HARARE, 27 October 2009 – Violence and intimidation against members of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) increased sharply within days of the party “disengaging” from Zimbabwe’s unity government, MDC spokesman Luke Tamborinyoka told IRIN News.
Morgan Tsvangirai, MDC leader and Prime Minister, “disengaged” from the unity government on 16 October in protest over the re-arrest of the party’s treasurer and deputy agricultural minister designate, Roy Bennett, which had “brought home the fiction of the credibility and integrity of the transitional government”.
Violence has erupted in Mashonaland Central Province, once a ZANU-PF stronghold in the north of the country. -The violence has intensified in rural areas … Also affected are close to 100 teachers who have fled from the province, Tamborinyoka said.
-Some of the biggest victims in this ongoing cycle of violence are children, because they have nobody to teach them, he told IRIN. ZANU-PF supporters have accused the teaching profession of being allied to the MDC, and teachers have been told that since their party, the MDC, had pulled out of the government, they were now considered enemies of ZANU-PF.
-The violence is spreading to many parts of the country like Mashonaland West and East [provinces], Manicaland [province in the east] and Masvingo [province in the south] – all former ZANU-PF strongholds – and even in central Harare. We believe that ZANU-PF is retaliating after our party disengaged from the government two weeks ago, Tamborinyoka said.
At the weekend, heavily armed police and soldiers raided a house used by MDC officials and accused the group of stealing weapons from army barracks in Harare. Tamborinyoka said recent events showed all the hallmarks of a crackdown on the MDC and its supporters. -Recently, a brigadier-general pointed a gun at one of our members of parliament and threatened to shoot him.
In the past two months “war collaborators” – people who assisted guerrilla fighters during the war of independence in the 1970s and remain staunch ZANU-PF supporters – have been holding meetings across the country, raising fears of an increase in violence. Zimbabwe’s defence minister, Emmerson Mnangagwa, recently addressed one of the meetings.
