Zimbabwe Update -- Things Just Keep Getting Worse

Conflicting reports out of Zimbabwe today.

The Independent warns that, especially in Matabeleland where opposition to Mugabe is strongest, tensions are rising to a boiling point:

[A] nationwide two-day strike came to a close yesterday, President Robert Mugabe's regime was taking no chances. The government, already braced for a backlash against its campaign of mass arrests and the destruction of street markets and shanty towns, stepped up security as anger threatened to turn into mass protest.

A senior official in the Bulawayo mayor's office, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the situation had reached boiling point and a single event or gathering could lead to serious clashes. "They [the government] have deliberately provoked the situation because they want to have an excuse to declare a state of emergency, get rid of the rules and deploy the arms they spent millions buying," he told The Independent.

In the townships outside Bulawayo, the atmosphere was tense. Police put up roadblocks on all the exits of the city. Anyone seen with a camera, or gathering in a group of three or more persons, faced arrest. On every street corner, plainclothes police and soldiers were on the look-out for any sign of opposition activity.

And AP reports "running battles" between police and protesters in Harare:

HARARE, Zimbabwe - Police fought running battles until dawn Friday with supporters of a general strike called to protest a government campaign against shack dwellers and street traders, the strike organizer said.

Lovemore Madhuku, the head of the group that called the strike, said anti-riot police beat and fired tear gas at protesters and shot bullets over their heads in the Chitungwiza township south of Harare.

The violence erupted, he said, after police set up roadblocks on all routes in and out of Chitungwiza and other crowded southern township and searched people after forcing them to leave their vehicles.

Read it here.

But other reports differ.

TVNZ reports:

A two-day strike called to protest a crackdown by President Robert Mugabe's government on informal traders headed for a total collapse on Friday when most businesses opened as usual for the second consecutive day....

In a statement, the main Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions which participated in the call, acknowledged it had attracted "a minimal response", with its sole success reflected in a boycott by MDC legislators on Thursday of Mugabe's speech to officially open a new parliament.

State media crowed over the flop on Friday, and the official Herald newspaper quoted Mugabe as saying the MDC had behaved like "little children, not yet mature".

Read it here.

It seems there might have been a few isolated clashes as people resisted the mass evictions from their homes and shops, but overall Mad Bobby Mugabe's campaign of intimidation has seemed to work.

The blogosphere has more specific information. Zimpundit posts a report from an opposition MP regarding the fate of the evictees.

[W]e were all shocked. People are not spread around in open fields on the farm, as we had imagined. They are crowded together in the fenced compound immediately around the farmhouse. When we drove past (we didn't risk going inside) about a hundred were crowded around the verandah....

The people are staying in tents, and the tents are right next to each other, not a bit of space in between. Laundry was drying on the fence, children were wandering around behind the crowd, and we noticed a police car parked inside.The main shock was the small size of the place - there is no way all the people from Hatcliffe Extension (there are still roughly 6000 - 8000 people staying there) will fit inside that compound, even if they all remain standing! And even before the Hatcliffe people started arriving, there were others already there from Porta Farm - and there will be many others coming from all over Harare....

The health dangers looming in Caledonia transit holding camp are obvious, but serious. Moreover, we wonder what people are eating, where they are getting their water, and how the sick, especially Aids sufferers, are being cared for, and what is happening to the orphans....

It has all the appearance of a detention centre - and it is extremely likely that they will be forced to attend re-education "pungwes" (all night rallies) at night for political correctness. The "vetting" may well be to sort out the ZanuPF members from the others, then they might well be re-allocated their stands back at Hatcliffe Extension - and the others will be discarded along with the other "rubbish" in this "clean-up campaign".

Read it here.

Ah, I see Publius Pundit has linked to the same source [here]. Robert Mayer writes that the situation in Zimbabwe reminds him of the holocaust. I think it's more like Mao's "Cultural Revolution" and Pol Pot's "ruralization" projects that resulted in the "killing fields." The inspiration for these atrocities comes from the Maoist left more than from fascism.

Visit Publius and follow Robert's links for more eyewitness testimony.

Meanwhile the NYT, from its Olympian perch, considers just what it is that Mad Bobby is trying to accomplish with his unrelenting purges. Michael Wines writes:

[A]s the campaign, directed at as many as 1.5 million members of Zimbabwe's vast underclass, spreads beyond Harare, it is quickly evolving into a sweeping recasting of society, a forced uprooting of the very poorest city dwellers, who have become President Robert G. Mugabe's most hardened opponents.

By scattering them to rural areas, Mr. Mugabe, re-elected to another five-year term in 2002, seems intent on dispersing the biggest threat to his 25-year autocratic rule as poverty and unemployment approach record levels and mass hunger and the potential for unrest loom.
....
Mr. Mugabe says the campaign is a long-overdue step to rid Zimbabwe of what he told Parliament on Thursday was "a chaotic state of affairs" in the nation's cities and towns. The street vendors being uprooted work in the black market and pay no taxes....

But by attacking the shanty dwellers and so-called informal traders, whose black-market businesses have supplanted much of the official state-dominated economy, the government also hopes to reclaim control of the foreign currency that the official economy desperately needs.

That would solidify Mr. Mugabe's authority at a time when Zimbabwe's economic and human crises seem to have eroded it. One Harare political analyst who refused to be identified for fear of retribution said: "I think they know what the country is going to look like in a few months, and they want to clear out the towns, to clear these people way out of here. It's a governing strategy, no doubt about it."
....

The government's drive shows no sign of slowing down.

Read it here.

Of course, famine has already begun, 80% of the population is unemployed. The only part of the Zimbabwean economy that was working was the black market, and now that is gone. Mugabe's determination to assert government control of all aspects of the economy is destroying the nation and the people, starting with the poorest, and as I pointed out in an earlier post, international intervention is very unlikely. At some point things will get so bad that mass protest will erupt, and when it does Mugabe will have his excuse for genocidal action against minorities.

Madness!