Back to Index

This article participates on the following special index pages:

Zimbabwean opposition held, then released by police
Celia W Dugger, International Herald Tribune
June 05, 2008

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/05/africa/05zimbabwe.php

Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition leader who placed first in Zimbabwe's March elections and now faces a runoff with President Robert Mugabe, was detained by the police for nine hours on Wednesday and charged with drawing a big crowd, his party said. He was released late in the evening.

"It makes absolutely no sense that a presidential candidate in an election is arrested for attracting crowds of people," the party said in a statement. The party said Tsvangirai was charged under the Public Order and Security Act, and it called the charge "spurious."

Amnesty International condemned his detention as part of a "sharp and dangerous crackdown" that has included killings, torture and the intimidation of the political opposition and its supporters.

The opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, also said Wednesday that three people sleeping at one of its offices in Masvingo Province were shot dead by unidentified militia members around midnight, bringing to 65 the number of its supporters killed since the March elections.

"The office was razed to the ground," said Nelson Chamisa, a party spokesman. The assailants poured gasoline on the bodies and set them and the office on fire, the party said.

A human rights doctor who has coordinated the treatment of more than 1,700 victims of state-sponsored violence said in an interview Wednesday that two severely burned opposition workers injured in the fire in Masvingo were now being treated in Harare.

Opposition party officials said the latest murders and their standard bearer's detention were yet more evidence that prospects for a free and fair election in Zimbabwe are vanishing. Earlier this week the police blocked Tsvangirai from holding rallies, and soldiers have reportedly beaten people in rural areas who greeted him on his tour, party officials said.

Tsvangirai, who went into self-imposed exile after the election because of fears he would be assassinated, returned to Zimbabwe a week and a half ago to campaign in advance of the June 27 runoff. During a political crackdown in March 2007, Tsvangirai was so brutally beaten by police that he was put in intensive care. The thrashing he received quickly turned him into an international symbol of resistance against Mugabe's repressive rule.

In addition to detaining Tsvangirai on Wednesday, the party said the police and members of the country's intelligence agency seized one of the security vehicles in his motorcade, a step opposition officials said could compromise his safety.

He and other senior members of his party, including its vice president, Thokozani Khupe, were driving in a convoy between campaign appearances when they were stopped by the police on Wednesday afternoon and then taken to a police station in Lupane. All were released.

A statement by the opposition party said the roadblock where Tsvangirai was pulled off the road was run by Zimbabwe Republic Police and members of the Central Intelligence Organization.

"This is outrageous," Chamisa said. "Who has heard of a candidate campaigning peacefully being detained?"

The United States also criticized his detention, calling it a "deeply disturbing development."

A rash of recent developments has prompted civic and human rights groups to decry the increasingly repressive atmosphere in the country.

The government has ordered CARE, one of the largest humanitarian groups in the country, to suspend all its operations and has curtailed the work of many other aid groups after accusing them of helping the opposition. Analysts said the government wanted to clear the rural areas of witnesses to state-sponsored violence and control the distribution of food aid to reward supporters and punish those who might vote against Mugabe.

Human Rights Watch on Wednesday called on the government to reverse its decision to bar aid agencies from delivering food. "The decision to let people go hungry is yet another attempt to use food as a political tool to intimidate voters ahead of an election," a Human Rights Watch researcher, Tiseke Kasambala, said in a statement.

In the past week the police have detained women protesting the wave of state-sponsored violence that has swept the country and raided the offices of Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition, one of the country's most prominent non-governmental organizations.

The police also arrested two prominent opposition leaders, a newly elected member of Parliament, Eric Matinenga, and Arthur Mutambara, leader of a breakaway faction of the opposition party who has endorsed Tsvangirai.

And in a chilling sign that the government is stepping up its efforts to discourage foreign journalists from covering the election, a court on Tuesday sentenced three South Africans to six months in jail for being in possession of illegal broadcasting equipment belonging to the British company Sky News. The three were arrested at a roadblock as they were about to cross the border into South Africa.

The state-owned newspaper, The Herald, quoted Magistrate John Masimba as telling the three men as he pronounced the sentence that they took a risk and "must now face the music."

Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.

TOP