Zimbabwe’s main opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai left hospital in a wheelchair on Friday after being treated for head injuries sustained at the hands of President Robert Mugabe’s security services. The Movement for Democratic Change president made no comment to waiting reporters as he was driven away from the hospital in Harare.
A defiant Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe told critics of his government to ”go hang” themselves on Thursday in his first response to the arrest and assault of opposition chief Morgan Tsvangirai. After talks with Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete, the veteran leader accused Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change of instigating violence.
Central bank chief Gideon Gono has compared Zimbabwe’s 1 730% inflation rate to the Aids pandemic and warned it cannot be tackled by the government alone, state media reported on Thursday. ”Inflation has ceased to be just the number one enemy. It is now actually the economic HIV of this country,” Gono said in remarks carried by the Herald newspaper.
Zimbabwe accused opposition supporters on Thursday of waging a militia-style campaign of violence against the government, amid rising world condemnation of President Robert Mugabe’s latest crackdown on dissent. Police officials said three officers had been badly hurt in a petrol-bomb attack in the capital, Harare, late on Tuesday.
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,” said spokesperson William Bango.
Zimbabwean opposition chief Morgan Tsvangirai and 49 other opposition activists were released from hospital into their lawyers’ custody late on Tuesday, one of the lawyers said. Tsvangirai was detained on Sunday, along with dozens of other activists, after a police crackdown on an opposition rally.
Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe is considering a tough security plan that could see the country placed under a state of emergency within the coming month, media reports said on Tuesday. Meanwhile, opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has appeared in court, two days after he was arrested, and a protest in Johannesburg has called for his release.
A commando unit based at the Cranborne Barracks in Harare was responsible for the brutal torture of Morgan Tsvangirai and other opposition leaders on Sunday, according to a police officer who witnessed the assault. The officer said the beatings were carried out by drugged soldiers disguised as police officers.
The major threat to Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe comes from disgruntled members of his Zanu-PF party upset with his plans to extend his rule rather than the official opposition, according to analysts. Mugabe has attracted widespread international criticism for ordering a brutal crackdown on the opposition.
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. Lawyers reported that Morgan Tsvangirai fainted three times after being beaten by police.
Zimbabwe’s chief opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has been left fighting for his life after being brutally beaten in police custody, his deputy claimed on Monday. ”As of now … Tsvangirai is battling for his life at Borrowdale police station after he was brutally assaulted,” Thokozani Khupe, deputy head of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), told reporters.
Zimbabwe’s opposition movement vowed on Monday to continue with its drive to topple veteran President Robert Mugabe despite the arrest of its top leaders and the use of deadly force to crush a mass rally. The Save Zimbabwe Campaign insisted they would not be cowed by the crackdown.
Lawyers demanded access to Zimbabwe opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai on Monday after his arrest, along with dozens of supporters, when riot police crushed an anti-government demonstration in Harare. Tsvangirai has not been allowed to see either legal representatives or medics since he was arrested on Sunday.
Presidential hopefuls within the ruling Zanu-PF party are courting international diplomats to put pressure on 83-year-old President Robert Mugabe either to step down or embrace political reforms. Their thinking is that Mugabe’s departure will pull the country out of a deepening economic crisis.
Zimbabwe riot police arrested the country’s top opposition leader on Sunday as they suppressed a planned prayer rally in a crackdown on protests against President Robert Mugabe. Witnesses said heavily armed police fought skirmishes with rock-throwing opposition supporters in the Harare township of Highfield.
Zimbabwe’s long-ruling President Robert Mugabe said in an interview on Sunday that he intends to stand in the country’s next presidential elections if they are held as scheduled in 2008. ”If the party says so, I will stand,” the Southern Times, co-published by New Era in Windhoek and Zimbabwe Newspapers in Harare, quoted Mugabe as saying.
Armed Zimbabwe riot police sealed off a stadium on Sunday to block an opposition prayer meeting that officials have banned, calling it a political protest against President Robert Mugabe. Teams of police officers, many of them armed with shotguns and tear-gas canisters, patrolled around the stadium in the Harare township of Highfield.
Blue-helmeted riot police cordoned off roads leading to a Zimbabwean township early Sunday where an opposition prayer rally was due to take place. Riot police in open-topped trucks milled around the area. A coalition of churches and civic groups has called a prayer rally in Highfield suburb despite a ban on political meetings.
Momentum was growing on Friday in Zimbabwe for the holding of a weekend prayer rally by a church-led coalition in the capital, Harare, despite a police ban on political meetings. Lucky Moyo, spokesperson for the Save Zimbabwe Campaign Taskforce, told the media that the group had informed the police of their intention to hold a peaceful prayer rally on Sunday in Highfield suburb.
Zimbabwe’s inflation hit a new record on Friday and analysts say it is a pointer that President Robert Mugabe’s government is fast losing the battle to turn around a crumbling economy threatening its rule. The Southern African nation is in the throes of a deepening economic crisis dramatised by the spiralling cost of living and a government crackdown on political opponents.
A daily paper that was widely rumoured to have been taken over by Zimbabwe’s secret service has stopped publishing, it emerged on Friday. The Daily Mirror, originally a semi-private paper that was owned by moderate ruling party member and intellectual Ibbo Mandaza has not published an edition since Tuesday.
She may have forged a successful career in international business but Zimbabwean Pamela Chigwida had no qualms about taking on a new challenge — learning Chinese at the newly opened Confucius Institute in Harare. ”There are lots of business opportunities in China but you can’t do much if you can’t speak their language,” she said.
Zimbabwe’s Information Minister on Thursday dismissed as a ”grandiose flight of imagination” claims by a Brussels-based think tank that President Robert Mugabe’s iron grip on the country was being challenged and could result in political change by next year.
Investigators are looking at a host of factors that could have led to Tuesday’s bus-train collision in Zimbabwe that killed 35 people. The bus had been speeding, carrying double its passenger capacity, and the driver was underage.
At least 34 people died in Zimbabwe’s capital Harare on Tuesday when a commuter bus crashed into a cargo train at a rail crossing, police said. Several other people were injured in the accident, which left bloodied and disfigured bodies strewn around a large swamp.
President Robert Mugabe’s government will soon withdraw financial support for black-owned commercial farms resettled under Zimbabwe’s controversial land reform policy. The move follows charges by central bank governor Gideon Gono that the reforms had caused chronic food shortages in the one-time food exporter.
Trade between Zimbabwe and China is expected to surge to half a billion US dollars by next year, Beijing’s ambassador to Harare was reported as saying on Monday. The Asian giant has already emerged as the largest single importer of Zimbabwe’s key export crop, tobacco.
The ruling party in Zimbabwe expelled one of its co-founders, veteran politician Edgar Tekere, for insulting President Robert Mugabe in a recently published autobiography. A meeting of party leaders in Tekere’s home district of Manicaland, eastern Zimbabwe, ”unreservedly condemned” Tekere’s book, A Lifetime of Struggle.
A senior director in the Zimbabwe government has been arrested at Harare International Airport for allegedly trying to smuggle diamonds, reports said on Saturday. William Nhara, who is also spokesperson for the ruling party for the Harare province, is still in police custody.
Doctors at Zimbabwe’s main state hospitals have called off a two-month strike for better salaries and working conditions after reaching a compromise with government, the health ministry said on Friday. As the strike escalated the health ministry had to call on army medics to step in and augment skeleton-staff numbers at some hospitals.
Zimbabwe’s main consumer watchdog said on Friday it was greatly concerned at a surge in the cost of living, which has shot up by 49,5% in the last month. There were huge increases in the cost of soap, vegetables, milk, rice and the staple maize-meal in the month of February, the Consumer Council of Zimbabwe said in its monthly report.
A burglar broke into a café in northern Zimbabwe in the dead of night, packed his loot and promptly fell asleep, it was reported on Thursday. Police in the town of Bindura had an easy job catching their man as he only woke up when he was being handcuffed, the official Herald newspaper reported.