The situation in Zimbabwe continues in crisis mode. Morgan Tsvangirai, the brave opposition leader struggling against the despot Crazy Bob Mugabe, was seized by police and locked up this past week, charged with “illegal campaigning.
The Presidential runoff is set for the end of June and Morgan was driving to a campaign stop in the western part of Zim when he was stopped at a police roadblock and grabbed, along with a couple of his party’s other leaders, They were released in about eight hours after charges were lodged.
Morgan has been arrested, and often beaten and bused, time and again over his eight years of opposing Mugabe’s dictatorial kleptocracy.
It is apparent that Morgan won the election for president in March but Mugabe claimed there was no clear majority and election officials working for him denied the victory to Tsvangirai and ordered a runoff election. Crazy Bob obviously needed more time to assure that the results would be fixed sufficiently to keep himself in office.
Washington Post reporter Charles Timberg, on the ground in a very dangerous environment, says that with the runoff imminent Mugabe’s men have been rampaging through the countryside beating, torturing and killing opposition sup-porters in what6 has been the worst sustained episode of violence and intimidation in the country for decades. A couple of dozen of Morgan’s influential supporters have been murdered in the past few weeks by men carrying automatic weapons, singing praise to Crazy Bob and his leadership.
One of Morgan Tsvangirai’s aides told the Washington Post, “They will try to kill, try to assault, try to butcher people, but they won’t succeed.”
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