Some readers accuse Monday Meeting of relying on the Zimbabwean government's propaganda to vilify Morgan Tsvangirai, and therefore allegations that the man is a thug are baseless and nothing more than misinformation. The truth of the matter is that, strange as it may sound, sources of iron-clad evidence of the man's propensity to violence are none other than the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) itself and some sections of the Western media, which point at a consistent and systematic use of thuggery by Tsvangirai even against perceived political rivals within the MDC itself. However, before looking at some of these sources we need to continue from where we left off last week, that is, at the point where the MDC splits. Apparently, during the run-up to the National Council - whose decision to participate in the senate elections precipitated the split in the party - Tsvangirai and his followers used threats of violent reprisals to intimidate provincial committees to vote against participation in the elections.
After the split, the animosity between the two rival MDC camps boiled to the point where Tsvangirai could no longer contain his brutal streak, and he unleashed violence against his rivals in the Mutambara MDC. The violence started off on a low key but as the frustration of Tsvangirai and his Western backers grew, he decided to throw caution to wind. In July 2006, Trudy Stevenson, the Harare North MP, together with four provincial executive members - all belonging to the Mutambara faction - were waylaid and severely assaulted by 40 of Tsvangirai's thugs. The thugs pounced on the MDC officials and attacked them with an assortment of weapons, which included stones, iron bars, sticks and machetes. According the MP, she recognised one of the thugs that attacked her, and he had been suspended from the MDC for violence the previous year. "And that is definitely a Tsvangirai person", she was reported to have said. Stevenson, a White woman, sustained a deep gash on the back of her head inflicted by a machete; a fractured cheek bone; broken arm bones; broken wrist; and bruises on her back and chest - Tsvangirai's recent injuries don't even come close to the ones his hooligans inflicted on Stevenson. As it would be expected, when the MDC split there were fence-sitters who didn't know which side to fall, and one of these was David Coltart, former MDC legal secretary and current MP for Bulawayo South. After seven months of weighing where he could survive politically, he eventually fell onto the side of Mutambara faction of the MDC. Around this time, Coltart, a White man, decided to blow the whistle on Tsvangirai: he wrote two papers; one entitled 'MDC must deal with violence in its own ranks', the other 'Why I cannot join Tsvangirai's faction', both of which he posted on his website (www.davidcoltart.com). In the two articles he lays bare Tsvangirai's violent nature presumably as a way of exonerating and distancing himself from endemic acts of violence that were perpetrated by the MDC. However, some Zimbabwean political commentators were not to be fooled, with one rightly pointing out that "for years, Coltart has been at the heart of this violent MDC with a powerful and influential position as legal advisor, but he chose to remain mum when the MDC unleashed violence against members of ZANU-PF, apolitical members of the society, torched Zupco buses, private cars and set dynamite under bridges. Instead, the MDC was misinforming the outside world claiming to be the victims when they were the aggressors. When MDC members got a taste of their own medicine when they directed the violence against their own, that is when Coltart decided to speak out, implying that violence is only violence when directed against himself, his interests and those within his circle, a typical Western policy...if he really abhors violence and is a principled politician, why was he putting up with it for that long, and even covering it up? That can be interpreted as his express or implied approval (of the violence)". Next week Monday Meeting will reveal the contents of the Coltart papers.
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