Union leader Lovemore Matombo's detention is the latest in a series of arrests of civil society activists which threaten Zimbabwe's fragile power-sharing pact
The arrest and detention of Lovemore Matombo, president of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, and three union colleagues highlights the resilience of hard-line security service forces within President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF.
The arrests are the latest in a series of attacks on labor, student and other civil society groups which could threaten the fragile power-sharing agreement between ZANU-PF and the Movement for Democratic Change.
Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy, has made an urgent High Court application for the labor officials’ release.
Matombo and his colleagues were arrested in the Victoria Falls District as was addressing members of the ZCTU in the first meeting of a scheduled national tour of union structures. The home of ZCTU council member, Gertrude Hambira, was also attacked last week and she was forced into hiding on her return from a US meeting on Zimbabwe.
“The climate of intimidation and harassment that remains in Zimbabwe creates extremely bad conditions for the trade unionists to exercise their rights,” said Guy Ryder, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation. “We hoped that the creation of an inclusive government with a commitment to human rights reform would have made severe trade union repression a thing of the past, but this does not seem to be the case,” he said.
ZANU-PF hardliners have targeted Zimbabwe’s unions, which are among the most resilient and robust civil society structures, as they have mobilized their members in a series of recent actions, including a strike by teachers eager to restore living standards and earnings that were seriously depleted during years of hyper-inflation.
“The workers now know that the economy has started to stabilize and that there should be an increase of salaries,” Matombo said recently. “Should they fail to do that, there is very much this feeling among workers that we should take action.”
The ZCTU receives assistance from the Solidarity Center, a core institute of the NED, and the international solidarity arm of the AFL-CIO, the major US labor federation.
Democracy and civil society groups fear that the MDC’s is not only subordinate and marginal within the power-sharing pact, but that it is being both corrupted and co-opted by Mugabe, “slowly compromising them and turning them on to the trappings of power”.
The MDC has just ended an abortive three-week boycott of cabinet meetings called to express the party’s frustration over Mugabe’s resistance to reform.
But others suggest that the MDC is pinning its hopes on a combination of economic revival raising popular expectations and the ZANU-PF old guard’s physical exhaustion, as one insider suggests:
“This is an old regime,” he explains, “and it’s on the way out. Some of them are quite literally dying. It might kick and bleat for a while, but there’s no stopping the momentum against it. Change is coming and I want to be there, on the ground, as it happens.”
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