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<\/p>\nTanzania\u2019s celebrated safari lodges and beachside villas are filling up for peak season. Off the tourist trail, desperate families are hunting for relatives who have been missing since an election crackdown that has been called a \u201cTiananmen Square moment\u201d for the usually stable east African state.<\/p>\n
Hundreds of young people are reported to have been shot dead by security forces before and after a disputed ballot on October 29 that extended the rule of the president, Samia Suluhu Hassan. According to official results, Hassan won 98 per cent of the vote. Under an internet blackout, killings, abductions and torture were followed by bodies being snatched from streets and mortuaries, erasing evidence of abuse, according to rights groups.<\/p>\n
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Once celebrated as a reformer, Hassan, a grandmother in her sixties, has acquired the nickname Idi Amin mama, after the late and famously bloodthirsty dictator of neighbouring Uganda. <\/p>\n
A hospital worker in the northern safari gateway city of Arusha described a weeks-long stream of wounded and dead, including his own brother, who was shot and then refused medical treatment on orders from above. <\/p>\n
\u201cYoung men were targeted by the security forces. Hospitals were told to ignore any cases brought in that matched this profile,\u201d he said. His brother, a 25-year-old accountant who had never protested, was walking to a shop weeks before the vote when he was chased and shot at close range by plain-clothes gunmen. <\/p>\n
Protest leaders said a campaign of killings and abductions was intended to enforce silence over the jailing, banning and disappearance of opposition figures before the election. <\/p>\n
Multiple reports suggest the attacks were aided by foreign mercenaries from neighbouring states, amid a pattern of cross-border arrests and jailings of government critics. Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya \u2014 all former British colonies and Commonwealth members \u2014 have been accused of co-ordinating the suppression of dissent as their governments confront rising anger among a globally connected Gen Z protest movement<\/a>.<\/p>\n Human rights activists in Washington<\/p>\n KEVIN WOLF\/AP<\/p>\n The tactic failed. Youth-led protests spread for days across Tanzania\u2019s big cities despite curfews and a rising death toll. In a rare rebuke, the African Union said the vote was \u201cnot conducive to a peaceful outcome\u201d.<\/p>\n In a hurried ceremony at a military parade ground away from the public, Tanzania\u2019s first female president was sworn in for her second term. Her Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) party has dominated the country since it gained independence in 1961. <\/p>\n Washington said it was reconsidering its relationship with the Tanzanian government, while Britain joined 16 other western countries in expressing horror at the evidence of extrajudicial killings and demanding the release of bodies and political prisoners. <\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/\/07e128c8-1882-4a7e-8aa9-b73cf1edc009.jpg\")
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