Solidarity - it can’t be beaten.

Protests in Zimbabwe
To follow events as they unfold, visit our index page on Strikes and Protests in Zimbabwe in 2007.

View an animation of photographs (500kb) taken on March 13 when activists, arrested for gathering for the Save Zimbabwe Campaign Prayer Meeting in Highfields on March 11th, were brought to the Magistrates Court. Right click the link and save the file onto your computer to share with others.

Despair is a lie we tell ourselves
I do not believe the wicked always win. I believe our despair is a lie we are telling ourselves. In many other periods of history, people, ordinary citizens, routinely set aside hours, days, time in their lives for doing the work of politics, some of which is glamorous and revolutionary and some of which is dull and electoral and tedious and not especially pure - and the world changed because of the work they did. That's what we're starting now. It requires setting aside the time to do it, and then doing it. Not any single one of us has to, or possibly can save the world, but together in some sort of concert, with all of us working where we see work to be done, the world will change. And we have to do it by showing up places, our bodies in places - turn off the computers, leave the Internet (or home, office, country of exile) - and show up, our bodies at meetings and demos and rallies and leafleting corners. Because this is a moment in history that needs us to begin, each of us every day at her or his own pace, slowly and surely rediscovering how to be politically active, how to organize our disparate energies into effective group action - and I choose to believe we will do what is required. Act. Organize. Assemble. Oppose. Resist. Find a place a cause a group a friend and start, today, now/now/now, continue/continue/continue.
Source: Tony Kushner, from The Impossible Will Take A Little While: a citizen's guide to hope in a time of fear

Courage is Contagious
I once asked Mary Robinson, the former Irish president, how citizens could resist the kind of bullying politics by which the United States forced her out of her position as United Nations High Commissioner of Human Rights after she had questioned the Bush administration's insistence on excluding Afghan prisoners of war from Geneva Convention protections. "People need the courage to stand up for what they believe," Robinson replied. "If I'd backed down just because the U.S. is the most powerful nation in the world, it would have sacrificed all the moral credibility of my office. By standing up, I preserved it. You have to keep standing up even if it's hard. You have to be willing to pay the costs." Here's a woman who turned what might be seen as a platitude - do what you think is right - into a living, breathing reality, one that challenges the rest of us to reflect upon when we would be willing to take a stand. Robinson's principled stance poses a challenge: What would it mean for us to apply her message to our own lives? For one thing, it would require that we speak out in contexts in which some people disagree with us, possibly vehemently, because that's the only way social change takes place. For another, we'd have to do so knowing that there may be difficult consequences. Sometimes dissent draws heat; at other times it draws fire. But democracy isn't a spectator sport. It's government of the people and by the people - in other words, a political process that works only to the extent that we participate. In the words of Tom Paine, we need to be more than "summer soldiers" and "sunshine patriots": We must learn to persist even when the political climate turns harsh. That's the other implication of Robinson's decision to challenge U.S. policy. As Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers, once said, "Every time a man or woman stands up for justice, the heavens sing and the world rejoices." More specifically, we who witness it rejoice, and our backs are thereby stiffened. Sure, the Robinson episode raises a hard question, "Will you, too, do the right thing?" It also offers much-needed inspiration: "You, like me, can do the right thing!" Courage can be contagious.
Source: Paul Rogat Loeb