Crackdown in Zimbabwe Widens Hundreds Attacked in Nighttime Raids

By Michael Wines

Hundreds of Zimbabwe political and civic activists, and in some cases their families, have been abducted and severely beaten in recent days by unidentified assailants, a string of dead-of-night assaults that appear part of a new government campaign to smother rising unrest. The assaults came to light on Wednesday after hundreds of police raided the Harare headquarters of Zimbabwe’s main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, and arrested the group’s best-known leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, and about 20 others.

President Robert Mugabe, the 83-year-old autocrat who has led the nation since it ended white rule 27 years ago, is simultaneously battling a reinvigorated political opposition, sustained by growing public unhappiness, and a growing movement in his own party to ease him from office before the country collapses.

Zimbabwe’s government was broadly criticized after the police arrested and beat Tsvangirai and scores of other political and civic activists two weeks ago, after they sought to hold a self-described prayer meeting in Harare. Since then, tensions have been high throughout Zimbabwe, and especially in poor neighborhoods that are centers of opposition to the government.

There is no complete list of those who have been abducted, but activists in Zimbabwe said the victims included political organizers, students, civic-group members and leaders of the Combined Harare Residents Association, which has organized Harare’s poor neighborhoods to press for better city services.

Nelson Chamisa, spokesman for Tsvangirai’s faction of the Movement for Democratic Change, said in an interview that nearly 200 party workers and activists had been seized in the last three days, usually in post-midnight raids on their homes.

In almost all documented cases, he said, the victims were taken in unmarked vehicles to remote locations where they were beaten and then abandoned. Chamisa was attacked last week at Harare’s airport as he prepared to board a flight to a political meeting in Europe. Four men with iron bars fractured his skull and crushed one eye socket.

“They’re abducting people at the provincial and district levels,” he said. “They are attacking them together with family members. They blindfold them and take them. They just beat them and dump them in the bush. It’s state terrorism.”

The abductions and beatings may signal a new and defining phase in Zimbabwe’s overwhelming economic and political crises. The nation’s economy is all but dysfunctional, with inflation exceeding 1,700 percent a year by government estimates and rapidly increasing, and eight in 10 workers are jobless.

Mugabe tried to extend his legal rule by two years, to 2010, in December, but received an unprecedented rebuff from party leaders. He has since said he would run for a full six-year term at the next election in 2008.

But broad elements of his party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front, are working to derail his ambitions, and it is widely reported that some in Mugabe’s party are negotiating with Tsvangirai’s opposition movement over a succession plan.

Given those power struggles, one Harare political analyst said Wednesday, it is unclear whether the systematic beatings of potential political opponents are the government’s strategy or another effort by Mugabe’s backers.

“The state is behaving repressively on a very, very wide scale, but is the state doing it, or a state within a state?” that person said. “I think there’s good reason to believe there’s a third force operating here.”

(c) 2007 International Herald Tribune. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.