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Zimbabwe police arrest more than 9,600 in crackdown on street vendors
May 23, 2005 - 8:48
HARARE, Zimbabwe (A) - Paramilitary units armed with batons, riot shields and tear gas patrolled main roads in Harare Monday as police warned they would not tolerate protests against their crackdown on street trading - the only livelihood for thousands of poor township dwellers.
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 centre.
Angry demonstrators 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.
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.
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 endeavour to flush out economic saboteurs," said Mandipaka.
In Harare's Mbare township police had seized 36 metric tons of sugar. Ten filling station attendants had been arrested with 30,000 litres 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 to 123 per cent. He announced a 45 per cent devaluation to 9,000 Zimbabwe dollars to the U.S. dollar.
Tsvangirai accused Mugabe of ordering the crackdown in response to pressure from newly arrived Chinese businessmen to stop secondhand 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.
Crackdowns also were launched in the cities of Gweru and Bulawayo, strongholds of Tsvangirai's MDC.
After seven years of unprecedented economic decline leaving 80 per cent of the work force unemployed, four million of Zimbabwe's 16 million people have emigrated. Agriculture, once the mainstay, has been hard hit by seizure of 5,000 white-owned farms following Mugabe's defeat in a February 2000 constitutional referendum.
Farming leaders and economists at the weekend scorned a suggestion by Gono that "progressive" former owners might be prepared to return under short-term agreements, to teach new occupants how to grow specialist crops for export.
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