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Opposition vows mass protest against Mugabe's rule
Agence France-Presse (AFP)
January 16, 2008

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jxtqOVsmoGiXVqenTqGUrRqVpjvw

Harare - Zimbabwe's main opposition on Wednesday vowed to stage protests in the capital Harare next week to demand free and fair elections and a resolution to the country's mounting economic crisis.

"We have decided to march on January 23," Tendai Biti, the Secretary General of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) told reporters.

"Our march is a statement against poverty, against the failed state. Our march is a demand for our cash, for drugs in our hospital.

"We are marching because we are pressing the case for the democratic demands we have been making and that is the demand for a new constitution, the demand for free and fair elections.

"We are saying to the people of Zimbabwe we're taking the struggle for democratisation, the struggle against dictatorship from the boardrooms to the streets," he said.

Presidential and parliamentary polls are expected to be held in Zimbabwe in March.

Biti said MDC lawmakers and senior party officials would lead the march, dubbed the "New Zimbabwe Freedom March", which is expected to start from the MDC headquarters in central Harare.

He lamented the country's economic crisis which he said was unheard of even in countries emerging from war.

"Our country is at crossroads as a result of man-made mismanagement, misgoverning and an unbelievable capacity to score own goals, lack of love and attention from a government which has totally abandoned its functions," Biti said.

Zimbabwe is in the throes of economic crisis with inflation officially put at nearly 8,000 percent although independent economists put it at around 50,000 percent.

"It's within this background of a deficit state, of a failed state that the weight of responsiblity on the shoulders of the MDC has increased. It's the MDC that's filling in that deficit. We have to provide the leadership that Robert Mugabe and cronies are not providing."

Mugabe, 83, who has been in power since the nation gained independence in 1980, is his ruling ZANU-PF party's presidential candidate in the March poll.

Previous protests by the opposition have been brutally broken by state security agents who invoked the tough security laws which ban rallies and protests without police approval.

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