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| Africa Subsaharan |
| Zimbabwe police watch but allow prayer meeting |
| 2007-04-15 |
| Zimbabwe police allowed an opposition prayer meeting to take place on Saturday in the second city of Bulawayo despite earlier threats to stop the gathering as an illegal anti-government protest. President Robert Mugabe's government has in the last two months used riot police to break up opposition rallies. Main opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai and dozens of other members of his Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) sustained serious injuries on March 11 after being arrested by police at an aborted prayer rally in the capital Harare. In Bulawayo, journalists said police officers, in uniform and in plain clothes, watched opposition figures, labour and student leaders, rights activists and clerics filing in and out of a township church for the protest prayer meeting. "They did not stop the meeting but they watched from some distance, from a police station near the church," one journalist said by telephone from Bulawayo, southwest of Zimbabwe. On Friday the government said it might stop the gathering because it could be turned into an illegal opposition protest. Organisers of the vigil, the Save Zimbabwe Campaign, said in a statement on Saturday they were determined to defy any attempt to stop the prayer meeting despite fears of a police crackdown. "The leadership of the campaign once again reiterates its commitment to the resolution of the Zimbabwean crisis in total defiance of the brutality being perpetrated by the state security agents," it said. "We deplore the use of violence by those that are in power." |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #2 Police NOT attacking a "prayer meeting"? Bet the "Meeters" were heavily armed this time. |
| Posted by: Redneck Jim 2007-04-15 12:08 |
| #1 A Prayer meeting again allowed the government of zimbabwe to stand through another day. There are animals God may use against Mugabe. |
| Posted by: newc 2007-04-15 00:51 |