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Zimbabwe: Hands Off Leftists, Trade Unionists! The following joint statement was issued by the Spartacist League/Britain and Spartacist South Africa, sections of the International Communist League, on February 27. The Spartacist League/Britain (SL/B) and Spartacist South Africa (SSA) condemn the arrests on 19 February of some 52 trade unionists, students, workers and activists attending a meeting of the International Socialist Organisation of Zimbabwe. We vehemently protest the fact that these men and women were arrested in a raid on a lecture in Harare by police and were detained and tortured. Outrageously, they now face treason charges, which can carry the death penalty, for the simple reason that they organised a meeting in solidarity with the mass mobilisations that overthrew the dictators Mubarak and Ben Ali in Egypt and Tunisia. These arrests are a blatant attempt to suppress protest and strike fear into left organisations who oppose the government. It is in the direct interests of the working class to oppose this naked act of state repression. As Marxists, the Spartacist League/ Britain opposes the sanctions and other machinations practiced by the racist British ruling class against Zimbabwe. From the time of Cecil Rhodes’ bloody quest to establish a “British Africa” from Cairo to the Cape, to the racist “independent” Ian Smith government, to the sanctions against Zimbabwe today, imperialist Britain never hesitated to use bloody force to assert its control and was responsible for the deaths of thousands of black Africans killed during the independence struggle in Zimbabwe. The present British government led by David Cameron and the Labour regimes that preceded it couldn’t care less what the Robert Mugabe regime does to workers and peasants. Their only concern is that the enormous wealth that is extracted from the exploitation of black labour continues to flow into the coffers of the City of London and Wall Street. As revolutionary internationalists in South Africa, the dominant regional economic power, SSA fights for solidarity by the South African workers movement with its class brothers and sisters in Zimbabwe and throughout the region. In particular, we fight for the workers to vigorously oppose the South African government’s harassment and threat of impending deportations against hundreds of thousands of Zimbabwean immigrants; we demand full citizenship rights for all immigrants. We demand the immediate release of the detainees in Zimbabwe and the dropping of all charges.
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