of Zimbabwe's prime minister who was released on bail over terror charges Thursday, is a white farmer who became an outspoken opponent of President Robert Mugabe.In his decade-long political career, he has been expelled from his Zimbabwe farm, jailed for fighting in parliament and exiled in South Africa.
He was arrested and dumped in jail on February 13 just an hour before Mugabe swore in a unity government that was meant to heal the nation's political divide.
Bennett, a Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) nominee for deputy agriculture minister in the recently-formed government of national unity, was arrested on terror charges.
His arrest at a small airport outside Harare highlighted concerns about the unity deal with Morgan Tsvangirai, the MDC leader who became prime minister on February 11.
Bennett was born to a farm family in 1957 in the town of Rusape.
He started his own coffee plantation in Chimanimani, a lush region near the border with Mozambique, where he grew into one of Zimbabwe's top exporters of the crop.
A fluent speaker of the majority Shona language, Bennett endeared himself to people in the region, who nicknamed him "Pachedu", meaning "We are one."
When Tsvangirai formed the MDC a decade ago, Bennett was one of the few white farmers to openly declare his support for the party that set out to defeat Mugabe at the ballot box.
After MDC's first electoral foray in 2000, he was one of just a handful of white lawmakers in the parliament dominated by Mugabe's ZANU-PF.
He remained outspoken even in the face of great personal challenges.
His Charleswood farm was expropriated under Mugabe's land reforms in 2003 and the following year he was jailed for eight months for assault after he punched the justice minister during a heated debate in parliament on the land programme.
The sentence was imposed by the ZANU-PF lawmakers in parliament and following his conviction he lost his parliamentary seat.
In 2006, he fled to neighbouring South Africa to escape arrest after being implicated in an alleged plot to assassinate Mugabe.
Police claimed Bennett was the mastermind in the alleged conspiracy which also implicated MDC lawmaker Giles Mutsekwa, who became co-minister for home affairs in the new unity government.
The charges came back to haunt him with his latest arrest, even though courts have discredited the plot and cleared other MDC officials accused in the case.
Source : Sapa-AFP /po
Date : 12 Mar 2009 16:42
