Harare | Friday
ZIMBABWEAN police appear to have launched a crackdown against one of Zimbabwe’s leading civic bodies, arresting more than 300 women on the eve of a planned anti-government demonstration, officials said on Friday.
A total of 354 women, members of the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA), an alliance of human rights, labour and church groups, were arrested on Thursday and more on Friday. The 354 were meeting in the Harare township of Kambuzuma to discuss plans for a demonstration.
The demonstration, scheduled for Saturday, would demand a new national constitution, said MDC chairman Lovemore Madhuku.
Police arrested more women on Friday in the satellite township of Chitungwiza, but further details were not immediately available.
Scores of officers on Thursday swooped on a gathering of about 500 women in Kambuzuma, but many managed to escape while police were trying to bundle them into police trucks.
”It’s absolutely outrageous,” said Madhuku.
”These are pregnant women, women who had children with them and women who left their children at home to attend the meeting. They are scattered around nine police stations. Police are refusing to let them attend to their children.”
The women were told they had been arrested in terms of the controversial Public Order and Security Act (POSA), passed in January, but Madhuku said police had not decided on specific charges against the women.
”We are rushing to get a high court order for their release before the demonstration,” he said.
The law was used by authorities to impose what was almost a blanket ban on meetings by the opposition Movement for Democratic Change in the run-up to presidential elections last month.
The use of POSA was one of the reasons observers from most of the world decided that Mugabe’s victory was illegitimate.
The civic group published a letter they had received from the police in a local newspaper on Friday. The letter stated that they were ”not sanctioning the intended march(es),” scheduled to be held simultaneously in all Zimbabwe’s major urban areas.
The letter, signed by the chief superintendent in charge of operations in Harare, said ”the NCA cannot impose its constitution on the government”.
It also said that ”holding demonstrations/marches will occasion public disorder,” and warned that ”police will deal with any offender effectively in terms of the Act”.
The NCA, as well as other civic groups, have tried repeatedly in the last two years to stage demonstrations but have been met with a violent response from riot police and mass, arbitrary, arrests, usually in defiance of court orders. – Sapa-AFP