Paramilitary units armed with batons and tear gas patrolled Harare's main roads yesterday as police said they would tolerate no more protests against their crackdown on street trading -- the only livelihood for thousands in Zimbabwe's shattered economy.
The crackdown on streets traders -- who include teachers and other professionals unable to make a living at their old jobs -- came as the government took drastic measures to address an economic crisis it once denied.
Angry demonstrators had clashed with police over the weekend in the most serious unrest since President Robert Mugabe's ruling ZANU-PF won a landslide victory in March 31 parliamentary general election, widely condemned by Western governments for alleged rigging and intimidation. Mugabe, 81, has been in power since independence in 1980.
During the election campaign, the government had scoffed at critics who said the economy was on the verge of collapse. But since winning, it has taken drastic action, last week announcing an effective 45 percent devaluation of the Zimbabwean dollar to 9,000 Zimbabwe dollars to the US dollar, a ban on luxury imports and heavy subsidies for agriculture and exporters.
Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, accused Mugabe of trying to provoke conditions for declaring a State of Emergency, which would give him unlimited powers of detention, seizure and censorship.
Tsvangirai accused Mugabe of ordering the crackdown in response to pressure from newly arrived Chinese businessmen to stop second-hand dealers undercutting their cheap imports.
"The country has been mortgaged to the Chinese," Tsvangirai said in a statement. "How can we violently remove Zimbabweans from our flea markets to make way for the Chinese? The majority of Zimbabweans depend on informal trade to feed, clothe and educate their families."
Under Mugabe's "Look East" policy, the country has recently acquired airliners and jet fighters from Beijing, rejecting calls to make up with the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Links were severed in 1998 over chronic budget indiscipline.
Police Chief Superintendent Oliver Mandipaka said 9,653 people were arrested in the five-day blitz on street vendors, flea market stalls and other informal businesses.
He said people were preparing to demonstrate but that police were ready and commuter minibuses were prevented from entering the city center.
Mandipaka said operators of informal businesses had been fined for operating without city council licenses or possessing scarce staple items such as maize meal, sugar and gasoline intended for resale on the black market.
"Police will leave no stone unturned in their endeavor to flush out economic saboteurs," said Mandipaka.
Crackdowns also were launched in the cities of Gweru and Bulawayo, strongholds of the opposition. In Harare's Mbare township police had seized 36 tonnes of sugar. Ten filling station attendants had been arrested with 30,000 liters of gasoline.
In a policy statement Thursday, Reserve Bank governor Gideon Gono blamed speculators for a new surge of hyperinflation, after last year's fall from 622 percent to 123 percent.
After seven years of unprecedented economic decline leaving 80 percent of the work force unemployed, 4 million of Zimbabwe's 16 million people have emigrated.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS