Letter from Zimbabwe
Abridged from a statement from the International Socialist Organisation (ISO), Zimbabwe:
“On the whole it is not safe for us to do street sales with our paper any more, though we can still hold public meetings if we are careful about security. The new press laws pushed through by Mugabe are going to make a lot of what we say very difficult to publish, because of course it is critical of the government.
“The state is protecting the thugs of the ruling party, ZANU-PF. it is encouraging them. The top brass and those who run the state day-to-day are personal appointees of Robert Mugabe himself…
“…There is also some danger for us from the MDC. We live in the urban areas where the MDC has most of its support, so with ZANU-PF and the MDC, we are between a rock and a hard place. Most of the people in the top positions in the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions are toeing the MDC line. A few toe the ZANU-PF line. But on the whole the ZCTU has fallen hook, line and sinker for the MDC line, which is that we must have peace before the election; the MDC will win the election, but there should be no action before the election…
“…We are saying ‘No to dictatorship’ - meaning ZANU-PF - and ‘no to neo-liberalism’ - meaning MDC. Both these parties represent one section or other of capital, of the bosses. We have to be prepared to fight which ever of the two comes into power. We must have no illusions in either. We haven’t been advising people which way to vote. The advanced workers have been so disillusioned with the MDC that to advocate voting for the MDC would be political suicide for us…
“…Our paper is distributed only in the five urban areas where we have branches. It is too dangerous to try to distribute it in the counteryside. With the crisis and the struggles that are bound to be erupting, and our very low level of resources, we have launched an international fund appeal so that we can get equipment for the reproduction of material for our own comrades and for our paper…We also ask socialists in other countries to forward the updates we send out, and to publicise them, so that workers internationally can get the real story of what is happening in Zimbabwe.”
Donations to the ISO can be sent to the following bank account:
First Direct Bank, 40 Wakefield Road, Leeds, LS98 1FO. Account name: John Page; sort code 40-47-78; account number 1118 5489.
Please email details of deposits to isozim@hotmail.com
To recieve email updates from the ISO, send a request to the same address.
To read the full statement, click here.
d.z. bodenberg said,
April 2, 2008 at 7:46 pm
Just a point: is this statement actually recent? (I seem to remember it being distributed around the time of the last elections in Zimbabwe).
The rest of the Zimbabwe-ISOs website (linked to above) is on the same stand it has been for many, many years, except that the issues of Zim. SW have gone, and the ‘coming events’ referred to were in 2002. The SWP (Britain) contact address given is also out of date, as are some of the details of other IST affiliates (e.g. Germany, USA - again, around 5 years out of date in that case, amongst others).
The current IST website (not the one linked to on this statement either, which is a dead link) gives this as the current ISO Zimbabwe website: http://isozim.blogspot.com/ . (which hasn’t been updated since September 2007).
Also, according to Wikipedia (amongst others) the ISO/MDC-MP referred to in the statement, Munyaradzi Gwisai, hasn’t been an MP since being expelled from the MDC in 2002.
In short: the statement is probably from the time of the 2000 general election (when I think it appeared in Solidarity).
d.z. bodenberg said,
April 4, 2008 at 9:36 am
Here you are:
http://www.workersliberty.org/node/24
published on the AWL website on March 6 2002.
A contemporary report from the Zimbabwe ISO is here:
http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2008/02/22/new-opposition-zimbabwe
Jim Denham said,
April 4, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Thanks for that, d.z: you are clearly correct about the date of the article I posted. It was not my intention to mislead anyone, and I still think it’s a good and relevant article. I haven’t yet read the contemporary report from the ISO, posted on the Workers’ Liberty website (shame on me!), but thanks for drawing my attention to it.
d.z. bodenberg said,
April 4, 2008 at 6:48 pm
No problem Jim. I obviously have a strange kind of photographic memory, which is unfortunately specific to issues of Solidarity from the early years of this century.