Zimbabwe’s Split Opposition

A conservative white businessman expressing a passion for freedom, tradition, polite manners and the British royals sits at his long shiny boardroom table in Zimbabwe musing on plans to try to topple President Robert Mugabe.

With the same dedication he devotes to his business, he composes, hides and secretly distributes fliers, sometimes swapping cars to dodge arrest.

“When you are working for your country in a state of crisis, it’s just such a thrilling experience. It’s just such a wonderful emotion to be involved with people who are doing the same thing,” he said in a quiet, clipped voice. “In today’s modern world, it doesn’t really happen that much anymore.”

His aim, like that of other regime opponents, is simply to render the country ungovernable. But the big question is how to do so.

Sokwanele, the ghost organization to which he belongs, and a similar underground movement called Zvakwana (both meaning “enough is enough” in different African languages) are multiracial movements that eschew violence, each struggling for change by trying to mobilize people to resist the regime.

The nation’s March parliamentary elections were condemned by the United States and European Union as neither free nor fair. However, Mugabe did not employ the type of overt violence he has used in past elections, and his victory was endorsed by powerful African allies such as South Africa. He followed up with a national police operation to scatter urban opposition supporters by demolishing informal shacks and traders’ stalls across the country.

At this point, Zimbabwe’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change is as deeply demoralized and divided as it has ever been. The limited impact of a two-day general protest strike the MDC organized in June has raised doubts on whether its plodding brand of peaceful resistance can ever pose a threat to the regime. The organization is almost broke, squabbling and believes itself to be infiltrated at the highest levels by the state intelligence organ, the Central Intelligence Organization.

Zvakwana and Sokwanele are more innovative, leaving fliers in buses or pasted up in small rural shopping areas, distributing “revolutionary” condoms branded with the exhortation to “Get Up, Stand Up,” hiding anti-regime messages in matchboxes or wrapping soap or candles in them. Yet these too seem to have had little effect in encouraging people to actively resist the government.

Mugabe’s regime has ruthlessly suppressed even small street protests. Despairing of decisive leadership from the MDC, some regime opponents such as the Roman Catholic archbishop of Bulawayo, Pius Ncube, are simply praying for the 81-year-old Mugabe’s death.

“People in Zimbabwe, myself included, pray that God should take him because we can’t change anything here,” Ncube said. “We are under constant oppression. There’s nowhere to run. He has all the guns and all the aircraft. All the laws are on his side. Parliament is just his rubber stamp. He divided the churches and bought some support from them.”

Ncube said the MDC general strike was badly organized. But David Coltart, a prominent MDC lawmaker, said it had limited effect because the regime did not care about damage to the economy. “Clearly we have to change tack now. We have got to have strategic, peaceful strategies that will make this regime wake up.”

Most regime opponents agree they need a new approach, but few have specific ideas on what forms of protest might work.

Money is just one problem.

“We are a movement absolutely strapped for cash. We don’t even have enough money to publish pamphlets to call people out into the streets,” Coltart said.

“We certainly don’t have enough money to buy lots of orange scarves. The Orange Revolution [in Ukraine] cost hundreds of millions which we just don’t have.”

The Zvakwana website (www.zvakwana.com) conveys the despair regime opponents feel with scathing sarcasm, but the group’s anger is directed at the MDC as much as at the regime.

The site displays a picture of MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai on a rum bottle label, with the words, “Captain Morgan, Extra Light.” A rum cocktail recipe calls for drinkers to garnish the drink with plenty of appeals to the international community, pour it, then “put your feet up, and sip slowly while watching other revolutions unfold on TV.”

“We have to become our own leaders. We need to lead by personal example, whether by organizing small house meetings to discuss challenging the regime, or making and distributing our own leaflets, or standing up to institutional repression by refusing to pay taxes in any form,” the Zvakwana site said.

“We cannot go face to face with an enemy that has all the state machinery at its disposal so we must work with stealth like a thief at night.”

Both Sokwanele and Zvakwana support ousting Mugabe through a peaceful, popular revolt. Zvakwana is more imaginative in its approach, using condoms, soap and candles to get its message out whereas Sokwanele concentrates on leaflets.

Sokwanele (www.sokwanele.com) gets foreign funding from an undisclosed Western source. The businessman activist said the organization was “bold, brazen and totally covert” with about 100 “highly effective” activists, mainly educated young people with families, and a loyal courier network extending to small rural settlements.

“They show tremendous courage. If they were caught, the punishment is severe,” he said.

Couriers leave tapes with revolutionary songs in public places and leaflets that often focus on character assassination of key officials.

“It makes them very uncomfortable. They’re reminded that ultimately they will pay for their crimes no matter how long the road. There will be a threat, ‘Be careful, people are watching you,’ that kind of thing,” the businessman said.

He supports spontaneous “hit-and-run” protests and shutdowns rolling continuously across the country to disrupt communications, transportation and even the food supply “to the point where it becomes a threat to the state.”

But although small shadow organizations such as Sokwanele and Zvakwana can support civil disobedience campaigns, they don’t have the organizing capacity to initiate them.

The businessman claims that a third small but tightly organized underground group has decided peaceful resistance has failed and the time has come to start blowing up government buildings and bridges without injuring people.

“I don’t believe there’s anybody out there interested in spilling blood. That’s to be avoided at all costs. But people are getting highly frustrated,” the Sokwanele member said.

One reason Zimbabweans cannot stage successful mass street protests like the people-power revolutions that dislodged regimes in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan is that Mugabe’s security forces keep a much tighter rein on people’s movements, deploying roadblocks and security forces that are not afraid to kill to prevent significant street demonstrations.

“I can’t see the people getting as far as the streets, with all the roadblocks,” said Dominican nun Sister Patricia Walsh, whose order helped people in Hatcliffe shantytown until it was demolished this month. She feels the only real hope for change is if the ruling party changed heart, “to really have the good of the country at heart and not just enrichment of a small elite.”

Last September, MDC leader Tsvangirai told a rally of supporters, “We are on the winning track. Zimbabwe is on the verge of massive and decisive change.” But the message proved false.

Now disillusioned supporters are either turning away, losing hope or calling for arms. At one opposition rally in Mutare in May, young men were shouting to speakers to get them weapons so they could take action themselves.

“I feel the opposition leader is hopeless,” said Archbishop Ncube, “and now young people are being tempted into violence because he has done nothing. Now [the authorities] are destroying vendors’ stalls, stealing people’s goods, burning and breaking up their stalls, and he is just doing nothing. I tend to think that things will just continue to go down, down, down.”

Even insiders are asking what happened to the opposition’s “Plan B” that they had designed to put into operation the day after the March elections. The plan called for Tsvangirai to claim a confident victory, with masses of his jubilant supporters flooding the streets for a spontaneous “victory party” -- banking on the idea that with observers from neighboring African countries and the international media present, Mugabe’s security forces would hesitate to unleash violence.

The failure of this and other opposition plans led to such anger in the hours after the vote that one activist nearly punched another in the MDC rooms. Tsvangirai had to keep the men apart.

There is now a conviction that regime spies have infiltrated the party’s top levels. Fourteen members have been expelled for violence against other party members in a recent attack at MDC headquarters, and the party is paralyzed by a tortuous internal investigation to root out the spies. The problem is proving the allegations, particularly when one suspect is on the committee deciding the matter.

“There’s a tremendous sense of betrayal,” said the Sokwanele supporter, referring to the MDC’s failures.

Ncube sits in his Bulawayo office beneath posters of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and former South African President Nelson Mandela. As well as criticizing the MDC’s lack of leadership, the archbishop calls for greater self-sacrifice and courage by ordinary Zimbabweans.

“People must be ready to lay down their lives for the truth, because at present this government can bully them. We can’t change this government until we have the courage to be shot.”