President Robert Mugabe vowed on Saturday that the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) would never rule Zimbabwe and that he was prepared to fight to keep them from taking power.
”We shall never, never accept anything that smells of … the MDC. These pathetic puppets taking over this country? Let’s see. That is not going to happen,” he said in a speech at the funeral of a former army general.
”We are prepared to fight for it if we lose it in the same way that our forefathers lost it [to British colonial rule].”
MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai will face Mugabe in a run-off presidential election on June 27, after winning the first round in March but without the necessary majority.
Tsvangirai, rights groups and Western powers accuse Mugabe of unleashing a brutal campaign, including using police to harass opponents, to win the run-off.
Tsvangirai and and 11 MDC campaign colleagues were held by police for three hours on Saturday after being taken into custody at a roadblock in the morning. He has been detained several times this month.
The party’s secretary general Tendai Biti, arrested on Thursday as he returned to the country, appeared before a judge.
At the closed hearing prosecutors said they planned to charge him with ”treason and making malicious statements detrimental to the interests of the state”, which could carry a death penalty, Biti’s lawyer said.
Police took Biti — accused of announcing results of the March 29 poll prematurely — away after the hearing and said they might bring him back to court on Monday, the lawyer told reporters.
Mugabe’s Zanu-PF lost control of Parliament in elections also held in March but the president, who has ruled since independence from Britain in 1980, has shown little sign of accepting change.
”It is clearly impossible to talk about a free and fair election in Zimbabwe,” the MDC said in a statement after their leader was detained.
”To suggest otherwise is to be clearly blind to the grave harassment, intimidation and violence that the people of Zimbabwe have had to endure over the past few years.”
War rhetoric
The MDC claims 66 of its followers have been killed in attacks since the March polls.
Mugabe (84) blames the MDC for the violence that has caused widespread international concern.
His language has grown increasingly belligerent as the run-off approaches. He said again on Saturday that Western countries were interfering in politics by sponsoring the MDC.
”We have become the focus of the British and the Americans. The US has provided $70-million to the MDC for regime change … and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is interfering in our internal affairs.”
”Never again shall this country come under the rule of the white man, direct or indirect. Not while we, who fought for its liberation, live,” he said to wild cheers from thousands of supporters, including soldiers.
The former guerrilla commander told Zanu-PF youth members in Harare a day earlier that liberation war veterans had told him they would launch a new bush war if he lost the run-off.
”They said if this country goes back into white hands just because we have used a pen [to vote], ‘we will return to the bush to fight’,” Mugabe said.
War veterans have regularly been used to intimidate Mugabe’s opponents and were involved in implementing the government’s seizure of thousands of white-owned farms beginning in 2000.
Zimbabwe’s agricultural sector, once one of the most prosperous in Africa, has collapsed, and shortages of bread, milk and meat are common. Inflation is running at 165 000% and unemployment is 80%.
UN humanitarian officials say the situation is rapidly worsening, with up to four million people in need of aid.
World Vision, a US-based humanitarian group, warned that 1,6-million children could lose access to vital resources if the government continued to suspend aid work, including 400 000 children it was helping through school feeding programmes. – Reuters