Police fought running battles on Saturday with supporters of a strike called to protest against the forced eviction of slum dwellers in Zimbabwe.
Riot police fired tear gas at protesters in the Chitungwiza township south of the capital, Harare, according to one of the strike organisers.
Lovemore Madhuku, chairperson of the newly-formed pressure group the Broad Alliance, said many people were beaten by police officers, who also fired live ammunition over their heads.
The violence erupted after police set up roadblocks on routes out of the township, Madhuku said.
Opponents of President Robert Mugabe are now calling for increased confrontation with the government after the two day strike proved a failure.
”The [strike] leadership must just show they are not deterred,” Madhuku said. ”We may have to push the government more and more to that corner of shooting people and then they must expose themselves to the whole world.”
Although traffic levels on city streets were lower than normal, most businesses were open for work on Friday, the second day of the strike.
In a statement, the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, which backed the strike, acknowledged it had attracted ”a minimal response”. Its sole success was the boycott by opposition MPs of the state opening of Parliament on Thursday.
Police in Zimbabwe could seize the goods and trading license of any business that failed to open during the strike, and many Zimbabweans believed the protest was only a rumour after state-controlled TV, radio and newspapers declined to mention it.
State radio broke its silence on the strike on Friday to describe it as ”a failed attempt to sabotage Zimbabwe’s economic turnaround”.
A Reuters round-up of the capital’s major industrial sites and the central business districts on Friday showed most firms were open and employees at work.
”I don’t honestly see the point of stay-aways. Maybe in the past, but not now,” said one woman as she hurried to work.
The Herald newspaper quoted Mugabe as saying opposition MPs had behaved like ”little children, not yet mature” for boycotting the opening of Parliament.
”If they want to stay away, the better and we will move on … What room is there for you to discuss anything with them?” Mugabe said.
Economists said five years of economic decline in Zimbabwe have left only about 800 000 of its 12-million people with jobs in the formal sector, making it difficult to gauge the effect of a strike.
At least 200 000 people have been left homeless during the southern African winter after police destroyed shanty town homes and traders’ stalls, in what the opposition believes is an assault on its urban support base.
In a speech to Parliament on Thursday, Mugabe described the crackdown, in which thousands of street traders were arrested, as an attempt to curb crime in Zimbabwe’s cities.
The black market traders deal in commodities such as sugar as well as exchanging foreign currency at rates far lower than the official level. The government regards them as economic saboteurs.
The United States embassy said in a statement on Friday that it deplored the evictions that ”left thousands without shelter”.
”We urge the government to end this campaign and turn its attention to the humanitarian needs of its people, including those recently displaced.” – Guardian Unlimited Â