As Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe rolls out his strategy to hang on to power, attacks on his opponents are getting bloodier by the day.
Restrictions on his political opponents’ activities are also getting tighter and now even humanitarian interventions by key aid groups are being curtailed.
On Wednesday activists said three opposition supporters were burned alive at the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) offices in Bikita, southern Zimbabwe.
As their bodies were carried to Harare, MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai was detained at a police station in Lupane. He was released eight hours later.
In the past two weeks Mugabe’s regime has arrested four opposition MPs and a leading opposition politician and banned the MDC from holding rallies.
On Sunday police surrounded the home of Arthur Mutambara, leader of a faction of the MDC, and arrested him for writing a newspaper article critical of Mugabe.
Mutambara was released on Tuesday, saying the arrest was part of a deliberate campaign by Zanu-PF to intimidate opposition leaders into suspending their campaigns.
On Wednesday police accused Tsvangirai of violating a ban on rallies, but MDC officials denied that their leader held rallies in the rural areas he visited, saying he was on a “meet-the-people campaign” in the region.
Officials travelling with Tsvangirai said he was separated from his group and taken to an isolated detention facility at a police station in the town.
“We are still with the police. They accuse him of addressing a rally at St Paul’s in Lupane without authorisation,” Job Sibanda, a lawyer for Tsvangirai, told the Mail & Guardian from Lupane late on Wednesday. Sibanda said Tsvangirai was not harmed.
Lawyers such as Sibanda are also at increased risk. This week Andrew Makoni, one of a team of lawyers that represented hundreds of tortured opposition campaigners in the past few weeks, said that at least 10 Zimbabwean human rights lawyers from Zimbabwe plan to flee the country because ruling party supporters are targeting them.
Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights said: “Of concern is the apparent abuse of the law against these groups of people, especially when one looks at the noticeable trends of wanton arrest, prolonged detentions and the lodging of unnecessary appeals to frustrate orders of court.
“Groups and individuals continue to face legislative and administrative impediments as they seek to exercise their human, fundamental and constitutional rights, and this must be brought to an end.”
The detention of the opposition leaders has added a new front to a violent campaign already being waged by militants loyal to Mugabe. Rights groups report that at least 50 activists have been killed since March, while 25 000 people have fled political violence.
International aid groups have not been spared either. CARE International, one of the most active groups distributing food aid in Zimbabwe, was forced to stop operations, while the work of Save the Children UK, which says it has been feeding 60 000 children in northern Zimbabwe, was also halted.
The government wants to have sole control of all food aid distribution, to gain an advantage in the run-off election.
Aid workers warned that the interruption of food aid will aggravate already harsh living conditions and could have devastating consequences on the population.
“If this continues, we face a serious humanitarian disaster,” Cephas Zinhumwe, head of a coalition of NGOs, told the M&G on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, the media also continue to take a beating. This week a magistrate said that to prove that Zimbabwe was “not a banana republic”, he would jail three South African journalists for six months for working without official government accreditation.
The journalists had been found in possession of equipment belonging to Sky TV, one of several foreign media organisations that were banned from reporting from Zimbabwe.