ZIMBABWE: A large portion of Zimbabwe's working population has ignored calls by an anti-government coalition to stay away from the workplace for the past two days.
The Broad Alliance, a coalition of opposition, civic and labour groups, had called on the nation's workforce to bring the country to a halt in protest against the continuing demolition of urban shanty towns, which according to the UN has left at least 200,000 people homeless at the onset of winter.
While many roads have been quieter than usual in the capital, Harare, and other major centres since early Thursday, banks, schools, shops and other businesses have remained open as Zimbabweans apparently heeded police warnings not to participate in the strike.
In the run-up to the two-day protest the police had warned they would "deal ruthlessly" with anyone who became involved in the anti-government action.
And from the beginning of the week there was a huge increase in the number of police and army units patrolling urban areas.
A spokesman for the alliance, Lovemore Madhuku, blamed the lower than expected participation levels on a climate of fear that has been fostered in the southern African country since the late 1990s, when the government-sponsored land invasions began.
"If the police can demolish your home, they can come to your room and demand why you are still in bed and have not gone to work," he said.
However, Mr Madhuku maintained that up to half the Zimbabwean population had in fact stayed away from work.
"The stay-away call has been heeded by many workers, but businesses have opened. Mind you, we did not call on business people to stay away," Mr Madhuku said.
According to media reports some people said they went to work under duress as they did not want to be labelled opposition sympathisers, while many others said that extreme poverty had made the idea of a strike out of the question.
Economic experts also noted that mounting an effective strike would be difficult at best, with only about 800,000 of Zimbabwe's 12 million people employed in the formal sector.
At the opening of parliament on Thursday, which was the first of the two scheduled strike days, President Robert Mugabe defended Operation Restore Order, saying it would improve people's lives and was "meant to create a better infrastructure for the ordinary man".
"The current chaotic state of affairs where small-to-medium-scale enterprises operated outside the regulatory framework and in undesignated crime-ridden areas could not be countenanced much longer," he said.
But the opposition party the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which boycotted the opening day of parliament, accuses Mr Mugabe's Zanu-PF government of trying to dilute its support base in urban areas by dispersing the population back into the countryside.
The campaign has drawn widespread criticism in Zimbabwe and internationally, including from the UN, which accused the government of "a gross violation of human rights" and of creating "a new kind of apartheid".