MDC-T’s Nelson Chamisa
The latest developments where leaders of multiple opposition parties demanding basic electoral reforms, to ensure free and fair elections, have been arrested can no longer be ignored.
The MDC UK is also urging the United Nations General Assembly which starts sitting tomorrow to show President Mugabe that it can no longer be business as usual when he is ill-treating the opposition in his country.
Members of the MDC in the UK and Zimbabweans in general will be celebrating the 17th anniversary celebrations of the birth of the Movement for Democratic Change to be held in Birmingham at the weekend, and they will further strategize who to catalise an international response.
MDC officials in Zimbabwe were dismayed by the way the police decided to crack down on the demonstrations, with Kuwadzana MP Nelson Chamisa saying they had unnecessarily turned the demonstrations into a war zone.
MP Bunjira and others were detained in connection with the National Election Reform Agenda (NERA – a coalition of opposition parties and ngos demanding change.
In Hatfield, Police disrupted the procession and brutally attacked demonstrators, taking more than 10 into custody at Hatfield Police station.
Said Charlton Hwende, an MDC National Council Member, some were seriously injured in the barbaric attack by the police close to Parktown where he had addressed the demonstrators.
In Mutare the local MP, Mr Saruwaka was detailed and six more people were arrested in Dzivarasekwa including MDC-T District Youth Organizer, Donnie and ward 39 Chairman Chipindu.
In Bulawayo and Gweru however the NERA demonstrations went well with
Gweru MDC-T MP Amos Chibaya addressing despite Zimbabwe National Army trucks and heavily armed Police harassing demonstrators on their way to the venue.
In Gwanda there were twenty arrests carried out by about by about 200 heavily armed anti riot police who also arrested the MDC-T Member of Parliament Nomathemba Ndlovu.
Zimbabwean news websites reported that police were hunting down known activists in what is now believed to be a crackdown on democratic dissent in Zimbabwe.
Human Rights Lawyers are on the cases in what is increasingly turning out to be a war between the rulers and the ruled, including raids on homes of leaders such as in Marondera and in rural Maramba-Pfungwe where a black truck was reported to be making rounds at the MDC T Provincial spokesperson’s homestead, and in Mudzi where the MDC chairman was forced to sleep in the bush after unidentified people were seen looking for him and threatening his family.
The repression is directly linked to increased activism in the country by ordinary citizens who have realised that the regime in not reform-able and is in fact deceitful when it claims that it is going to reform.
Meanwhile the international community is turning a blind eye to the worsening situation which has already produced millions of refugees who have scattered all over the world.
The MDC UK and Ireland is urging Mrs Theresa May to use the United Kingdom’s seat at the United Nations Security Council to demand the expulsion from the United Nations regimes such as Robert Mugabe’s which has abused the forum of the United Nations for years to peddle repression that is disguised as liberation.
Post published in: Featured