Zimbabwe+workers+confront+Mugabe,+D+Tweedie,+Morning+Star

Morning Star, London, 4 April 2007
=Zimbabwe’s workers confront Mugabe=


 * DOMINIC TWEEDIE** explains how working-class action is driving the fight for trade union rights and democracy.

FOR over a month, South Africa has been preoccupied with the new turn of events in closely related Zimbabwe, situated immediately to its north. The catalyst of the new situation is working-class action in both countries.

Zimbabwe was conquered twice from the south in the 19th century. First, it was the Ndebele power. Then came whites led by Cecil Rhodes, the South African diamond monopolist and prime minister of the Cape colony. A long spell of subjugation to the British empire followed.

In the late 20th century, the short-lived white settler republic of Ian Smith was effectively a South African client until Zimbabwe's 1980 liberation. Nowadays, Zimbabwe has four-digit inflation and unemployment is at 80 per cent. The number of Zimbabweans living in South Africa is said to be in the millions. We know all their problems and the peoples remain allies in struggle. So what are those problems?

The rights and wrongs of President Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF regime and its supposed land-reform policies are fiercely debated in South Africa. Opinions are divided. The fact that land ownership here is still largely in the hands of whites gives this question a particularly sharp edge.

But it is among the South African working class and its main democratic institutions, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) that the most determined attitudes have emerged.

Both organisations have given a clear lead for years past, insisting above all that their brother and sister workers in Zimbabwe must have their trade union rights respected, their democratic rights restored, the country's desperately crippled economy brought back to life and the unemployed put back into secure and properly paid work.

In Zimbabwe itself, the opposition to ZANU-PF has been diffuse and sometimes contradictory. The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) campaigns against President Mugabe and his party, but it is otherwise quite ambiguous and obscure.

The MDC has been split down the middle for over a year, for reasons which appear more tactical than political. Unlike South Africa's ANC, the MDC offers no freedom charter and is not proposing a national democratic revolution or anything like a broad front or unity in action.

Other anti-Mugabe institutions in Zimbabwe include NGOs, women's organisations, church structures and ratepayers. Most are as non-committal as the MDC about the kind of Zimbabwe that they want to build in the future. The outstanding exception to this eclectic oppositionism is the country's trade union centre, the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, an ally of COSATU.

The ZCTU cut through a long impasse on February 24 this year with a decisive communique detailing a concrete set of demands and announcing a two-day general strike - in southern African parlance, a "stayaway" - for yesterday and today.

No demonstrations were planned for fear of police violence. Soldiers and police officers were out in force yesterday, manning roadblocks and patrolling bus stations, businesses and factories - supposedly, according to a police spokesman, to prevent intimidation of workers by trade unionists.

Stayaways are to be repeated every three months "and they will be incremental until the situation improves," declared the ZCTU.

The ZCTU insists that "the government should take steps to address the economic meltdown" and should put into action the recommendations of Zimbabwe's Tripartite Negotiating Forum, which includes the government, trade unions and representatives of capitalist business.

The steps specified by the ZCTU would include the negotiation at national level of minimum wages and salaries above the poverty datum line, availability and free access to antiretroviral medicines, the stabilisation of prices of basic commodities and a halt to police harassment of informal traders.

The ZCTU communique drew a swift response in South Africa. It was immediately picked up by the COSATU central executive committee and plans were put in place which culminated with a march in Johannesburg yesterday, another due in Pretoria today and a simultaneous border blockade at Beit Bridge on both days.

Then, on March 11, came the news of the rally in Highfields, Harare, that was crushed by Zimbabwe's police. It was a joint event between the two factions of the MDC, the Combined Harare Residents Association and another entity called the National Constitutional Assembly.

A young man called Gift Tandare was tragically shot and killed in the crowd by police. Leaders of the four organisations were arrested and some of them, notably MDC founder Morgan Tsvangirai, were beaten up.

Neither the ZCTU nor the church organisations were involved in the Highfields rally, for reasons that are not entirely clear. It is quite possible that they were not invited. The Tsvangirai faction of the MDC has, unfortunately, been deliberately "distancing itself" from the labour movement.

The other MDC faction only announced its support for the ZCTU stayaway two weeks later, during the visit of its leader Arthur Mutambara to COSATU House in Johannesburg on March 23.

The ZCTU has not escaped widespread harassment and arrests on trumped-up charges. For example, Tennyson Muchefa from the National Engineering Workers Union, Douglas Dzimiri from the Zimbabwe Domestic and Allied Workers Union and ZCTU staff member Gilbert Marembo were arrested in Masvingo on March 20 for "littering" while handing out leaflets promoting the April stayaway. Another four trade unionists were arrested shortly after in Bulawayo.

South African politicians have spoken out this month in various ways. So has the Southern African Development Community, which met in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, on March 29. But the ZCTU demands have not yet been addressed and the stayaway has gone ahead.

There is no doubt that the working class has been the motive force behind the new Zimbabwean developments. It is likewise clear that the international working class will be the main component of solidarity during this week's strike and its aftermath through the Easter weekend. Especially active will be the South African contingent led by COSATU and the SACP.

The full list of ZCTU demands can be found on the internet at [|www.zctu.co.zw/html/stmts/21906.shtm]


 * From: http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index2.php/ex/examples** (subscription)

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