Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe said yesterday force had been necessary to maintain peace and stability in the face of a nationwide anti-government strike called by the opposition Movement Democratic Change (MDC).

"It is sad when we are forced as a government to use teargas against our own youth who are being misled but we have to do it in the interests of peace and security," Mugabe told South Africa's SABC television news.

"We don't want to make our people suffer. We suffered enough during colonial times and during independence...

"We want our people to be free to express their free views and feel that the country belongs to them, that they have a stake like everybody else in the country".

The MDC on Monday launched a five-day national strike and protest marches in a bid to force Mugabe out of office or at least get him to the negotiating table.

The opposition accuses the government of plunging the country into economic and social crisis and has demanded that Mugabe engage in serious dialogue with it.

Mugabe said there was no way the MDC was going to remove his government by force.

He said the MDC had rejected advice from South African President Thabo Mbeki and Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo not to engage in acts of violence to overthrow the government.

"Their appeal to the MDC not to resort to mass action, not to resort to violence has not yielded fruit but we asked them to continue to appeal to them," he said.

The MDC said yesterday that hundreds of its supporters had been arrested since the start of the protests on Monday and that one of its activists had been killed.

An activist from Mugabe's ruling Zimbabwe African National Union - Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) was also reportedly stoned to death by suspected MDC supporters on the first day of the protests.

An MDC official said that as many as 500 opposition activists, officials and lawmakers could have been arrested since Monday.

There has been no official tally yet from the party but opposition officials quoted in yesterday's Daily News newspaper said that more than 277 opposition supporters had been arrested on Monday and Tuesday.

The MDC also alleged the army had "spent the whole night harassing and beating up" opposition supporters in the poor suburb of Budidiro.

It said ten opposition supporters arrested in Zimbabwe's second city of Bulawayo were missing.

The High Court last weekend declared the planned mass action against Mugabe's government illegal and warned that demonstrators would face the full wrath of the law if they defied the ban on the protests. – Sapa-AFP.