| History Of Zanzibar |
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The islands gained independence from Britain in December 1963 as a constitutional monarchy. A month later, the bloody Zanzibar Revolution, in which thousands of Arabs and Indians were killed in a genocide and thousands more expelled, led to the establishment of the Republic of Zanzibar and Pemba. That April, the republic was considered by the mainland former colony of Tanganyika. This United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar was soon renamed (as a portmanteau) the United Republic of Tanzania, of which Zanzibar remains a semi-autonomous region. However, unlike mainland Tanzania, the struggle for political power in Zanzibar has largely been twisted by racial alignments. In spite of sharing a common language (Swahili), religion (Islam) and a high rate of inter-marriage among the islands’ racially diverse communities, racial tags of “Africans” versus “Arabs” are widely employed especially during the election period. This owes its beginning back to 1964 when the government following the revolution of Zanzibar leaned more towards the claim of Africans being the true natives and at the beginning of its rule it abolished all claims of the Shirazis. Although one could still claim to be a Shirazi, he/she had to accept being an African first and Shirazi underneath. Zanzibar’s Revolutionary Government of Zanzibar is made up of the Revolutionary Council and House of Representatives, which has a similar composition to the National Assembly of Tanzania. There are many political parties in Zanzibar, but the main Parties are the Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) and the Civic United Front (CUF). Since the early 1990s, the politics of the archipelago have been marked by repeated clashes between these two political parties. Contested elections in late 2000 led to a massacre in Zanzibar in January 2001 when the government shot into crowds of protestors, killing 35 and injuring 600. Violence erupted again in 2005 after another contested election, with the CUF claiming that its rightful victory had been stolen from them. Following 2005, negotiations between the two parties aiming at the long-term resolution of the tensions and a power-sharing accord took place, but they suffered repeated setbacks. The most notable of these took place in April 2008, when the CUF walked away from the negotiating table following a CCM call for a referendum to approve of what had been presented as a done deal on the power-sharing agreement. In October 2009 Zanzibar President Amani Karume met with CUF Secretary Seif Shariff Hamad at the State House to discus how to save Zanzibar from future political turmoil. It was the first time CUF agreed to recognize Karume as the legitimate president of Zanzibar. However, the relationship between Zanzibar government and Tanzanian Mainland has not been so well in recent years since Tanzania Prime Minister Mizengo Pinda's remark about the Isles' sovereignty that Zanzibar is not an independent country outside the Union Government, within which it can only exercise its sovereignty  |
