PRETORIA – South African police fired rubber bullets to drive away hundreds of protesting Zimbabweans from a presidential guesthouse where regional leaders were meeting to try to push President Robert Mugabe and his rival Morgan Tsvangirai to form a unity government.

The protestors led by the Save Zimbabwe Now group and other organisations of exiled Zimbabweans had moved onto the grounds of the guesthouse in Pretoria in an attempt to hand over a memorandum of demands to South African President Kgalema Motlanthe, who was chairing the regional summit.

When the protestors refused to leave the guesthouse grounds police opened fire with rubber bullets, reportedly injuring scores of people in the process.

“The reaction from the police was completely over the top,” said Richard Smith from the Zimbabwe Solidarity Forum that was one of the groups leading the protests.

“People were singing and dancing when police started firing rubber bullets. This type of intolerance is part of the culture which must be changed not only here in South Africa but across the SADC region,” he said.

As the police forcibly dispersed the protestors, they also arrested eight representatives of Save Zimbabwe Now who were trying to handover the memorandum to the summit of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) leaders.

The eight included Kumi Naidoo, an honorary president of CIVICUS group who is on his sixth day of fasting to press for quick resolution of Zimbabwe’s crisis. South African Commission for Gender Equality head Nomboniso Gasa was also among those bundled into a police car and taken away from the guesthouse.

The memorandum the activists wanted to hand to SADC leaders called for decisive action from the bloc that is accused of failure to pressure Mugabe to agree to share power with the opposition in a government of national unity seen as the best way to halt Zimbabwe’s spiral towards total economic collapse and humanitarian disaster.

Ingrid Srinath secretary-general of CIVICUS said of the arrests: “The detention and of civil society activists trying to peacefully and non-violently draw attention to the gross violations of human and democratic rights in Zimbabwe is a sad reflection of the lengths South Africa’s government will go to suppress legitimate civil society demands and protect the Mugabe regime.

“Their actions are a new low in their complicity and dereliction of duty with regard to the crisis in Zimbabwe.”

After being removed from the property, the eight campaigners were subsequently released, and returned to the venue of the summit to attempt to present the Memorandum again. – ZimOnline