Itai Dzamara, leader of the Occupy Africa Unity Square initiative, was abducted on Monday 9 March and, at the time of going to print, had not been seen or heard from. Five men bundled him into an unmarked car before driving off with him to goodness knows where. The state claims it knows nothing about this, but after several similar abductions carried out by security forces in the past, only one conclusion can be made.
While VP Mnangagwa was putting on an Oscar-winning performance – ‘we are a democratic society and we believe every citizen has the right to do what they want to do peacefully’ – instead of explaining Dzamara’s abduction or calling a search party, the police were beating up MDC-T supporters for staging a peaceful demonstration outside Parliament Building.
One imagines that this sort of thing happens only in some banana republic, with a madman for a president, where armed soldiers regularly leap out of their jeeps in the middle of the market, indiscriminately overturning baskets, trampling tomatoes and generally scaring the peasants. The group Occupy AU Square has circulated a petition to increase local and international pressure on the government to locate Dzamara, whose only crime is standing up for his beliefs.