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Archived News
28th October 2003
MDC petition against election result
Zim Court overturns Makoni 2000 result
NCA demo in Harare
MDC pins its hopes on court challenge of poll
Zimbabwe opposition fears another delay in election challenge
Zimbabweans scramble to survive ''Mafia'' economy
Bringing down the hammer
Health concerns over reintroduction of DDT
Zim police crush demo
Police bar lawyers after demo arrests
Zimbabwe judge removes two senior officials for election misconduct case
Top cop's victory scrapped
What happened in Makoni East
Zim farmers call on the army
Lack of foreign currency hampers seed shortages
Zimbabwe gov't uses food as weapon
Spat grows over British aid for Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe land grab policy is 'a failure'
Tables are turned on Mugabe 'war veterans'
Zim protesters 'beaten, dumped'
Finance minister says current budget had underestimated steep rise in inflation
Zimbabwe grants new license to banned newspaper
Tsvangirai back in court
Zim police release protesters
Rights group criticizes politics of food in Zimbabwe
Zvinavashe/Tungamirai vie for Gutu North
Zimbabwe's woes are bringing grief to its wildlife, too
Police shut down Zimbabwe's only independent newspaper
Paper: Nkomo's niece held
Tsvangirai's treason trial delayed once more
Anglican bishop grabs white farm in Zimbabwe
Congo militia resume plunder from foreign forces
Zimbabwe state doctors strike for 8 000% pay rise
Springtime in Harare, and winds of dissent blow with new vigour
Zimbabwe police resume war on defiant newspaper
Police arrest Zimbabwe paper chief
Zvobgo critically ill
Zimbabwe govt wants to nullify white title to land
UN cuts details of Western profiteers from Congo report
Playing the 'imperialist' card has cast a spell on Mugabe's critics
Zimbabwe police continue Daily News crackdown
Four newspaper directors are charged in Mugabe's media crackdown
Mugabe 'flown to South Africa after collapse'
Mugabe sick in SA - rumours fuel mystery
A2 multiple farm owners exposed
The power of political ideas
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From Business Day (SA), 22 October
MDC pins its hopes on court challenge of poll
Case could form part of deal with Zanu PF
International Affairs Editor
Eighteen months after the main opposition party in Zimbabwe, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), initially sought to have the March 2002 presidential election declared invalid, the country's high court is due to hear the case early next month. It is likely to be a long, drawn-out case that could become part of a deal between the MDC and the ruling Zanu PF party, if one is ultimately reached. But the current strained political climate gives little indication that such a deal is imminent. Last weekend security guards at the MDC headquarters in Harare were shot and the MDC says its members continue to face prosecution and intimidation. MDC spokesman Paul Themba-Nyathi said yesterday that the party would consider withdrawing the case if it were to reach an agreement with the ruling party that could ensure free and fair presidential elections. Zanu PF broke off talks with the opposition party when the original petition to have the election declared invalid was brought. Themba-Nyathi said that while there were contacts with Zanu PF, brokered by church groups and the South African high commission, there were no formal talks. He said the contacts were aimed at narrowing the topics to be discussed should formal talks begin.
While the party's shadow minister for legal and constitutional affairs, David Coltart, had concerns about the independence of the judiciary, he said it was still important that the party place before the public what he described as overwhelming evidence of a rigged election. The party said it had hundreds of witnesses who could give evidence of election abuses, including voters being turned away from the polls and the stuffing of ballots. Coltart said nearly 30 of the party's election agents were abducted. All of them were in constituencies where the MDC was expected to win a majority of the vote. Mugabe won 1,6-million votes and the MDC candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai, gained 1,2-million votes. A decision by the court to declare the elections invalid would embarrass observer missions including those from SA and what was then the Organisation for African Unity, now the African Union, that declared the poll substantially free and fair. Election observer missions from the Commonwealth, the Southern African Development Community parliamentary forum and the Norwegian observer mission, said it was neither free nor fair. The European Union's observer mission was not allowed into the country as Zanu PF banned its British, German, Dutch and Swedish members.
At the five-day hearing starting on November 3 the court will hear the legal arguments from MDC lawyers, led by South African advocate Jeremy Gauntlett, as to why the election was invalid. Should the court make a finding in favour of the MDC, a fresh election will have to be held within three months of the ruling. In the second part of the case the MDC intends to present evidence of the violence around the polls and the stuffing of ballots. Although Mugabe has tightened his control of the judiciary over the past 18 months, the MDC is convinced any judge who decides against it will have to give a ruling that will not stand up to scrutiny. Since the election the party has been struggling to obtain copies of the voters roll and ballot papers that were used in the election. Despite a series of judgments in its favour the MDC has been unable to obtain these. Coltart said the records would bolster the MDC's case, but even without them there was sufficient evidence that Zanu PF committed substantial fraud in the election.
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From VOA News, 21 October
Zimbabwe opposition fears another delay in election challenge
Challiss McDonough
Johannesburg - The main opposition party in Zimbabwe is getting ready for its court case challenging last year's presidential election. The case is scheduled to go to court in about two weeks, but the party fears it could be delayed yet again. Two senior leaders of the Zimbabwean Movement for Democratic Change told reporters in Johannesburg that they are afraid the court case challenging the election could be put off again if there is not pressure from the international community to keep the trial on schedule. The opposition party filed its court case in April of last year, after President Robert Mugabe was declared the winner of an election that several international observer missions called deeply flawed. MDC spokesman Paul Themba Nyathi said the party has had to file several legal motions just to get the case into court, despite a provision in the country's Electoral Act requiring election disputes to be handled quickly. "The very fact that it has taken over 18 months for the case to come to court is a serious indictment against the state of Zimbabwe's democracy," he said.
Both the South African embassy and the Zimbabwe Council of Churches have been shuttling back and forth between the Movement for Democratic Change and President Mugabe's ruling Zanu PF party, in a joint attempt to get some kind of dialogue going. So far they have had little success. There are reports that so-called "talks-about-talks" are happening at some level, but it is not clear how much progress they are making. Critics have said the electoral challenge is increasing tensions in Zimbabwe and interfering with attempts to mediate talks between the opposition and Zanu PF. Movement for Democratic Change officials dismissed that criticism. Mr. Nyathi says the MDC is exercising its democratic right to challenge the election.
The party's secretary for legal affairs, David Coltart, said it has offered to postpone the court action if there is a breakthrough in talks with Zanu PF. But he says dropping the case completely is out of the question for now. "The case is in fact our only peaceful weapon, and so we cannot drop that case unless we can be assured that the discussion, the talking process is irreversible," he said. Mr. Coltart says he is afraid Zanu PF and government officials are not taking the case very seriously. He says the High Court has not yet appointed a judge to handle the trial, even though the opening arguments are scheduled for November 3. The opposition official says he does not believe the electoral challenge will lead to a solution to what he calls the Zimbabwe crisis. With the economy on the brink of collapse, he says, the two sides will have to hammer out some kind of political solution long before the court case is over.
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From Reuters, 21 October
Zimbabweans scramble to survive ''Mafia'' economy
By Cris Chinaka
Harare - Zimbabweans battling economic crisis are living by their wits on the streets, in shops, on farms and at home, with everything from paying water bills to buying crop seed or property fraught with the risk of fraud. Police say the southern African country has been hit by a rise in petty crime as shortages empty supermarket shelves and the jobless and inflation rates soar. Critics say corruption and crime is also on the rise among Zimbabwe's business and government elite, where greed has created a race for wealth as political and economic tensions push the once-prosperous country to the brink of collapse. Zimbabwe's economy has shrunk sharply in the last three years. Much of the problem is rooted in the key farming sector where production has dropped more than a half since the government's controversial seizures of white-owned farms for black resettlement.
While a small group of businessmen prospers, the shortages caused by a fall in the agricultural sector and a drought of foreign currency to import goods have left many vulnerable. Now, small-scale cheats and a growing number of big-time crooks - the so-called ''Mafia economy'' - are the biggest headaches for consumers struggling to make ends meet. "Surviving now has gone beyond just running around to get scarce products, and getting the money to buy the products but it also means avoiding those who are trying to cheat you," said Solomon Muchengi, a car mechanic with a Harare firm. "If you really want to survive now you cannot afford the luxury of blinking during your transactions because it can be very costly," he told Reuters. Almost daily, Zimbabwe media carries private and public advertisements warning people about scams ranging from counterfeit money to fake crop seeds. The economic crisis blamed by many government critics on ''mismanagement'' by President Robert Mugabe's Zanu PF party - which has ruled Zimbabwe since independence in 1980 - has left the country with disastrous shortages of fuel, cement, seed, fertiliser and basic foodstuffs such as sugar.
Black market traders sell their wares at up to 10 times the prices set by Mugabe's government. But the hunger for life's basic necessities has also spurred a raging trade in fake goods. Many Zimbabweans now comb newspapers for "health warnings" on what fraud schemes to look out for in what one government minister called a fight against the "Mafia economy." A bag of cement might be partly filled with sand, a tin of cooking oil might turn out to be tightly sealed water while a pack of ''maize seed'' bought at a premium might just be ordinary maize glossed up with paint. Some estate agents have warned property buyers to watch out for crooks "selling" homes they do not own, while urban authorities have put up notices warning consumers to get official receipts for rates and water charges - or risk yet another stinging fraud. An official with the watchdog Consumer Council of Zimbabwe (CCZ) said on Tuesday fake goods had become a big problem. "'We don't have figures...but yes, we are getting many reports of people being cheated, of fake goods on the market," he said. "We are trying to work with the police to address the problem," he added.
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Comment from ZWNEWS, 22 October
Bringing down the hammer
By Michael Hartnack
Zimbabwe's annual tobacco auctions used to have a holiday atmosphere - boisterous families, the nasal droning of the auctioneers, international buyers fingering the contents of the bales. At the end of this selling season a gloomy mood hung over the cavernous auction floors. Just two small, solemn groups of white farmers breakfasted at the cafe overlooking the lines. Out among the bales a shabbily dressed black peasant farmer and his wife argued with an official. Peasant farmers twice brought auctions to a halt during the past season in mass protests against the Z$800 - US$1 exchange rate that the government imposed on the proceeds of sales, which averaged US2.26c/kg. This did not even match the official Z$824 - US$1 exchange rate, and was vastly below the Z$7 000 - US$1 "parallel" or black market rate at which farmers have to buy imported inputs such as tractor spares. State radio, obsessed with racial paranoia, accused the peasant farmers of being a front for disgruntled whites. Traditionally, Virginia flue-cured tobacco was the country's largest single export, with gold trailing second. The biggest recorded crop, in 2000, was 237 million kg and fetched US$600 million. Earnings from tobacco exports paid for imports of petrol, diesel, paraffin and aviation fuel. Even in the searing drought year of 1981, some 1 500 large-scale commercial growers managed to produce 87 million kg which fetched US$141 million. This year, a crop of a mere 78,5m kg was sold for US $191 million, although weather was favourable and production had been opened up to thousands of peasant farmers. Peasants grew 12 million kg and may double this in the next two years, but they say they need an exchange rate of Z$7 500 - US $1 exchange rate to break even.
As the auctions drew to an end, details leaked of a confidential audit on the so-called "fast track land reform" performed by Charles Utete, recently Secretary to the Cabinet, a fanatical Mugabe loyalist, and himself the recipient of one of the farms seized from 5 000 farmers over the past three turbulent years. Utete’s objectivity is thus questionable. Sources say that in the report presented to Mugabe last month, Utete blamed the failure of the programme on the economic crisis in Zimbabwe, rather than acknowledging the economic crisis is a result of the land seizures. He said the seizures were necessary because "white farmers routinely resorted to legal action to protect their ownership rights". He ignored the fact that Mugabe abandoned the peaceful, internationally-funded reform plan agreed with the U.N. Development Programme at a conference in Harare in 1998. And Utete blamed European Union and US "sanctions" for drying up of investment and export revenues. That’s the favourite Mugabe explanation. However, he did admit that Mugabe's oft-repeated claim that 300 000 black families have been successfully resettled is untrue. No more than 134 000 have received identifiable plots or farms, and 40 percent of these have failed to take them up.
In addition, 50 000 families were supposed to receive larger A2 commercial holdings. But, Utete reported, only 7 260 did. These, say Mugabe's critics, included recipients of the prime estates seized by members of the elite and their relatives. Some of them seized farms with the aid of violent thugs and made a quick profit by marketing the evicted owners’ crops, including tobacco, as their own. Many hold top state jobs, including military and police chiefs, or own businesses linked to Mugabe’s Zanu PF party. Utete said farms were seized to alleviate poverty - as opposed to the view of critics that land reform was a cover for violent intimidation by a corrupt and incompetent regime. There is less disagreement about the result. The Financial Gazette, now run by a consortium of pro-Mugabe businessmen, reported: "swathes of productive land were left lying idle...this not only compromised the country's food security situation but also had a negative effect on the feeble economy." Oliver Gawe, spokesman for the Zimbabwe Tobacco Association, which says it is non-political, said the new growers wanted security. "They ask to be left alone when they plant a crop (a hectare costs up to Z$30 million to bring to reaping stage) yet they are under a lot of political pressure still." Economics consultant John Robertson put it less coyly: farmers, including the few hundred surviving white tobacco growers who have committed themselves to a further season, are still being summarily thrown off. Robertson says only 30 million kg may be produced in the coming season. Gawe hopes for 60 million kg and says Zimbabwe must restore a crop of at least 80 million kg by 2004-5 to maintain international buyers' interest. "If we don't, that could spell doom for the industry," Gawe concedes.
So why has production fallen calamitously under the fast track land reform which Mugabe and Utete claim has been a resounding success? "It was a chapter of unfulfilled promises," says Jerry Davidson, chief executive of the Commercial Farmers Union. Apart from broken pledges that white farmers would each be left with at least one farm, incoming black recipients did not get free ploughing, soil preparation, seed and fertiliser. "There was bad planning and bad implementation," adds Davidson. "People were just dumped in the bush where there is no water and no housing. They have no means of accessing the development capital to open up the land and get it working for them." Even the wealthy recipients of A2 model farms all assumed they were going to take over a fully running farm, he added. And even Davidson Mugabe, president of the Indigenous Commercial Farmers' Union, and a fan of farm seizures, is complaining. He says his 2 000 members - established farmers - were unable to get diesel and seed, adding, "This has left most of them stranded." Mugabe propagates the fallacy that a farm or a plot of land represents a cash cow for the recipient. However, the 134 000 who were allocated holdings were not given freehold title. Any suggestion of political disloyalty, and party bosses will have their leases cancelled, regardless of whether they have incurred a Z$30 million overdraft to grow a hectare of crops. It is, therefore, not just whites who are too insecure to produce. It is the same for all - and so the nation goes hungry and lacks fuel.
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From IRIN (UN), 20 October
Health concerns over reintroduction of DDT
Harare - Environmentalists and public health officials in Zimbabwe have warned that government plans to reintroduce the banned chemical dichloro-diphenyl-trichlorothene (DDT) in this year's anti-malaria spraying programme could do serious ecological damage. The use of DDT was banned worldwide in the early 1990s after it was found to have adverse health and environmental effects. According to Minister of Health David Parirenyatwa, the government has resorted to DDT because it was "cheap and more effective, with a longer residual killing power". But a senior health official told IRIN the government had turned to DDT, "despite the obvious dangers, because it has no money to buy prescribed, environmentally friendly spray chemicals". Zimbabwe is grappling with an increasing malaria death toll and a resurgence of the disease in areas where it had previously been brought under control.
"The reintroduction of chemicals with a proven record of destructive behaviour, like DDT, in populated areas and water sources only shows that government wants to be seen to be doing something to control the malaria epidemic. But this will be more than just killing the mosquito and destroying their breeding grounds, it will also kill the people and animals in those areas in the long term," said a senior environmental health official in the Ministry of Health, who asked not to be named. He said that apart from being carcinogenic, DDT also poisons animals that come into contact with it, and disrupts the food chain. "Anyone who eats animals, birds or fish from water sources that have the DDT residue will also take the chemical into their body. The effects include high infant mortality, as lactating mothers may pass the DDT on to their offspring through breastfeeding."
In justifying the use of DDT, Parirenyatwa told the Bulawayo Chronicle: "So many people have died of malaria since January and we are doing our best to control it ... DDT is very effective because it sticks for a long time on the walls and kills a lot of mosquitos with a single spray ... South Africa and Swaziland are using it, and I don't see why we should not use it." He said the effects on the environment and humans would be minimal because the use of DDT would be restricted to indoor spraying programmes. But agriculturalists are concerned, fearing that an anti-malaria campaign will inevitably result in DDT seeping into the environment, especially when DDT-tainted water is used on crops and for livestock. "The minister is correct to say it remains active for a long time, but I don't understand why he believes it will have minimal effects on people and animals. To me, the way government wants to do this is like introducing quick measures to control the malaria epidemic, by using slow poison to systematically decimate the same people they are trying to protect. The effects on crop and livestock farming will be the same. DDT is an undesirable chemical," Edward Mkhosi, an agricultural expert, explained.
Public health officials have also warned that the government was running the risk of revitalising a number of DDT-related infections that are still being detected in communities living along the Zambezi Valley, which forms the northern malaria zone of the country. The Zambezi Valley covers the Victoria Falls, Hwange, Binga and areas around Kariba, further downstream on the Zambezi river. DDT was widely used in mosquito and tsetse-fly control programmes by the pre- and post-independence governments until its worldwide ban. The other significant malaria belt occurs along the major rivers in Zimbabwe's Midlands and the southeastern lowveld. The highest fatalities have been recorded among illegal alluvial gold panners living in thousands of informal settlements along the rivers. This year Zimbabwe's malaria control programme has been threatened by a shortage of spraying equipment, chemicals, personnel, transport and fuel. The scarcities have been blamed on the lack of foreign currency to pay for imports.
Although Stanley Midzi, the director of the Centre for Disease Prevention and Control in the Ministry of Health, could not be reached for comment, he recently told IRIN that his department would not be able to cope with any new large-scale disease outbreak because of the budgetary, manpower and equipment shortages. Malaria has officially killed 782 people in Zimbabwe since the beginning of the year, but disease control officials say the real figure is undoubtedly far higher. "The number is much higher because some deaths occur at homes, or in remote clinics while the patient is still awaiting transport to the nearest hospital. Those are neither reported nor recorded, but they make up a significant percentage of the total death toll. However, that does not justify the use of highly toxic chemicals like DDT, because it will kill more people and animals over the years than malaria," said Mkhosi.
Correction Re this article from IRIN concerning the use of DDT in anti-malaria spraying. IRIN have pointed out that the claim that more people would die in the long term from anti-malaria DDT spraying than from the disease itself is unproven. IRIN regrets the error.
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From News24, 22 October
Zim police crush demo
Harare - Riot police crushed another pro-democracy demonstration in Zimbabwe's capital, Harare, lashing at protesters with long rubber truncheons and arresting 275, according to protest organisers. Police with automatic weapons, teargas and batons descended on the gathering group of demonstrators, wearing T-shirts with slogans demanding a new democratic national constitution, and bundled them into police trucks before they could begin their planned march. Douglas Mwonzora, spokesperson for the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA), an alliance of civic, trade union and human rights organisations, said initial reports from the group's lawyers were that at least five people had been injured and that police assaults continued after protesters were taken into Harare central police station. Among those arrested was NCA chair Lovemore Madhuku - his ninth arrest - and, unusually, a reporter and photographer for the state-controlled Herald newspaper. The demonstration was organised to press for a constitution to replace the current national law that has had civil rights whittled away over the last 23 years of 79-year-old Mugabe's rule, and to protest against government repression and violence. Mwonzora said the demonstration was the first of the NCA new campaign, nicknamed "Keep on Knocking", aimed at keeping alive demands for constitutional change.
The NCA has made scores of attempts to hold public demonstrations since 2000. Each one has been stamped out by riot police, and hundreds have been injured. Zimbabwe's constitution guarantees the right to hold public demonstrations, but it has been ignored as police use notorious security laws to ban almost all political meetings. Two weeks ago, 200 supporters of the country's national labour movement were arrested in demonstrations all over the country against soaring prices and the climate of lawlessness. Zimbabwe has been suspended from the Commonwealth and the elite of wealthy ruling party cronies around Mugabe have been barred entry into the United States, Europe, Australia, Switzerland and New Zealand for constant violation of people's constitutional rights, the suppression of the press and electoral fraud. Mugabe's economic policies have driven to economic collapse, marked by inflation now at 455%, shortages of basic commodities from fuel to banknotes, joblessness at 70%, a national currency that halves in value every three months and famine.
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From The Daily Telegraph (UK), 23 October
Police bar lawyers after demo arrests
Harare - Zimbabwean lawyers were forcibly evicted from the capital's main police station yesterday as they tried to secure the release of more than 200 demonstrators arrested earlier in the day. The demonstrators were members of the National Constitutional Assembly, who were held after a protest against the government's handling of the economy, which the group believes is responsible for chronic shortages of food, fuel and foreign currency. The lawyers were concerned about the welfare of the protesters after witnesses in the police station reported riot police using batons to beat the detainees. Beatrice Mtetwa, a prominent human rights lawyer, who was the victim of a police attack earlier this month, was one of seven lawyers thrown out of the police station. She said: "Riot police threatened us with tear-gas and beatings." Last month police quelled a similar protest by the NCA, a coalition of political parties and student, church and rights groups which has staged a series of demonstrations in the past four years. It believes President Robert Mugabe has manipulated the constitution to tighten his 23-year grip on power.
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From VOA News, 22 October
Zimbabwe judge removes two senior officials for election misconduct case
Tendai Maphosa
A High Court judge in Zimbabwe Wednesday has approved a petition by two top government officials that allows them to remove themselves from a case brought by the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. The opposition is questioning the judge's decision, saying the two officials played a key role in the presidential election last year that the opposition is challenging in the courts. In their petition, the two officials, the registrar general and the minister of justice, argued that the election challenge is strictly between President Robert Mugabe and Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who alleges gross irregularities in the poll. Most Western observers condemned the election result, which Mr. Mugabe won, as not being either free or fair. With the registrar general and the minister of justice removed from the case, two respondents remain: President Mugabe and the Electoral Supervisory Commission. But the Commission has also applied to the courts to be removed as a respondent. The opposition has expressed surprise at the court decision. Brian Elliot, the MDC legal representative in the case, said any person with a substantial interest in the case must be cited. He said the registrar general was cited in his capacity as head of the body that conducts elections and the minister of justice was cited because he wrote the laws that tilted the elections in the president's favor. In a related development, another High Court judge has annulled the election victory of a ruling Zanu PF parliamentary candidate in the 2000 general election. The MDC won 57 of the 120 contested seats in that election. The courts have so far ruled in favor of the opposition in eight of the more than 20 results it has challenged. However, the ruling party candidates in the other cases continue to sit in parliament pending the hearing of their appeals in the Supreme Court. The next general elections are due in 2005.
From ZWNEWS: If you would like to read an outline of the opposition case in their petition challenging the 2002 presidential election, please let us know. The document will be sent as a Word attachment to an email message. Please specify whether you would like the SUMMARY version (1 1/2 times the size of the average daily ZWNEWS) or the FULL version (12 times the size of the average daily ZWNEWS).
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From News24 (SA), 22 October
Top cop's victory scrapped
Harare - A High Court judge on Wednesday annulled the election victory of President Robert Mugabe's former secret police boss in parliamentary elections in 2000. Judge Paddington Garwe declared that Shadreck Chipango, the former head of the Central Intelligence Organisation, "is not duly elected". He said his reasons would be given in a full written judgment to be released later this week. However, it does not mean that the opposition Movement for Democratic Change's candidate in the constituency would automatically take his place. The judge said that "no-one else is entitled to be elected." Lawyers said it meant that a by-election would have to be held to fill the vacancy. The MDC came close to unseating Mugabe's government by winning 57 out of 120 elected parliamentary seats, although Zanu PF secured a comfortable margin of seats through a legal provision that allowed Mugabe to choose another 30 seats for the 150-seat parliamentary chamber. The MDC challenged 39 of the constituencies won by Zanu PF. The party won eight of its petitions and another eight have been dismissed. The remainder are either still stuck in the judicial system or the MDC candidates have withdrawn their challenges. However, lawyers said the MDC's court victories, including Wednesday's, made little real difference to the balance of seats in parliament. None of the eight Zanu-PF MPs who had their seats annulled have had to leave parliament because they had appealed against the decision to the Supreme Court. Despite electoral law that demands that election challenges be heard "as a matter of urgency," not one of the appeals have been heard by the Supreme Court since the first judgement was given 31 months ago. It took Judge Garwe two years to deliver his ruling.
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From ZWNEWS, 23 October
What happened in Makoni East
Judge Paddington Garwe yesterday annulled the election victory of Shadreck Chipanga in the 2000 parliamentary election in the Makoni East constituency. Here is just a taste, from victim and witness testimony, of what went on in Makoni East prior to the vote:
Sydney Mureravanhu was accused of distributing maize to MDC supporters. He was taken to a dam and assaulted. His attackers then threw him into the water and stoned him, while watched by Shadreck Chipanga. Francis Chinonza and two friends were assaulted by men travelling in a blue Nissan twincab. One friend escaped after being slapped. The other was beaten and then placed under the wheels of the vehicle. The driver was asked to run him over, but did not. Chinonza himself was then beaten and told to lean against the vehicle. One of his attackers stabbed him. He had to walk two kilometres to a clinic holding his exposed intestines. The driver of the Nissan twincab was Shadreck Chipanga. David Sundai was assaulted by men travelling in a blue Nissan twincab. He was slapped by one man, and then beaten senseless by a group of Zanu PF youths. The man who slapped Sundai, and then watched the beating, was Shadreck Chipanga. Mrs Erica Nyaunde was woken in the middle of the night by a policeman, who asked if she was a leader of MDC youth. She was then accused of being a ‘child of white people’ for supporting the MDC. The policeman then urinated in her room. Her home was later set on fire. Three men were arrested for the crime but were released within 24 hours. Shadreck Chipanga "won" the election by 118 votes, gaining 7509 votes against 7391 for the opposition MDC candidate.
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From News24 (SA), 22 October
Zim farmers call on the army
Harare - Zimbabwe's farmers facing a crippling fuel shortage have appealed to the military to help transport to market more than 100 000 tons of maize harvested some six months ago, state media said on Wednesday. Zimbabwe Farmers Union (ZFU) vice president Wilfanos Mashingaidze said the grain was discovered in several rural villages, some just 200km of the capital Harare. He warned that the maize would rot unless it was collected immediately. The appeal came amid UN humanitarian reports of a worsening food crisis in the southern African country where stocks have been exhausted in most districts. An estimated 5.5 million Zimbabweans will require emergency food aid by early next year, out of a population of 11 million. Maize is a controlled crop and can only be moved by or with special permission of the country's state-owned Grain Marketing Board (GMB). An official of the GMB was quoted by the state-run Herald paper as admitting that the organisation's operations had been hard hit by the critical fuel shortage affecting most sectors of Zimbabwe's economy. Zimbabwe has experienced shortages of petroleum-based fuel since 1999 when the country started running short of foreign exchange to import fuel. Countries such as Libya that had come to Zimbabwe's rescue under special barter trade agreements turned off the fuel supply taps after Harare failed to honour its side of the deal. The fuel shortage has in recent weeks grounded thousands of public commuter buses, stranding hundreds of thousands of workers. Last week the country's railways suspended commuter train services for a few days due to lack of diesel. The World Food Programme (WFP) early this month said it had received only a quarter of the funds it is seeking to feed millions of starving people in southern Africa, most of them in Zimbabwe.
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From IRIN (UN), 21 October
Lack of foreign currency hampers seed shortages
Johannesburg - Zimbabwe's newly settled and communal farmers face the prospect of this season's expected good rains falling on empty fields if the government does not distribute seed in time for the first plantings at the end of October. The official Herald newspaper reported on Tuesday that the US $30 million needed by the Ministry of Lands, Agriculture and Rural Resettlement to buy inputs like seed and fertiliser for distribution throughout the country, was yet to be released by the country's reserve bank. According to the Herald, the bank had raised the precious foreign exchange using tobacco revenues as security, but the money would not be released until the government had met certain terms. It was not immediately clear what these were. Government spokesman Steyn Berejena told IRIN that Zimbabwe's land reform programme, which saw thousands of white-owned farms transferred to black farmers, resulted in an increase in the amount of acreage to be planted this year and a corresponding shortage of seed.
The government has a programme to buy seed from seed houses for distribution to new farmers through the Grain Marketing Board (GMB) and the Agricultural Rural Development Authority. "Government will need more seed this year to make sure enough is channelled to the needy farmers," Berejena said, adding that the farmers were hoping to use the predicted good rains to make up for the last two years' drought-induced losses. "The main thrust [for the government] is to assist newly settled and communal farmers because they don't have the resources to buy seed on their own," he said. "It has to be available in rural shops for purchase, or obtainable through a soft loan from the GMB by the end of October, when the maize planting season starts." He said the government had already sourced 10,000 mt of maize seed from neighbouring countries, and now just needed to pay for it. Up to 32,000 mt was currently available, but another 56,000 mt was still needed. "Although many other seeds like millet and sorghum are needed, the emphasis is placed on maize seed for food security," Berejena said. "We are raring to go - the seed has been found, we just need the money to pay the supplier," he explained.
Economist John Robertson told IRIN there was a possibility that the Reserve Bank simply did not have the foreign currency the government needed, as many business people were holding onto their currency in anticipation of another devaluation. The Zimbabwe dollar was last devalued in February from Z$55 to US $1 to a selling rate of Z$848 to US $1, with the promise of devaluations every three months. "It is likely that exporters are holding back on repatriating their earnings and waiting for a devaluation, and it is likely that the currency will be sourced from the parallel market at a rate of Z$5,000 to US $1, which would make the seed very expensive." He added: "It is a disgrace that Zimbabwe is importing seed ... we used to be an exporter. The country also runs the risk of importing seed not suitable for germination in this climate."
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From Associated Press, 23 October
Zimbabwe gov't uses food as weapon
Johannesburg - Zimbabwe's government is using food as a weapon, denying it to political opponents as nearly half its people face starvation, Human Rights Watch said Thursday. The group said the government and ruling party punish opponents by manipulating the supply and distribution of subsidized food, as well as the registration of people eligible for international relief. In a 51-page report, the New York-based group said corruption and profiteering are rampant at the government's Grain Marketing Board, which oversees distribution of most staple food. It said officials divert large quantities of grain at tremendous profit to the black market and neighboring countries. "Select groups of people are being denied access to food," Peter Takirambudde, executive director of the group's African division said in a statement. "This is a human rights violation as serious as arbitrary imprisonment or torture." Human Rights Watch said food is used as a weapon against members of the main opposition party and people presumed to support it, teachers, former commercial farmworkers and those living in urban opposition strongholds. "That's a lie," George Charamba, the spokesman for President Robert Mugabe, said in a telephone interview. "It sounds like a very familiar lie to which we are too busy to respond."
The report also criticized international donors for preventing international food aid from going to black farmers who received land confiscated without compensation from white farmers under Zimbabwe's controversial land reform program. However, Richard Lee, regional spokesman for the U.N. World Food Program, said he was unaware of any such conditions imposed by donors. Human Rights Watch, aid workers and political analysts in Zimbabwe said people without ruling party membership cards are routinely denied access to government-subsidized food and often prevented from registering to receive international relief. "No party card, no food," said John Makumbe, a political analyst at the University of Zimbabwe. Increasing numbers of people seen as opponents must turn to the black market, where Makumbe said a day's supply of food for one person can cost more than a household makes in a day. Zimbabwe until recently was a grain exporting nation. The United Nations now estimates more than 5.5 million Zimbabweans will need emergency food aid before the next harvest. Human Rights Watch and others say a collapse in agricultural production prompted by the government's often violent land seizures has contributed greatly to the shortage.
The government and state-controlled press have reported 40 deaths from malnutrition in the second city, Bulawayo. No figures are available for the rest of the country. ``We expect the situation is much worse in other areas, particularly in Matabeleland north and south,'' said Makumbe, who also advises the Famine Early Warning System monitoring food supplies in the region. Human Rights Watch said the government compounded food shortages and consolidated its control by preventing private merchants, the opposition party and all but a handful of aid groups from importing grain. More than 220,000 tons of grain imported by the government have simply vanished, according to diplomats in Zimbabwe. Human Rights Watch said it appears grain bought by the government abroad was diverted to foreign markets and the local black market, where reports indicate ruling party politicians and favored businessmen can make a 220 percent profit.
The group said the grain board is run by former police, military and intelligence officials who report directly to Mugabe's Cabinet in what Makumbe and other analysts called the militarization of key government industries and ministries. The government blames food shortages on prolonged drought and donor withdrawal. However, Lee, the WFP spokesman, said drought has eased in the region, and donors have not withdrawn humanitarian aid. Britain, Zimbabwe's former colonial ruler, committed a further $8.5 million Thursday to emergency food aid after receiving assurances that politics would not interfere with the handouts. Human Rights Watch said the government often uses war veterans and ruling party militants, groups blamed for the widespread violence and intimidation, to distribute food. International relief organizations such as WFP have strongly resisted government attempts to take over food distribution, Human Rights Watch said. Relief groups have briefly suspended operations in some areas because of government interference and threatened to pull out entirely if the government persists in trying to politicize food aid. However, the government still punishes opponents by manipulating the list of people eligible for international aid, said Human Rights Watch. Makumbe said party officials and traditional leaders are instructed to exclude opponents from the lists. Lee acknowledged there had been interference, some of it serious, but said the vast majority of incidents were minor. Charamba, Mugabe's spokesman, called Human Rights Watch a tool of the British government and dismissed the report as an attempt to support the hardline anti-Mugabe position of Australia, Britain and Canada. ``We don't even dignify it by denying it,'' he said.
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From The Financial Times (UK), 23 October
Spat grows over British aid for Zimbabwe
By Tony Hawkins in Harare
Britain will give a further £6.88m ($11.65m) in humanitarian aid to Zimbabwe, bringing the total of British assistance to over £62m in the last two years. The new pledge comprises £5m to the World Food Programme and £1.88m to Unicef. It excludes ongoing British support for HIV-AIDS programmes in Zimbabwe. The announcement in Harare on Thursday came ahead of Friday's publication of a report by Human Rights Watch not only accusing the Zimbabwe government of using food aid for political ends but claiming that international agencies have failed to ensure that access to food is based on need alone. The 51-page report, "Not Eligible: The Politicisation of Food in Zimbabwe", claims that food has been denied to suspected supporters of the main opposition party and to residents of former commercial farms resettled under the government's land reform programme. It accuses members of the ruling Zanu PF party of systematically manipulating the supply and distribution of food aid.
Human Rights Watch also accuses donor agencies of tacit complicity in preventing food from reaching former commercial farm areas resettled under land reform. While the international community has spent hundreds of millions of dollars pouring food aid into Zimbabwe, thousands continue to go hungry, it says. These claims are dismissed by the World Food Programme, which co-ordinates international food aid to Zimbabwe. Its Harare representative, Kevin Farrell, said on Thursday that politicisation problems had been "minor and dispersed". But Peter Takirambudde of Human Rights Watch said the government was manipulating relief efforts while the international community was "playing along". Estimates are that 5.5m people - about 45 per cent of the population - will need food aid over the next nine months. Food imports to date are estimated by FEWSNET, a non-government organisation that monitors food problems in Africa, at only 28 per cent of the current year's cereal deficit.
Although there have been repeated warnings of another poor harvest in 2003/4, the government insists its land resettlement programme is working and that Zimbabwe will produce up to double its domestic consumption of maize (3.5bn tonnes) in the current year. FEWSNET warns that while rainfall prospects for the current season are "fair to good", the signs are that Zimbabwe will not manage to produce even two thirds of its annual maize requirement unless urgent steps are taken to overcome shortages of fuel, fertiliser, foreign currency and maize seed. The government appeared to confirm this on Monday when Agriculture Minister Joseph Made said the central bank had failed to release $30m needed to pay for maize seed imports. Bankers say this is a reference to a $30m loan - with repayment pledged against next year's tobacco crop - that the government is trying to raise from foreign banks. Tobacco sales for the current year will end next week with sales of around 80m kilograms - less than half the 166m produced last year. The 2004 crop is forecast to be possibly as low as 40m kilograms. This latest spat over food aid comes against a background of rising political temperatures in Zimbabwe. On Wednesday some 300 civil rights demonstrators were arrested by police, with most of them kept in the cells overnight. On Monday the treason trial of opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai will resume, while a week later the high court will hear the opposition Movement for Democratic Change's challenge of President Robert Mugabe's March 2002 election victory, widely perceived to have been rigged.
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From The Times (UK), 24 October
Zimbabwe land grab policy is 'a failure'
By Jan Raath in Harare
The Zimbabwe Government proclaimed President Mugabe’s "revolutionary land reform programme" an outstanding success yesterday, but simultaneously published statistics showing completely the opposite. A commission set up by Mr Mugabe to review his regime’s four-year campaign to appropriate white-owned farms showed that just over a third of the 350,000 officially resettled families had actually moved on to the land allocated to them. Instead of the 300,000 peasant families said to have been given new land for small-scale farming, the commission found that only 123,000 had been resettled. The commission’s statistics for the creation of new black commercial farmers - in reality, nearly all ruling party officials, judges, civil servants, police, soldiers and air force officers - indicate an even greater failure. Mr Mugabe has claimed that 50,000 families in this category were resettled, but the report says that only 4,800 have moved on to the property allocated to them. That "implied a considerable amount of land lying fallow or unused", said the report, in what white farm union officials described as a "dramatic understatement".
Mr Mugabe presented the report to Kofi Annan, the United Nations Secretary-General, recently in an apparent attempt to persuade the UN to rescue Zimbabwe’s agriculture from catastrophe. The statistics notwithstanding, the report insists that the programme is "an overwhelming success". It blames any shortcomings on "a relentless foreign media campaign of vilification and the imposition of sanctions by the UK and its European partners, the white Commonwealth and the USA". In fact, the only Western "sanctions" imposed on Zimbabwe are those that bar Mr Mugabe and members of his ruling elite from visiting certain countries, and holding assets there. The report follows a similiar investigation by a minister in Mr Mugabe’s office whose details of rampant abuse by senior ruling party officials were leaked to the press in February. That report listed 30 senior ruling party and state officials who had occupied more than one farm in violation of Mr Mugabe’s "one-man, one-farm" dictum, and noted that the list was "not exhaustive". It also reported that, in two districts alone, Zanu PF thugs had driven resettled peasants off 11 farms. The new commission said that earlier reports would not be published, and that the abuses uncovered were being dealt with "by a special government task force".
Statistics on the output of the 25 million acres (10.1 million hectares) of appropriated land, once some of the most highly productive farmland in the world, is scant. But commercial agriculture has collapsed since the land seizures began. Tobacco production - in a country that was once the world’s largest tobacco exporter - plummeted this year to 80,000 tonnes, from 237,000 tonnes in 2000. Wheat output has fallen from 283,000 tonnes in 2000 to 60,000 tonnes this year. The commercial farms’ cattle herd has fallen from 1.2 million head then to 150,000 now. "Nobody can farm any more," said Doug Taylor-Freeme, president of the Commercial Farmers’ Union. "Commercial farmers can’t because they have no land, and new farmers can’t because they have no inputs, no finance and no title deeds. "There is no production, no confidence. Agriculture is becoming irrelevant in Zimbabwe. We are in chaos."
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From The Times (UK), 24 October
Tables are turned on Mugabe 'war veterans'
From Jan Raath in Beatrice
Wretched people camping by the highway south of Harare make up one of the lasting images of President Mugabe’s land grab, which has made about one million farm workers and their families homeless. Tattered clothing and blankets hang on barbed wire fences, runny-nosed children squat round a small fire and men without shoes talk quietly around an anthill. But these are not farm workers. They are war veterans, members of the rabble militia which has terrorised thousands of white farming families and their workers since February 2000 and the start of Mr Mugabe’s third chimurenga, or war of liberation. Vodka Moyo, spokesman for the group, said the police came three weeks ago. "They destroyed our houses," he said. "No letter, no warning." A woman in a blue dress added: "They took our grain." They were kicked out of nearby Eden farm to make way for Tichaona Jokonya, Zimbabwe’s former Ambassador to the United Nations and now the head of the Zimbabwe Tourism Authority, who already has at least two other farms, according to Agriculture Ministry sources.
In September last year, Mr Mugabe announced to the UN General Assembly that "Zimbabwe has concluded the fast-track land reform programme" that was to "transfer land to the hitherto landless black majority". A year later thousands of them are again landless, violently evicted by the new brigand ruling class that includes some of Mr Mugabe’s closest aides and family members. Mr Moyo’s original group of 78 families moved on to Eden farm, near Beatrice, about 50km (33 miles) south of Harare, in 2000 after an earlier group of war veterans hounded an Afrikaner cattle rancher off the property. Over the next three years they cultivated the land with hoes, producing just enough to feed themselves. On the other side of the main road is Greenlands farm, where, three weeks ago, another 68 families of "new farmers" were evicted by police. "They have gone back now," Mr Moyo said. "They are resisting."
The makeshift camp is just out of sight of Mr Jokonya’s ostentatious new home, which includes a squash court. It was built on a hill, the top of which was levelled for him by a bulldozer belonging to the state District Development Fund, which is meant to provide infrastructure for poor rural areas. Building supplies were delivered by lorries marked "Ministry of Public Construction". Over the past three months there has been a growing stream of reports of evictions of ruling party peasants resettled by the Government. Late in August, 5,000 people who occupied 11 prime irrigation properties on the shores of Lake Manyame, west of Harare, were driven off by police. Among those who took over the land was Mr Mugabe’s elder sister, Sabina, who has two other farms, two of her sons and Winnie Mugabe, a widow of one of the President’s nephews. John Worsley-Worswick, co-ordinator of Justice for Agriculture, the commercial farmers’ lobby group, said: "It’s happening all over the place. They used the war vets to clear the way, now the cheffes (party chiefs) come in through the back door."
Black commercial farmers are equally at risk. In December last year Charles Kuhuni, a major in the Zimbabwean army, arrived at Peter and Everjoyce Gotora’s farm, Talana, also in Beatrice. He told them he would shoot them if they did not leave. They fled. This year a messenger with a court order for Major Kuhuni’s eviction was chased off by his hired mob of 66 ruling party youth militia. Late last month after a ten-hour showdown with armed riot police, he moved out. But he returned as soon as the police had left. Police refuse to go back. Major Kuhuni already has a farm 70 miles east of Harare, allocated to him by the Government. "I cannot possibly understand why a man who has already been allocated a farm wants to dispossess us, as fellow black people, of a farm we legally bought and which is not under acquisition by the Government," Mrs Gotora said. The removal of the remaining estimated 1,000 white farmers clinging tenuously to their properties, has accelerated dramatically. Since Mr Mugabe’s "happy announcement" to the UN last year, 1,873 farms have been listed for state seizure. Last Friday, Patrick Chinamasa, the Justice Minister, and his wife, Monica, forced Richard and Cally Yates out of their tobacco farm in Headlands, 60 miles east of Harare.
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From News24 (SA), 23 October
Zim protesters 'beaten, dumped'
Harare - Zimbabwe civil rights demonstrators who were arrested for staging an anti-government demonstration claimed Thursday they were beaten by police while in custody. Some members of the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA), who were among at least 100 arrested on Wednesday for demonstrating for a new constitution, were Thursday receiving treatment at a Harare clinic. One demonstrator with a bandage around his elbow said he and a group of NCA members were made to lie on the floor in a police station and beaten by police with batons. "After being beaten we were taken in a police vehicle and driven 40-60km out of town" before being left at the side of a road, he said. Other NCA members showed an AFP correspondent bruised backs and heads and forearms. Police spokesman Wayne Bvudzijena said he had received no such reports and said people should make a report "when they are unfairly dealt with".
The NCA has since 1999 been campaigning for a new constitution. In 2000 it successfully lobbied Zimbabweans to reject a proposed constitution drafted by a state-appointed commission. The group, headed by constitutional lawyer Lovemore Madhuku, continues to hold regular demonstrations against the government. Demonstrations without police permission are illegal under the country's strict Public Order and Security Act. At least 78 other NCA members, including Madhuku were still in police custody on Thursday morning, according to NCA spokesman Enerst Mudzengi. A lawyer for the arrested demonstrators said police were going to charge them under the security law for "creating an atmosphere which was conducive to creating riots". Ray Muzenda, an NCA official told AFP that members of the group would not be cowed by "the culture of fear" in Zimbabwe. "Everyone is prepared to die for a new constitution," he said.
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From Business Day (SA), 24 October
Finance minister says current budget had underestimated steep rise in inflation
Bulawayo Correspondent
The Zimbabwe government has revised downwards its annual estimate for economic decline from the initial 7% projected in the 2003 budget, to 14% by year end, reflecting the reduced output from the production sector and the poor performance of the agricultural sector. Over the same period, the country's balance of payments position has worsened and the country's foreign currency deficit now stands at Z$309m, mostly as a result of government's skewed exchange policy and a sharp decline in exports, against a gradual rise in non-productive imports such as luxury vehicles. In his address to business leaders and legislators at a pre-budget seminar held yesterday, the acting minister of finance and economic development, Patrick Chinamasa revealed that the current budget had underestimated the steep rise in inflation, which reached a record 455,6% last month. He said the balance of payments deficit was about 23,5% of the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP), against initial estimates that it would be 1,5%.
"Our budget and policies were done with inaccurate assumptions and predictions particularly those referring to the GDP, inflation, interest rates, the budget deficit, money supply growth and the balance of payments. For example, when we did the current budget, the exchange rate was fixed at one US dollar to 55 Zimbabwe dollars, but we were forced to introduce a dual exchange rate system in February so that government dealings would be done at $1:Z$55, but the rest at $1:Z$824," said Chinamasa, who is also the minister of justice, legal and parliamentary affairs. He admitted that the much-lauded National Economic Revival Programme had failed to achieve its objectives, particularly those linked to exports and foreign currency generation. Chinamasa revealed that the Z$600bn supplementary budget approved by Parliament in August had been necessitated by hyperinflation and a public service job evaluation exercise that had cost the state Z$300bn. Economists who participated in the formulation of the budget, said key areas to tackle were inflation, policy inconsistencies, the lack of urgency in addressing macro-economic imbalances and its misplaced priorities of expenditure.
During the meeting, Chinamasa drew jeers of disapproval from MDC legislators and business leaders when he suggested that the government, in future, wished to review the budget half-yearly, instead of quarterly. "We would like to see a half-yearly review of the budget instead of the current quarterly system, because the finance minister does not have the capacity to review and compile data on the implementation of the budget every quarter." An economist who spoke during the same meeting said government's targets in the 2003 budget had largely been driven by political rationale, instead of economic facts. In announcing the 2003 budget, the finance minister, Herbert Murerwa indicated that government intended to drive inflation downwards to 96%, from approximately 200% in January 2003.
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From Reuters, 24 October
Zimbabwe grants new license to banned newspaper
By Cris Chinaka
Harare - Zimbabwe's only private daily newspaper prepared on Friday to resume publication as soon as possible after a court ordered government officials to grant a license to the newspaper, which was closed by police last month. Judge Michael Majuru, president of the Harare Administrative Court, said the government media commission was wrong to deny a license to the Daily News - a persistent critic of President Robert Mugabe's government as the country grapples with a mounting economic and political crisis. "This is a unanimous decision. Given the finding of bias, (and) unjustified delay, I order that the appellant be issued a certificate," said Majuru, who heard the case with two court assessors. "The commission was improperly constituted. I order that a valid commission be appointed by the appointing authority and that a properly constituted commission should issue a certificate by November 30. If it is not issued, then the appellant is considered registered by that date," he said.
Sipepa Nkomo, chief executive of the Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe (ANZ), which publishes the Daily News, said the group would sue the government for loss of business during its closure over the last six weeks. When asked when they planned to resume publication, he said "as soon as possible." Police closed the offices of Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe on September 16 after the Supreme Court ruled the paper was illegal because it was published without the license required by strict media laws Mugabe's government introduced last year. The government's media commission turned down the paper's subsequent application for a license in what ANZ said was an attack on press freedom. On Friday, the commission said it would appeal the decision to the Supreme Court, the country's highest court.
The Daily News, which began publishing in 1999, had initially refused to register for a license to protest against the laws, introduced soon after Mugabe's re-election as president last year and seen as aimed at silencing government critics. ANZ appealed the decision by the commission, which argued that it denied the license because the newspaper "was not only eight-and-a-half-months late in applying but had actually demonstrated publicly that it did not wish to apply." 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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From The Zimbabwe Independent, 24 October
Tsvangirai back in court
Vincent Kahiya
The treason trial of Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai resumes in the High Court on Monday with the state seeking to amend its indictment papers so that they conform to evidence led when the state closed its case. The trial should have resumed on September 15 but was postponed to October 27. A week after the resumption of the trial another high profile case, the presidential election petition will open in the High Court. Both cases will be before Judge President Paddington Garwe. Charges of high treason against Tsvangirai arose from video and audio evidence provided by Canadian lobbyist Ari Ben-Menashe who alleged that the MDC leader in 2001 wanted to hire his company Dickens & Madson to assassinate President Mugabe.
The application for the fresh indictment was filed in September in the High Court. Justice Garwe is expected to make a ruling on the application before Tsvangirai is put to his defence against charges of high treason arising from the allegations that he plotted to assassinate Mugabe. Tsvangirai's co-accused, the MDC's secretary-general Welshman Ncube and agriculture spokesman Renson Gasela, were in August acquitted in the case that has attracted international attention. The state had alleged in its original indictment papers when the trial opened in February that Tsvangirai plotted to assassinate Mugabe and stage a coup d'état at a meeting in Montreal, Canada, on December 4 2001.
"The evidence led by the state was at variance with the particulars in the indictment in respect of what was discussed at the meeting of December 4 2001," the state application reads. The state based its case on a grainy video recorded in Montreal. But it turned out during the trial that the video evidence did not support the charge of planning the assassination of Mugabe. The state now contends in the application that Tsvangirai requested the help of Dickens & Madson to assassinate Mugabe at two meetings held in London in October and November 2001 prior to the Montreal discussions. "There is no evidence to show that the accused specifically repeated this request at the third meeting in Montreal in December 2001," the state now says in its application. "Instead, the evidence shows what was discussed between the accused and other parties in furtherance of the accused's requests at the first and second meetings. It is these anomalies the amendment seeks to correct," the state said. The state said there was nothing amiss about the application to amend the indictment, as it was permissible under Section 202 of the Criminal Procedure and Evidence Act.
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From News24 (SA), 24 October
Zim police release protesters
Harare - Police in Zimbabwe have released 78 civil rights protestors arrested earlier this week for demonstrating for a new constitution, a rights group official told reporters on Friday. Douglas Mwonzora, the vice chair of the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) said 77 protesters were released on Thursday after paying fines, but NCA chair Lovemore Madhuku was only released on Friday. "He has been charged with conduct likely to lead to riots," said Mwonzora. He said Madhuku appeared at a court on Friday and was freed after paying Z$10 000 Zimbabwe dollars (about R85) bail. On Wednesday at least 100 NCA demonstrators were arrested as they tried to hold a demonstration in a central Harare park. Some of them claim to have been beaten while in police custody. The NCA has since 1999 been campaigning for a new constitution. In 2000 it successfully lobbied Zimbabweans to reject a proposed constitution drafted by a state-appointed commission. The group continues to hold regular demonstrations against the government. Demonstrations without police permission are illegal under the country's strict Public Order and Security Act.
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From VOA News, 24 October
Rights group criticizes politics of food in Zimbabwe
Challiss McDonough
The Zimbabwean government is being accused of using food as a political weapon in a report by Human Rights Watch. The group also condemns donor nations for directing their food aid away from newly resettled Zimbabwean farmers. The staple food in Zimbabwe is corn, or maize. There are two ways it gets to people. Those who can afford it buy maize through the government-run Grain Marketing Board, when it is available. Those who cannot afford to buy it get humanitarian food rations, mainly from the U.N. World Food Program. The WFP says it expects to feed more than five million Zimbabweans between now and the harvest next year, nearly one-half of the population. Human Rights Watch says the government's Grain Marketing Board is corrupt, and is manipulating the food supply for political reasons. Zimbabwe has angrily denied those allegations. A government spokesman called Human Rights Watch a tool of the British government. Zimbabwe's main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change has long complained about food being used as a political weapon. Party spokesman Paul Themba Nyathi says MDC members can rarely buy maize, even if they have money, because the Grain Marketing Board will only sell it to supporters of the ruling party, Zanu PF. "Of course, we have numerous examples where food that is provided to the Grain Marketing Board by donor funds is purchased corruptly by those that are well-connected," he said. "And even when it gets down the distribution line, it is still bought by those that are expected to produce membership cards. We have abundant evidence to that effect."
There are other ways that food gets used as a weapon in Zimbabwe. The MDC secretary for legal affairs, David Coltart, is a member of parliament from the southern city of Bulawayo. He says during recent city council elections, he saw ample evidence that the ruling party was using food to influence voters. "In my constituency, which is a working-class area of Bulawayo, at two of the three polling stations, there were large quantities of grain left and guarded by Zanu PF operatives, within 100 meters of the polling stations," he said. "People were told the food would not be distributed until the results of the election were made public. And if they went the right way for Zanu PF, then that food would be distributed. So that's as recently as August." Human Rights Watch says because of corruption in the Grain Marketing Board, much of the maize that is supposed to be sold at subsidized prices ends up either on the black market or in neighboring countries, where it can be sold at a much higher price. The report says the resulting shortages mean that more people must rely on international assistance and relief aid. The World Food Program has been appealing to donor nations for more help in meeting Zimbabwe's humanitarian needs.
But WFP spokesman Mike Huggins says donors are very concerned about keeping their donated food separate from the highly politicized government supply, and that has made it harder for the agency to raise funds. "I think from WFP's perspective, we have done absolutely everything possible to ensure that our food gets to those people who need it the most in what is a very difficult situation," added Mr. Huggins. "So apart from increasing our monitoring capacity in Zimbabwe, there is little more that we can do to actually reassure the outside world that food is reaching those who need it." Relief agency sources confirm a Human Rights Watch allegation that some donors are putting conditions on their aid to Zimbabwe. They say the European Union, Britain and the United States are reluctant to fund aid programs targeting newly resettled farmers, who have benefited from Zimbabwe's controversial land-reform program. That fact has also spurred criticism in the Human Rights Watch report, which urges those donors to reconsider their policy. The group says they have a duty under international law to assist all those who are in need.
From ZWNEWS: if you would like to read the Human Rights Watch report on the politics of food, please let us know. It will be sent as a Word attachment to an email message - total size approximately 4 times the size of the average daily ZWNEWS.
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From The Zimbabwe Independent, 24 October
Zvinavashe/Tungamirai vie for Gutu North
Augustine Mukaro
The scramble for Gutu North constituency has started in earnest amid speculation that Zanu PF military heavyweights, General Vitalis Zvinavashe and retired Air Marshal Josiah Tungamirai, are vying for the post. The constituency fell vacant following the death of Vice-President Simon Muzenda last month. Highly placed sources in the province said Tungamirai had been working closely with Muzenda to boost his chances of taking over the seat. Tungamirai, a member of the decision-making politburo in the ruling Zanu PF party, has already started flexing his muscles in the constituency. Zvinavashe hails from the constituency and is seen as a likely contender for political leadership after he retires from his current post as commander of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces.
"As a way of identifying with the electorate, he recently bought a residential property at Mpandawana growth point in the constituency," a source said. "Tungamirai has already started informal campaigns through visits to the constituency and mixing with the electorate," he said. The Zimbabwe Independent last week witnessed Tungamirai driving in his navy-blue Jeep Cherokee and doing some shopping at the growth point. However, Tungamirai faces a strong challenge in Gutu North from Zvinavashe, long regarded as Muzenda's successor by virtue of coming from the same area. Zvinavashe is expected to retire from his army post at the end of the year, after which he could start a political career. There is speculation that President Robert Mugabe would likely push for Zvinavashe's candidacy in a move that could see him being elevated in the party structures. Efforts to contact Tungamirai and Zvinavashe this week for comment were unsuccessful.
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From The New York Times, 25 October
Zimbabwe's woes are bringing grief to its wildlife, too
By Michael Wines
Hwange National Park - Once this 5,700-square-mile expanse of wilderness, Zimbabwe's largest, was one of Africa's grandest showcases of wild animals. These days, it is exhibit A in the unfolding story of their destruction. On a recent steamy morning, perhaps 60 elephants staged a scrum at the Nyamandlovu watering hole here, jockeying frantically to get a drink of water - not from the watering hole, a porridge of mud and flopping, dying fish, but from a trickling pipe at the hole's edge. During Hwange's long, bone-dry winter, more than two dozen pumps supply almost all the water to thousands of animals. But Zimbabwe's government had neither enough fuel to run them nor spare parts to repair the many that were broken. The scene was but a small element in what Colin Gillies, a wildlife expert with a private group here, calls "an unholy slaughter" of one of southern Africa's most varied stocks of wildlife. It is the product of three years of economic collapse, corruption and decaying civil order in a nation where the government is encouraging squatters and political allies to seize commercial farms and game preserves. Hunting and tourism once pumped millions of dollars into Zimbabwe's economy each year, sustaining wildlife management programs on millions of acres of private scrubland too arid or rocky for commercial farming, but ideal for photographic safaris and big-game hunts. Zimbabwe's decision to confiscate most of that land from its white owners, and then to redistribute it to peasants and political supporters, has had an unexpected result: thousands of hungry families on land too poor to support crops have turned to poaching as their prime source of food and income. Private wildlife programs have been all but destroyed. Precise figures do not exist. But by estimates from several conservationists, former landowners and opposition politicians, as many as two-thirds of the animals on Zimbabwe's game farms and wildlife conservancies have been wiped out.
The situation in parks is less dire, according to activists. Some charge that in a few parks, as many as 40 percent of the big-game animals have been poached or illegally hunted down, but other local conservationists say the damage has been mostly confined to scattered species like impala trapped for their meat. No one disputes that thousands of animals have been lost, including significant numbers of species like rhinos and wild dogs that were already severely endangered. No one disagrees that the losses are continuing, despite the first belated efforts by Zimbabwe's government this month to rein in profiteering in wildlife by some of its own officials. "The re were 4,000, 5,000 buffalo as of three months ago, when we got run off," H. A. de Vries, 69, said of the 400,000-acre wildlife conservancy he partly owned in eastern Zimbabwe, bordering Hwange National Park. "Impala - thousands and thousands. Kudu, thousands. Elephants, 500 or 600. There was lion research going on there, wild dog research. I'd be surprised if there are 20 percent of the animals left," he said. Mr. de Vries said he had been told that antelope in the preserve, known as the Gwayi Valley Conservancy, were being slaughtered to feed thousands of members of the Green Bombers, a much feared government paramilitary force, at a camp at an abandoned tin mine in central Zimbabwe. Similar charges were leveled by members in Zimbabwe's Parliament in August. There is no easy way to verify such claims. Former farmers and owners of conservancies like Mr. de Vries are largely barred from their old lands, and the settlers who replaced them are hostile to outsiders. But a Zimbabwe representative of the Washington-based World Wildlife Federation and a top official of Wildlife and Environment Zimbabwe, a private conservation group here, both said that reports of wildlife losses on conservancies like Gwayi Valley were credible. "I don't think it's an exaggeration," Mr. Gillies, a vice president of the Wildlife and Environment group, said in a telephone interview from his home in Bulawayo, about 100 miles south of Gwayi. "There have been huge, huge numbers of animals lost. It was an unholy slaughter."
Harrison Kojwang, the World Wildlife Federation representative in Zimbabwe, said that estimates of a 60 to 70 percent loss of wildlife on farms and game conservancies were common, but that the death rates in national parks like Hwange were so far considerably lower. Hwange park and its neighbor, Gwayi Valley, are, however, prime examples of the collapse of the nation's parks program. In testimony to Zimbabwe's Parliament this summer, the minister for environment and tourism, Francis Nhema, confirmed that a senior ranger and a warden at Hwange National Park had each been awarded land seized in the Gwayi Valley Conservancy and had been accused of allowing illegal hunting there. Other major parcels of Gwayi Valley property have gone to Zimkbabwe's information minister, Jonathan Moyo, and to senior officials of Zanu PF, the ruling political party. Former landowners in the region, most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity, charged in interviews that unscrupulous safari operators from South Africa and Botswana had moved into Gwayi Valley and other large conservancies, bribing settlers and officials to take big animals far in excess of previous government quotas, which limited kills of animals each year. The quotas not only conserved wildlife populations but ensured profit for both the conservancies and the Zimbabwean government by putting a premium on hunting rights. Settlers now trap animals indiscriminately, both for their own food and for a growing market in so-called bush meat. One conservation organization, Born Free, reported on an Internet Web site this month that antipoaching teams in Gwayi Valley had found more than 1,400 wire snares in the conservancy in the last three months.
One former landowner said in an interview that he had run a profitable conservancy with three other families on 13,000 acres of arid bush northwest of Bulawayo, until the government evicted him in 2001 and resettled 60 families there. "I told them it would never work," he said. "Sixty families, and one bore-hole which barely supported the wildlife. We had 70 eland, 150 impala, 30 sable, 200-plus kudu. And what I've heard in the last couple of months is that there's hardly anything left." The destruction of wildlife in Gwayi and other lands next to national parks raises another ominous prospect: that valuable game in the parks will migrate to the newly empty lands and become prime targets for future hunters. Many fences on the conservancies have been torn apart to make snares. Mr. Kojwang of the World Wildlife Federation said that about one in 10 of Zimbabwe's 550 rhinos had died in recent years, largely because of illegal safari hunting and wire snares set by local poachers. In the Gwayi Valley, snares and poachers have practically wiped out scores of the fewer than 3,000 painted wild dogs, already an endangered species. Mr. Kojwang and Mr. Gillies depicted the situation as not entirely hopeless. Within the parks bureaucracy, they said, some officials are battling corruption and political influence. In the last two weeks, the government has banned hunting on land next to Hwange park, and there are unconfirmed reports of the arrest of at least one safari operator. "The poaching is by no means alleviated," Mr. Gillies said, "but there's a little more positive attitude adopted lately than there has been in the past." But as the elephants' battle at Hwange showed, the government is ill-equipped to deal with even basic issues like fuel for water pumps, much less enforcing hunting bans. During an animal census in Hwange this month, Mr. Gillies said, members of his organization encountered a half-dozen dead elephants - victims not of poachers, but of dehydration and stress. That, he said, is a new phenomenon. "Zimbabwe was probably the best hunting land in Africa - in southern Africa, for sure," said another former conservancy operator, who refused to be identified. "I suppose it's improved in some respects," he added with irony. "Because there's nothing left to kill."
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From Reuters, 25 October
Police shut down Zimbabwe's only independent newspaper
Harare - Police occupied the offices of Zimbabwe's only independent daily newspaper on Saturday, halting operations and detaining staff one day after a court order blocked government efforts to shut it down. Officials at the Daily News said armed police swooped on the newspaper offices in central Harare and detained 18 journalists and administrators just hours after the paper put out its first edition since being closed by government order six weeks ago. The employees were released after about four hours, but were required to sign statements saying they worked for the newspaper's publisher, a possible preliminary step toward prosecution for working illegally. They also received a verbal warning not to return to work, newspaper staff said. "Police have physically occupied our offices and are stopping us from working. They are trying to achieve by force what they could not achieve through the courts. They've ordered our staff out without a legal warrant or a court order," said Gugulethu Moyo, a lawyer representing Daily News publisher Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe (ANZ). "This is an act of vengeance by a government that preaches the rule of law but lives by the rule of the jungle. We are being persecuted but we are determined to fight on," Moyo said.
A Reuters reporter saw several armed policemen standing outside the newspaper's Harare office on Saturday. The raid occurred one day after the Harare Administrative Court dealt President Robert Mugabe's government a defeat by ordering that the Daily News - a persistent government critic - be granted a new publishing license. The license had not yet been issued, but newspaper executives said they believed the court order was sufficient grounds to resume publication immediately. The newspaper, closed after a court found it did not have the license required by Zimbabwe's strict new media laws, quickly went to work and rushed out an eight-page edition on Saturday headlined "We Are Back." Senior Assistant Police Commissioner Wayne Bvudzijena told state TV police were enforcing the will of the court. "The police have taken action against the ANZ because the Daily News cannot publish without a license and must comply the court's ruling." Zimbabwe state radio quoted unnamed lawyers suggesting the Daily News' publication on Saturday was against the law and in contempt of court.
Friday's court ruling held that the state media commission erred when it rejected a license application by the Daily News, which has stepped up criticism of Mugabe's government as Zimbabwe slides into a worsening political and economic crisis. The court ordered that a new commission be appointed and a license granted to the Daily News by November 30. Media commission officials, who argued that the paper's application came too late, said they would appeal against the ruling. The newspaper, which began in 1999, had initially refused to apply for a license in protest at the new media laws, introduced soon after Mugabe's re-election as president last year and seen by critics as a tool for silencing opponents. An editorial in the Daily News' Saturday edition said the law, officially known as the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA), was bound to fail. "If the government insists that this notorious law, whose passage through parliament was as stormy as some of its provisions were of dubious legality, must continue to be on our statute books, then we can foresee it having to endure humiliation after humiliation as AIPPA is successfully challenged in the courts," the editorial said.
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From News24 (SA), 25 October
Paper: Nkomo's niece held
Harare - Zimbabwe police on Saturday raided the Harare home of the chief executive of the Daily News, the country's only independent daily, and arrested his niece, the paper's legal adviser said. "Nine police officers raided Mr (Samuel) Nkomo's house about an hour ago (05:00 GMT)," Gugulethu Moyo said. "They've arrested his niece at his home." Tulepi Nkomo is believed to be in her 30s and is not connected with the Daily News, according to Moyo. The raid comes hours after police in Harare arrested about 18 employees of the Daily News, hours after the paper reappeared on the streets for the first time in more than a month. Police also visited the homes of three other of the paper's nine directors, Moyo added. No other arrests have been made so far. The Daily News was shut down by police early in September after the Supreme Court ruled it was operating illegally. The paper was subsequently denied a licence by the state-appointed Media and Information Commission (MIC). But a court on Friday ruled that the commission had to issue the popular daily with a licence. Samuel Nkomo is related to a government minister, John Nkomo, who is also the chairperson of President Robert Mugabe's ruling Zanu PF party.
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From IOL (SA), 25 October
Tsvangirai's treason trial delayed once more
Harare - The trial of Zimbabwe opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, set to resume next week, has been postponed for the second time. The marathon trial, which started in February this year, was supposed to see Tsvangirai being cross-examined by state lawyers on his role in allegedly plotting the assassination of President Robert Mugabe. The trial, first supposed to resume in September, was then postponed to Monday. But Innocent Chagonda, one of Tsvangirai's lawyers, said the trial may only resume "some time next year" after it was discovered that the judge and one of his assessors had other engagements that might interrupt proceedings. He added however that the court might still resume during the current term, which ends in early December, so that the state can amend its case against Tsvangirai. State lawyers have argued that Tsvangirai, who attended a meeting in Canada in December 2001 with political consultant Ari Ben Menashe, allegedly requested Mugabe's elimination ahead of 2002 presidential elections. The videotaped evidence of that meeting produced in the Harare High Court has been grainy, and only partially audible. Reports say state lawyers now want to produce evidence that Tsvangirai discussed the alleged plot at two meetings prior to the Canadian one. Tsvangirai denies the charges against him, which carry the death penalty on conviction. He says he was set up by government agents ahead of last year's presidential poll, which he lost to Mugabe. Two other senior officials from his Movement for Democratic Change who had stood trial alongside him had charges against them dropped in August due to lack of evidence. Tsvangirai faces a second charge of treason for allegedly inciting his supporters to overthrow the government in June this year. That trial is due to start next year.
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From The Sunday Times (UK), 26 October
Anglican bishop grabs white farm in Zimbabwe
Brian Latham and Jon Swain
An Anglican bishop has seized a previously white-owned farm for himself and his family in one of Zimbabwe’s prime agricultural districts. In the process, Nolbert Kunonga, the Bishop of Harare and a close associate of President Robert Mugabe, has evicted more than 50 black workers and their families to make way for his own staff. Senior figures believe Kunonga’s actions will damage the international reputation of Anglicanism. "The Anglican Church is going to be compromised by this action. It will debilitate our authority," said a source close to Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. "Dr Williams is determined Anglicans should provide a solution and not a problem to the crisis in Zimbabwe." St Marnock’ s farm, which Kunonga has taken over, is just 10 miles from the old stone-clad cathedral of St Mary’s in the centre of Harare, the capital, from where he officiates. Since his controversial election in April 2001, Kunonga has been one of the most wayward figures in Anglicanism and a worry for Williams. The archbishop has taken a close interest in Zimbabwe and was briefed on the situation there earlier this year by Pius Ncube, the Catholic Archishop of Bulawayo and a critic of Kunonga. Ncube once accused the Anglican Church in Zimbabwe of aligning itself with the "forces of evil".
Visitors to St Marnock’s said yesterday that Kunonga’s son had moved into the seven-bedroom farmhouse overlooking a dam and what were once 2,000 acres of wheat and soya bean fields, now abandoned. "I’d love to get back there to farm again, but I can’t see it happening soon," said Marcus Hale, 25, the legal owner of St Marnock’s, who studied at the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester, Gloucestershire. "There’s nothing happening there now. The machinery is all lying useless in the sheds and they won’t let me take it. No one has done anything about planting a crop for this season." Hale was kicked off his farm some months before the 49- year-old bishop took it over. "I think Kunonga wants the farm because it’s so close to Harare and he thinks he can use it for property development," he said. It is believed Kunonga was given Hale’s farm as a reward for his outspoken support for Mugabe. He has mocked the president’s black opponents as "puppets of the West". Mugabe’s policy of land seizures, which has plunged the country into its worst crisis since independence from Britain in 1980, is largely being blamed for a two-year hunger crisis that threatens the lives of 5.5m Zimbabweans.
Additional reporting: Christopher Morgan
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From Reuters, 24 October
Congo militia resume plunder from foreign forces
By Evelyn Leopold
United Nations - A UN report on the plunder of gems and minerals in the Congo proposes the break up of large state-owned mining firms, transparent accounting and a "name and shame" list of arms buyers and traffickers. The report, obtained by Reuters on Friday, said however there was some reduction in the volume of illegally exploited minerals after Uganda and Rwanda reduced their forces and left pillaging to militia they helped create in the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. "Overall, this transition of control from foreign forces to the armed groups has led to a temporary reduction in the volume of illegally exploited resources," said the independent panel, headed by Mahmoud Kassem, a former Egyptian ambassador to several African nations. And the report said the activities of the giant diamond mining firm, De Beers, needed more investigation on possible human rights abuses. The panel, whose mandate expires this month at the insistence of the United States, also issued a still-embargoed report on arms flows, which proposed a "monitoring mechanism" on who bought and sold weapons to fuel the Central African country's five year-old civil war that is subsiding. "Without arms, the ability to continue the conflict, and hence creating the conditions for illegal exploitation of resources, cannot be sustained," the panel said. Diplomats said the embargoed section of the report fingered Rwanda and Uganda's interference in the Congo more pointedly. The report, the fourth of its kind, commissioned by the UN Security Council, had previously blamed Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe, aided by Congolese officials and criminal networks for exploiting Congo's riches and thereby extending the war.
Among the resources in the Congo are gold, diamonds, niobium, cassiterite, medicinal barks, cobalt, copper and coltan, used in cell phones and nuclear reactor parts. The panel said pillaged minerals likely were still passing through Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe as well as Angola, the Central African Republic, Kenya, Mozambique, the Congo Republic Tanzania and Zambia. The report proposed the break up of two large state-owned mineral resource enterprises, it called "grossly inefficient" firms that "channeled away" revenues that should be used by the Congolese people. One was the copper producer, Gecamines, technically owned by the government but once largely controlled by Zimbabwean interests and now looking into joint ventures with Canadian and South African firms. The other is MIBA, a diamond company largely owned by the state, with additional shares controlled by British-based De Beers. And the report said that natural resource companies, both domestic and foreign, should discloses all payments, such as concession fees, taxes and royalties, paid to the government, which in turn should reveal how the monies were used. It suggested the World Bank and the International Monitoring Fund institute a "Publish What you Pay" demand as a condition for further funding to the Congo. Last year's report included a lengthy list of 29 companies and 54 individuals linked to the pillaging. The new report broke down the firms into categories, according to how they responded to the allegations. It also put in categories 85 multinationals in South Africa, Europe and elsewhere it said had violated ethical guidelines and human rights standards, such as de Beers.
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From The Mail & Guardian (SA), 24 October
Zimbabwe state doctors strike for 8 000% pay rise
Harare - Doctors at Zimbabwe's government hospitals have gone on an indefinite strike demanding an 8 000% pay increase, their union leader said on Friday. "The strike started around midday yesterday," said Phibion Manyanga, president of the Hospital Doctors Association. The doctors, who earn a gross monthly salary of 378 000 Zimbabwean dollars (US$473), are demanding that their new basic salaries be pegged at 30-million Zimbabwean dollars (US$37 500), he said. The strike has affected hospitals in the capital Harare, the cities of Bulawayo and Masvingo, and the town of Chitungwiza, south of the capital. Only foreign consultant doctors hired by government from Cuba and the Democratic Republic of Congo are at work at the affected hospitals. Manyanga said his association had written to the government on several occasions asking for a review of their wages, but there had been no positive response. "We were patient, we were trying to reach a compromise, but they (government) closed the door on us and we were left with no option but to go on strike. We feel for us our patients ... but a disgruntled doctor is more dangerous at work. So it's better to stay at home," he said. Pay-related national strikes by Zimbabwe's government hospital doctors have become an almost annual tradition. In some years, the strikes last for as long as several months.
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Comment from The Sunday Telegraph (UK), 26 October
Springtime in Harare, and winds of dissent blow with new vigour
John Simpson reports on the growing dissent in Zimbabwe and the opposition's increasing determination to confront Mugabe and force him to step down
'We're back!" The headline on the front of yesterday's Daily News was huge. Though the paper contained only eight pages, dozens of people in the centre of Harare pushed and shoved to buy their copy at exorbitant prices. A cartoon showed Zimbabwe's information minister, Jonathan Moyo, being crushed by the paper, which, though fallen, was resprouting like a tree in spring. It is spring in Harare now, and the opposition is beginning to take heart. The News was closed in early September by the government's Media and Information Commission, but on Friday a judge in Harare ruled that the MIC had lacked the legal authority to deny the newspaper a publishing licence. Within hours of the judgment, the editor decided to bring out at least one edition of the paper before the government could ban it again. That haste was well judged. Yesterday, only hours after the paper had reached the streets, armed police raided the Daily News offices and arrested up to 18 journalists and other staff. The raid came as little surprise after state radio declared the issue of the Daily News was "in contempt of court". But the police action looks unlikely to curb a renewed groundswell of opposition.
The paper's reappearance had been the culmination of an important week for President Mugabe's opponents; a week in which they have shown that the fierce clampdown that began two months ago has not silenced them after all. The National Constitutional Assembly, which represents the main opposition groups, took the difficult decision to act outside the law. As a result, the NCA held a demonstration last Wednesday near the parliament building in Harare, without asking permission. The demonstration was entirely peaceful, but 300 people were arrested. Many of them, according to an NCA official, were later beaten on their backs, hands and feet. Among those tortured in this way was the assembly's chairman, Lovemore Madhuku. The demonstration represents a particularly important straw in the wind. Opposition leaders such as Madhuku, and the leader of the Movement for Democratic Change, Morgan Tsvangirai, have been reluctant in the past to break the law, partly on ethical grounds and partly because of the danger of dividing their supporters. But there is a growing feeling that only outright confrontation, peaceful but resolute, can force President Mugabe to step down.
The situation in Zimbabwe is getting worse. By the end of the year, a third of the population will require food aid to survive. Last week, the New York-based Human Rights Watch accused the government of denying its opponents access to food supplies. In a report entitled The Politicisation of Food in Zimbabwe, the group said that Zanu PF party officials were manipulating the distribution of subsidised grain and the registration of those eligible for international food aid. Zanu PF's information secretary, Nathan Shamuyarira, denied it hotly. "There are so many people, as you know, who write false reports about Zimbabwe," he said. "I can assure you that there is no politicisation of food." But last week Mr Shamuyarira and his colleagues also announced that President Mugabe's land reform programme had been an outstanding success, when its own figures show that it is a clear failure. The official commission that reviewed the government's four-year campaign to take over farms owned by whites discovered that fewer than 40 per cent of the 350,000 resettled families and fewer than a tenth of the 50,000 Zanu PF officials had moved on to the land allocated to them.
Other realities from Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe emerged this week. Several young, hungry, homeless refugees from his regime told their stories to the South African press. Themba Ndlovu was one of them: an illegal immigrant, aged 22, who had escaped from Zimbabwe because, he said, he couldn't bear what he was doing any longer. His story is an ugly one. He was one of the so-called Green Bombers, the thugs recruited by Zanu PF for its campaign of rape, murder, and arson and beating. Themba says that he and the others were promised jobs, land and cash for joining Zimbabwe's National Youth Service, which the government presented to the public as a kind of peace corps. According to Themba, he and his friends were given crowbars and firearms and ordered to burn down farms. They were told they would die if they ran away. "I have not killed," Themba said, "but I have raped. I raped a 12-year-old girl. We have attacked many people. I need to change my life. That is why I ran away from Zimbabwe." These are still dark days in Zimbabwe. But the more the realities of President Mugabe's regime are brought to light, and the more people decide they have to take action to change things, the more heart it gives the opposition. After the events of this past week, it's hard to be altogether pessimistic about Zimbabwe's future.
John Simpson is the World Affairs Editor of the BBC
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From The Times (UK), 27 October
Zimbabwe police resume war on defiant newspaper
From Jan Raath in Harare
Authorities in Zimbabwe pressed on yesterday with their smothering of the Daily News, the country’s only independent daily paper, as police held a director of the company that owns it. Soon after midnight on Saturday they tried to arrest Washington Sansole, a former High Court judge and one of the nine directors of Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe (ANZ), at home in Bulawayo. He refused to open his door and they returned after dawn to take him away on allegations of "publishing a newspaper without a licence". Police were still refusing to allow lawyers to see Tulepi Nkomo, niece of Sam Nkomo, the ANZ’s chief executive, at Harare central police station yesterday. Miss Nkomo, in her early twenties, has nothing to do with the newspaper. She answered the door at her uncle’s home when nine police officers arrived looking for him. She was arrested under the draconian Public Order and Security Act for allegedly being "rude" to them, Gugulethu Moyo, the ANZ lawyer, said. "We are very anxious about her safety," he added.
The zeal of the police action followed the appearance of an eight-page edition of the Daily News after a judge ordered the lifting of a six-week ban by the state-controlled Media Commission on Friday. The judge said that the commission had been improperly constituted. The mood in urban centres rose sharply as people pressed around newspaper-sellers to buy copies. "It is like clean air again," Aggrey Jabulani, an insurance clerk, said. Nqobile Nyathi, the Editor, said. "You could see people have really missed it very much." The speed at which staff produced the edition of 120,000 copies - nearly all sold in a matter of hours - took the authorities by surprise. By midday on Saturday, the Government had responded. Police occupied the paper’ s office and its printing press and 18 journalists were in custody in Harare central police station. They were released after four hours. Police were still outside the office yesterday. Ms Nyathi said: "If they stay I don’t see how we can move forward. But I have no regrets about what we did."
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From Reuters, 26 October
Police arrest Zimbabwe paper chief
Harare - Police arrested a director of Zimbabwe's only privately owned daily newspaper on Sunday on charges of operating without a license, and said he would be held until his colleagues turn themselves in, a lawyer said. Gugulethu Moyo, a legal adviser to the Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe, said that Washington Sansole, a former judge, was arrested in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second largest city. "They are holding him on charges of publishing without a license, and they are saying they will hold him until the other directors turn themselves in (to face similar charges)," she told Reuters. Police have raided the offices of the Daily News Saturday and detained 18 staff after it resumed publishing following a court order overturning government efforts to shut it down. Bill Saidi, editor of the Sunday edition of the Daily News, said a truckload of armed police arrived at the newspaper's offices on Saturday and detained 18 members of the editorial and administrative staff a day after a court ordered that they should be given a new publishing license.
Newspaper executives said they believed the court's order on Friday was sufficient grounds to resume publication. The newspaper, closed six weeks ago after a court found it did not have the license required by Zimbabwe's strict new media laws, put out an edition on Saturday headlined "We Are Back." "They've picked up all the staff they found here. We suspect they are trying to stop us from producing tomorrow's edition. I think the government doesn't want us to resume business yet," Saidi said, adding that he only avoided being detained because he was out for lunch. "Our lawyers' interpretation of yesterday's ruling is that we can resume publication immediately. But apparently the information (media) commission's interpretation is that we cannot publish until we have a license, which is only due to us at toward the end of next month." Police were not immediately available to comment on the reported raid.
The Harare Administrative Court ruled on Friday that the state media commission erred when it rejected an application for a license by the Daily News, which has been critical of President Robert Mugabe's government. The court ordered that a new commission be appointed and a license granted to the Daily News by November 30. Media commission officials, who had argued that the newspaper's application came too late, said they would appeal against the court's ruling. Daily News journalist Godwin Mangudya, reached by Reuters at Harare's central police station, said the raid came unexpectedly as newspaper staff were preparing the Sunday edition. "We are here and we have not yet been charged. They came looking for the editor, Bill Saidi, and for journalists who produced today's edition of the Daily News," Mangudya said. "They have rounded us up and they ordered us to switch off the machines and not to make any telephone calls from the office."
The Daily News, which began publishing in 1999, had initially refused to apply for a license in protest at the new media laws, introduced soon after Mugabe's re-election as president last year and seen as a tool for silencing government critics. An editorial in the Saturday edition said the law, officially known as the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA), was bound to fail. "If the government insists that this notorious law, whose passage through parliament was as stormy as some of its provisions were of dubious legality, must continue to be on our statute books, then we can foresee it having to endure humiliation after humiliation as AIPPA is successfully challenged in the courts," the editorial said.
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From The Zimbabwe Standard, 26 October
Zvobgo critically ill
Valentine Maponga
Harare - Eddison Mudadirwa Zvobgo, the Zanu PF founder member long considered the heir apparent to President Robert Mugabe, is seriously ill and had to be flown out of the country to South Africa where he is receiving specialist treatment, The Standard has established. Zvobgo, the Member of Parliament for Masvingo South, was last week rushed to a South African hospital and is now in a private ward at Constantiaberg Clinic in Cape Town, relatives said. The relatives said Zvobgo, a former close adviser of President Robert Mugabe until he fell out in the late 1980s, was not able to talk or walk when he left Zimbabwe. The Standard however managed to speak to him yesterday, and in a hoarse and barely audible voice, the veteran politician could only say: "I am feeling much better now as compared to how I felt five days ago. That is all I can say right now," he said before switching off his mobile phone.
Zvobgo's wife, Julia, who is also in Cape Town, said South African doctors had operated on the veteran politician who is suffering from an undisclosed ailment. Some relatives and aides said he might have a liver disease. Staff at the Cape Town hospital on Friday confirmed that Zvobgo had arrived at the institution in a "worrying" condition. "I have not been to his room this morning to see how he is doing but what I have noticed is that he looked much better than yesterday. I am going to dress him right now and I think he is going to be fine," said a nurse at the hospital.
Zvobgo was last seen publicly at Vice President Simon Muzenda's funeral last month, walking with the assistance of an aide supporting him by the arm. He recently escaped a disciplinary hearing before Zanu PF's supreme Politburo to answer accusations that he had undermined Mugabe's re-election campaign last year. Analysts though say the accusations against Zvobgo stemmed from fear in Zanu PF circles that he would one day challenge Mugabe. As head of Parliament's legal committee, Zvobgo clashed with Information Minister Jonathan Moyo over the constitutionality of the draconian Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA). The Harvard-trained lawyer described the Act - which is being challenged in the courts - as, "the most calculated and determined assault on our liberties".
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