Zimbabwe’s ruling party has accused opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai of advocating war following his call for mass protests and warned of reprisals, a daily newspaper reported on Wednesday.
The Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) party said in a statement that Tsvangirai should ”desist from attempts to incite civil disobedience” as it ”could lead to bloodshed and undermine democracy”, the state-run Herald said.
”It is surprising that those leaders who never went to war are the ones advocating it,” said the statement.
”Those who reject the legal and democratic way of running the government and choose confrontation will be confronted by the long arm of the state,” it added.
Tsvangirai, who was re-elected president of a faction of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party on Sunday, warned President Robert Mugabe, saying ”the dictator must brace himself for a long, bustling winter across the country”.
The former trade union leader called on about 14 000 supporters at a weekend conference to take part in a ”sustained cold season of peaceful democratic resistance”.
The statement by Zanu-PF information secretary Nathan Shamuyarira and Elliot Manyika, national political commissar, said the MDC had not taken part in Zimbabwe’s liberation war against British colonial rule and therefore did not understand the implications of violence.
”Their leaders have never fought in a war, and they do not know the problems of promoting war in a society,” it said.
”War is not like a picnic or a dinner party, it is blood, sweat, injuries, and death.”
Once posing the biggest challenge to Mugabe’s rule, the MDC split late last year over Tsvangirai’s decision to boycott senate elections and the gap between the rival camps shows no sign of being bridged.
Created in 1999 with Tsvangirai as its leader, the MDC made major gains in the 2000 parliamentary elections but lost ground in last year’s March elections that the party dismissed as a sham.
The ruling party also reiterated a charge that the MDC and Tsvangirai were puppets of Britain which has criticised Mugabe’s land reforms in which thousands of white farms were seized and redistributed to landless black farmers.
”No matter how Tsvangirai may try to market his lies and wishful thinking, MDC has remained the baby of our colonial masters in Britain,” it said.
”It is indeed the master’s voice and will continue playing to the gallery of the West.”
Political analysts say the MDC is at the moment too weakened to confront the government and its army in the streets after the opposition party split into two rival political parties.
Besides the Tsvangirai-led MDC — which is widely seen as the main rival to Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party — there is another faction of the opposition party that also calls itself the MDC and is led by former student activist Arthur Mutambara.
Calls in the past by Tsvangirai and his MDC for mass revolt have fizzled out with only a handful of people heeding such calls, while the army and police have always been more than ready to prevent people from taking to the streets against the government.
But analysts and observers say Zimbabwe — in the grip of its worst economic crisis to date, which has seen shortages of literally every basic survival commodity, from fuel to food and electricity and with inflation beyond 700% — may just be ripe for a revolution. – Sapa