Category: Politics

{The protesters responded to the clampdown by throwing stones at the police.}

Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe on Friday warned that the Arab Spring style of protests would fall flat in Zimbabwe after police fired teargas and beat up protesters staging the latest of a string of highly charged demonstrations.

Dozens of police blocked off the site of the opposition rally for electoral reforms by 2018, when 92-year-old Mugabe who has ruled the southern African country for decades will seek re-election.

The protesters responded to the clampdown by throwing stones at the police while some set tyres ablaze and others pulled down the sign for a street named after Mugabe.

“They are burning types in the streets in order to get into power. They are thinking that what happened in the Arab Spring is going to happen in this country, but we tell them that is not going to happen here,” said Mugabe in remarks broadcast by state television.

“What politics is that when you burn tyres? We want peace in the country,” said Mugabe accusing foreign powers of having a hand in the unrest.

AFP correspondents saw armed police firing tear gas and water cannon at protesters gathered on the fringes of the central business district who were waiting for the march to start.

Some people caught up in the melee, including children going to a nearby agricultural show, ran for shelter in the magistrate’s court while riot police pursued the protesters and threatened journalists covering the rally.

ACTIVISTS

The usually-bustling pavements were clear of street hawkers and some shops were shut, as rocks, sticks and burning tyres were strewn across the streets.

Opposition protesters also clashed with supporters of the ruling ZANU-PF party who had refused to clear their street stalls.

ZANU-PF youths hurled stones at the opposition activists but were overpowered and their stalls set on fire.

The march was organised by 18 opposition parties including the Movement for Democratic Change led by Morgan Tsvangirai and the Zimbabwe People First formed this year by former vice president Joice Mujuru.

Opposition leaders condemned the brutal repression of the protest and vowed to increase pressure on Mugabe’s regime.

“If that was meant to cow us from demonstrating, I want to say we are going to do the same next week Friday,” former Mugabe ally and ex-cabinet minister Didymus Mutasa told reporters.

Protests “will continue until the day we vote”, said Mutasa, a former top member of ZANU-PF who is now a senior member of Mujuru’s party.

“We have had enough of ZANU-PF misrule.”

Tsvangirai said the public would not be easily calmed.

“The people’s anger is very deep. The people’s desperation is very deep,” he said.

“Today’s brutal suppression of the people will not stop them from exercising their rights.”

Tsvangirai said the regime was in its “sunset hour”, warning that efforts to suppress the protests would backfire.

“Citizens are like a spring: the more they are suppressed, the greater the rebound,” he said.

Charles Laurie, an analyst with Verisk Maplecroft in London, agreed that the government was on the verge of losing control.

“The government is nearing a tipping point in its ability to control a population long used to violence and hardship, and who now have little to lose in putting themselves at risk in forcing political concessions,” he told AFP.

Police broke up the protest despite a court ordering them not to interfere or disrupt the march.

RIGGED

Authorities said the had arrested 67 people, and lawyers said one of them was a journalist.

Several foreign diplomatic missions based in Harare called on the authorities to ensure that basic human rights and freedoms are respected during policing.

The US embassy expressed “deep concern over reports of violence during some of the protests” and called on government to “exhibit restraint” and respect human rights.

And the Canadian embassy also said it was “increasingly concerned with reports of violence and human rights violations in response to public protest” while the Australian mission said the use of violence was “not acceptable under any circumstance”.

Friday’s march was to demand free and fair elections. The last elections in 2013 were won by Mugabe in a vote the opposition said was rigged.

Zimbabwe has seen a mounting tide of violent protests in recent weeks, with demonstrators demanding the resignation of Mugabe, who has been in power since 1980.

Under his rule, there has been an economic collapse that has caused food and cash shortages, with the country battling to pay public servants.

{Incumbent President Ali Bongo faces stiff competition from former African Union Commission chief Jean Ping.}

The people of Gabon went to the polls on Saturday to decide whether President Ali Bongo will remain in office or be unseated by a career diplomat and close associate of his late father, who ran the country for 41 years.

The election takes place in a climate of persistent social unrest driven in large part by the economic impact of the slump in the price of oil, which has long dominated Gabon’s economy.

Bongo, 57, and ex-African Union Commission chief Jean Ping, 73, who both worked under Omar Bongo until he died in 2009, are seen as the only credible candidates among a field of 10.

Until recently, Bongo was far and away the favourite, largely because several prominent politicians had declared themselves as candidates, thereby dividing the opposition.

But protracted negotiations led all the key challengers to pull out and put their weight behind Ping, with the last of them withdrawing only last week.

Some 628,000 of Gabon’s 1.8 million inhabitants are eligible to take part in the election, whose winner will be decided by a simple majority after a single round of voting.

The campaign period has been acrimonious, marked by months of bitter exchanges between the two main camps, including accusations, and strenuous denials, that Bongo was born in Nigeria and therefore ineligible to run.

On Friday, each side accused the other of trying to gain an illicit advantage by buying up voter cards in various parts of the country for sums ranging from $20 to $100.

Faced with repeated charges of nepotism, Bongo has long insisted he owes his presidency to merit and his years of government service.

His extravagant campaign was based around the slogan “Let’s change together”, playing up the roads and hospitals built during his first term.

In an overt jibe towards Ping’s long association with his father, Bongo has also stressed the need to break with the bad old days of disappearing public funds and dodgy management of oil revenues.

“There’s a risk that certain people who did so much harm to our country will come back” to power, the president told a crowd of thousands during his last rally in the capital, Libreville.

Ping has pledged to ensure, if elected, that Gabon would be “sheltered from need and fear”, dismissing the president’s much-touted moves to diversify the economy into rubber and palm oil as mere window dressing.

Despite boasting one of Africa’s highest per capita incomes at $8,300, a third of Gabon’s population live in poverty. Unemployment among the young, according to the World Bank, runs at 35 percent.

Recent months have seen growing popular unrest and numerous public sector strikes as well as thousands of layoffs in the oil sector.

Fears that this discontent might degenerate into violence are fuelled by memories of what followed Bongo’s contested victory in the 2009 presidential poll. Several people were killed, buildings looted, a ceasefire imposed and the French consulate in the economic capital Port-Gentil torched.

On Friday, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on “all political stakeholders, in particular the candidates, to exercise restraint, abstain from any acts of incitement or the use of inflammatory statements, and maintain a peaceful atmosphere before, during and after the election.”

He also urged the candidates to use “legal and constitutional channels” in the event of any dispute over the result.

Ping and Bongo go back a long way, having worked for years together under Bongo senior, who was responsible for getting Ping his job as chairman of the AU Commission.

Ping also has close family ties to the Bongo dynasty: he was formerly married to Omar Bongo’s eldest daughter with whom he had two children.

Ping turned on Bongo in 2014, and in March he told French daily Le Monde that “Gabon is a pure and simple dictatorship in the hands of a family, a clan”.

{Prime Minister-designate Youssef Chahed’s new unity government wins votes of confidence in parliament.}

Tunisia’s new government has won a confidence vote, almost a month after the last government was dismissed.

Prime Minister-designate Youssef Chahed’s unity government was backed by parliament late on Friday with 167 votes in favour, 22 against and five abstentions, according to the AFP news agency.

The vote of confidence will now see Chahed and his cabinet take office in the coming days and comes amid warnings by Chahed that an austerity programme will be inevitable if the country does not overcome its economic difficulties.

“If the situation continues like this, then in 2017 we will need a policy of austerity, and dismiss thousands of public sector employees and impose new taxes,” Chahed told parliament before the vote for his broad coalition, which includes secular, Islamist and leftist parties, independents and trade union allies.

Chahed, who at 40 is the youngest prime minister Tunisia has had since independence from France in 1956, vowed to press ahead with economic reforms sought by international lenders such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

He also said his new government would give priority to fighting corruption and “terrorism”, and would be tough on illegal strikes.

“We will not allow interruption of production at any factory, and we will be firm and severe in dealing with illegal strikes and sit-ins,” he said in his speech, according to Reuters news agency.

Critics of Chahed, who is an ally of President Beji Caid Essebsi, have questioned whether he has the political clout to overcome labour union opposition, strikes and party infighting that have dogged past governments.

Labour unions and other groups have resisted attempts to reform pensions and introduce more taxes while at 13.5 percent of gross domestic product, Tunisia’s public sector wage bill is proportionately one of the highest in the world.

Chahed was appointed prime minister-designate by President Essebsi early this month after parliamentarians passed a vote of no confidence in then-Prime Minister Habib Essid’s government following just 18 months in office.

Chahed is Tunisia’s seventh premier in less than six years following the toppling of the country’s longtime dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

Tunisia is considered a rare success story of the Arab Spring, though authorities have failed to resolve the issues of poverty, unemployment, regional disparities and corruption that preceded Ben Ali’s fall.

{Tear gas, water cannons and batons used to disperse rally in capital Harare with unconfirmed reports of injuries.}

Zimbabwean police have used tear gas, water cannons and batons to disperse an opposition rally protesting against police brutality in the capital Harare.

More than 200 supporters, mostly youths, of the main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), took to the streets on Wednesday.

Many protesters were reported to have been injured, but police spokeswoman Charity Charamba said she had no information on that.

Riot police blocked streets around the MDC headquarters and used water cannon against some youths in downtown Harare.

Some protesters threw back tear gas canisters, as well as rocks, towards the police, who fired more tear gas outside the MDC offices.

The demonstrators had marched through the streets of the capital denouncing the police for beating up protesters and called on President Robert Mugabe to step down, accusing him of running a dictatorship.

The rally came two days before a planned march by all opposition parties to try to force Mugabe to implement electoral reforms before a general election in 2018.

“We have been seeing a deliberate attempt by the police to intimidate, harass and silence the people of Zimbabwe,” Lovemore Chinoputsa, the MDC Youth Assembly secretary-general, said during the march.

Chinoputsa said police had refused to sanction the march, saying that it would degenerate into violence.

Over the past few months, Zimbabwean police have crushed demonstrations against high unemployment, acute cash shortages and corruption.

The police routinely deny charges of brutality and instead accuse the opposition of using “hooligans” during protests to attack officers.

A trauma clinic in Harare last month compiled a list of cases of people who had been caught up in a police crackdown during anti-government protests.

The MDC’s leader Morgan Tsvangirai and former vice president, Joice Mujuru, are expected to lead Friday’s march.

{Riek Machar, who was sacked as South Sudan’s vice-president last month, is in Sudan to receive “urgent medical attention”, the state news agency says.}

Sudan is hosting Mr Machar on “purely humanitarian grounds”, it said.

Mr Machar has not been seen in public since July’s clashes between his supporters and those of President Salva Kiir which killed some 300 people.

South Sudan has suffered more than two years of civil war, since gaining independence from Sudan in 2011.

Riek Machar’s condition was now “stable” and he would “stay in Khartoum under full medical supervision until he leaves… for a destination of his choice,” the Sudan News Agency (Suna) said.

The governments of both Sudan and South Sudan have accused each other of backing rebels in a bid to destabilise their countries.

Mr Machar’s presence in Khartoum will give Sudan influence. It is likely to try and present itself as a mediator in the conflict, although many South Sudanese will be suspicious of its intentions.

Taban Deng Gai, Mr Machar’s successor as vice-president, has also been in Khartoum this week.

He is likely to have sought assurances that Sudan is not planning on siding with Mr Machar, as well as requesting help to overcome his country’s economic crisis.

Mr Machar demanded a neutral force be deployed in July to keep peace and guarantee his safety after his bodyguards and President Kiir’s presidential guards fought each other, sparking days of violence.

Political differences between Mr Machar and Mr Kiir ignited the civil war in December 2013 – and they only agreed to settle their differences under intense international pressure, signing a peace deal last August.

Mr Machar returned to Juba in April to take up the post of vice-president, but President Kiir dismissed him in the wake of the latest violence.

This month, the UN authorised a 4,000-strong African protection force for Juba with a more robust mandate than the 12,000 UN soldiers already in the country.

But South Sudan’s government said it opposed the deployment and it is not clear how the mission can go ahead without its co-operation.