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Police quiz Zimbabwe unionists over wage protests
Reuters
September 19, 2006

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L1944559.htm

HARARE - Zimbabwe police interrogated two labour union officials on Tuesday over protest marches which were crushed by the government last week, the union said.

The Zimbabwe Confederation of Trade Unions (ZCTU) said its deputy secretary general Japhet Moyo and another official from an affiliated union were interrogated by police on their return from abroad. Moyo was detained for two hours at Harare airport.

Both were subsequently released, a ZCTU official said.

Lawyers told a Harare court last Friday that a dozen members of the ZCTU were tortured and some had limbs broken while in police custody after an attempted protest against poor wages.

All those detained were released on Friday pending trial on Oct. 3 on charges of violating Zimbabwe's strict security laws.

"It seems the paranoia afflicting the government keeps increasing every day. The Zimbabwean government will stop at nothing in its bid to prevent trade unionists from exposing its weaknesses and failure," the ZCTU said in a statement.

"He (Moyo) was accused of having organised the ZCTU protests and then going away out of the country to spread lies."

Police were not immediately available for comment.

The ZCTU says protests are necessary to highlight the plight of workers hit hard by an economic recession, which is marked by the world's highest inflation as well as shortages of foreign currency, food, fuel and deepening poverty.

President Robert Mugabe says the ZCTU has an opposition political agenda and denies charges he has run down a once-promising country. Instead, he blames the West for sabotaging the economy over his seizures of white-owned farms to resettle landless blacks.

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