Caprivi treason trial

Some of the alleged leaders of the sedition attempt were in exile at the time the Caprivi conflict peaked and have not been brought to court.

The Caprivi Strip is a remnant of the Berlin Conference of 1884, at which the European powers divided sub-Saharan Africa amongst themselves, indifferent to its ethnology and often with inadequate knowledge of its geography.

After the conference, European governments learned more about the geography of the interior and negotiated changes to boundaries agreed upon in Berlin.

In the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty, Germany gave up its interest in Zanzibar in return for the island of Heligoland in the North Sea and the Caprivi Strip.

The Namibian government has in the meantime recognised other traditional leaders who are perceived to be mere puppets of the ruling SWAPO party.

[5] Among the suspected leading figures detained and charged are:[6][7] A number of Caprivi traditional leaders and politicians have been implicated but were in exile at the time of the attacks: Botswana, Denmark and Canada have been granting asylum to people fleeing Namibia in the aftermath of the attack on Katima Mulilo.

In 2007 this second trial ended with ten of the accused convicted and sentenced to 30 or 32 years of jail each, depending on the length of their stay in custody,[17] and the remaining two acquitted and set free on a technicality.

[19] A number of secondary and tertiary trials have been split from the main proceedings, among them a number of counterclaims by the alleged secessionists of unlawful arrest, torture and manhandling, but also the claim that Namibian courts do not have jurisdiction over the Caprivi because the Caprivi Strip is not part of the Republic of Namibia.

[1] The Caprivi Treason Trial has been delayed by a number of factors, most prominently by its sheer size and the accompanying paper trail.

This makes it by far the longest[27] and largest[28] trial in the history of Namibia, frequently swallowing around half of all legal assistance funds budgeted by the Namibian Ministry of Justice.

[32] Both the massive delays of the trial and the treatment of the accused have been criticised by a host of local, regional, and international organisations.

Frequent reports of maltreatment, torture, medical neglect and unsanitary conditions in the holding cells have been made.

A sizeable fraction of the people imprisoned are not even thought to have participated in any violent action but might have been "arrested solely based on their actual or perceived non-violent support for the political opposition in the region, their ethnic identity or their membership of certain organisations".