Twelve killed in Zimbabwe fuel protest crackdown

Government imposes internet shutdown as nation buckles under currency crisis

At least a dozen Zimbabweans have been killed by security forces as Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government reimposed an internet shutdown on the southern African nation buckling under a currency crisis.

The Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum said on Friday that it had recorded the 12 deaths as well as dozens of gunshot injuries and hundreds of arbitrary detentions since protests over a sharp rise in fuel prices were put down with brutal force this week.

Zimbabwe was descending into “days of darkness”, the civil society group said.

The US, EU and the UN have all called for Mr Mnangagwa to end the crackdown, which has rounded up opposition leaders and activists amid an information blackout.

On Friday Econet, Zimbabwe’s largest telecoms company, said it had been “served with another directive for total shutdown of the internet until further notice”. Activists said that the outage provided cover for security forces to carry out violent house searches in several cities.

The NGO Human Rights Forum said it had “received disturbing reports of armed security personnel breaking into private homes of citizens, indiscriminately torturing occupants, including children as young as nine years old”.

Energy Mutodi, the deputy information minister, denied that there was any shutdown and blamed “congestion” for Zimbabwe’s internet being down.

Mr Mnangagwa is a former se- curity chief elevated to power by Zimbabwe’s army in 2017 after it toppled Robert Mugabe, the country’s strongman of four decades.

His pledge to make Zimbabwe “open for business” has been undermined by his ruling Zanu-pf’s failure to tackle severe shortages of US dollars.

The shortage and the rapid collapse in the black-market value of government-issued surrogate currencies have led to surging prices for basic items and misery for ordinary Zimbabweans.

Mr Mnangagwa’s decision to more than double fuel prices overnight triggered this week’s demonstrations, which included trade unions calling for workers to stay at home. The protests were unusually widespread and analysts said that they appeared to reflect growing desperation of the country’s urban poor.