A two-day general strike got off to a slow start today with most Zimbabweans seemingly heeding police warnings not to participate in the protest against the forced removal of tens of thousands of informal traders and shack dwellers from city streets.
In an address to Parliament, President Robert Mugabe defended the three-week blitz as “a vigorous clean-up campaign to restore sanity” in urban areas. The opposition has said it is a strike on its urban support base.
“The current chaotic state of affairs where (small and medium enterprises) operated ... in unregulated and crime-ridden areas could not have been tolerated for much longer,” Mugabe told legislators at the opening of Parliament.
Opposition politicians boycotted the session in protest, saying police continued to round up residents and pile them into trucks in at least one Harare township.
Early yesterday, several hundred policemen were seen cycling through Harare's industrial sites and poor townships, where hundreds of homes have been demolished over the past two weeks.
The United Nations estimates more than 200,000 people have been left homeless in midwinter cold; police say 30,000 roadside vendors were arrested in the blitz.
A loose alliance of opposition figures called the nationwide strike today and tomorrow to protest the demolition. A police spokesman warned that anyone appearing to support the strike would be arrested.
Mugabe's policy statement today is expected to include his plans to create a 65-seat Senate - extending his pool of political patronage - and to cancel all private land titles, so blocking further court action by 5,000 white farmers evicted from their land by ruling party militants.
Mugabe has the power to make sweeping legislative changes following March 31st general elections that gave his Zanu-PF party the two-thirds majority needed to amend the constitution. - (AP)