Thousands displaced in rural violence

More than 6,000 people have been internally displaced in Zimbabwe as rural violence and intimidation ahead of the
country's parliamentary elections later this month continue to take a rising toll.

Bidi Munyaradze, director of the Zimbabwe Human Rights Association, told IRIN on Tuesday that the association had already logged 6,040 displaced people since a campaign of rural violence and white farm occupations started in February.

He said the violence mainly involved incidents at campaign rallies and attacks on employees at more than 1,000 white farms occupied by independence war veterans and supporters of the ruling ZANU-PF party. On Tuesday afternoon, for example, he said ruling party supporters had interrupted a political rally of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in
Murerwa, 80 km east of the capital, Harare, and thrown stones at MDC vehicles.

"That is going on as we speak. Last night in Murerwa, ruling party people went into a school where they showed pupils t-shirts with our association's logo and told them that people wearing these t-shirts are the enemy and should be beaten," Munyaradze said. "This is very worrying given that we are
not participating in party politics and that we are an a-political organisation. It is not the first time this has happened."

Meanwhile, police reported the deaths of two people this week which brought the latest death toll to at least 32. News reports said an MDC supporter died after being beaten with sticks and iron bars at a place in central Zimbabwe called Texas Ranch, east of the second city Bulawayo he reports quoted an MDC statement as saying Finos Zhau, 23, had been held and beaten
for four days at the farm, "a well-known site used by the so-called war veterans as a place of torture".

In the other incident Leo Jeke, 29, a ZANU-PF activist, was stabbed by an MDC supporter at a rural settlement in Chivi in southern Zimbabwe in what was the first reported murder of a ruling party member. Police spokesman Wayne Bvudzijena said Jeke had been stabbed on Saturday night during an altercation in a bar.