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Grass-Roots Effort Aims to Upend Mugabe in Zimbabwe
Michael Wines, New York Times
March 26, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/27/international/27zimbabwe.html

HARARE, Zimbabwe - She is in her 40's and the mother of four, though in the dappled sunlight of an outdoor restaurant here, clad in a floppy hat and a thin cardigan, she looks too young to be either. Nobody would see her as a provocateur, much less a revolutionary.

But when Rebecca took one child to the doctor on a recent morning, she left behind a clinic restroom plastered with stickers urging resistance to the 25-year reign of Zimbabwe's president, Robert G. Mugabe. Later, she littered her bus seat with condoms emblazoned with a large Z and a call to "Get up! Stand up!" against the government.

"There are more than 10,000 of us," she said. "And every one is excited, because you know you are playing a part in something you believe in."

The Z stands not for Zimbabwe, but for Zvakwana, an underground movement that aims to resist - and eventually undermine - Mr. Mugabe's authoritarian rule. With a second, closely related group called Sokwanele, Zvakwana's members specialize in anonymous acts of civil disobedience - a meld of guerrilla theater and the philosophies of Gandhi and King.

In ideology, and sometimes even in identity, Zvakwana mirrors grass-roots efforts in any number of authoritarian nations. From Zubr in Belarus to Ukraine's victorious Pora to nascent groups in Egypt and Lebanon (whose names, in English, mean "enough"), such civic movements may be the hottest phenomenon in global democratic politics. Many take their inspiration from Otpor, the movement that played a major role in ousting Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia.

The groups sprang to life here three years ago, shortly after Mr. Mugabe won a re-election campaign that many international election observers said had been stolen from his democratic opponents. Their rationale is embodied in their names: in Shona and Ndebele, Zimbabwe's two main languages, both names also mean "enough."

That the groups truly number 10,000 seems doubtful. Yet the government is nettled enough to paint over much of their graffiti, and news media reports say the police assembled a team of senior investigators 14 months ago to find and destroy Zvakwana.

The police have failed. In fact, one Zvakwana member in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second-largest city, said members of the movement stole into a police station in January to slip antigovernment messages under supervisors' doors.

"We informed them that we are not their enemies, but their liberators," a member, who would be identified only as Magamula, said in an interview. "Even members of the police - the army, the C.I.O. and the C.I.D. are working with us," the member said, referring to Zimbabwe's intelligence apparatus and its criminal investigations division. "That's how we've managed to survive this far."

Michael McFaul, a Stanford University political scientist and student of grass-roots movements, has spent much of this year studying groups in Georgia, Ukraine and Serbia. To a remarkable degree, he said, they and similar groups are driven by the Internet and by the increasingly global nature of television.

Although many speculate that movements like Zvakwana are Western inventions, Mr. McFaul said the opposite appeared to be true, at least for the moment.

In Lebanon, "They're modeling what they're doing on the Ukrainians," he said. "And they're watching the Ukrainians on Al Jazeera, of all places. It's not an American-centric thing that's being channeled through the White House. It's more global."

Some movements do receive foreign money, but no amount of money will sustain a democratic movement, he added, if a nation's dissidents lack the passion and numbers to carry the battle on their own.

In personal conversations and an extensive interview via e-mail, Zvakwana members insisted theirs was a homegrown protest movement, free of foreign control. But not of foreign influence. In a long conversation, Rebecca said she and fellow members had begun their membership in Zvakwana by viewing videotapes on resistance movements in Poland, Chile, India and Serbia, as well as studying civil rights tactics used in Nashville.

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