Zimbabwe opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai was in intensive care with a broken skull on Wednesday following what he says was a brutal police attack while in custody, his spokesperson said.
”He has just had a brain scan because his skull is cracked,” spokesperson William Bango told Reuters from a Harare hospital, adding that the opposition leader had also needed blood transfusions.
”He will be here for some time. He is in the intensive care unit,” Bango said.
Doctors at the Harare Avenues Clinic have not issued any reports on his health and nursing staff say they do not discuss the condition of individual patients.
Zimbabwe prosecutors had earlier failed to appear for an expected court appearance by Tsvangirai and dozens of others arrested on Sunday for defying a ban on protests against President Robert Mugabe’s government.
”The prosecutors are not here, so we are going and they may have to proceed by way of summons,” one of Tsvangirai’s lawyers, Alec Muchadehama, told reporters outside the court.
Senior prosecutor Joseph Jagada said police had to complete paperwork before the case could proceed.
Lawyers earlier said Tsvangirai, who heads the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), had been released from police custody but remained in hospital along with 30 other opposition figures allegedly beaten after their arrest on Sunday.
Another 19 accused were freed and went home, lawyers said.
Tsvangirai was taken to hospital with a deep head wound on Tuesday soon after arriving at court. His condition and that of other opposition supporters fuelled world outrage over the crackdown on political protests by Mugabe’s government.
Sunday’s arrests, which occurred as Tsvangirai and other opposition supporters attempted to attend a prayer vigil, came as Zimbabwe faced a deepening economic crisis with inflation at more than 1 700%, unemployment of 80% and frequent shortages of food, fuel and foreign exchange.
Muchadehama said earlier the court case could proceed even if Tsvangirai and the other accused remained in hospital, noting a legal provision allowing lawyers to represent their client or court officials to visit an accused in hospital.
”Those who cannot make it to court might be remanded from their hospital beds,” he said.
Zimbabwe’s state media has not covered accusations that Tsvangirai and his colleagues were assaulted in custody, but has blamed the opposition for a wave of violence.
On Wednesday, the official Herald newspaper reported that some MDC supporters had gone on an ”orgy of violence”, barricading roads, destroying property and stoning vehicles in a Harare township on Tuesday.
”Sources said the violence was part of a broader campaign by the youths to cause chaos in the suburb,” the Herald said, adding that police quelled the violence and restored peace in the area.
Zimbabwe’s political tensions have mounted in recent weeks because of plans by Mugabe, now 83 and the country’s sole ruler since independence from Britain in 1980, to further extend his rule.
Mugabe originally proposed adjusting election dates to extend his current term by two years to 2010, and then said that if necessary he would be willing to stand in elections in 2008 — meaning he could remain in office through 2014.
‘Shamefully weak response’
Meanwhile, South African trade unions and church leaders have called their government’s response to unrest in Zimbabwe shameful.
While leaders across the world including United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the United Nations and the European Union had strong denunciations of the Zimbabwean government, regional power centre South Africa maintained that Zimbabwe’s problems could only be resolved by Zimbabweans.
In a statement, Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Aziz Pahad urged the Zimbabwean government to ensure respect for the rule of law and the opposition to ”work towards a climate that is conducive to finding a lasting solution to the current challenges faced by the people of Zimbabwe”.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) said it deplored the government’s ”shamefully weak response”.
”Such a response is disgraceful, in the face of such massive attacks on democracy and human rights, especially coming from those who owed so much to international solidarity when South Africans were fighting for democracy and human rights against the apartheid regime,” the country’s largest federation of trade unions said in a statement.
South Africa has pursued what it calls a policy of ”quiet diplomacy,” arguing working behind the scenes would do more to encourage reform in Zimbabwe than isolating Mugabe.
Now concerns are being raised that South Africa’s silence has added to Zimbabwe’s woes and is tarnishing the country’s image as a beacon of human rights.
”The silence of the South African government is aggravating the situation. Our leaders must show that they are committed to helping the people of Zimbabwe to find rapid solutions to the many problems confronting them,” said the South African Council of Churches.
Eddie Makue, the organisation’s general secretary, said in a statement that the situation in Zimbabwe threatened to destabilise the region.
”One would hope that in the glaring light of the growing brutality of the Zimbabwean government those [neighbouring] states would finally feel moved to act,” the US ambassador to Zimbabwe, Christopher Dell, told the BBC on Tuesday.
South African Foreign Affairs spokesperson Ronnie Mamoepa said calls for the government to condemn Zimbabwe were misplaced while contact between the two governments continued.
But Steven Friedman, a researcher at the Institute for Democracy in South Africa, a pro-democracy think tank, said there was a sense South Africa was concerned about not being seen to be siding with white farmers against a black government and giving the opposition any undue credibility, than it was in ”defending people’s rights to protest, which is a basic right enshrined in our Constitution”.
Friedman said South Africa was damaging its reputation as a country with a strong record on human rights issues.
”What the government fails to understand is that we are not a very large country so the extent to which we have any leverage in the world arena comes from our past. A consistent human rights approach is our greatest asset and we are busy squandering it and this is particularly true with regard to Zimbabwe,” he said. – Sapa-AP, Reuters