David Coltart, the legal spokesman for the MDC, sees the campaign as “a sinister pre-emptive strike designed to remove the maximum possible number of people from urban areas to rural areas where they are easier to control.” There are many very effective intimidatory measures that have been applied in the past to rural inhabitants 37 to ensure that they do not support the opposition, such as the use of food aid to ensure political acquiescence, and threats by chiefs and headmen to expel villagers if they support the opposition. Again there are problems with this thesis. As already pointed out, quite a number of those affected are people of foreign origins with no right of abode in communal lands, although some could be employed on commercial farms and it would still be more advantageous for ZANU (PF) to have them in the rural areas. Secondly, people in the rural areas will be reluctant to try to absorb more people at a time of chronic food shortages. Furthermore, there have been some reports of chiefs refusing to allow people back to their original homes until they have paid a head tax for the period of time that they have been away, money that the people seeking re-admission just do not have. Some commentators have sought to explain why the ruling party decided to target war veteran organised settlements during the campaign. They have suggested that, although the war veterans were a useful tool to carry out land invasions, with its spin off political benefits for the ruling party, they have now become a thorn in the side of the Government as they are seeking to hold the Government to ransom. Last year, President Mugabe had to discipline the war veteran leader, Jabulani Sibanda, after he had associated with a faction of ZANU (PF) that was seeking to block the elevation to the Vice-Presidency of Joyce Mujuru, the person chosen by the President for this post. This view holds that the war veterans are no longer needed to mount violent campaigns against the opposition now that there are ample supplies of youth militia. The war veterans are thus dispensable, and the ruling party has decided to suppress them. Others have argued that for the ruling party substantial economic benefits would flow from the relocation of a sizeable number of urban dwellers (whatever their political affiliation) to the countryside. The acute shortage of foreign currency has made it nigh impossible for the Government to pay the bill for imported petrol and electricity supplies, and to maintain water supplies to urban dwellers. If the urban population were to be drastically reduced, Government’s economic problems in this regard would be ameliorated. The strain on the urban health services would also be diminished. The leader of the MDC, Morgan Tsvangirai, has accused President Mugabe of setting the police against residents in opposition urban strongholds in a bid to provoke conditions that could enable him to declare a State of Emergency, and rule by decree. Again there are problems with this thesis. The police and army already have enormous powers under legislation, such as the Public Order and Security Act, and, even if the laws constitute some sort of legal restraints that would be removed by the declaration of a state of emergency, the police and army have shown that they are prepared to act in violation of the laws where they see fit . For instance, the power of indefinite detention 38 without trial is superfluous when the police are willing to detain people without proper legal justification for excessive periods of time, regardless of the legal provisions prohibiting this. Added to this there now exist a series of restrictions on the granting of bail in respect of various charges under the Public Order and Security Act.