CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: Criminal Zimbabwe State: It's Illegal Not To Go To Work! Fucking Slavedrivers!  Tue Apr 15, 2008 7:53 pm | |
| JOHANNESBURG — The call by Zimbabwe’s political opposition for people nationwide to stay away from work to protest a 17-day delay in releasing the results of the presidential election largely failed on Tuesday to interrupt the normal flow of life in the cities.
The relative ineffectiveness of the one-day protest said much about the long odds the opposition faces in ousting the nation’s long-entrenched autocratic president, Robert Mugabe, despite reports from independent monitors that he trailed badly in the Mar. 29 election against the opposition candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai.
People lucky enough to have jobs in a country with 80 percent unemployment explained that they couldn’t afford to lose a precious day’s pay by participating in the work stoppage.
“We have to eat,” said a man who identified himself as Michael, who guards people’s cars while they shop. He gave only his first name for fear of retribution.
Some were afraid the police would punish them if they heeded the opposition’s call and stayed home from work, which is known in Zimbabwe as a “stay-away.”
“We’ve been through this so many times, and every stay-away has had a lot of retribution attached,” said a leader of one of Zimbabwe’s nongovernmental organizations, who spoke on condition of anonymity, also because of fear of retribution. “The repercussions are severe. People have their property destroyed, their hands crushed. They’re beaten and battered.”
The Herald, the government-run newspaper, said Tuesday that the police had accused the opposition of “agitating for violence” in what the police said was an illegal stay-away.
According to The Herald, Wayne Bvudzijena, the police spokesman, said that the protest “is certainly aimed at disturbing this peace and will be resisted firmly by the law enforcement agents whose responsibility it is to maintain law and order in any part of the country always.”
Mr. Mugabe’s government, which has held power since 1980, flaunted its power in Harare, the capital, residents said Tuesday in telephone interviews. Trucks mounted with water cannons and loaded with armed soldiers singing revolutionary songsroamed the streets, they said, and helicopters and jets in formation flew over the city.
There were arrests in Harare and state-sponsored violence in the rural areas, according to non-governmental organizations and other reports.
Cabani Moyo, information officer for Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition, an alliance of human rights groups, spoke of two arrests from his cellphone on his way to Harare Central police station. He said that Marvelous Kumalo, an incoming member of Parliament newly elected from a constituency near Harare, had text-messaged him that he and Frank Chikore, a freelance journalist, had been arrested and were being held at the station.
Mr. Moyo said that Mr. Chikore was arrested Tuesday while videotaping police in a northern suburb of Harare as they towed away a burned bus.
“They ransacked his home, took his videotapes, cameras, cellphones and laptop,” Mr. Moyo said.
Mr. Moyo said that Mr. Kumalo had called him Monday to say his wife had text-messaged him that intelligence agents were looking for him in connection with the protest. “Don’t come home,” she told him, according to Mr. Moyo.
Later, after visiting Harare Central, Mr. Moyo said the police told him and Mr. Kumalo’s wife that the two men were not there.
“If they want to torture people, they give these confusing messages so when people get injuries they won’t be held accountable,” Mr. Moyo said.
A security guard who works in Harare described a panicked phone call he received from his brother, who he said lives in their home village in Nurewa, a rural area east of the capital. A militia of 10 to 15 youths, armed with a gun, knobkerries and batons, had come marauding, said the guard, who requested anonymity. He said that the militia rounded up the villagers and demanded to know who had been putting up posters for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change and campaigning for its candidates.
Half a dozen villagers had been badly beaten, the guard said.
“They are still bringing the violence,” he said. “They are still collecting the names, targeting people so they can beat them. There’s nothing I can do.”
Official results of last month’s voting showed that Mr. Mugabe’s party, ZANU-PF, had lost control of the lower house of Parliament for the first time in 28 years.
But election officials have refused to release the results of the presidential vote. And on Saturday the Zimbabwean Electoral Commission said that it planned to start a recount of the presidential and parliamentary votes in 23 districts, potentially enough for ZANU-PF to reclaim its parliamentary majority. A judge Tuesday postponed the opposition’s challenge of the recount.
In South Africa, the ruling African National Congress party issued a statement saying that Zimbabwe is in a “state of crisis” that could hurt the entire region. That contradicted President Thabo Mbeki’s contention, expressed Saturday, that there was no crisis. Mr. Mbeki was recently defeated in an election to lead the party.
In Harare, Nelson Chamisa, a spokesman for the opposition party, sought Tuesday evening to put a brave face on the protest, saying that many people had in fact stayed away from work.
“Our intention was never to cause abnormality,” he said, “but to make a statement that we need our election results yesterday, that we’re tired of dictatorship.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/world/africa/16zimbabwe.html
Slavery is a social-economic system under which certain persons — known as slaves — are deprived of personal freedom and compelled to perform labour or services. The term includes the status or condition of those persons who are treated as the property of another person, household, company, corporation or government. This is referred to as "chattel slavery".
http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/Slavery
Fuck the statists' law and order! |
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