Mugabe Foe Sees Resistance Growing
By Craig Timberg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, March 17, 2007
HARARE, Zimbabwe, March 16 -- Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai relaxed in the lush garden of his home Friday, a 5-month-old grandson on his knee. But for the five blue stitches on Tsvangirai's head or the bandage covering his broken left hand, there were few clues that he had spent the three previous days in intensive care, or the two before that in prison cells, bloodied and dazed by vicious beatings from police.
In his first hours home, with international outrage still high over Sunday's police crackdown on an opposition rally, Tsvangirai declared himself undaunted.
Despite the arrests and police assaults on nearly 50 top opposition activists, he said, the movement had been strengthened by an experience that has left many wounds but also a new determination to confront President Robert Mugabe's nearly 27-year-old government.
"This incident has just heightened the stakes," said Tsvangirai, 55, a former mineworker and union organizer. "This has created even more impetus and more determination on the part of Zimbabweans."
Political tension has risen sharply in recent months as years of economic troubles have turned increasingly acute, with inflation so high -- the official annual rate is 1,730 percent -- that Zimbabweans say they rush to the store whenever they get cash before prices rise yet again. Fees for schooling, transportation and health care have moved beyond the means of many. The few luxuries of Zimbabwean life, such as milk for tea, have been largely abandoned.
Seven long years of a grinding economic slide have left Zimbabweans embittered and volatile, they say. Life has grown so relentlessly, joylessly difficult that Mugabe's ever-rising threats to punish those who demonstrate against him no longer instill fear.
Add to that a suddenly emboldened opposition, and a crisis long growing appears to finally have reached its tipping point, activists say.
"People were waiting for Tsvangirai to lead," said John Sithole, 54, a lean, wily, street-level activist in Tsvangirai's party. "In people's hearts and in people's minds . . . they were simmering, but they were waiting for somebody to trigger."
Fueling the recent spate of protests, including Sunday's opposition political meeting that deteriorated into a rock-throwing confrontation with riot police, are growing legions of frustrated, jobless youths who say their only hope for bettering their lives comes from forcing out Mugabe, the country's leader since 1980.
His recent announcements making clear his desire to run for another term as president have reenergized opposition forces that spent most of last year squabbling with each other. Sunday's assaults have further emboldened activists.
"People at this juncture are now ready to get into battle," said Innocent Kasiyeno, 23, an official with the Students Christian Movement of Zimbabwe. "The amount of fear is now decreasing each and every day."
The next confrontation could come as soon as Saturday, when a funeral is scheduled for a man shot to death by police in rioting Sunday. Tsvangirai plans to attend the service and speak at the graveside.
Police have not denied beating Tsvangirai and others, saying only that opposition activists provoked trouble by defying the prohibition on political meetings.
"If they repeat it, they will get arrested and get bashed by the police," Mugabe told youth members of his ruling party Friday, according to the Reuters news service. "We now must have our police well armed."
Zimbabwe's decline dates to the overrunning of white-owned commercial farms in 2000 by black peasants who claimed to be veterans of the nation's war of liberation. Mugabe supported the hectic and often-violent process, saying it righted historical wrongs against Africans whose land was stolen by European settlers. But it also decimated the most crucial industry and biggest earner of foreign exchange.
The economy has contracted ever since, with unemployment spiking past 80 percent and buying power reaching levels not seen since the 1950s. Once a major exporter of corn, Zimbabwe is now a chronic recipient of international food aid.
An estimated 3 million Zimbabweans have fled to other countries, while those remaining behind have watched the most basic necessities become unaffordable. The national population is 12 million.
The economic rot gradually has worked its way through Zimbabwean society. Farmworkers first lost their jobs. Then small traders found their shops destroyed by a government crackdown on the informal economy. Inflation has raised the cost of transportation so high that teachers can barely survive. And in recent months, according to news reports here, police and soldiers -- the keys to Mugabe's grip on power -- have begun walking away to protest shrinking paychecks.
The incident Sunday began as a political rally in Highfield, the poor, bustling township southwest of Harare where Mugabe's ruling party was founded in 1963 as an anti-colonial liberation movement. Hundreds of police arrived at the site before dawn, activists said. With the area effectively sealed off, Tsvangirai gathered with fellow opposition leaders in a nearby township and went home after agreeing that only a small delegation should proceed, he said.
But when reports spread that dozens of activists had been arrested, Tsvangirai said, he drove to the police station in Highfield to check on their condition. What he saw were dozens of prominent anti-government campaigners lying facedown on the ground, many bloodied, while police hit, kicked and beat them using black batons.
The police soon ordered Tsvangirai to lie down as well, he said in an account supported by several other witnesses speaking in separate interviews. Men and women in police uniforms beat him on the buttocks, back and head while he was on his stomach on the concrete floor of a police yard. Tsvangirai contended that they were not police but war veterans, who in recent years have operated as the ruthless enforcement arm of Mugabe's government.
"I was actually surprised that they would dare beat me," he said. "You could feel the tension, the hate."
He recalled passing out, then regaining consciousness in another part of the police station; his face was in a pool of blood, and officers were pouring water on his head to revive him.
On another occasion, one of the uniformed men leapt in the air to stomp him with both feet in a manner Tsvangirai said reminded him of a professional wrestling move. The only difference, he recalled with a smile, was that the man bounced off Tsvangirai's thick midsection and fell to the ground.
After the beatings, he and the other activists were blindfolded, then driven across Harare to various police stations. He passed out two more times that day from exhaustion and seemed disoriented during a brief stop at a hospital the following morning, officials from his party said.
Doctors later gave Tsvangirai two pints of blood and scanned his head for evidence of a skull fracture or brain damage. Those tests were negative, he said. He was released Friday morning.
Anti-government activists have long criticized Tsvangirai for not moving aggressively enough against Mugabe. When Tsvangirai's party split in 2005, leaders of breakaway factions accused him of being ineffective and of having dictatorial tendencies.
But his critics were quiet this week. And Tsvangirai said the momentum gained in recent months, including other incidents in which police cracked down on public demonstrations, will not be lost. He said Zimbabweans have learned that the only place they can defeat Mugabe is in the streets.
"Unless they are prepared to stand up to Mugabe, this man is prepared to burn down the building," Tsvangirai said. "There's no letting up."
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