Interesting week in Arusha. While the elections at the end of October went off rather peacefully, there are still tensions between the ruling party (CCM) and the opposition party (Chadema).
We are all fine and everyone we know is fine. Lisa was driving through town on Wednesday morning to do a typical grocery run and saw police wearing riot gear and speeding around town in trucks. Later that day, we started receiving text messages to avoid town and that all roads in and out of town were closed.
There was an opposition party rally that turned violent with police shooting live bullets into crowds of protesters in Arusha town. The local papers report 2 deaths, the word on the street is 10 deaths with about 40 injured. Whatever the number of injured and dead, it is bad thing for Arusha and for Tanzania. All the old timers who we know and saw last night at the weekly Friday night expat pilgrimage to TGT said they have never seen anything like this before in Tanzania.
The rally was organized by the opposition party to protest corruption of the ruling party and seeking Kikwete to step down arguing that the elections results were not counted accurately. Part of me thinks this is healthy because it's an indicator that Tanzania is moving closer to a true multi-party system. But obviously the violence and strong military reaction from Government is alarming at the least.
Article from the Daily Nation:
http://www.nation.co.ke/News/africa/Arrest%20of%20Tanzania%20leader%20sparks%20protest%20/-/1066/1084566/-/bcdjpdz/-/index.html
BBC Article:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12126861
Thanks for this post Matt. We read about the violence in Arusha, but didn't know how accurate it was. Sort of sounded like a bad night in the ghetto here, but it's obviously deeper than we knew.
ReplyDelete