ZIMBABWE: With the MDC broke and maybe infiltrated by spies, groups opposed to President Mugabe have to raise their game, reports Robyn Dixon in Harare
A conservative white businessman expressing a passion for freedom, tradition, polite manners and the British royals sits at his long, shiny boardroom table in Zimbabwe, musing on plans to topple President Robert Mugabe.
With the same dedication, he devotes to his business, he composes, hides and secretly distributes fliers, sometimes swapping cars to dodge arrest.
"When you are working for your country in a state of crisis, it's just such a thrilling experience. It's just such a wonderful emotion to be involved with people who are doing the same thing," he said. "In today's modern world, it doesn't really happen that much anymore."
His aim, like that of other regime opponents, is simply to render the country ungovernable. But the big question is how to do so.
Sokwanele - the ghost organisation to which he belongs - and a similar underground movement called Zvakwana (both meaning "enough is enough" in different African languages) are multiracial movements that eschew violence, each struggling for change by trying to mobilise people to resist the regime.
The nation's March parliamentary elections were condemned by the United States and European Union as neither free nor fair. However, President Mugabe did not employ the type of overt violence he has used in past elections, and his victory was endorsed by powerful African allies such as South Africa.
He followed up with a national police operation to scatter urban opposition supporters by demolishing informal shacks and traders' stalls across the country.
At this point, Zimbabwe's opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) is as deeply demoralised and divided as it has ever been. The limited impact of a two-day general protest strike the MDC organised in June has raised doubts as to whether its plodding brand of peaceful resistance can ever pose a threat to the regime.
The organisation is almost broke, squabbling and it believes itself to be infiltrated at the highest levels by the state's Central Intelligence Organisation.
Zvakwana and Sokwanele are more innovative, leaving fliers in buses or pasted up in small rural shopping areas, distributing "revolutionary" condoms branded with the exhortation to "Get Up, Stand Up", hiding anti-regime messages in matchboxes or wrapping soap or candles in them. Yet these too seem to have had little effect in encouraging people to actively resist the government.
President Mugabe's regime has ruthlessly suppressed even small street protests. Despairing of decisive leadership from the MDC, some regime opponents such as the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Bulawayo, Pius Ncube, are simply praying for the 81-year-old Mugabe's death.
"People in Zimbabwe, myself included, pray that God should take him because we can't change anything here," Archbishop Ncube said. "We are under constant oppression. There's nowhere to run. He has all the guns and all the aircraft. All the laws are on his side. Parliament is just his rubber stamp. He divided the churches and bought some support from them."
Dr Ncube said the MDC general strike was badly organised. But David Coltart, a prominent MDC lawmaker, said it had limited effect because the regime did not care about damage to the economy.
"Clearly, we have to change tack now. We have got to have peaceful strategies that will make this regime wake up."
Most regime opponents agree they need a new approach, but few have specific ideas on what forms of protest might work.
"We are a movement absolutely strapped for cash. We don't even have enough money to publish pamphlets to call people out into the streets," Mr Coltart said.
"We don't have enough money to buy lots of orange scarves. The Orange Revolution (in Ukraine) cost hundreds of millions which we just don't have."
The Zvakwana website (www.zvakwana.com) conveys the despair regime opponents feel with scathing sarcasm, but the group's anger is directed at the MDC as much as at the regime.
"We have to become our own leaders. We need to lead by personal example, whether by organising small house meetings to discuss challenging the regime, or making and distributing our own leaflets, or standing up to institutional repression by refusing to pay taxes in any form," the Zvakwana website said.
"We cannot go face-to-face with an enemy that has all the state machinery at its disposal, so we must work with stealth like a thief at night."
Both Sokwanele and Zvakwana support ousting President Mugabe through a peaceful, popular revolt. Zvakwana is more imaginative in its approach, using condoms, soap and candles to get its message out, whereas Sokwanele concentrates on leaflets.
Sokwanele (www.sokwanele.com) gets foreign funding from an undisclosed western source. The businessman activist said the organisation was "bold, brazen and totally covert" with about 100 "highly-effective" activists, mainly educated young people with families, and a loyal courier network extending to small rural settlements.
"They show tremendous courage. If they were caught, the punishment is severe," he said.
Couriers leave tapes with revolutionary songs in public places and leaflets that focus on character-assassination of officials.
"It makes them very uncomfortable. They're reminded that ultimately they will pay for their crimes, no matter how long the road. There will be a threat: 'Be careful, people are watching you', that kind of thing," the businessman said.
But although small shadow organisations such as Sokwanele and Zvakwana can support civil disobedience campaigns, they don't have the organising capacity to initiate them.
The businessman claims that a third, small but tightly-organised, underground group has decided peaceful resistance has failed and the time has come to start blowing up government buildings and bridges without injuring people.
One reason Zimbabweans cannot stage successful mass street protests like the people-power revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, is that Mugabe's security forces keep a much tighter rein on people's movements, deploying roadblocks and security forces not afraid to kill.
"I can't see the people getting as far as the streets, with all the roadblocks," said Dominican nun Sr Patricia Walsh, whose order helped people in Hatcliffe shantytown until it was demolished this month. She feels the only real hope for change is if the ruling party changed heart, "to really have the good of the country at heart and not just enrichment of a small elite".
"I feel the opposition leader is hopeless," said Archbishop Ncube, "and now young people are being tempted into violence because he has done nothing. Now (the authorities) are destroying vendors' stalls, stealing people's goods, burning and breaking up their stalls, and he is just doing nothing. I tend to think that things will just continue to go down, down, down."
There is a conviction that regime spies have infiltrated the MDC party's top levels.
Archbishop Ncube sits in his Bulawayo office beneath posters of the Rev Martin Luther King jnr and former South African president, Nelson Mandela. As well as criticising the MDC's lack of leadership, the archbishop calls for greater self-sacrifice and courage by ordinary Zimbabweans.
"People must be ready to lay down their lives for the truth because, at present, this government can bully them. We can't change this government until we have the courage to be shot." - (LA Times/Washington Post)