[Don Myers]

bttt

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Zimbabwe -- Iron fist will fail, analysts warn*** A NERVOUS Zimbabwe government has put its opponents under siege in what analysts this week said was a futile effort to thwart swelling public anger and agitation over the administra-tion's failure to end a worsening economic and food crisis. They said the government was panicking at the prospects of mass protests threatened by the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). "The strategy is to thoroughly terrorise the population into submission as a way of neutralising the impending MDC-led mass action," University of Zimbabwe (UZ) political analyst Masipula Sithole told the Financial Gazette. The MDC has threatened to call mass protests soon to force President Robert Mugabe, who it accuses of stealing a presidential election earlier this year, to re-stage the ballot.

In a show of force unprecedented since Mugabe and his ruling ZANU PF party wrested power from British colonialists 22 years ago, armed police have in the past few weeks swooped on the opposition, arresting nearly 100 MDC activists. The law enforcement agency has also broken up social gatherings and university student meetings, arguing that they could be used to mobilise support for the proposed strike. The government has also intensified a crackdown on the country's independent media by arresting and sending several journalists to the courts for alleged contravention of sections of a tough media law passed earlier this year.

Sithole said by publicly wielding the iron fist, the government was sending a clear message to ordinary Zimbabweans on the cost of joining any protest against it. UZ Institute of Development Studies associate professor Brian Raftopoulos said the government's high-handed approach was an admission it did not have any solution to the deepening political, economic and food crisis. Nearly half of Zimbabwe's 12 million people face starvation because of poor rains last season but largely because ZANU PF supporters disrupted agricultural production when they seized land from large- scale producing white farmers.***