You deserve the beatings, Mugabe tells trade unionists

HARARE - BARELY five days after laying the blame for the much-criticised brutal beatings of labour union leaders on the “overzealousness of one or two police, exaggerating their role", President Robert Mugabe told his staff in Egypt the unionists deserved the treatment they got because they asked for it.

Mugabe, in Egypt on a brief stopover from the United Nations in New York to catch a connecting Air Zimbabwe flight from London to Harare, said police officers were right in their heavy-handed way of dealing sternly with the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions protests over low wages on September 13.

According to the state-controlled Herald newspaper, Mugabe said the trade unionists  “want to become a law unto themselves”. He was speaking at a dinner hosted for him by the Zimbabwe Embassy in Egypt where an official likened him to the late Egyptian statesman Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Mugabe did not meet Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak as he waited for his flight back home. Likening the protests to a revolt meant to catch the eye of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. President George W. Bush, Mugabe said the police would deal effectively with any such attempts to dislodge him from office the Slobodan Milosevic way. He said what happened in Yugoslavia would not happen in Zimbabwe.

Mugabe said he did not know what the trade union leaders wanted, adding their protests were “nonsensical” and “stupid”.

He blamed journalists “invited” by the protesters “playing to the gallery” for helping them catch the attention of “a Bush or a Blair”. He described the scribes as "the stupid ones who always write stupid things". He also blamed unnamed non-governmental organisations for dramatising the protests. 

"We cannot have a situation where people decide to sit in places not allowed and when the police remove them, they say no,” said Mugabe. “We can’t have that, that is a revolt to the system. Vamwe vaakuchema kuti takarohwa, ehe unodashurwa (others are crying that we were beaten up, yes you would be beaten up) When the police say move, move. If you don’t move, you invite the police to use force.”

The brutal assaults on trade union leaders led to worldwide condemnation and protests in solidarity with the ZCTU leaders and their allies. Taking a cue from the US, leaders of British Trade Unions turned out in pouring rain to protest outside the Zimbabwe Embassy in London against the ill-treatment of the trade unionists. 
 
The President of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), Alison Shepherd, said they wanted to demonstrate the depth of their support for fellow workers in Zimbabwe through the protests.