Increased violence before polls
2005-05-09 13:24
Zanzibar - Officials can try to explain away or deny the rise of armed gangs in the lead-up to Zanzibar's elections. Arafa Yakub says she knows better.
Just days after a ruling party official falsely accused Yakub's husband of trying to register as a voter more than once, masked men burst into her home at night. They hacked her husband with machetes and dragged her into the bushes to gang rape her.
Yakub's husband is from Zanzibar's second main island of Pemba, an opposition stronghold.
Fellow villagers said the raiders have been nicknamed the Janjaweed — after Sudan's pro-government Arab militiamen who unleashed a campaign of rape, murder and terror on perceived government foes in the country's western region of Darfur.
A bomb damaged an office of the ruling party on April 24, a day after the partially decomposed body of one of the party's election officials was found with machete wounds.
Would-be voters lining up to register have been attacked, registration centres have been raided by unidentified assailants in opposition strongholds, and homes, businesses and churches have been set on fire in predominantly Muslim Zanzibar.
"Security has deteriorated sharply. No one feels safe anymore," Yakub said,adding witnesses said some of the men who attacked her home were from her village.
Bloodshed and threats against voters are nothing new for politics on Zanzibar, a place that has lured travellers for centuries, some in search of spice wealth, others conquest. The brutality, though, has spiralled to unprecedented levels with the creation of the militias.
Increased violence feared
The elections are months away, leading to fears violence will get much worse before voters on the semiautonomous archipelago go to the polls October 30 to elect their own president and legislature.
Zanzibar's ruling and opposition party officials accuse each other of recruiting militia members through networks of party branches and training them in covert camps.
Government officials, however, play down reports of militias in Zanzibar.
Zanzibar's politics are historically violent. The Omani Arab sultan lost power in a violent revolution in 1964. The country quickly united with a much larger former Tanganyika to form the United Republic of Tanzania, in search of political stability.
The use of militias and unusually early start for election violence has been linked to a power struggle within the ruling party and an unprecedented challenge to its monopoly by a strong opposition.
Ayoub Bakari Hamad, director of elections for Zanzibar's opposition Civic United Front, charged government militia members are also trained to rape as part of a strategy to humiliate opponents and break their spirits.
Ruling party officials denied charges of raising a militia to intimidate and harass opponents.
- AP