The Master Of Survival

Samuel Khumalo's dreadlocks once reached down to his chest. All that remains of them now are prickly halos of hair that surround several centimeters of split, swollen scalp. The 40-year-old postal clerk and member of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions was among the first to arrive last month outside the governor's office in downtown Bulawayo for a peaceful protest against Zimbabwe's high taxes and cost of living. Several dozen demonstrators had barely begun to gather when police charged the crowd. Khumalo received two cracks to the head before police officers dragged him by his dreadlocks for nearly a kilometer, until they reached a police station where they thrashed him with their batons and ripped out his matted tresses with their bare hands. Khumalo and two other protesters were then blindfolded and driven 20 km out of town, beaten again and dumped in the bush. "They were saying, 'What you chaps started is war,'" Khumalo says.

Khumalo's ordeal is just one skirmish in President Robert Mugabe's long, bloody war on dissent. Over the past six weeks, Mugabe's ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front party (ZANU-PF) has closed the country's only independent daily newspaper and stepped up its violent crackdown on political opponents and dissidents. The next target: nongovernmental organizations. Mugabe's parliament has drafted laws requiring aid groups to register with the government and allowing it to suspend their leadership. "They want to do to civil society exactly what they've done to the media," says John Makumbe, a professor of political science at the University of Zimbabwe in Harare. "They want to close them down. Any voice that is not a ZANU-PF voice is harmful to ZANU-PF, that is their thinking." The crackdown is forcing the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) underground. The party is reorganizing its communication structure, relying more on door-to-door campaigning and radio stations that beam broadcasts in from outside the country.

Seven months ago, wishful reports from within and outside Zimbabwe suggested that Mugabe, 79, a freedom fighter turned dictator, might finally be close to stepping down. Instead, he's been tightening his grip. Many take this to mean he is planning to stay. But since ZANU-PF is embroiled in a succession struggle after the death in September of Vice President Simon Muzenda, others believe Mugabe's crackdown is a negotiating ploy meant to strengthen his hand for transition talks with the MDC. The aging President may yet be looking for a way out.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]Last week the MDC took its case to overturn the 2002 presidential election result to the high court in Harare. The party argued that Mugabe's victory is invalid because the government packed the electoral commission with its supporters, reopened voter registration without telling the MDC and limited the number of polling stations in cities, where the opposition is strongest. But almost nobody expects a Zimbabwean court to rule against Mugabe, and the MDC's real audience will be in South Africa, where President Thabo Mbeki has been one of the President's most faithful apologists. "As long as Mugabe thinks he is being supported by his African brothers, he will see himself as a victim, not as the perpetrator," says MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai. "If the African countries were to stop supporting Mugabe, there would be a sea change."

Of course, you won't read about that in the Daily News, Zimbabwe's only independent daily newspaper. The publication was shut down in September after the Supreme Court ruled that it had broken the law by not registering under the country's tough new media regulations. "There is a reign of terror against all journalists," said Bill Saidi, editor of the Daily News on Sunday, at a meeting last week of his paper's supporters in London. "The independence we thought we were entitled to is not the independence we have." Publishers and journalists can't look to the courts for redress either. In the rare cases when a court does rule against the government, the decision is often ignored. After an administrative judge ordered that the Daily News should be allowed to reopen — citing bias on the part of the agency in charge of media registration — the police closed the paper down again as soon as the first issue hit the stands. They also arrested four of the paper's directors.