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Archived News
18th November 2003
ZCTU calls for nation-wide protests, Nov 18
Zimbabwe police clamp down on illegal fuel
IDC says Zimbabwe 'off limits' for investment
Unions call for tough SADC line on Harare
Playing deadly games while Zimbabwe burns
The ANC ought to sympathise
Come to Zimbabwe
Mugabe tells irate doctors to go back to work
Zimbabwe paper seeks to resume publishing
Paper urges end to SA 'silence' over Zimbabwe
Free Robert Mugabe
Zimbabwe cannot pay for vaccine
Justice denied
Armed movement forms to oust Mugabe, rights activist warns
'Rebels' vow to end Mugabe's rule
Lunatics, or dirty tricks?
ANZ directors further remanded
Zim needs wider consultation
Zim land grab turns sour
Striking Zimbabweans doctors arrested
Chidyausiku allows police appeal on ANZ
Jail ordeal of Daily News chief
McKinnon: Zimbabwe is on a downward spiral
Sekeramayi denies Zim helped Colombian rebels
Zim farm workers beaten
Treatment denied
Zimbabwe's isolation its own making
Mugabe's 'reforms' cast doubt on talks
No barriers too great for illegal immigrants
Mugabe wants invitation
Zim tourism police unit to protect foreign guests
Zimbabwe seizes foreign currency
Bill Saidi's penchant for annoying leaders
Top-form Mugabe keeps succession pot boiling
Mugabe appears confident of 11th-hour invitation to Commonwealth summit
Mugabe insists he will go to summit
Police warn against protest
Cosatu backs ZCTU protest
Cholera claims 26 lives in two outbreaks
Gono’s appointment: Yet another mirage
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From Reuters, 11 November
Zimbabwe police clamp down on illegal fuel
By Stella Mapenzauswa
Harare - Zimbabwean police intensified a crackdown on illegal foreign currency trade on Tuesday, setting up roadblocks in the country's second largest city to search for hard cash amid a crippling shortage, witnesses said. A Reuters photographer said police set up a roadblock along a main highway into the southern city of Bulawayo from the airport, where youths in plain clothes thoroughly searched vehicles and their occupants, under the watchful eyes of police. "I asked them what they looking for. They said they were looking for forex, gold, anything illegal," he said. "They searched the car, they searched my luggage. I showed them my wallet. I saw them doing body searches on other motorists." Other residents of the city reported roadblocks in different areas. Police were not immediately available for comment. Local media reported at the weekend that Bulawayo police had launched a clampdown on illegal trade in fuel and foreign currency, raiding the homes and cars of suspected dealers and confiscating foreign currency while some people were arrested.
The central Reserve Bank has also set up a unit to probe the flow of local banknotes to neighbouring countries which led to a four-month-long cash crunch earlier this year and prompted the bank to issue high-denomination bearer cheques. The central bank has come under fire from government officials this year for failing to clamp down on a thriving black market for foreign currency where the Zimbabwe dollar is trading at up to 6,000:1 to the greenback compared to an official rate of 824. The cash shortages are part of a crisis faced by President Robert Mugabe's government, which critics accuse of mismanaging the country. Mugabe says Zimbabwe is being sabotaged by domestic and foreign opponents opposed to his policy of seizing white-owned farms for redistribution to landless blacks. Millions of Zimbabweans experience food shortages, unemployment stands at around 70 percent and annualised inflation has surged to more than 450 percent, one of the highest rates in the world. In addition to foreign currency, the black market has also seen a thriving trade in fuel, minerals and basic food commodities not readily available in the normal economy.
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From Business Day (SA), 12 November
IDC says Zimbabwe 'off limits' for investment
The Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) is implementing an investment ban against Zimbabwe, according to its chief economist Lumkile Mondi. This suggests that while President Thabo Mbeki is operating a policy of quiet diplomacy with SA's troubled northern neighbour, government's major investment promotion agency is adopting a more cautious approach. Referring to the IDC's investment in the two Mozal aluminium smelter projects in Mozambique, Mondi said yesterday the IDC, which at one stage operated only within SA, was expanding its activities throughout Africa. "The IDC has a lot of potential joint ventures, particularly in tourism and telecommunications," he said. "There are huge opportunities in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola for tourism." However, Zimbabwe was not a part of the IDC's expansion equation. "Zimbabwe is the only country we are not looking at in southern Africa," he said, pointing to problems with "risk management" and a "not very attractive investment climate". Clive Robertson, the GM of export reinsurance group Credit Guarantee, agreed it was becoming almost impossible to do business with Zimbabwe. "Zimbabwe's biggest problem is that it does not have sufficient foreign currency to externalise its debt," he said. "It can't pay in dollars or pounds or euros or yen because there are no foreign reserves." Reg Rumney of Business Map said it was "pretty damning" that the IDC had declared Zimbabwe off limits.
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From Business Day (SA), 12 November
Unions call for tough SADC line on Harare
International Affairs Editor
Trade unions from around the region meeting in Harare yesterday called on Southern African Development Community (SADC) governments to take a tougher line against Zimbabwe and Swaziland. While the statement by the 11 affiliates of the Southern African Trade Union Co-ordination Council does not call on governments to impose sanctions, it does ask them to put pressure on the two countries to respect human and workers rights. South African union federation Cosatu has consistently taken a tough line on Zimbabwe and Swaziland, but yesterday's statement is one of the most outspoken so far by trade unions in the region. The statement sends a clear message to SADC governments that trade union movements are unhappy with "quiet diplomacy", and signals that they may take action in the near future to support their Zimbabwean affiliate. The council's statement stops short of calling for sanctions, but it does speak of support for actions to draw attention to the deteriorating situation in the two countries. One option is border blockades by trade unions and protests.
Earlier this year Cosatu blockaded the SA border with Swaziland, but so far no action has been taken against Zimbabwe. Cosatu spokesperson Patrick Craven said if the idea for similar action were called for by the Zimbabwe Confederation of Trade Unions, "I am sure this would be considered very sympathetically." He said any action against the Harare government would have to be in support of its counterpart in Zimbabwe. This week the Law Society of SA called on international and SADC leaders to press Zimbabwe to halt human rights abuses as well as an unfolding humanitarian disaster. Apart from a statement opposing quiet diplomacy issued last year by the SA Foundation, which counts among its members SA's largest corporations and multinationals operating, organised business groupings have been silent on Zimbabwe. Yesterday's union statement accuses the two governments of violating the SADC Charter on Fundamental Social Rights and a number of international conventions they have ratified.
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Comment from The Daily News Online Edition, 11 November
Playing deadly games while Zimbabwe burns
By Fr Oskar Wermter SJ
As we bury the 35-year old father of three nobody mentions, but everybody knows, why he died so early. Nobody asks what fate might await the young widow. Everybody knows why the 29-year old single mother of two, only recently returned from "Unit K" (UK) so sick she needed a wheelchair at the airport, had her life cut short. But we are all far too polite to say so. Roads are no longer passable in Mbare because of uncollected refuse. We just walk another street. Nobody makes any fuss about it. We celebrate all feasts and go to all parties and sing all new tunes as if nothing had happened. No one admits that we can’t really afford it, that hiring a bus costs millions, that our living standard has slumped so much we have hardly enough for sadza and vegetables. We are told that even if you are found to be HIV positive life will go on: just change your lifestyle, avoid stress, eat healthy food, take your medicine, "get real", "make your own choices". Live (and die) in cloud-cuckoo-land. How can anyone avoid stress in a situation where people automatically join any queue and only afterwards ask what the queue is for? Who can afford special diets when the most basic foodstuffs are scarce? Medicines? What medicines? Even when the doctors are not on strike, who can buy what they prescribe?
Chipo wants to marry Tonderai. It would be the most rational thing in the world to be tested for their HIV status. But then what if Chipo tests negative and Tonderai positive? Is she still going to marry him? The truth will make you free and miserable. To know the daunting truth and act on it is the rational thing to do, but most of us can’t face it, they just don’t want to know. Better take a chance and hope for the best. "Maybe I am lucky!" "My husband died five years ago. I know I am HIV-positive, I was tested. I have to provide for my children. So far I am feeling all right, but the time will come…." She is speaking in a plain, matter-of-fact tone. It takes courage to face the truth. Crowds panic and run. Strong individuals resist. They have the courage to walk alone, follow their own insights, make their own decisions. There is a faith dimension in their lives, and from that perspective it is not the end of the road, and they are not really alone.
The country is gravely ill. It can no longer feed itself. It can no longer offer its children a workplace and security in the community. It has lost the confidence of the young who leave in ever greater numbers. People, apparently of the same country, live nevertheless on different planets. "Dialogue has been shelved while party leaders are preoccupied with the succession issue". Old leaders bury more and more of their own generation. But they never bother to inspect a cemetery to see that most recent graves are of people born in the 1960s and 1970s. "AIDS? What about it? The Minister of Health takes care of that. Is he not doing a fantastic job?" As a matter of fact, what can he do? Poverty and hunger have now joined forces with AIDS, and that is a lethal alliance. AIDS you can fight. AIDS plus hunger means definite defeat. Hunger is not dealt with by one ministry. It is the result of years of mismanagement involving everybody. Only a radical change of direction of the whole government can make a difference to that. That is the tragedy. They pretend everything is normal. Things run their course. There is somebody in charge of everything.
In the meantime they can play their games as usual. Their power games in the champions’ league to see who comes out tops. In their 70s and 80s, but still playing games. Their grandchildren, already dead and buried, have not reached that age, but they have not noticed, they keep playing games, deadly serious, as if it really mattered. Which it doesn’t, of course: it will not be long before they join the heroes. For the time being, however, the old men keep playing their blaming games (Imperialism, Neo-Colonialism……) and naming games (e.g. Tony Blair, hardly innocent, possibly foolish, but really not responsible for our children running away, or dying). They even play high-risk, deadly games. They play with our lives. Play politics even with the starving who are near death. Decide who is to live and who is to die. Give food only to "reliable cadres". Allow only government agents to distribute the life-saving grain. Deny import licences to political suspects. Instead of forgetting all silly games and single-mindedly working for the survival of all, every Zimbabwean man, woman and child. But the obsession with playing those power games will not go away.
What will ever make them sit up and face the truth? That there is mass poverty and starvation and death for which they are responsible, they themselves and nobody else. Will anyone have the enormous courage and say: "Yes, we did it. We failed to provide. We were blind. But it is not too late. Let us start now. Even if it costs us position and power. Even if it is the last thing we do…" But they will not do that. They will pretend that all is normal. All is manageable, even without knowing the whole awful truth. They mean somehow to muddle through. Until the end. Their end. But not ours. We no longer pretend or trust good luck. We want to know. And take it from there.
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Comment from ZWNEWS, 12 November
The ANC ought to sympathise
By Michael Hartnack
The Herbert Chitepo Memorial Lecture delivered at the University of Zimbabwe on November 4 by Professor Jakes Gerwel, Chancellor of Rhodes University, Grahamstown, was a masterpiece of diplomatic discourse. His remarks could not have caused offence to the senior figures from Robert Mugabe's Zanu PF party seated in the front row - a 45 minute talk in which the former secretary to Nelson Mandela’s Cabinet made only tactful, passing references to the harrowing situation in Zimbabwe. Taking the theme "What have universities to do with human rights, democracy and good governance?" Gerwel said there appeared to be a ``synchronicity’’ between the collapse of the Zimbabwean economy and of norms associated with the rule of law. "From where I sit and observe as a friend of Zimbabwe, one cannot be glad that we have to seriously engage in questions of whether there has been such a departure from these norms as to move a model nation to one in crisis," he said in one diplomatic mouthful. Leaving at least some of the audience wondering when Zimbabwe was ever a "model nation," Gerwel added that in a number of countries "multi-party democracy" had been replaced by the concept of a coalition on which diversities and minorities had to be accommodated.."
In addition, said Gerwel, African nations were obliged to surrender some of their sovereignty under, for example, the New Economic Partnership for African Development (NEPAD). In terms of NEPAD, African nations are supposed to review each other for abuses of human rights, bad governance, rigged elections and the rest. Gerwel said this peer view process "will establish the credibility of Africa as the master of its own fate" - delicately avoiding the fact that Mugabe has not so far had even a slap on the wrist from African leaders. In fact, South African President Thabo Mbeki at a news conference in Toronto a day later maintained that the Zimbabwe crisis would soon be over and, despite evidence to the contrary, said the Zanu PF and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change were in talks that might quickly produce a coalition government. "They've been talking to each other. They're talking to each other now. My sense is that it won't take that long," Mbeki said at a news conference with Canada’s Jean Chretien. "I think the ruling party and the opposition understand the depth of the economic crisis and the impact on the lives of the people. Both sides are very, very sensitive to it. Nobody is dragging their feet. They will move with some speed." To remove any possible ambiguity, Chretien added: "There will be an agreement (in Zimbabwe), he thinks, soon." In Cape Town, British Foreign Office minister for Africa Chris Mullin said Britain and South Africa agreed to a large extent about Zimbabwe. "We know that President (Thabo) Mbeki and others have been working hard to help the negotiations between Zanu-PF and the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) bear fruit."
These statements are not supported by any source in Zimbabwe. David Coltart, MDC justice spokesman, said there had been no progress for at least five weeks in convening further talks. If Zanu and those promoting the idea have in mind a unity government, they fail to appreciate the deep-seated opposition to such an arrangement, especially in Matabeleland.’’ Coltart said many Zimbabweans recalled the ill-fated 1987 unity pact between Mugabe and the late vice president Joshua Nkomo's PF Zapu party. Nkomo went on to become one of the largest landowners and richest businessmen in the country, while Matabeleland merely became the prime source of economic refugees illegally entering South Africa. "The people of Matabeleland saw how Joshua Nkomo and Zapu were sucked into this arrangement and compromised, and the development needs of Matabeleland were never addressed. They fear this could happen again with the MDC leadership benefiting greatly but no fundamental changes to Zimbabwean society," said Coltart.
While Mbeki talks of a quick fix coalition, Mugabe is waging a civil war, against an unarmed section of Zimbabwe's population consisting of black "terrorists" and whites - also terrorists - who have to be dispossessed and expelled. And Mugabe's critics do not see there is any complex economic problem on which the regime and the opposition need to put their heads together. What is needed, they say, is for Mugabe simply to stop what he is doing. Where one side is pursuing policies which the other side believes to be utterly destructive, coalition governments can only give respectability and a facade of social unity where none exists. Mugabe explicitly demands the opposition show "patriotism" by endorsing his Third Chimurenga. It sometimes seems that South Africa would like the MDC to accept office under Mugabe to improve the chances of Mbeki’s favourite, Simba Makoni, succeeding to the presidency instead of a veteran of the 1980s' Matabeleland genocide. The MDC slogan, however, is "Chinja maitiro", change the method, not "Chinja mambo", change the tsar. The ANC ought to sympathise: it used to insist the old South African philosophy could not be reformed - it had to be eradicated.
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Comment from The Guardian (UK), 11 November
Come to Zimbabwe
Come to Zimbabwe! Er, no thanks.
But why not?
Oh, the famine, the widespread human rights abuses, the breakdown of law and order...
Do you like elephants? We have lots of elephants.
...the state-sponsored repression, the crippling fuel shortages...
These are lies! Zimbabwe remains a beautiful and hospitable place. Come to Docklands this week and see.
Docklands?
To the World Travel Market exhibition. Stop by the Zimbabwe Tourist Authority booth for a chat.
You're joking.
Not at all. We at the ZTA aim to position Zimbabwe as a world-class tourist destination. It's all in our vision statement.
I see. Do the people at the World Travel Market know you're coming?
Of course. They believe in encouraging, as they put it, "dialogue and understanding among all countries involved in travel and tourism".
And torture and murder?
Have you ever been to the Victoria Falls? It's so lovely this time of year.
Who are you? The minister for tourism?
No. Sadly he cannot make it because of prior commitments.
It's not because he's included in an EU-wide travel ban on members of Mugabe's government, is it?
You have been poisoned by lies! You must come to beautiful Zimbabwe and see for yourself.
OK, but I'll have to make sure I can get the time off first. It's a pretty busy time of year for us journalists.
Journalist? Did you say journalist?
British journalist, yes.
I'm afraid you can't come.
Why not?
No reason.
But I'm curious to see the situation first-hand.
Get out of the way, please. There is a queue of genuine tourists forming behind you.
No there isn't.
Visit Zimbabwe, Where Food Aid Distribution Is Never Manipulated For Political Ends.
I will.
Not you.
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From IOL (SA), 12 November
Mugabe tells irate doctors to go back to work
Harare - The government in Zimbabwe has ordered police to arrest all striking state hospital doctors for defying last week's court order to return to work. Mariyawanda Nzuwah, head of the the government human resources agency, the Public Services Commission (PSC), said the doctors face contempt of court charges for ignoring a labour tribunal order that they should end their strike because it was illegal. Quoted by the official ZIANA news agency, Nzuwah said the PSC "has requested the commissioner of police to bring before the courts of law all those doctors who have violated the law and the attorney general to prosecute them forthwith". Doctors at government run hospitals, whose monthly salaries can barely pay for basics such as rent, bills and groceries, have been on strike for a month demanding pay hikes of up to 8 000 percent. Nzuwah said the doctors' demands were "ridiculous and unacceptable" and that even President Robert Mugabe did not earn the kind of salary they have asked for.
A labour tribunal last Thursday ruled that the doctors' strike, then two weeks old, was illegal, but the doctors vowed not to return to work until they had a written undertaking from government to deal with their demands. Nzuwa said the doctors were in breach of labour laws that prohibit workers in essential services such as the medical field and the uniformed forces from striking. He said the doctors had "deliberately and intentionally violated the law and therefore committed a criminal offence". He added that the doctors were being contemptuous of parliament which promulgated the labour laws and President Mugabe who enacted them. The labour court declared the doctors' strike illegal because, it said, the doctors did not follow legal procedures of channelling their grievances when they embarked on the strike. The court gave the government authority, as the doctors' employer, to take disciplinary action against any doctor who defied the order. Military doctors and consultant medical staff brought in from Cuba and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), have been attending to serious and emergency cases at hospitals affected by the strike. Nurses who went on strike days after the doctors, have since returned to work after government promised to address their grievances.
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From Associated Press, 12 November
Zimbabwe paper seeks to resume publishing
By Michael Hartnack
The publishers of Zimbabwe's only independent daily newspaper began legal action Wednesday seeking to resume publication after twice being shut down by the government. Associated Newspapers Zimbabwe applied to the Administrative Court for permission to immediately resume publication of the Daily News, company lawyer Gugulethu Moyo said. The court, which has the power to review all decisions by government bodies, ruled Oct. 24 that the government's Media and Information Commission did not have the right to withhold a license from the newspaper. A special edition of the Daily News was published Oct. 25, but then police shut it down again. President Robert Mugabe's government has appealed the court decision, effectively keeping the newspaper from publishing. The Supreme Court, now headed by Chief Justice Godfrey Chidyausiku, a former minister under Mugabe, may take years to hear the appeal.
Three directors of the company arrested last month are scheduled to appear in a criminal court Thursday. They expect to learn if the case against them for allegedly defying Mugabe's media laws will continue. Moyo said the publishers had no income from advertising or circulation but still were paying a staff of 300. "What we are saying is that we would suffer immense and irreparable prejudice if the situation continues," she said. She could not say when the hearing would take place. During its four years of publication, the Daily News became Zimbabwe's largest daily newspaper. Its presses were blown up in January 2002, hours after Information Minister Jonathan Moyo claimed it was "a threat to national security." The newspaper gave space to Mugabe critics, who blame the collapse of the economy on the president's seizures of white-owned farms. Mugabe has ruled for 23 years. Zimbabwe faces its worst economic crisis since independence, with 70 percent unemployment and acute shortages of food, gasoline and medicine. Inflation is running at more than 455 percent.
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From SABC News, 12 November
Paper urges end to SA 'silence' over Zimbabwe
A South African newspaper hit the streets of Zimbabwe today with a one-off edition urging Robert Mugabe, the Zimbabwean President, to step down and an editorial lambasting South Africa's "shameful silence" on the crisis in its northern neighbour. Justice Malala, the editor of South Africa's newest paper This Day, said the edition was largely meant to criticise the closure of the Daily News. The Daily News was closed in September after its publisher, Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe, was found to be illegally operating without a licence. It had been critical of Mugabe's government, particularly its handling of a political and economic crisis that critics say is the result of misrule since independence from Britain in 1980. "We did this edition as a once-off to urge the people of South Africa to signal to the government of Zimbabwe that we are not pleased with what happened to the Daily News," Malala told Reuters by telephone from Johannesburg.
The ironic headline "Free Robert Mugabe" was splashed on the front page and an editorial said: "Mugabe must free himself of power. Zimbabweans of all classes, allegiances and hues should help him out." It added: "We South Africans owe it to our neighbours to break our shameful silence. We hope this special edition...will help break the silence on the tragedy of Zimbabwe." Thabo Mbeki, the South African President, has been criticised at home and abroad for his "soft diplomacy" towards the Zimbabwe crisis. The newspaper drew the attention of curious pedestrians in the capital Harare, limited to a single state-owned daily since the Daily News was closed. "The paper has been selling quite well since it came out this afternoon and I'm sure all the copies will go," a vendor told Reuters. Mugabe (79) denies mismanaging the country and in turn accuses local and foreign opponents of sabotaging Zimbabwe's economy to punish his government for seizure of white-owned commercial farms for landless blacks.
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Comment from This Day (SA), 10 November
Free Robert Mugabe
Here is Zimbabwe, a nation in ruins. In these pages are accounts of a country that has entered a Kafkaesque realm, whose dreams and hopes, celebrated across the world in 1980, at its independence, have turned into nightmare. Since Bob Marley so optimistically sang of a free Zimbabwe at Harare’s Independence celebrations we have seen a mountain of ruined lives and a country devastated. Zimbabwe’s rich land lies fallow, the army dispenses a brutal form of law and order, the press is gagged, educational institutions have become propaganda houses, the economy is ruined and death and disease stalk the land. Robert Mugabe’s oligarchy holds a death grip on power and exercises it with the blessing of an emasculated judiciary, a lame parliament and a brutal army. The youth militias, Zanu PF’s Tontons Macoute, ensure by violence and threat that food aid is handed only to the party faithful. Mugabe, a statesman who many lauded when he came to power, is loathed in his country and viewed with revulsion and embarrassment by his neighbours and the world.
We all know how the beautiful land of Monomotapa got to this tragedy, crushed under the boot of megalomania. It is a long story, meandering from hope and pride in freedom to the spectre of starvation in a country that naturally fits the cliché "breadbasket of Africa". We all should have heard the alarm bells when thousands disappeared in the Gukurahundi, the army’s mass slaughter of opposition Zapu members and their supporters in the early 1980s. We should have known the consolidation of power in Mugabe’s executive presidency in 1990 was another step to dictatorship. We should have warned that land reform was too slow and unstructured where a small white minority held large swaths of the country while the vast majority lived in penury in squashed townships. The past eight years in Zimbabwe have displayed all the classic signs of desperate megalomania: disregard for the rule of law, disregard for human rights, disregard for the international community, disregard for the people. We have witnessed a spectacular intolerance of free speech and a devotion to hate speech, an obsession with personal enrichment, the rise of a coterie of henchmen who obey the rules unquestioningly.
The results are predictable and devastating. A recent study by the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria says Zimbabwe’s economy has shrunk more than 19 percent in the past year. The gulf widens daily between the official exchange rate (US$1 to Z$824) and the parallel market (US$1 to Z$6 000). Economic output has declined by 19,3 percent in the past three years and 11,9 percent last year. The manufacturing sector declined by 17,2 percent last year, mining shrank by 7,1 percent and gold production plunged by 18 percent. Officially, inflation is running at 455,5 percent, a figure derided as far too low by independent economists, and is expected to surge towards 1 000 percent by year-end. This stands in stark contrast to Africa’s average yearly inflation of 12,6 percent. The health sector has collapsed and opportunistic diseases fuelled by rampant HIV-Aids infections run free. At embassies such as South Africa and Britain’s queues are even longer than those for fuel. Millions of Zimbabweans, black and white have fled. For a Zimbabwean doctor, life sweeping the streets in London is better than the harassment, pain and helplessness of watching patients die in a Harare hospital. Unemployment hovers near 70 percent.
The Daily News, the only independent daily newspaper, has been shut down, its staffers arrested and harassed mercilessly. Zimbabwe’s people exist in an information blanket so effective that they do not know what is happening in their country except the propaganda and denials they hear from the state-owned media. All that is left of Zimbabwe of 1980 is the indomitable spirit of its people. In the face of unimaginable odds, they circumvent the brutality and kleptomania of Mugabe’s regime and hold the country together. They have been abandoned by the world, which continues to talk of a quiet diplomacy or shouts from afar while wringing its hands. This unbending spirit must now ease Mugabe of his burden. He should be freed of the burden of rule. Only the people of Zimbabwe can show him the door. But we can help. Removing Mugabe is a first step. The international community should press for free and fair elections, monitored without hindrance. It should agitate for a neutral international body to oversee these elections. And it should do so loudly, consistently, resolutely.
We did not lightly decide to devote a front-page editorial to this matter, but we are outraged by Africa’s lethargy and silence. South Africans are a beneficiary of the voices of the world who spoke up and instituted hard-hitting sanctions against the apartheid government. We hope this special edition of THISDAY will help break the silence on the tragedy of Zimbabwe. To its people we can only say we feel your pain, we want it to end. After Zimbabwe’s free election the world should stand ready to pour resources into rebuilding and normalising the country. But before that, Mugabe must free himself of power. Zimbabweans of all classes, allegiances and hues should help him out.
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From Business Day (SA), 13 November
Zimbabwe cannot pay for vaccine
Bulawayo Correspondent
The Zimbabwean government has failed to obtain the vaccine needed urgently to stop the spread of foot-and-mouth disease, dashing hope of resuming lucrative beef exports to Europe and the Middle East. The government was recently unable to come up with the foreign exchange needed to pay for an order of more than a million vials of the vaccine from the Botswana Vaccine Institute. This shortage of foreign currency is largely rooted in Harare's refusal to value the local currency correctly against hard currencies. According to officials at Zimbabwe's veterinary services department, the country has 300000 doses of vaccine significantly less than it needs to vaccinate animals in more than 10 identified "red zones" of infection, mostly in Matabeleland. Before the first outbreak of the disease, first detected at a cattle feedlot outside Bulawayo in August 2001, beef exports made up a significant percentage of the country's foreign currency inflow. Veterinary services director Stuart Hargreaves said yesterday that the department was fighting a losing battle against outbreaks of the disease, due to the insufficient supply of foreign currency. "More than 1-million doses are needed to vaccinate all the livestock in the affected areas, and it is rather a tall order due to the scarcity of foreign currency," said Hargreaves.
Although the lands, agriculture and rural resettlement ministry announced in August that it would make available 4m for the purchase of vaccines, the funds have not yet come through, and there are reports of new outbreaks in Matabeleland South and Masvingo provinces. To curb the spread of the disease, the veterinary services department needs to vaccinate all cattle in affected areas and revaccinate them after six months. A further round is carried out after a year, before an area can be declared free of the disease. The state-owned Cold Storage Commission beef processor is considering exporting processed beef to counter the decline in demand for Zimbabwe's fresh beef. Neighbouring countries, particularly Botswana, have blamed their foot-and-mouth outbreaks on the prevalence of the disease in Zimbabwe as cattle from Plumtree district in Matabeleland South frequently cross over into Botswana in search of grazing. Botswana is currently erecting an electric fence along the border with Zimbabwe in a bid to stop cattle crossing into its territory.
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Comment from ZWNEWS, 13 November
Justice denied
Two years ago today, the body of Cain Nkala was "found" in a shallow grave near Bulawayo. Nkala, a Matabeleland war veterans' leader, had been abducted at gunpoint from his home, watched helplessly by his family, during the previous week. His disappearance was immediately seized upon by the government as an excuse to begin a particularly vicious attack on the MDC - vicious even by the low standards which now prevail in Zimbabwe. The opposition, the government claimed in increasing hysterical tones, was to blame for Nkala's kidnapping. MDC offices in Harare were besieged, and there were mass arrests. The Bulawayo MDC offices were burnt down by a mob accompanied by the police, who refused to allow a fire engine to attend . The MDC treasurer Fletcher Dulini-Ncube was arrested, was denied medication for his diabetic condition during his imprisonment, and later had to have an eye removed as a result. While recuperating from this operation, the police kept him in leg-irons in the hospital. Simon Spooner, election agent for Bulawayo MP David Coltart, was arrested and kept illegally in prison, in disgusting conditions, for weeks. Dozens of others were also illegally detained. Remember Moyo and Khetani Sibanda are still incarcerated, despite a court order for their release, which a senior prison officer openly flouted in court.
There are various theories as to who killed Nkala. He certainly seems to have fallen out with other war veterans in Matabeleland. It also seems he may have threatened to tell what he knew about the murder of Matabeleland farmers in 2000, and other atrocities committed in Matabeleland North in the run-up to the 2000 parliamentary elections - including the kidnapping and probable murder of another of Coltart's election agents, Patrick Nabanyama. But whatever the truth, it has not been allowed to be revealed in open court. The case has been dragging on for years. Convenient scape-goats have been named and arrested, innocent families harrassed. Witnesses have been threatened, re-arrests have followed releases, evidence has been concocted, and then the police dockets containing this evidence have been "lost". Charges have been brought, then dropped, then brought again. Due process of law has been mocked. As a distilled analogy for the state of the whole country, the Nkala case stands as eloquent testimony. Lies and brutality. Justice denied.
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From CNN, 14 November
Armed movement forms to oust Mugabe, rights activist warns
London - A British-based human rights campaigner who has tried to make a citizen's arrest of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe on Thursday announced that an armed rebel movement aims to depose the president and put him on trial. The British government said it wanted nothing to do with the rebels. The newly formed Zimbabwe Freedom Movement plans an armed rebellion unless Mugabe steps down, activist Peter Tatchell told a news conference, adding he had no involvement in the organization and was merely acting as its messenger. ZFM was "in no way" connected to the Movement for Democratic Change, Zimbabwe's main opposition political party, and it received no aid from outside Zimbabwe, Tatchell said. British Foreign Office minister Chris Mullin said Britain would not support armed force against Mugabe. "The British government have made clear we can have nothing to do with any attempt to overthrow the government of Zimbabwe by violence," Mullin told reporters at a Foreign Office briefing. Mullin added that he believed members of ZFM had informally approached British authorities, but had been told "very firmly" that Britain would have nothing to do with their project. "ZFM believes that since we have not achieved democracy by peaceful means ... it is necessary to place the illegitimate president and government of Zimbabwe on notice that they are about to be removed by the judicious use of appropriate force," the group said in statement released via Tatchell.
A call to the Zimbabwe High Commission in London went unanswered and a message was not immediately returned. The office of the Zimbabwean government's press secretary George Charamba, contacted by phone from London, said he was unavailable for comment. Mugabe, 79, led Zimbabwe to independence and faced little dissent until recent years, when the nation's economy collapsed and political violence erupted. Tatchell said ZFM hoped to slowly build support among the Zimbabwean security forces so that it could seize the president and trigger a "bloodless democratic revolution." Tatchell said ZFM consisted primarily of serving members of the Zimbabwean armed forces, police and intelligence service, and estimated that its membership ran into the "low thousands." The Australian-born Tatchell, 51, has been an aggressive campaigner for gay rights, and disrupted an Easter service at Canterbury cathedral in 1998 to complain about the church's position on homosexuals. He staged his first attempt to make a citizen's arrest of Mugabe in London in 1999. Two years later, he was beaten by Mugabe's bodyguards in Brussels, Belgium when he tried again. At a London news conference, Tatchell showed a film interview with two men he described as leading figures in the ZFM -- the movement's commander Charles Black Mamba and deputy commander Ntuthuko Fezela, both of whom were referred to by their pseudonyms. He said both had participated in Zimbabwe's armed struggle for independence in the 1970s. Tatchell said the interview took place outside Zimbabwe's capital Harare and the film was smuggled out of the country. Tatchell added that the ZFM chose him to make Thursday's announcement because it knew of his campaigning and his extensive contacts in the media.
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From The Star (SA), 14 November
'Rebels' vow to end Mugabe's rule
By Brian Latham
Harare - A British-based human rights campaigner who has tried to make a citizen's arrest of Robert Mugabe has announced that an armed rebel movement aims to depose the Zimbabwean president and put him on trial. But the movement's existence has been denied by civil rights and pro-democracy organisations in Zimbabwe, who say it is a ruse by the Zimbabwean government itself. The newly formed Zimbabwe Freedom Movement (ZFM) planned an armed rebellion unless Mugabe stepped down, activist Peter Tatchell told a news conference yesterday. Meanwhile British Foreign Office Minister Chris Mullin said he believed members of the ZFM had informally approached British authorities, but had been told "very firmly" that Britain would have nothing to do with their project. Tatchell said the ZFM hoped to slowly build support among Zimbabwe's security forces so that it could trigger a "bloodless democratic revolution". He said the ZFM consisted primarily of serving members of the Zimbabwean armed forces, police and intelligence service, and estimated that its membership ran into the "low thousands".
At the London news conference, Tatchell showed a film interview with two men whom he described as leading figures in the ZFM - the movement's commander Charles Black Mamba and deputy commander Ntuthuko Fezela, both of whom were referred to by their pseudonyms. He said both had participated in Zimbabwe's armed struggle for independence in the 1970s. Tatchell added that the ZFM had chosen him to make yesterday's announcement because it knew of his campaigning and his extensive media contacts. But opposition parties in Zimbabwe are sceptical. National Constitutional Alliance leader Dr Lovemore Madhuku said: "If anything, it's a creation of Zanu PF, part of some Zanu PF strategy." Movement for Democratic Change shadow justice minister David Coltart said: "You have to ask whose interests this serves. It only serves Mugabe's interests. Mugabe will make the most of the propaganda from this sort of thing by blaming the British for meddling in Zimbabwe's affairs." Added Coltart: "Zanu used pseudo-dissidents in the 1980s during the Matabeleland crisis. I suspect that these are people from the military and the Central Intelligence Organisation."
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Comment from ZWNEWS, 14 November
Lunatics, or dirty tricks?
A small sample of the London press corps was yesterday treated to a production of downmarket melodrama, as the Zimbabwe Freedom Movement launched it's inaugural video onto a hitherto unsuspecting world. The MTV awards this wasn't. A camera which didn't move from its tripod, an off-screen interviewer, and two actors so wooden they had more grain than the pictures, this low-budget presentation was reminiscent of 1970's footage from the steamier sort of Latin American banana republic. Several of the assembled hacks were heard stifling giggles as ZFM's National Commander, Charles Black Mamba and Ntuthuko Fezela, the group’s Deputy National Commander, outlined their strategy in electronically distorted voices. ZFM - the name suggests a radio station rather than a liberation movement - would attempt to "take Mugabe alive".
The scene was dripping with tacky symbolism. The two commanders, in military fatigues and ski-mask balaclavas, with Mr Mamba sporting a rather fetching beret, sat side-by-side on benches which appeared to have been ripped from one of Harare's commuter taxis. The flag behind the two goggled-eyed characters had been doctored. The Zimbabwe bird floated alone in the white triangle, searching forlornly for the red star which seemed to have slipped off the standard. Other pictures show ZFM's "arms dump", which consists mostly of stacked ammunition boxes and half-a-dozen superannuated rifles. They really should find a new PR consultant. Speaking of which, the show was compered by Peter Tatchell - world-renowned self-publicist, gay rights activist, and now rebel group impresario - who stressed that he was not involved with the organisation "in any way", but was solely a facilitator, bringing it's message to the world. He did manage to find a half-decent venue - the Institute of Contemporary Arts on The Mall between Admiralty Arch and Buckingham Palace. Never has an African coup been launched from so salubrious a postcode.
ZFM have a website. The address - www.zfm.cc - indicates that it is registered in the Cocos Islands (population 630). Is this an unintended consequence of global warming? Are a group of Indian Ocean islanders plotting to take over Zimbabwe before their home disappears below the waves? The Cocos Islands are an Australian territory. Is the combination of rising damp and direct rule from Canberra proving too much? Do they see their future with well-known anti-Australians in southern Africa? The islanders have 287 working telephones, one radio station, no TV station, and no railway. They would feel at home in Zimbabwe. Or could it be that ZFM's website was registered as .cc because .com, .org and .net were already taken. Whatever; they appear to have had some small help with their site, which so far features "Communiqué 1" and a couple of photos, from a web design company in less-than-exotic North London.
If ZFM are who they say they are, why have they talked the talk before walking the walk. Most "rebel" groups at least have the tactical foresight to take a couple of hostages, or blow up a few telephone poles, before presenting themselves to the world. So far, so ludicrous. But in Zimbabwe this may play, not as farce, but as tragedy. For this drivel is the answer to J Moyo's dreams. Here, on one video cassette, are all the visions of his paranoid mind. A "gay gangster" - once memorably described by Mugabe as British minister Peter Hain's "husband" - is seen associating himself with promises of violent revolution, in the centre of British imperialism. Moyo has been spouting this kind of rubbish week after month after year, and suddenly the strands of "evidence", like London buses, all conveniently arrive together. Perhaps this is not so much the answer to Jonathan's dreams, as the product of them. This will go down like iced-beer with Moyo's friends in Africa and betond who, of course, suspected it all along. And don't bet against more ransacking of offices, more mass arrests, more treason charges, more draconian laws - on the pretext of this ridiculous film.
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From The Daily News Online Edition, 14 November
ANZ directors further remanded
A Harare magistrate has further remanded four directors of Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe (ANZ) to February, saying there were reasonable grounds to believe an offence was committed when they allegedly authorised the publication of the Daily News without a licence last month. Harare regional magistrate Mishrod Guvamombe remanded the four - ANZ chief executive Sam Sipepa Nkomo, finance director Brian Mutsau and directors Stuart Mattinson and Rachael Kupara, to 6 February 2004. They were remanded out of custody on $50 000 bail. The four directors were arrested two weeks ago, following the publication of The Daily News on 25 October, a day after Administrative Court President Michael Majuru ruled that ANZ should be granted a licence to publish in Zimbabwe. ANZ is the publisher of Zimbabwe's largest circulating daily, The Daily News, and the weekly Daily News on Sunday. The two publications were barred from publishing by the police in September, after the Supreme Court ruled that ANZ should register with the government-appointed Media and Information Commission (MIC) before it could consider the company's constitutional challenge of the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA).
AIPPA requires all journalists and publishing firms to register with the MIC, which denied ANZ registration, a decision that the publishing group appealed in the Administrative Court. The Administrative Court last month ruled that the MIC was improperly constituted and that a properly constituted commission should grant ANZ a licence on or before 30 November. However, Guvamombe on Thursday said the argument by ANZ lawyer Beatrice Mtetwa that the Administrative Court registered ANZ when it made its ruling was incorrect. The magistrate said: "I am of the view that clearly, there is a reasonable suspicion that an offence was committed. It's proper that the accused directors should be placed on remand on the same bail conditions." Guvamombe made the ruling following Mtetwa's refusal for remand application to the Magistrates Court. The application sought the removal of the four directors from remand, arguing that their arrest and subsequent charging was illegal.
ANZ had argued that the ruling by the Administrative Court authorised it to publish because Section 8 of AIPPA allows mass media houses to continue publishing while their applications are being considered by the MIC. The company also argued that the courts had erred in charging the directors as individuals because ANZ was a properly registered firm that should have been charged for the alleged offence. But Guvamombe dismissed the argument, saying the state's case was stronger because it was backed by Section 385 (6) of the Criminal Procedures and Evidence Act (Chapter 9:07), which clearly stated that individual directors could be charged for offences committed by a company they represent. However, the Bulawayo High Court refused to place Washington Sansole, another ANZ director charged with the same offence, on remand. But Guvamombe said the Sansole case was a different matter because it had ended with the police and did not proceed to remand. Mtetwa told reporters after the magistrate's ruling that it was ironic that Guvamombe should be dissociating Sansole from his fellow directors when they belonged to the same company and faced the same charges. "It does not make sense for the court to make such a ruling. The magistrate failed to address the constitutional matter," Mtetwa said.
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From News24 (SA), 13 November
Zim needs wider consultation
Kuala Lumpur - The powerful trio of Australia, South Africa and Nigeria should not be allowed to override other Commonwealth countries in deciding whether Zimbabwe stays banned from the group, Malaysia's foreign minister said. Syed Hamid Albar said the "troika" of countries had strong influence over the 54-nation organisation of Britain and its former colonies, amid differences among the group about whether the restrictions on Zimbabwe should be lifted. "I don't think a few countries should be able to dictate the decision of the whole of Commonwealth," Syed Hamid was quoted as saying by the Bernama national news agency after holding talks on Wednesday with his visiting Zimbabwean counterpart Stan Isack Mudenge. The Commonwealth secretariat should consult broadly with members and "take note of the feelings, the underlying factors within the Commonwealth countries," Syed Hamid said. Zimbabwe was suspended from Commonwealth decision making councils after President Robert Mugabe's government was accused of intimidation and vote rigging in March 2002 presidential elections. But Commonwealth members are divided over Zimbabwe's exclusion, and whether it should be allowed to attend the group's next summit, due in Nigeria next month. Australian Prime Minister John Howard has been among those urging tougher measures against Mugabe, whom he has called an "unelected despot". South Africa has pressed for more diplomatic steps. Commonwealth Secretary-General Don McKinnon, a New Zealander, said last month that Mugabe's government must engage political opponents, and that ending restrictions on free speech is among conditions Mugabe's government must meet if it is to be readmitted.
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From The Mail & Guardian (SA), 12 November
Zim land grab turns sour
Chris Anold Msipa
Harare - The "fast-track" land grab and resettlement the Zimbabwean government claims to have completed "successfully" has been described as one huge national scandal. "What the world is hearing or reading differs greatly from the reality on the ground, especially when it comes to who benefited from the programme. No Zimbabwean is against land redistribution, but the manner in which it has been handled is not right," says a retired accountant, who only gives his name as Nyani. His comment comes amid reports of fresh confusion and clashes on the farms, where senior government officials and politicians from the ruling Zanu PF are displacing peasants and ex-combatants of Zimbabwe's liberation war resettled during the controversial exercise. Three years ago it was the poor blacks against whites in the fight for farms. The tables have now turned, as the rich blacks have descended on the peasants. The former guerrillas, who led the initial invasions in 2000, are threatening retaliation. Endy Mhlanga, secretary general of the Zimbabwe Liberation War Veterans' Association, says: "Comrades [ex-combatants] are now being moved off the land they seized, to make way for some civilians, who, at that time, distanced themselves from the jambanja [the violent seizure of the land]." His group is inviting all former guerrillas who have been displaced from their new land to report to the association. "We are prepared to fight," Mhlanga says, but adding, "As an association, we are in the same line with the party [Zanu PF] and the government. "We have discovered a lot of abnormalities in the scheme. We respect the president [Robert Mugabe] and cannot reveal the information until we brief him. He can later tell whoever else he wants ... we just don't want to wash our dirty linen in public." Mhlanga says some incidents are already public knowledge, like the eviction of five disabled ex-combatants from a farm in Beatrice, near the capital, Harare. The property has been taken over by the wife of a late member of Parliament.
Three months ago police set ablaze 1 000 homes during an early-morning raid at Windcrest Farm in the south-eastern region of Masvingo, ordering the original invaders to return to their former communal homes and make way for a Ministry of Foreign Affairs official. The families were allotted the plots in 2001 under the so-called "fast-track" land resettlement programme. Hundreds of other settlers have a pending case with the authorities over Little England Farm in the western Zvimba district, home of Mugabe. His late nephew's wife and about 70 other people have been selected to take over the 6 000ha farm. The evicted families have been resisting the move. "These people and the war veterans were used to grab the farms. Now they are being forced to join hundreds of stranded former farm workers who lost their jobs and homes in the land invasions," says a traditional leader in the district. The elder, who prefers anonymity for fear of reprisal, says the land issue is "a headache. There are too many scandals involving very senior [Zanu PF] party and government officials. Some of them are even selling the farms to aspiring settlers. They are demanding bribes." About a million farm workers lost their jobs when Mugabe's government seized land from 4 500 white farmers between 2000 and 2002, according to human rights groups. Multiple farm ownership is another problem bedevilling the controversial land-reform programme in Zimbabwe, amid reports that some Cabinet ministers have properties registered, in some cases, in the names of their children. Mugabe in July ordered senior officials who had seized more than one farm to surrender all and remain with one, under his "One Man One Farm Policy", which seems to have been ignored so far. However, Zanu PF national chairperson John Nkomo is quoted as saying that about 60 000ha of land have been returned. But he neither mentions names nor any action likely to be taken against those who returned the farms.
Bright Garikai Mombeshora, a commentator on agricultural issues, says while the disturbances on the farms continue, they are also laying the foundation for more difficulties ahead if the state does not come up with clear guidelines. "The fundamental problem regarding the agricultural sector at the moment is the direction the government wants to take. It doesn't seem to have a clear policy as to how it wants it to develop," he says. Mombeshora says there was no need to destroy an already-established infrastructure by white farmers to institute a land-reform programme. The authorities should have employed simple approaches like collecting the names and number of people interested in land and the size of areas needed to cater for them, without removing existing producers. He says financial institutions that were dealing with the commercial farming sector before the invasions also need clarity on who will settle the debts and other transactions left behind by the evicted white farmers.
Ex-combatants in 2000 reportedly defied orders by Vice-President Joseph Msika, the then interior minister John Nkomo and the Minister of Agriculture Joseph Made not to seize farms. Mugabe was out of the country when the noise began. On his return he quickly declared the illegal occupations as a "demonstration" against unfair distribution of land, and barred forcible eviction of the invaders, plunging the country into chaos and sparking shortages of food, fuel and other essential commodities. But Mugabe needed support from war veterans and rural masses ahead of last year's presidential poll. The government says persistent drought has frustrated production, especially of crops, in parts of the country. It does not explain the reduction in irrigation activities on the seized farms, where there are reports of massive looting and vandalising of equipment, either by former farm workers or the new settlers. The looted equipment is reportedly resold cheaply. A report by a team of retired senior civil servants - appointed by Mugabe this year to review the resettlement exercise -- says whites now hold 3% of the country's arable land. Before the invasion, they used to own 30%, or 11-million hectares. While the state claims to have resettled 300 000 families, the study shows only 127 200 benefited from the exercise. Many of the farmers who fled their properties with their workers have either crossed into neighbouring Zambia or Mozambique. Others are renting houses in the cities, awaiting the outcome of petitions against their evictions. Some Zanu PF officials say they expect Mugabe, in office since independence from Britain in 1980, to announce his retirement plans next month at the party's annual conference. The civil servants report, they say, supports Mugabe's claim of successfully returning land to its rightful owners, one of the major conditions he set before he steps down.
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From VOA News, 14 November
Striking Zimbabweans doctors arrested
Tendai Maphosa
Zimbabwean authorities have arrested state-employed doctors who went on strike for higher wages. The arrest of three doctors was made when they turned up for a scheduled meeting with the government negotiating council. Spokesman for the striking doctors, Dr. Phibion Manyanga, who is in hiding, told VOA that the doctors were aware of the police plan to arrest them. The head of the Public Service Commission, Mariyawanda Nzuwa, said the doctors' demands for a salary increase of up to 8,000 percent is ridiculous and unacceptable. Mr. Nzuwa said even President Robert Mugabe does not earn as much as the doctors are demanding. He also accused the doctors of trying to gain public sympathy by deliberately understating their income. At the unofficial rate, junior doctors now earn about $63 a month, while their mid-level counterparts earn about $80 a month. Under Zimbabwean law, it is illegal for doctors, who are considered essential workers, to strike. The doctors went on strike on October 23, after several attempts failed to get their salaries increased. They defied a court order to return to work, saying they first want government assurances their salaries will be increased. Zimbabwe's health care system, once considered one of the best in sub-Saharan Africa, is collapsing because of a severe shortage of money for salaries, medical equipment and essential drugs. Many of Zimbabwe's doctors, nurses and other health care professionals are leaving the country for places offering better pay.
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From The Zimbabwe Independent, 14 November
Chidyausiku allows police appeal on ANZ
Vincent Kahiya
In a setback to attempts by Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe (ANZ) to get the Daily News back on the streets, Chief Justice Chidyausiku has condoned the late filing of papers of appeal by the police who are opposing a High Court ruling by Justice Yunis Omerjee that the company should be allowed to operate. At the time of Justice Omerjee's judgement on September 18, the court ordered by consent that the police should lodge any appeal by close of business on September 22. Omerjee ordered the police to return computer equipment confiscated from ANZ and to stop interfering with the activities of the organisation. The Daily News and its sister paper, the Daily News on Sunday, were closed on September 12, a day after Chidyausiku dismissed an ANZ application challenging the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (Aippa).
The latest ruling by Chidyausiku, made last week, effectively means that the police can withhold the equipment until the case has been determined by the Supreme Court. Although the lawyers representing the police managed to file the notice of appeal on the ANZ judgement before the September 22 deadline, they only filed their court papers with arguments after the deadline. The police lawyer, a Mrs FC Maxwell of the Attorney-General's Office, said the appeal had not been filed on time because their messenger was delayed and the office ran out of bond paper while preparing the documents. Chidyausiku allowed this explanation to prevail. "The explanation for the delay is plausible," the Chief Justice said in a chambers order. "The bond paper ran out causing the preparation of the record to be completed a few hours after the deadline. "In any event the appeal itself was lodged on time. It is the record of the proceedings that could not be filed on time. There is hardly any prejudice that could have been caused to the respondent," said Chidyausiku.
He said condonation was allowed as the police had a prospect of success in the application. "In cases, as in casu, where the delay is minimal and the explanation for the delay is plausible, condonation should be granted unless prospects of success on the merits are virtually non-existent and the applicant is only seeking to delay the day of reckoning," said Chidyausiku. Advocate Adrian de Bourbon, for the ANZ, had argued the appeal by the police was "fatally defective in that it was not an appeal against the relief granted by the learned judge (Omerjee) but the reasoning behind the granting of the relief". The condonation means the Supreme Court is now swamped with cases to do with the media. The Supreme Court has since November last year still not produced a judgement on the application by the Independent Journalists Association of Zimbabwe challenging the constitutionality of Aippa. It has to rule on the police's appeal against Omerjee's judgement. And it has yet to decide on the appeal by the Media and Information Commission after the Administrative Court ruled that the regulatory body was not properly constituted and that ANZ should be deemed licensed by November 30.
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From Press Gazette (UK), 14 November
Jail ordeal of Daily News chief
By Jon Slattery
The chief executive of Zimbabwe's Daily News has told how he and fellow directors of the newspaper were kept in a cell infested with lice and bed bugs following their arrest. Sam Nkomo said he and other directors of Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe were held by police after The Daily News reappeared for one day last month, but was again forced to close. Nkomo, whose niece was held hostage by police searching for him, voluntarily gave himself up along with three ANZ directors. They were then charged with operating a newspaper without a licence. Speaking at a press conference in London, Nkomo said: "we were taken to the cells and I heard a policewoman say, 'These are special people, give them a special cell'. I felt we were being treated so nicely. Little did I know was that that 'special cell' was one infested with lice and bed bugs, there were millions of them in there." The next day fellow prisoners came to their rescue and swapped cells with them "They sacrificed themselves for us. That's Zimbabwe. That's our country we love so much."
Nkomo, who supported the struggle for liberation and was jailed for 15 years under the Ian Smith regime, said: " I did not believe in my life time that I would see a government I helped to install and the freedom I helped to fight for utterly turn against me." He accused Robert Mugabe's regime of trying to "wear The Daily News down" through the courts and bankrupt it by costly legal actions. Police seized the newspaper's computers as "evidence" when it was first closed down in an armed police raid on 12 September. "We are trying to get our journalists laptops to work from home or places other than our offices, " Nkomo said. "We employ 340 staff, including journalists, and we have 1000 vendors dependent on The Daily News. The strategy of the regime is to scatter staff so that when we come back we will have lost the staff." The Daily News is trying to get newspapers outside Zimbabwe to give some of its journalists jobs until they are safe to return. Nkomo said The Daily News was determined to keep up its legal battle to win the right to publish and was also trying to mobilise international pressure to get Mugabe to stop persecuting the newspaper. He called on the British Government to be more outspoken in its condemnation of the Mugabe regime, claiming "Quiet diplomacy is doing no good. I think the British Government should be more vocal in support of the masses in Zimbabwe".
Bill Saidi, editor of The Daily News on Sunday, said a reign of terror had been unleashed against independent journalists in the country. "If you live in Zimbabwe as a journalist you can feel like a terrorist," he said. "They call you names, say you are disloyal and a 'puppet of the imperialists'." Saidi spoke of his desperation at seeing his newsroom stripped of it's computers. "There's a vast emptiness in the newsroom. There's no conference because there's no paper. You are looking at nothing. Tomorrow there's nothing. After the Saturday we published, we all came into the office and we were filled with spirit. We were going to produce 16 pages. We were all ready. Half the newspaper was done." Instead, the paper was raided by police and has not published since. Gugu Moyo, company secretary and legal adviser to The Daily News told the press conference that 60 journalists had been arrested under the notorious Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act. "This law is to silence the independent media," she said. "Every two weeks a journalist is arrested and charged with something. The impact of this law is very traumatic and has a chilling effect on journalists."
Anyone able to donate a laptop to The Daily News can contact Press Gazette on 44 (0) 208 565 4448
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From IOL (SA), 14 November
McKinnon: Zimbabwe is on a downward spiral
Brussels - Zimbabwe's chances of having its suspension from the Commonwealth lifted before a summit next month suffered a new blow on Friday as the 54-nation group's head said the situation there is getting worse. Harare was suspended from the Commonwealth's decision-making councils in March 2002 over its human rights record, and after President Robert Mugabe was re-elected in polls widely condemned as rigged. "Since then the troika of Commonwealth leaders has sought to engage with the Zimbabwe government in order to help find a solution that would benefit all the people of the country," Commonwealth head Don McKinnon said in a speech here. "I myself have sought such engagement. But despite our best efforts, all our attempts at establishing a dialogue have been spurned and we have seen the situation in Zimbabwe deteriorate continuously," he added.
The Commonwealth's Heads of Government and State Meeting (CHOGM) is set for December 5 in the Nigerian capital Abuja, under the banner of Development And Democracy: Partnership For Peace And Prosperity." Neither Zimbabwe nor Pakistan, also suspended in the wake of General Pervez Musharraf's October 1999 coup, have been invited to the Abuja summit. Last month McKinnon listed five changes that would have to take place in Zimbabwe for its suspension to be reconsidered, including the repeal of harsh media laws and an end to the harassment of the political opposition. Under its controversial land reform programme launched in 2000, the Zimbabwe government took over white-owned farms for redistribution to new black farmers. The eviction of white farmers has been partly blamed by aid agencies and critics of Mugabe's regime for Zimbabwe's worst famine in living memory which has left about two-thirds of the country's 11.6 million people facing severe food shortages. The Commonwealth is made up primarily of former British colonies.
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From The Zimbabwe Independent, 14 November
Sekeramayi denies Zim helped Colombian rebels
Dumisani Muleya
Defence minister Sydney Sekeramayi has dismissed as an "absolute fabrication" reports that Zimbabwe was involved in the covert supply of arms to rebels in Colombia. Sekeramayi said media reports in North and South America were part of a "smear campaign" against the government. "It's a smear campaign by those opposed to the government of Zimbabwe," Sekeramayi said this week. "There is absolutely no truth in it whatsoever. It actually emanates from the usual hostile quarters that we all know." Reports last month in Ecuador, Colombia and Miami, United States, said the weapons, worth US$240 000, had been transferred in 2000 from Ecuador to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), the main anti-government guerrilla movement in Colombia. El Nuevo Herald, a Spanish language sister paper of the Miami Herald, reported from the Colombian capital Bogata last month that documents in its possession showed that the armaments, originally belonging to the Ecuadorean Air Force, had been sold fictitiously to Zimbabwe Defence Industries, but had in fact been transferred to Farc. Some of the weapons were reportedly to be used in an assassination attempt on the Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, and had also been used in more recent attacks against armed forces in Colombia. Farc and other guerrilla groups have been fighting the Colombian government for four decades in a bid to seize power. The rumbling war is inextricably entwined with Colombia's vast drugs trade.
The arms - M-72-A2 rockets and cluster bombs - were originally bought by Ecuador in 1977. In 2000, the then Ecuadorean minister of defence, Admiral Hugo Unda, decommissioned the weapons as "obsolete", and arranged for them to be "sold to Zimbabwe", using the Brazilian company ATR as an intermediary, at a considerable discount to their real value of US$3 million, the reports claim. ATR has denied any involvement in the deal. But El Nuevo Herald said the arms were transported in an Ilyushin 76 aircraft - registration number UR 76767 - which left Russia, landed in Mexico en route to Ecuador, and then filed a false flight plan from the Ecuadorean military base at Taura to Chile, Brazil, Angola and finally Zimbabwe. The shipment, however, was in fact only flown as far as Iquique in Chile, and was then ferried to various places in Colombia by a fleet of smaller planes. Another figure accused of being at the centre of the deal is the Anglican bishop of the Ecuadorean capital Quito, Walter Crespo Guarderas, who is currently being held there in prison, and is said to have brokered the arrangement. Guarderas recently admitted having links to Farc but denied involvement in the arms shipment, saying that a confession he had made had been extracted from him using drugs placed in his food while he was incarcerated.
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From News24 (SA), 15 November
Zim farm workers beaten
Harare - An opposition member of parliament said on Saturday he feared for his life after six workers on his coffee farm were shot at and beaten with rifle butts. Roy Bennett, a member of parliament for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change said the workers on his farm, Charleswood Estate, were attacked at dawn by a group of armed men. He was in the capital Harare, 700km west of his farm in the Chimanimani district when the incident occurred. A witness, who cannot be named for his own safety, told Bennett he saw workers in a coffee berry washing plant being shot at and beaten with rifle butts after they fell to the ground. The witness was forced to flee before determining the workers' injuries, said Bennett. Spokespersons at police headquarters in Harare were on Saturday unavailable for comment. "What they are doing is trying to get me to go back there so they can kill me," said Bennett, who has been repeatedly detained and beaten up by ruling Zanu PF party militants and security forces since he was elected to opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai's party in June 2000.
Attempts to seize Bennett's 3 000ha mountainous estate under President Robert Mugabe's "fast track" land redistribution have been overturned by the High Court. However, ruling party supporters remain on 140ha of the 250ha on which arable crops such as coffee can be grown. Despite court rulings, police and ruling party activists again invaded the farm buildings on Friday, among them four armed men claiming to be security guards for the government's Agricultural and Rural Development Authority, which wants possession. "I think they were army guys in civilian clothes," said Bennett. "They said they have been told from Harare to come and take over the farm," he said. "They said 'you guys have got the farm now but it won't be for long and then see what we are going to do to you'." Shortly after 05:00 on Saturday a group was seen moving around on the farm. "The witness saw from a distance shots being fired, people falling, and rifle butts being used," said Bennett.
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From ZWNEWS, 16 November
Treatment denied
One of the workers from Charleswood Estate who were severely beaten yesterday morning was denied medical treatment.. Workers on the farm, which is owned by opposition MP Roy Bennett, were attacked with rifle butts and planks of wood, with one man being particularly severely injured. However, the police and armed civilians who had attacked the workers refused to allow him to be removed from the farm for treatment until much later on Saturday, when he was finally taken to Mutare for treatment. The armed civilians, said to be employees of ARDA, a government agricultural agency, were lead by a Mr Zvinoira, who said he had been sent by the governor of Manicaland province to take over the farm. The police were lead by Sgt Nasho and Chanunorwa Muusha of Chimanimani police. Sgt Nasho is currently facing criminal proceedings relating to previous violent incidents on the farm.
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From The Sunday Times (SA), 16 November
Zimbabwe's isolation its own making
Mugabe belatedly tries to woo the Commonwealth
Sunday Times Foreign Desk
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe is making frantic efforts to get a late invitation to next month's Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (Chogm) in Abuja, Nigeria, from which he is barred. Mugabe is engaged in critical talks with Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, in a bid to get an invitation to the summit, which runs from December 5 to 8. It is understood South African President Thabo Mbeki and Australian Prime Minister John Howard, who is also Commonwealth chairman and head of its troika on Zimbabwe, are also being consulted. "Consultations are still going on and a final decision on the issue will be made in due course," a senior official at the Nigerian High Commission in Harare said. "Presidents Obasanjo and Mugabe are talking." Nigerian Foreign Affairs Director of International Organisations Olusegun Akinsanya said the Nigerian president was engaged in consultations over Mugabe's ban from Chogm. Obasanjo said last month that Mugabe would not be invited to the Abuja meeting unless there was a positive "sea change" in Zimbabwe. However, Mbeki's spokesman, Bheki Khumalo, said he was not aware of the issue.
Mugabe has since promised to make sweeping reforms of state institutions, including the Cabinet, in an attempt to get a Chogm invitation. Last week, Mbeki was in Canada and said the Zimbabwe crisis would be resolved soon. This was seen as an attempt to do Mugabe's bidding for an invitation. But British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Howard have openly threatened to boycott the meeting if Mugabe attends. Howard, who has described Mugabe an "unelected despot", said it would be a "tragedy" to allow the Zimbabwean leader to attend the Abuja meeting. Queen Elizabeth, the head of the Commonwealth, might also stay away if Mugabe is allowed to participate. Zimbabwe was suspended from the Commonwealth in March of last year. It was stated that the country would not be readmitted unless it adopted fundamental democratic and electoral reforms, something it has not yet done and appears to have no intention of doing. Commonwealth Secretary-General Don McKinnon said this week in Brussels that Harare's chances of having its suspension lifted were between "slim and none", because it was refusing to adopt reforms, while the situation in the country went from bad to worse.
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From The Zimbabwe Independent, 15 November
Mugabe's 'reforms' cast doubt on talks
Dumisani Muleya
President Robert Mugabe's proclaimed sweeping reforms of state institutions, including cabinet and Zanu PF, have put talks between the ruling party and opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) on ice. Zanu PF sources say the ruling party unilaterally suspended informal talks with the MDC recently to first complete its leadership regeneration through the ongoing provincial elections ahead of the party's annual conference in Masvingo next month. South African President Thabo Mbeki has said Zanu PF is undergoing a "leadership renewal". He has also said the Zimbabwe crisis would be resolved by June next year and reaffirmed last week that a solution would be found soon to the current crisis. Mugabe, who recently told a central committee meeting that he would be making changes to state institutions, including his "war cabinet", is said to be preoccupied with his internal re-organisation exercise which means talks with the MDC are on the back burner. After promising reforms two weeks ago, Mugabe launched the changes last week by appointing Jewel Bank chief executive Gideon Gono as the new Reserve Bank governor and announcing new provincial governors. Mugabe is also set to make changes in the armed forces command structure after Zimbabwe Defence Forces commander General Vitalis Zvinavashe confirmed he was retiring next month. Zvinavashe has been linked to the post of vice-president left vacant by the death of Simon Muzenda. Last weekend he said he was ready for any "national" appointment. He ruled out accepting a post in the districts.
Mugabe also last week removed Lieutenant-General Mike Nyambuya from the army and made him Manicaland governor amid speculation that he was trying to purge "problematic" senior army officers. Nyambuya and senior army colleagues like Major-General Philip Sibanda had reportedly been targeted for redeployment from the military to other areas to defuse tensions within the armed forces ranks. Air Commodore Elson Moyo was recently elevated to Air Vice Marshal as part of the changes. Airforce commander Perence Shiri has been tipped to replace Zvinavashe as ZDF commander. It is understood that Mugabe and Zanu PF officials are keen to proceed with the leadership shake-up before they can re-engage the MDC. Going into talks divided would only provide a hostage to fortune to the opposition, they calculate. The two parties had until July 31 been engaged in talks. Sources say Zanu PF wants to go to the Masvingo conference with new leaders, at least at provincial level, so that it can claim to have finally grasped the reform nettle. Those vying to succeed Mugabe are also anxious about the outcome of provincial polls as they have a major bearing on the succession race. The ruling party, sources say, wants to deal with its succession crisis and corrosive internal factionalism ahead of any further talks. Sources say Mugabe's succession dilemma has profoundly divided the party and become a major stumbling block to a negotiated settlement. Zanu PF infighting over talks and other policy issues has resulted in the ruling party failing to adopt a common position on a wide range of matters. Sources say this is the primary reason why it has unceremoniously disengaged from dialogue.
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From IPS, 15 November
No barriers too great for illegal immigrants
Wilson Johwa
Bulawayo - It is the middle of the month and the buses headed for Francistown, the border town in neighbouring Botswana, 160 kilometres away, are leaving half full. But vehicles driving in the opposite direction, back to Zimbabwe, are overcrowded. That is because traders, mostly women, are returning home. They cross the border at the end of each month to sell an assortment of items including cigarettes, spirits and wood carvings. What drives them is the desire to earn the Pula, the stable Botswana currency that fetches a good rate on Zimbabwe's thriving parallel market for foreign currency. For those enterprising enough to get hold of it, the Pula - like other hard currencies - is making the difference between sustaining a family and sinking into poverty. As Zimbabwe's political impasse worsens the humanitarian and economic crises, runaway inflation of 500 percent has rendered the local currency literally worthless.
However, not everyone going to Botswana has items to sell. Some go in search of part-time employment as domestic helpers, construction hands and even cattle herders. Up to 20 percent of Zimbabwe's population is estimated to have sought sanctuary and a living wage in neighbouring countries. Even struggling Mozambique now has an estimated 400,000 Zimbabweans. Botswana is one of the popular destinations for the very desperate who use any of the various footpaths mainly along the 100 kilometre-stretch between the smaller border posts at Mphoengs and Maitengwe. One such border jumper is Morris, who lives about 200 kilometres from the main border post, Plumtree. Since August last year the 23-year-old has sneaked into Botswana three times. Save for his last trip last month when he secured a job on a construction site, he had been nabbed and deported before securing employment.
Botswana's immigration authorities have said they cannot cope with illegal immigrants from Zimbabwe who are arriving in ever bigger numbers. Estimated at over 60,000, the flood of illegal immigrants threatens to overwhelm the country's population of 1.7 million. Recently, the state built a new detention centre for illegal immigrants near the border with Zimbabwe. However, the government is also thinking long-term. In October last year, the authorities began erecting an electric fence meant to protect Botswana's key livestock industry recently hit by an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease traced to Zimbabwe. The 500-kilometre-long fence is also aimed at keeping out border jumpers. Although Zimbabwe voiced its disquiet over the fence, accusing Botswana of seeking to create a Gaza Strip like in Palestine, authorities in Botswana hope it will keep out border jumpers. For now, however, Morris says slipping into Botswana is still possible. "They haven't switched on the power so people are still crossing illegally," he says.
Police in Plumtree say on each week day Botswana prison trucks spew a minimum of 80 Zimbabwean deportees at the border post. The figure is now expected to swell three-fold because during the festive season the Botswana government steps up patrols. In the past, deportees were fined or detained on both sides of the border. But now they are seldom charged in Zimbabwe. Officers say this is because the Plumtree courts and police lack the necessary stationery. But this is unlikely to elicit sympathy from Botswana and has undoubtedly further strained relations between the two neighbours. "Do you need stationery to charge someone?" comments Moshe Setimela of the Botswana Ministry of Labour and Home Affairs. "They won't charge them because it's their own people and they understand the situation that they are running away from."
Among those classified as border jumpers are traders who would have involuntarily over-stayed in Botswana while awaiting payment for items sold. Tafadzwa, a bus conductor who travels Francistown daily, says many passengers successfully jump the border back into Zimbabwe to avoid paying a fine of 10 Pula (two U.S. dollar) for each day overstayed.Although Botswana is a close enough destination for daring Zimbabweans intent on escaping growing poverty, 22-year-old Eriphas says he had rather go to South Africa where, he says, there are better prospects and less xenophobia. In Botswana, the deluge of Zimbabweans has caused tension, with the Tswanas blaming the "Makwerekwere" - as Zimbabweans are derogatively known - for the upsurge in crime. In Zimbabwe the press regularly highlights the misfortunes of fellow nationals in Botswana. A local man was recently reported to have died in a prison fight. Another was shot by the police while three others were said to have been poisoned. A month before, authorities in Botswana buried 12 unclaimed Zimbabwean bodies who had died in unexplained circumstances.
To Eriphas, Botswana is an unwelcoming place with relatively few opportunities. As a member of the Johane Masowe Apostolic Church whose female flock is identifiable by flowing white robs, Eriphas says fellow sect members will help him pass through the South African border post. "We have been trading for a long time," he says. "We know the techniques of crossing into South Africa without a passport." To curb the influx of Zimbabweans, South Africa - host to about three million Zimbabweans - has just announced more stringent visa requirements. Locals are required to pay a surety cash guarantee of 1,000 Rand (146 U.S. dollars) or the Zimbabwe dollar equivalent. Previously, Zimbabweans were only required to deposit the equivalent of about 50 U.S. dollars before travelling to South Africa. The South African High Commission also says Zimbabweans willing to pay in foreign currency must show proof that the money was sourced from a local bank - a tall order in a country where most foreign currency transactions take place on the parallel market. For the growing numbers of hungry Zimbabweans, however, the desire to cross the border is often so compelling that no risk seems too great and few barriers impenetrable.
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From News24 (SA), 16 November
Mugabe wants invitation
Abuja - President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria will meet Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe in Harare on Monday, ahead of a Commonwealth summit to which the Zimbabwean leader has not been invited. In just under three weeks, Nigeria will host the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Abuja, bringing together 52 leaders from the club of mostly former British colonies for wide-ranging talks on world affairs. Obasanjo's spokesperson Remi Oyo said on Sunday that the Nigerian leader would leave Abuja overnight for a one-day visit to meet Mugabe, and that the Commonwealth meeting would be on the agenda. Zimbabwe has been suspended from the Commonwealth's councils since March after Mugabe was returned to power in an election which the opposition and many in the international community rejected as deeply flawed. But both South Africa and Nigeria have since argued that Mugabe's rule has improved sufficiently for his country to be readmitted.
News reports in Harare suggested that Mugabe is lobbying for a last-minute invitation to the three-day Abuja summit, which will be formally opened by Britain's Queen Elizabeth II on December 5. "There's no way the two leaders could meet without discussing CHOGM," Obasanjo's spokesperson said. Britain, Australia and the Commonwealth's general secretary Don McKinnon have insisted that Mugabe is not invited, and the summit programme on the Commonwealth web site makes it clear that the suspension stands. But Obasanjo holds the key to invitations to Nigeria, and his spokesperson would not entirely rule out a change of plan. "Every new day presents its challenges," Oyo said. "I don't think we should make any definitive statement." She added, however, that Obasanjo would be looking to Mugabe to present evidence that he has begun to address the Commonwealth's concerns over his style of rule, which many have criticised as brutal and despotic. "The president is keen on Zimbabwe going on with the agreements that have been reached. He wants to ensure that Zimbabwe is on the right path," Oyo said.
This week McKinnon said in Brussels that Mugabe had spurned efforts to engage Harare in dialogue, and that "we have seen the situation in Zimbabwe deteriorate continuously". He said that Zimbabwe could not be brought back within the Commonwealth fold until Mugabe's regime ended its harassment of the opposition and involved the United Nations in its controversial land reform programme. Any new disagreement over the issue could widen the rift between African Commonwealth members - led by South Africa and Nigeria - and the so-called "white Commonwealth", represented by Britain and Australia. African leaders favour a tactic of "quiet diplomacy" to try to persuade Mugabe to improve his rule, while those outside the continent, with the support of the Zimbabwean opposition, remain committed to his isolation. Mugabe believes that he has been victimised by white leaders in revenge for a land reform programme which has seen large swathes of land owned by white Zimbabweans seized for redistribution to blacks. Aid organisations, including the United Nations, say the programme has contributed to severe food shortages threatening the survival of around half the country's 11.6 million people. Pakistan is also suspended from the Commonwealth, following the 1999 military coup which brought Pervez Musharraf to power, and has also not been invited to the Abuja summit.
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From The Star (SA), 17 November
Zim tourism police unit to protect foreign guests
Visitors to troubled Zimbabwe are to get special police protection under a government plan to restore confidence in the country as a tourist destination. A special tourism police unit is to be set up "aimed at increasing the safety of tourists in all the country's tourist destinations", the state-owned Sunday Mail reported yesterday. Amid worsening economic hardship in Zimbabwe, foreign tourists have increasingly been targeted by local criminals. Robberies involving tourists have claimed two lives this year, with an Australian killed at the Victoria Falls resort in January and a young South African tourist shot dead in Bulawayo in June. "The need to set up a tourist police unit will restore confidence in the country's tourist industry," Paul Matamisa of the Zimbabwe Council for Tourism said. He noted: "In the past, crimes committed against our foreign guests failed to go through the courts in time as the tourists ... often returned to their countries before the cases were finalised." Tourism was once one of Zimbabwe's main foreign currency earners, but receipts are reported to have declined tenfold since the start of a controversial land reform programme three years ago. The authorities say Zimbabwe is the victim of a hostile media campaign, and have recently launched a number of initiatives aimed at reviving the country's image as a world-class holiday destination.
Meanwhile, a Zambian newspaper reported yesterday that Zimbabwean border police have started confiscating foreign currency from Zambians passing through the country. In the latest incident, a bus travelling through Zimbabwe en route to South Africa was stopped near Bulawayo, the Sunday Post reported. Police searched passengers on the bus and confiscated large sums of South African rands, US dollars, Botswana pula and Namibian dollars. One Zambian passenger who rides the bus regularly told the Post that bags were searched and items in them were thrown out on the ground. Some students were left stranded at the border after having all their cash confiscated. The report said police had explained they were acting under instruction from the Zimbabwean Reserve Bank. People had received receipts with a serial number and a Zimbabwean government stamp if their money was confiscated. Zimbabwe's high commissioner to Zambia, Cain Mathema, said he had not heard of any such reports. Zimbabwe is facing its worst economic crisis since independence in 1980. The deepening crisis is blamed partly on the state programme that seized thousands of commercial farms from white farmers for redistribution to black Zimbabweans. Zimbabwe is also suffering shortages of local currency - blamed on runaway inflation, the central bank's inability to print conventional notes quickly enough, and people hoarding money.
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From The Guardian (UK), 17 November
Zimbabwe seizes foreign currency
Andrew Meldrum in Pretoria
Zimbabwean police have thrown up roadblocks across the country in a desperate bid to seize foreign currency, whether legally held or not. "It's terrible. Police stand by as youth militia give body searches to everybody," one Zimbabwean motorist told the Guardian. "They take all the foreign currency they find, even through legally we are entitled to hold up to $250." In the tourist centre of Victoria Falls, police barged into the offices of big travel agencies and safari operators and confiscated all foreign currency. At the northern Chirundu border post, Zimbabwean police searched Zambian and South African travellers and seized all their currency. Some Zambian students travelling to South Africa were stranded without any funds, according to reports. Economists say the seizures cannot possibly bring in enough foreign currency to alleviate the fuel and electricity crisis. One Harare economist said: "The government should be looking at the root causes of the problem, such as falling exports, an unrealistic exchange rate and negative interest rates. "Instead [Robert] Mugabe is responding the way he always does, by tightening controls and increasing repression. It is destined to fail."
Zimbabwe is bracing for demonstrations tomorrow called by the trade union congress against policies that have resulted in an annual inflation rate of 455%, 70% unemployment and widespread shortages of food and fuel. The Nigerian president, Olusegun Obasanjo, is to visit Harare today to tell President Mugabe why he has not been invited to attend the Commonwealth heads of government meeting to be held in Abuja from December 5-8. Zimbabwe has been suspended from the Commonwealth as a result of the overwhelming evidence of state violence and vote rigging in last year's presidential poll. Mr Obasanjo is expected to point out to Mr Mugabe that his government's recent actions, such as the closure of the largest daily newspaper and the illegal arrests and beatings of union leaders and lawyers, highlight that it has moved even further away from the Commonwealth's democratic principles.
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From The Financial Mail (SA), 14 November
Bill Saidi's penchant for annoying leaders
By Abdul Milazi
Veteran journalist was hounded by Ian Smith and now Mugabe
Author and veteran Southern African journalist Bill Saidi should be enjoying the fruits of the liberation he so fiercely fought for as a young reporter on the African Daily News, Rhodesia's only black daily in the early 1960s. But the bitter irony is that Saidi (66), editor of the Daily News on Sunday, is being crucified by his first editor and mentor, Nathan Shamuyarira, now Zimbabwe's information minister. A tinge of mischief lights up in Saidi's eyes when he talks about African governments. He seems to have a penchant for annoying leaders. He was sought by Rhodesia's Ian Smith on treason charges for inciting black people against the government. While in exile, he was fired from the Zambian Times on orders from President Kenneth Kaunda in 1975 for his "anti-establishment" reports. Recently, Saidi was detained without trial for defying President Robert Mugabe's decree that all journalists be licensed to practise their craft. Defiant as ever, Saidi says aspects of the Access to Information & Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA) violate the right to freedom of expression guaranteed in the constitution. Licensing journalists is tantamount to censoring and controlling the flow of information, he says, because Harare can withdraw at will the licences of journalists judged to have published the "wrong" information.
On October 25, police raided the Daily News offices and arrested him and 17 colleagues on charges of running a newspaper without a licence. The paper had been shut down in September by armed police, leading it to challenge the AIPPA in the supreme court. Saidi quotes Zimbabwe's constitution: "Except by way of his consent or by way of parental discipline, no person shall be hindered in the enjoyment of his freedom of expression, that is to say, freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart ideas and information." Further, he says, s ection 3 states that the constitution is the country's supreme law and that "if any other law is inconsistent with this constitution that other law shall, to the extent of the inconsistency, be void". That was the basis on which his paper appealed to the supreme court in September. "The court refused to hear our argument," he says. "It instead ordered that we should comply. The next day the police shut down our business and confiscated 127 of our computers, which are still at Chikurubi prison."
Yet Saidi and holding company Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe (ANZ) CEO Sam Nkomo were not about to give up. They applied for a licence from the Media & Information Commission, which was rejected outright. "We appealed to the administrative court on October 24. It ruled in our favour and allowed us to publish while we waited for a licence, to be issued on November 13," says Saidi. The next day Saidi and his staff went back to work and printed 50 000 copies, which sold out in two hours. The police again shut down the newspaper and arrested its employees, then all ANZ directors. But the battle to get the Daily News back on the streets continues. "Our next step is to file an application to the administrative court for its October 24 order be enforced pending the appeal. This would allow us to publish while the appeal process was proceeding." Though they have been released, the charges against Saidi and the 17 journalists are still pending. "We are now expected to be engaged in a protracted legal battle to get the paper back on the streets, " he says.
Saidi was forced into exile, in Zambia, in 1963, where he witnessed that country's independence the next year. "In Zambia, Mugabe and the late Joshua Nkomo visited often and gave us hope that Rhodesia would soon also be free. We continued the fight from outside the country. When Ian Smith's government took over, we were devastated," says Saidi. He returned to Zimbabwe at independence in 1980 and joined The Herald as assistant editor. The new Zimbabwe government bought the paper from the Argus group, now Independent Newspapers. He then joined the Daily Gazette as editor, where he broke the story of Mugabe's affair with his secretary, now his wife, and was fired as a result. He joined the Daily News in 1998. Saidi says he doesn't deliberately look for trouble, but trouble seems to follow him everywhere he goes. "I saw a dead body for the first time when I was 10 and it traumatised me. There was a general strike and the dead man had been killed by strikers for supporting the system. That people could kill someone for not agreeing with them unsettled me and I began to think a great deal. My mother told me always to be my own man and to stand up for what I believed in. I guess that made me a bit dogmatic about right and wrong," he says. Saidi's message is that the situation in Zimbabwe should not be allowed to set the tone for Africa.
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Comment from The Financial Mail (SA), 7 November
Top-form Mugabe keeps succession pot boiling
By Tony Hawkins, Harare
Mugabe's talk of retiring has touched off a scramble for power
Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe may have had a health wobble 10 days ago, but in a series of public appearances last week he gave the lie to mostly SA media reports that he was seriously ill. From all accounts he was in top form at Friday's central committee meeting of his ruling Zanu PF party at which he put the wind up many in the business community, with promises to restructure national institutions. Number one target is the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, which is to become "much more of a developmental institution", but other parastatals and even his "war cabinet" will not be spared, he said. Time will tell just what that means, but bankers are battening down the hatches as they anticipate tighter foreign currency and interest rate controls. The president is particularly incensed that the banks have quadrupled prime lending rates, which reached 160% last week. He - and many others - accuse the banks of profiteering in the parallel market for foreign exchange and by pushing up their lending rates much more than their deposit rates. But because inflation has doubled from 228% in March to 456%, real interest rates continue to become increasingly negative, despite prime rate hikes. Businessmen and bankers warn that more controls will make matters worse, a view shared by senior officials and even cabinet ministers. But so frenetic now is the scramble for power once Mugabe finally decides to step down or is forced out of office by ill-health that day-to-day management of the country and the economy is sidelined.
Cynical outsiders believe Mugabe is playing his party and the country like a consummate violinist. His Delphic references to possible retirement, including, according to President Thabo Mbeki, a promise to retire by June 2004, have set off an orgy of factionalism within Zanu PF. The mood is fuelled by the vacancy for deputy president since the death of Simon Muzenda in September. The net effect has been to create the conviction, or fear, that if and when he goes, Mugabe will leave behind a hopelessly divided party unable to agree on a successor. This, cynics argue, suits the president perfectly. Parliamentary speaker and long-standing Mugabe loyalist Emmerson Mnangagwa remains the frontrunner, but there are reports of a stop-Mnangagwa front, spearheaded by two former military men - retired air force chief Josiah Tungamirai and one-time army general Solomon Mujuru. They are said to have the backing of former home affairs minister and leading Ndebele politician, Dumiso Dabengwa. Tungamirai himself is contemplating contesting the Gutu North parliamentary seat, previously held by Muzenda. Also in the running for that seat, apparently, is yet another military man, Gen Vitalis Zvinavashe, head of the army, who is due to retire soon. His name is being touted, too, as a possible successor to Mugabe. Mujuru, a former army chief turned farmer and businessman, is more a behind-the-scenes powerbroker than an active player in the presidential stakes. He has often been associated with bids to build up the standing of former finance minister Simba Makoni (said to be Mbeki's preferred choice).
On the surface, none of these "newer" players fits the Zanu PF mould in which seniority is paramount. Unless this changes, Mnangagwa's main rivals are likely to be defence minister Sydney Sekeramayi (also close to Mugabe and a man who has held numerous cabinet portfolios since independence), and party chairman John Nkomo. His strength is that he is seen as a safe pair of hands, a relative moderate and a man capable of uniting some of the smaller factions against unpopular party heavyweights - a category said to include both Mnangagwa and Sekeramayi. The party is split on more than personalities and regionalism. Though there is no serious ideological divide, there is a d eep split over how to handle the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Hardliners believe they can play the country as Mugabe has - using the courts, the police and army, the state media, and the "green bombers" (youth militants) to keep the opposition under control. The more thoughtful believe this is no longer possible and instead favour a Makoni-like figure in the hope that he would represent so radical a change from Mugabism that swing voters would desert the MDC in droves and support the party of experience. All of this is academic so long as Mugabe holds on to power. His performance last week certainly suggests that he is in no hurry to move on, and that speculation that he will quit at the party congress next month or when he turns 80 in February, is wishful thinking.
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From AFP, 18 November
Mugabe appears confident of 11th-hour invitation to Commonwealth summit
Harare - Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe appeared confident that he would receive a last-minute invitation to next month's Commonwealth summit after talks in Harare with Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo. This year's Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) is due to take place in the Nigerian capital Abuja from December 5 to 8, but Zimbabwe has been suspended from the Commonwealth's councils for the past 20 months because of a controversial presidential election, and has yet to receive an invitation. Obasanjo, speaking after the two presidents met for an hour-and-a-half, did not rule out the possibility of an invitation to Mugabe despite fierce opposition from mainly white Commonwealth countries. "I am consulting," he said when asked whether Zimbabwe would attend the meeting. "I have undertaken to consult as widely as possible. One has to learn from first hand what exactly the situation is here in Zimbabwe," said Obasanjo, adding that he was consulting "with Commonwealth leaders as to what should be the line of action before CHOGM, during CHOGM or after CHOGM".
Mugabe gave the impression he was preparing to pack his bags. "We look forward to attending the Abuja CHOGM," he said, standing next to Obasanjo. He later told state media that Zimbabwe had no case to answer and should be allowed to attend the Abuja talks. "As far as we are concerned, and even as we were placed under sanctions which expired in March ... there is no case really for Zimbabwe to answer. We must be allowed to attend the CHOGM 2003 in Abuja because we are a full member of the Commonwealth," Mugabe was quoted as telling state media by the ZIANA news agency. Zimbabwe was suspended from the Commonwealth's councils following March 2002 presidential elections which returned Mugabe to power. The opposition and many in the international community rejected those polls as deeply flawed and marred by violence. Britain, Australia and Commonwealth Secretary General Don McKinnon have insisted that Mugabe should not be invited to the Abuja summit, but Obasanjo, as host, holds the key to invitations to the meeting.
Earlier Monday, Obasanjo met with Zimbabwe opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai for about 45 minutes. He met with Tsvangirai again after a second meeting with Mugabe. Tsvangirai, the leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), refused to make any comments after the two meetings with Obasanjo. Press reports in Harare have suggested that Mugabe was lobbying for a last-minute invitation to the summit, which will be formally opened by Britain's Queen Elizabeth II on December 5. Nigeria sits on a Commonwealth troika concerning Zimbabwe along with South Africa and Australia, set up last year after Mugabe's re-election. The troika has been split over how to deal with Zimbabwe, with Australia calling last year for Zimbabwe to be fully suspended from the Commonwealth, but Nigeria and South Africa arguing against the move. Obasanjo admitted the troika had failed to agree on Zimbabwe. "We could not reach unanimity, indeed we could not reach consensus. ... That created a problem," he said.
McKinnon said in Brussels last week that Zimbabwe could not be brought back into the Commonwealth fold until Mugabe's regime ended its harassment of the opposition and involved the United Nations in its controversial land reform programme. Any new disagreement over Zimbabwe could widen the rift between African Commonwealth members and the so-called "white Commonwealth," comprising members such as Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand. Mugabe believes that he has been victimised by white leaders in revenge for the land reform programme, which has seen large swathes of land owned by white Zimbabweans seized for redistribution to blacks. He said Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair and Australia's Howard have threatened to boycott the summit if he was invited to Abuja. Aid organisations, including the United Nations, partly blame the land reforms for severe food shortages threatening around half the country's 11.6 million people. Obasanjo left Harare for Abuja on Monday afternoon, cancelling a scheduled trip to Tanzania because President Benjamin Mkapa is away receiving medical treatment in Switzerland, according to a Nigerian embassy official here.
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From The Guardian (UK), 18 November
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