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Police besiege union's offices
Caroline Mvundura, Zim Online (SA)
February 27, 2010

http://www.zimonline.co.za/Article.aspx?ArticleId=5774

Zimbabwean police on Friday launched a second surprise raid in four days on the headquarters of the General Agricultural and Plantation Workers' Union (Gapwuz) and took juniors officers for interrogation after failing to locate secretary general Gertrude Hambira. The Gapwuz boss went into hiding earlier this week for the second time in three months as state security agents swooped onto the union's offices and arrested two officials in Harare and interrogated them over a video produced last year showing brutal torture perpetrated by security forces on white commercial farmers and their workers. In the latest attack on pro-democracy groups by the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) and the Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP), the security agents reportedly took the junior officers after finding out the rest of management had gone into hiding.

One of the unionists who is in hiding said they were seeking legal counsel from the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR) and will only come out their hideouts if they are advised to do so. He said for the past 24 hours before the Friday raid they had received threatening calls from unknown people demanding to be told Hambira's whereabouts. "In the absence of the general secretary, they had been picking up other officers," said Wellington Chibebe, secretary general of the country's main labour body, the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU). "Today they were picking junior officers," he added. We have handed over the case to ZLHR, they will only go there (to the police) with lawyers because if they go alone that is when they disappear," Chibebe told Zim Online. Gapwuz assistant secretary general Gift Muti and president Manjemanje Munyanyi were briefly detained last Thursday before they were released.

The ZCTU condemned the continued harassment and intimidation of trade unionists, despite pledges by Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai's 12-month-old power-sharing government to observe the rule of law and uphold human rights. Hambira had to go into hiding in Bulawayo last November after getting wind that the CIO were after her following a presentation she made in the United States chronicling the heinous crimes committed by Mugabe's government on white commercial farmers and the effects of the actions on farm workers. In the video, she chronicles how the number of farm workers had plummeted from 150 000 before the violent farm seizures to less than 10 000 after the displacement of their employers left them jobless. She also exposes how the government had defied a regional court to press ahead with farm invasions last year, and how the fresh invasions in 2009 had left hundreds of farm workers injured or killed, and the effects it had on production, especially in the Chegutu area near Harare.

Fresh farm disturbances in Zimbabwe have reportedly rendered over 4 000 farm workers homeless since the formation last February of the unity government. Zimbabwe's decade-long farm invasions, which Mugabe says were necessary to ensure blacks also had access to arable land that they were denied by previous white-led governments, have been blamed for plunging Zimbabwe into food shortages. Once a net food exporter Zimbabwe has avoided mass starvation over the past decade only because international relief agencies were quick to chip in with food handouts. Mugabe has vowed to continue the land acquisition, despite a November 2008 ruling by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Tribunal outlawing farm seizures because they were discriminatory, racist and illegal under the SADC Treaty.

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