JOURNALISTS are not always welcome in Zimbabwe’s tense countryside. “We’re Zimbabweans and if you don’t leave now we’ll use our guns against you,” warned the leader of a group of more than 200 people who gathered in front of a helicopter carrying journalists that landed on a rural football field. “Take off, we don’t want you here,” he said as Zimbabweans voted for a new parliament in an election threatening President Robert Mugabe’s 20-year strangleholds on power. A number of the men threatening an AFP photographer at Hwedza, a rural town in Mashonaland East province, 130km southeast of Harare, were clearly drunk. As the helicopter waited, an AFP journalist on the way to check on a voting booth saw police arrest five brawling men, but it was not clear what was behind the fighting. The opposition Movement for Democratic Change candidate, Pierson Tachiveyi, fled the country recently after receiving death threats. Ruling party militants attacked a convoy of MDC activists accompanied by journalists near Hwedza last Tuesday as they tried to enter the region to campaign.
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