President Robert Mugabe has backed Zimbabwean police for using brute force to pre-empt an anti-government protest by the country’s largest trade union, a state-run daily reported on Monday.
”Police were right in dealing sternly with Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) leaders during their demonstration … because the trade unionists want to become a law unto themselves,” the Herald quoted Mugabe as saying.
The 82-year-old leader said the protest organisers got the treatment they deserved for breaking the Public Order Act, which bars unauthorised protests and is roundly condemned as a piece of draconian legislation by critics.
”We cannot have a situation where people decide to sit in places not allowed and when the police remove them, they say no,” Mugabe was quoted as saying.
”We can’t have that, that is a revolt to the system. When the police say move, move. If you don’t move, you invite the police to use force,” Mugabe said.
The ZCTU was forced on September 13 to abandon plans for a series of anti-government protests after the organisers were beaten up and arrested while gathering for the march in central Harare.
ZCTU secretary general Wellington Chibebe and 29 labour leaders were assaulted in police custody, leading to Chibebe’s arm being broken, according to his lawyer.
The Southern African country has been beset by unemployment running at 80% and the annual inflation rate hit a world-record levels of more than 1 200% last month. There are serious shortages of food and fuel.
Mugabe said the unionists were trying to effect a regime change like in the former Yugoslavia where ex-president Slobodan Milosevic was toppled.
It would not work because ”Zimbabwe is Zimbabwe, it has a revolutionary struggle”, Mugabe said, repeating accusations that the protesters were trying to get his arch-critics, United States President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, to intervene in Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe’s relations with the West have been tense since Mugabe’s government launched controversial land reforms six years ago, seizing farms from about 4 000 white farmers for redistribution to landless blacks, often with no expertise or equipment.
Once the breadbasket of Southern Africa, the country of 13 million has descended into economic chaos, blamed in part by critics on the land reforms. — Sapa-AFP