Crackdown on opposition continues

Zimbabwean police on Friday cracked down on opposition by-election campaigning in the capital, Harare, arresting the leader of a faction of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and 60 of his supporters. Arthur Mutambara, head of the MDC's pro-Senate faction, was campaigning in Harare's high-density Budiriro suburb, where this weekend's by-election will be fought. He was detained along with the faction's deputy secretary-general, Pricilla Misihairambwi-Mushonga, and spokesperson Gabriel Chaibva, the by-election candidate. His group had been given police clearance to march, but this was later cancelled to allow President Robert Mugabe to campaign for the ruling party's candidate. Mutambara told IRIN they were driving in a convoy of cars when they were stopped by police, who ordered them to a nearby police station. "These are the tactics of a government which is afraid of competition. If they are not afraid, why deny us an opportunity to speak to our members?" The arrests come at the end of a week of tension over the commemoration by advocacy groups of the first anniversary of the government's Operation Murambatsvina - the demolition of illegal homes and businesses that affected an estimated 700,000 people across the country. Useni Sibanda, coordinator of the Zimbabwe Christian Alliance, told IRIN that police in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second city, had banned them from holding a prayer procession over the weekend for those affected by Murambatsvina, known colloquially as 'the tsunami'. "The Zimbabwe Christian Alliance is organising these prayer events, not for political gain or mere publicity, but because it has a Biblical mandate to stand in solidarity with the poor. Churches in Bulawayo sheltered over 2,000 families at the height of Murambatsvina and have continued to provide food assistance as well as medical help and payment of school fees for displaced children," Sibanda told IRIN. Late on Friday the churches were still battling to get a High Court order to allow the march in Bulawayo to take place. One of President Mugabe's sternest critics, Archbishop Pius Ncube, was scheduled to lead the procession. "All this has to do with the Operation Murambatsvina commemorations being organised. The authorities just don't want the truth to be known," alleged church member Jonah Gokovah. The government justified Operation Murambatsvina ('Drive Out Filth') on the grounds of cleaning up the cities and weeding out criminals. But a stinging report by UN special envoy Anna Tibaijuka in July last year called on the government to pay reparations to those who had lost housing and livelihoods and punish those who, "with indifference to human suffering", had carried out the evictions. Tibaijuka, UN-HABITAT's Executive Director, said the three-month operation involving armed police, who on occasion demolished legal homes, "breached both national and international human rights law provisions guiding evictions, thereby precipitating a humanitarian crisis". The report noted that "it will take several years before the people and society as a whole can recover". Thousands of people returned to their rural homes where jobs are scarce, some are in resettlement camps on the outskirts of Harare, others have rebuilt illegally in their former neighbourhoods.