Dozens of opposition supporters were arrested across Zimbabwe on Tuesday as the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) launched its most widely followed protest against President Robert Mugabe’s government for years, the opposition said.
At least 63 people, including two MDC lawmakers, were arrested, according to police spokesman Wayne Bvudzijena, who said there had been ”stoning of passing motor vehicles and barricading of roads, besides petrol-bombing targets”.
Buses were stoned in several poor suburbs of the capital Harare, and shops and businesses remained closed in the city and several other towns as MDC supporters heeded the party’s call for a nationwide strike.
Bvudzijena maintained the mass action, which police had declared illegal, had been a ”total failure”. The state Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) concurred, saying it had been ”business as usual” around the country.
But the claims were contradicted by MDC representative Paul Themba Nyathi, who said ”thousands” of Zimbabweans had heeded his party’s call and stayed away from work.
By late on Tuesday afternoon, central Harare’s streets were nearly empty, with the few businesses that had opened in the morning closing early for the day.
The MDC said the mass action had also been widely followed in the country’s second city of Bulawayo and in the eastern border town of Mutare.
Two MDC legislators were arrested in central and southern Zimbabwe, Nyathi said. He also alleged that four MDC activists had been abducted in the northern farming town of Bindura.
An AFP correspondent in Bulawayo reported seeing police disperse groups of commuters waiting for public transport in the Renkini bus terminal. Most businesses in the city, including banks, remained closed.
Previous mass anti-government movements organised by civic groups in the southern African country have failed to get off the ground, but Tuesday’s stay-away appeared to have been widely followed.
As tensions flared, a bus from a parastatal firm was petrol-bombed near the slum township of Epworth on the outskirts of Harare. Two policemen were reportedly injured in the attack.
A Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) van was stoned in the Harare suburb of Glen View and rocks were also hurled at at least three mini-buses in the working class suburb of Mabvuku, east of the capital, an eyewitness said.
Police had to fire teargas in Rugare township to disperse youths who were setting up barricades on the main roads leading out of the suburb.
The MDC had called for peaceful mass ”action for national survival” to protest at Zimbabwe’s deepening socio-political and economic crisis. The action was to start on Tuesday and end on Wednesday.
”The majority of Zimbabweans are wallowing in poverty. More than eight million people … are staring death in the eyes,” the MDC said in press advertisements at the weekend.
”When people lose their dignity through despair, injustice, hunger and oppression, they have to resort to desperate measures to survive,” it added.
Mugabe’s government has linked the stayaway to the extension of Zimbabwe’s suspension from the Commonwealth.
”The planned opposition mass action has been calculated to coincide with Wednesday’s Commonwealth report on Zimbabwe’s suspension from the councils of the 54-member grouping and America’s push to have Zimbabwe condemned for alleged human rights abuses,” the state-run Herald newspaper said.
Pro-government commentators have blamed former colonial power Britain for being behind the mass protests, in a bid to increase hardship for Zimbabweans. – Sapa-AFP