Police halt Zimbabwe opposition rally

By Francesca Lo Basso
Collegian Editor
February 21, 2007

A police blockade was set up on a major road in Zimbabwe over the weekend in order to prevent the main opposition party from holding a rally. The leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), Morgan Tsvangirai, was holding the rally to launch his presidential campaign for the 2008 elections.

According to BBCNews.com, he had obtained a High Court Order Feb. 17 to hold the demonstration, but was blocked on Sunday from reaching the sports ground in the Highfields district of the capital where the rally was supposed to take place. Police also lobbed tear gas and shot water cannons at Tsvangirai’s supporters as they gathered in the Highfields, and an unconfirmed number of arrests were made.

When Tsvangirai finally arrived at the location, he told the crowd that remained that the rally was being cancelled.

For almost 30 years, Zimbabwe has been controlled by President Robert Mugabe. The country, originally a major tobacco and agricultural producer, has now fallen on hard times after Mugabe forced the seizure of almost all white-owned commercial farms. He claimed that this was to aid poor black Zimbabweans, but the confiscation of land only resulted in steep falls in production and the collapse of the agriculturally-based economy.

Mugabe’s politics follow in the tradition of African liberationists from the 1960s. He believes in strong and ruthless leadership, maintains an anti-Western and anti-capitalist stance and deals with dissidents harshly. His Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front party (ZANU-PF) has preserved dominance in politics since Zimbabwe won its independence from Britain in 1980.

Mugabe and his supporters blame the economic downfall on a long-running drought, and accused Britain and its allies of purposefully disrupting the economy as revenge for his land reform program.

In 2005, the government enacted a “slum demolition drive,” which was said to be boosting law, order and development, but critics saw the destruction of slums as a way to leave opposition supporters homeless. Whatever the reason, the drive left approximately 700,000 people without jobs or homes, according to U.N. estimates.

Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, has a long history of conflict between white settlers dispossessing the resident population, guerilla armies forcing the white government into holding elections and post-independence leadership enacting violent control in areas where it lacked support from its citizens.

The police blockade of Tsvangirai’s rally comes in the middle of a weeks-long strike by doctors, nurses and teachers demanding better wages. Civil servants are now threatening strikes as well unless they are awarded an immediate 400 percent pay increase to combat the exorbitant levels of inflation.

www.bbcnews.com

lobassof1@lasalle.edu