Police assaulted and tortured Zimbabwe’s most prominent opposition leader after breaking up a protest prayer meeting, leaving him with deep gashes on his head and shoulders, colleagues said on Monday.
The organisers of the ”Save Zimbabwe” meeting — an alliance of opposition, civic, church leaders and student and anti-government groups — said lawyers reported that Morgan Tsvangirai fainted three times after being beaten by police. The Save Zimbabwe Campaign also said another opposition leader, Lovemore Madhuku, was taken to the main Harare hospital early on Monday after collapsing from police assaults. He was reported in a serious condition.
At least four other opposition and civic leaders were beaten and tortured in custody, the campaign said.
Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change said his wife was allowed to see him on Monday in a suburban jail and reported the wounds. Susan Tsvangirai reported her husband was heavily bandaged, said his deputy, Movement for Democratic Change vice-president Thoko Khupe. Some of the wounds were sutured and an eye was badly swollen.
”This is not consistent with the normal police brutality we have witnessed. The injuries were deliberate and an attempt to assassinate him,” said Eliphas Mukonoweshure, another top opposition official.
Lawyers were still being denied access to Tsvangirai, Khupe said.
Opponents of President Robert Mugabe blame him for acute food shortages, record inflation of about 1 600 percent — the highest in the world — and repression and corruption. They have demanded the ouster of 83-year-old Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s only ruler since independence from Britain in 1980.
Fliers for Sunday’s meeting, described as a prayer meeting, proclaimed: ”Zimbabwe Will Be Saved.” A United States State Department spokesperson condemned the police response to the protest and said the United States was shocked by reports of injuries suffered by opposition leaders.
The attacks ”were an indication of the repressive nature of the Mugabe dictatorship”, said the spokesperson, Tom Casey.
One protester was shot dead by police in Sunday’s unrest in the western Harare township of Highfield and scores of others were arrested. Two journalists trying to cover the events also were arrested.
Khupe said police ”unleashed a wave of indiscriminate violence” to clear people from the streets of the area where Sunday’s meeting had been planned. She also said police arrested at least 100 demonstrators suspected of protesting Sunday’s arrests in the western city of Mutare on Monday.
No comment was immediately available from the police on the latest arrests.
”We are not trying to make headlines, we are just exercising our democratic rights,” Khupe said.
The opposition alliance said lawyers were still trying to establish the whereabouts of all those picked up by police, saying some were denied food or legal advice.
”Our just, legitimate and peaceful struggle will not cease,” the alliance said on Monday.
On Sunday, police spokesperson Wayne Bvudzijena said police arrested Tsvangirai and other top party officials as they ”instigated people to come out and commit acts of violence”.
He said one man was shot and killed when 200 opposition party ”thugs” attacked about 20 policemen. The organisers identified the dead protester as Gift Tandare, an activist of Tsvangirai’s opposition group.
Bvudzijena told state television that three police officers were hospitalized with injuries in the violence.
Authorities had declared the prayer meeting to be in breach of a three-month ban on political demonstrations. Riot and paramilitary police reinforcements, which had been deployed since Friday in the area where the prayer meeting was scheduled, sealed off approaches to a sports ground and fired tear gas to disperse the gathering.
A Harare freelance photographer, Tsvangirayi Mukwahzi, and a freelance television producer, Tendai Nusiyu, were among the journalists arrested at the scene.
Bvudzijena alleged that demonstrators tried to use children as human shields against the police and had picked up tear gas canisters and lobbed them back at police. He gave no figures of the number of arrests. ‒ Sapa-AP