ZIMBABWE: Police swoop on injured MDC supporters
HARARE , 25 April 2008 (IRIN) - About 400 people seeking refuge from alleged state-sponsored violence at the opposition party offices of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in the capital, Harare, have been arrested by riot police, according to an IRIN correspondent.
Hundreds of people, including children, have fled to Harare from rural areas, seeking medical attention after the ZANU-PF government launched "Operation Mavhoterapapi" (Who did you vote for?) in the wake of their parliamentary election defeat and an anticipated second round of voting in the presidential ballot.
President Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF lost control of parliament after the 29 March poll for the first time since independence from Britain in 1980, while the MDC have claimed that their leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, won the presidential vote by the required 50 percent plus one vote, ruling out the need for a run-off ballot. ZANU-PF have said there was no clear winner in the presidential race, although the results have yet to be announced.
A political analyst who declined to be identified, told IRIN the victims of Operation Mavhoterapapi, including those who sought refuge at the MDC offices, were being portrayed by the state media as the perpetrators of post-election violence and were likely to be charged with public violence.
Hundreds of people were bundled into waiting buses outside of the MDC offices, many of them still bandaged as a result of injuries sustained during alleged assaults by soldiers and police in the rural areas, and taken to Harare's Central Police station. The political analyst said it was likely that ZANU-PF would claim the injuries of those arrested were sustained during attacks perpetrated against ZANU-PF supporters.
The state-controlled daily newspaper, The Herald, reported on 24 April that eight homesteads belonging to ZANU PF-supporters, who were beneficiaries of the government's fast-track land reform programme in 2000, which saw white commercial farms redistributed to landless blacks, were torched by suspected MDC supporters.
MDC supporters contemplate retaliation
Taziva Maponga, 38, of Mudzi in Mashonaland East province, told IRIN: "Most of these perpetrators of violence are people who belong to our communities and are well-known. There is a growing feeling among us as supporters of the MDC that we can't let small groups of people do whatever they want with us. If they continue burning our houses and granaries, we might also have to roast them alive."
The MDC has urged restraint among its supporters, and has said that responding to violent attacks in kind would allow the government to impose a state of emergency.
Churches and civil society fear state-sponsored violence against opposition supporters in the aftermath of the elections will intensify. The MDC claim that at least 10 of their supporters have been killed since the voting and hundreds have been beaten, their houses razed, livestock slaughtered and food reserves plundered.
The Evangelical Fellowship of Zimbabwe (EFZ), the Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops' Conference (ZCBC) and the Zimbabwe Council of Churches (ZCC) said in a statement: "Organised violence perpetrated against individuals, families and communities, who are accused of campaigning or voting for the 'wrong' political party, has been unleashed throughout the country."
The churches said people were being "abducted, tortured and humiliated", and forced to "attend mass meetings where they are told they voted for the 'wrong' candidate" and in some cases murdered.
The church organisations called on the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the African Union (AU) and the United Nations (UN) to intervene, and warned that "if nothing is done to help the people of Zimbabwe from their predicament, we shall soon be witnessing genocide".
South African President Thabo Mbeki, appointed in 2007 by SADC to mediate between Mugabe's government and the opposition, was condemned by the international community and civil society for failing to acknowledge the country's crisis, although his own party, the ANC, and its trade union allies, have taken a different stance.
ANC president Jacob Zuma, who deposed Mbeki from the party presidency in a bitter power struggle in December 2007, has called on African leaders to "move in to unlock this logjam", while the country's largest union federation, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), is organising mass demonstrations on 10 May against the "dictatorial Mugabe".
Violence worsens humanitarian situation
The clerics said the post-election violence was exacerbating the "widespread famine" in Zimbabwe, and compounding the severe shortage of basic commodities and medical supplies brought about by an eight-year recession that has seen inflation rise to more 165,000 percent annually.
MDC spokesperson Nelson Chamisa told IRIN it was "easy for the humanitarian situation in the country to be worse than during Operation Murambatsvina", a reference to a 2005 blitz that displaced about 700,000 people, according to the UN.
"The carnage could even reach the proportions of Darfur, Kenya and Rwanda, because we are talking of systematic violence being unleashed on defenceless civilians by a government determined to stay in power at all costs, and without any regard to international law and advice. They clearly want to eliminate dissenting voices and, if you go back in history, they tried to do that to people in Matabeleland in the [nineteen] eighties."
In the early 1980s, Operation Gukurahundi (a Shona expression for 'the early rain which washes away the chaff before the spring rains') was launched against alleged supporters of ZAPU, a rival liberation movement with widespread support amongst the Ndebele people in southern Zimbabwe.
The North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade, the Zimbabwean army's vanguard unit, killed about 20,000 people during the campaign, according to the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace.
Appeal for international assistance
Chamisa said the MDC was appealing to humanitarian organisations to assist victims of political violence. "The situation is overwhelming us. There is no way in which we can, on our own, provide shelter for [the people from] over a hundred homes that have been destroyed; drugs and hospital bills for the maimed, or displaced families, some of whose members are mere toddlers, and food for the hungry. Casualties are increasing by the day."
After an international tour to Europe and African countries, Tsvangirai is currently staying in neighbouring Botswana, a critic of Mugabe's presidency. Although party officials are reticent to describe it as exile, they concede that it does guarantee his safety and enables him to engage unhindered with international leaders, although his absence could render the party rudderless in Zimbabwe.
"State agents might want to harm our president, but there is nothing that will stop the winds of change in this country. He will return when the time comes, but in the meantime he is making inroads in conscientising the world to the excesses of Mugabe," Chamisa said.
A Chinese ship carrying weapons to Zimbabwe, which included millions of rounds of ammunition and mortar bombs, has reportedly begun its voyage home after being at first thwarted by civil society intervention from delivering its cargo to the South African port of Durban, and then cold-shouldered by other SADC states after the regional body's chairman and Zambian president, Levy Mwanawasa, urged member states not to provide the ship with docking facilities.
Pedzisayi Ruhanya, spokesperson for the Crisis Coalition in Zimbabwe, an umbrella NGO organisation, told IRIN: "What they [ZANU-PF] are doing right now is setting the stage for a bloodbath. They want to flush out opponents so that, come time for the run-off, there will be no opposition to talk about."
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Theme(s): (IRIN) Governance, (IRIN) Human Rights
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Copyright © IRIN 2008
This material comes to you via IRIN, the humanitarian news and analysis service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the United Nations or its Member States.
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