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Caprivi high treason trial witness recalls days as a shunned refugee
November 4, 2005

* WERNER MENGES

THE State's 10th witness in the main Caprivi high treason trial was avoided "like human excrement" by fellow refugees from the Caprivi Region after he had been accused of being a Swapo spy in the Dukwe refugee camp, he testified in the High Court in Windhoek yesterday.

For the witness, whose identity may not be revealed by the media because he has said he fears for his own and his family's safety, the half a year that he says he spent at Dukwe from late 1998 appear not to have ended on a happy note.

He told Judge Elton Hoff yesterday that whereas he had at one stage been a leader of one of the groups that Namibian refugees at Dukwe were divided into, he was later accused of being a "Swapo informer" among the refugees in the camp.

With that, he became an outcast among his fellow refugees.

The witness told the Judge that one of the reasons why he was accused of being a Swapo informer in the refugee camp was because he had arrived at the camp in a helicopter with which the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees had transported him, whereas other refugees from Namibia arrived there in trucks.

Even Mishake Muyongo, the alleged leader of the secessionist movement in the Caprivi Region, heard of the suspicions about him, the witness said.

He told the court that Muyongo then wrote a letter from Gaborone, and that this was read to the other people from the Caprivi Region living in the refugee camp.

Muyongo's letter did not actually state his name, but the person who read the message to the people in the camp was put under pressure and then revealed that it was he who was being referred to, the witness said.

After that, people started avoiding him, he testified.

He said when he encountered people they would run away, avoiding him like one would avoid human excrement.

He told them that if they did not stop treating him like that, he would go back to Namibia and reveal everything they all had been involved in, he said.

He then went ahead and registered to be repatriated to Namibia, he said.

What the people in the camp had been involved in back in Namibia, he said, were the activities of a movement that aimed to take up arms to achieve the secession of the Caprivi Region from Namibia.

That was also why they went to Botswana, he added: because they had been informed that they would be receiving military training in Botswana, and would quickly be able to return to the Caprivi Region to liberate it from Namibian rule.

Another incentive was that they had been promised a good living upon their return.

They were told that they could choose which houses belonging to Masubia residents of the Caprivi Region they wanted to take for themselves upon their return, he said.

The Masubia were against the secessionist idea, he explained.

The witness, who has been in the witness box for eight days, is set to continue with his testimony today.

Deputy Prosecutor General Taswald July is still leading his evidence in chief on behalf of the State.


Source: www.namibian.com.na
http://www.namibian.com.na/


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