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Swaziland
Amnesty International's activities in Swaziland have focused on the situation of refugees from South Africa. In mid-1974, AI learned of the arrest and deten- tion of V.A. Shange, who had been associated with the opposition Ngwane National Liberatory Congress (NNLC) since his arrival in Swaziland some years before.
After representations had been made to the Swaziland government and to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Mr Shange and two other detained refugees were released and allowed to take up offers of settlement in other countries. More recently, AI has taken up the cases of two more refugees from South Africa who are known to have been detained in Swaziland.
Tanzania
Amnesty International groups continued to handle more than 60 adoption and investigation cases in Tanzania, both on the mainland and on the offshore islands of Zanzibar and Pemba. These prisoners include individuals sentenced to death or to long prison terms at a trial which culminated on Zanzibar in May 1974, and which stemmed from arrests made after the assassination of Zanzibari President Sheikh Abeid Karume in April 1972.
In May 1974 AI appealed to President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania to ensure that the death sentences which had been passed at the Zanzibar trial would not be carried out. Meanwhile, the convicted men are carrying their appeals against con- viction and sentence to the High Court in Zanzibar, and ultimately to President Aboud Jumbe (President Karume's successor) who has the final decision on the
matter.
A number of the accused who were tried in the Zanzibar treason trial between May 1973 and May 1974 are in fact in detention on mainland Tanzania, the government having refused to return them to Zanzibar for trial in view of the lack of guarantees that the proceedings would be fair. In December 1974, 10 long-term detainees were released by the Tanzanian authorities, including five persons who had been held since the killing of Sheikh Abeid Karume but who had been acquitted in absentia by the Zanzibar court. Fourteen others allegedly involved in the Karume assassination plot remain in detention on the mainland. They include Abdul Rahman Babu, the former Tanzanian Minister for Economic Affairs and Development Planning, who was sentenced to death by the Zanzibar court in May 1974.
Prisons in Dar es Salaam, the Tanzanian capital, and in the mainland towns of Tabora, Mwanza, and Tanga, hold an unknown number of untried prisoners detained under the provisions of the Preventive Detention Act (1962). These prisoners include relatives of former Tanzanian cabinet minister Oscar Kambona, now in self-imposed exile; refugees from other African states who have become suspect in the eyes of the Tanzanian authorities; and Tanzanians suspected of subversion or other crimes. Individuals among them are adopted as soon as the Research Department has sufficient data on them.
Al-adopted prisoners on mainland Tanzania were released in presidential amnesties in December 1974 and April 1975.
During the year the authorities on Zanzibar showed a curiously ambivalent
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