Zimbabwe’s main opposition party on Wednesday accused President Robert Mugabe’s government of continuing a crackdown on opponents and called for an African Union crisis summit to resolve the country’s problems.
The opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) says Mugabe’s government has intensified a crackdown on its members ahead of elections next year.
MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai last month said more than 600 opposition supporters were abducted and tortured by government agents since March this year and on Wednesday secretary general Tendai Biti said MDC’s low-ranking officials countrywide, key in mobilising support, had been targeted.
”The systematic unbridled assault on the MDC and civic society is continuing unabated and we know these are barbaric acts of a gangster state whose days are numbered,” Biti told journalists.
”We ask the AU to call for an extraordinary summit on Zimbabwe, which is long overdue, to condemn these atrocities and put pressure on this regime,” Biti said.
AU chairperson and Ghanaian President John Kufuor said on Tuesday Africa should be worried about the crisis in Zimbabwe and that he planned to learn from President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa what the situation was like in that country.
Mbeki was recently appointed by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to mediate in the Zimbabwe crisis and Biti said the MDC would want a quicker pace of the mediation process.
Mbeki’s mediation followed the severe beating of Tsvangirai and several opposition and civic society in police custody on March 11 after they tried to hold a prayer vigil in defiance of an official ban on political rallies.
Biti said Tsvangirai was scheduled to meet Kufuor soon.
”We want the facilitator of the SADC dialogue, President Thabo Mbeki, to realise that no dialogue can take place in an environment full of fascism and violence perpetrated by the state,” said Biti.
He said the MDC was preparing for parliamentary, presidential and local government elections next year but maintained the opposition would only take part if there was a new constitution to guarantee political freedoms and international observers.
Mugabe, in power since independence in 1980, says the MDC is being funded by the West to carry out a campaign of terror to topple his government from power. The MDC denies the charges.
Assaulted
On Tuesday, the Zimbabwe Law Society and witnesses said that armed police violently broke up a demonstration of lawyers wearing traditional legal gowns outside Zimbabwe’s High Court and took several away and beat them.
One group was corralled on to a truck and taken to open grassland in the Eastlea suburb of Harare, where they were made to lie on the ground and were assaulted, said attorney Beatrice Mtetwa, head of the Zimbabwe Law Society.
Afterwards, some were being examined for injuries by doctors at a private clinic in northern Harare, she said.
During the lunchtime demonstration in downtown Harare, some of the lawyers, in white court collars and other legal attire, were struck with riot sticks as they argued their rights against orders to disperse.
They were protesting against the arrest and detention of two of their colleagues on Friday for allegedly obstructing the course of justice in their defence of opposition activists.
A senior police officer, using a bullhorn, warned the group of about 30 lawyers that their protest was illegal under a ban on demonstrations in the Zimbabwe capital.
Riot police, some armed with automatic rifles and shotguns, pushed and jostled the lawyers, hitting out at them. — Reuters, Sapa-AP