|
Archived News
7th April 2003
Ruling on Sibanda's bail application set for today
More Zimbabwe protests loom
Election reform needed, say poll observers
The Jewel of Africa
MDC deputy chief battles for bail
SADC unlikely to ignore tensions in Zim
Cosatu condemns arrests, state violence in Zimbabwe
Upcoming by-elections crucial for Zanu And MDC
The Jewel of Africa - Part II
Magistrate defers MDC leader's trial
Southern Africa team to probe Zimbabwe crisis
Chefs panic over land audit
Zim High Commissioner to Tanzania threatens lawyer
The Jewel of Africa - Part III
Africa mission to investigate tensions in Zimbabwe
Zim fact-finding mission welcomed
Task force acts on Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe launches charm offensive
Story pure fabrication - Zim diplomat
Costly blunder haunts Air Zimbabwe
Police blamed for Zim stadium deaths
US tightens screws
UN brings food aid to cities as Zimbabwe's plight worsens
Commonwealth plotters try to exclude Charles
Masipula Sithole dies
The world's other tyrants, still at work
Mass action to go ahead, says Ncube
White farmers 'lawless': report
Politics and food make volatile mix in Zimbabwe
Ex-dissidents unleash reign of terror in Binga
SADC's fact-finders may meet mandate
Zimbabwe opp leader in jail as party alleges post-poll retribution
Top
From ABC News (Australia), 2 April
Zimbabwe opp leader in jail as party alleges post-poll retribution
The vice-president of Zimbabwe's Opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), arrested in connection with an anti-government strike, appeared in court on Tuesday, but was denied bail, a party official said. Gibson Sibanda, who was detained on Monday after the opposition won two weekend by-elections, will reappear in court Wednesday to pursue his bail application. "The state opposed bail ... and the magistrate will decide tomorrow," David Coltart, laywer and MDC legislator said. Police said they arrested Sibanda for attempting to subvert a constitutionally elected government following his party-led two-day mass stayaway from work last month. The MDC organised a national strike on March 18 and 19 to press President Robert Mugabe to take urgent steps to resolve the country's grave economic and political crises. The opposition party has meantime claimed that several of its members were attacked late Monday and early Tuesday in post-election retribution allegedly by ruling party militias. The MDC retained the seats in two constituencies in the capital Harare after the by-elections. Mugabe has a parliamentary majority behind him, but short of the two-thirds he would need for constitutional changes. "The MDC deplores in strongest terms the barbaric, disgusting behaviour by a party that thrives on violence," MDC party spokesman Paul Temba Nyathi in a statement. Police could not be immediately reached for comment on the violence allegations. A local elections monitoring agency, the Zimbabwe Elections Support Network (ZESN) "deplored the violence that erupted in Highfield (constituency) after the announcement of the elections results". The campaign ahead of the elections was marred by violence and intimidation. A losing ruling Zanu PF candidate, war veteran leader Joseph Chinotimba, said he would not accept the results of the polls, alleging some of his supporters were intimidated by opposition members.
Top
From The Daily News, 2 April
Ruling on Sibanda's bail application set for today
From Chris Gande in Bulawayo and Zerubabel Mudzingwa in Gweru
A Bulawayo, Cephas Sibanda, will today determine whether Gibson Sibanda, the opposition MDC vice-president who is accused of organising an illegal mass action, should be remanded out of custody. The State, represented by Mary Zimba-Dube yesterday, however, said if granted bail, Sibanda was likely to abscond or interfere with witnesses. The State alleged that Sibanda had pending cases which his lawyer Josphat Tshuma immediately disputed. Tshuma argued that there were several people facing the same charges who had been granted bail and asked whether they were interfering with witnesses. The State further alleged that Sibanda was involved in the planning of the pending mass action following the expiry of the MDC's ultimatum to the government on Monday. Tshuma said it was impossible for the State to accuse Sibanda of organising a mass action that never occurred. He said: "Even in the 15 points for the ultimatum, it is not mentioned that the MDC will violently overthrow the government. There have been successive delays in denying the accused persons access to the courts."
Sibanda, who was arrested on Monday, is being charged with violating Section 32 of the draconian Public Order and Security Act after he met provincial members of the MDC on 17 March where they allegedly plotted the stayaway. Meanwhile, Kadoma magistrate Claudius Chimanga yesterday denied bail to nine more MDC supporters arrested following last month's two-day mass action which allegedly left a trail of destruction in the small mining town. The nine, who were represented by Christian Mafirakureva, were remanded in custody to 11 April. They now join 28 colleagues including Austin Mupandawana, the Kadoma Central MP, who were also denied bail last week and remanded to 9 April. Property worth about $12 million was allegedly destroyed when the suspects went on an orgy of violence and petrol-bombed several shops and homes belonging to their political rivals. The MDC supporters are being charged with 18 counts of public violence, robbery and malicious injury to property. The State alleges that on 18 March, Mupandawana and his supporters secretly set up detonators and petrol bombs and destroyed property worth $11 743 593 owned by Zanu PF supporters.
Top
From BBC News, 1 April
More Zimbabwe protests loom
The Zimbabwe Government has not responded to Monday's deadline to meet 15 opposition demands or face "mass action". Movement for Democratic Change leaders are now deciding what their next step would be, spokesman Paul Themba Nyathi told BBC News Online. He said they were considering a strike, marches in the city and a boycott of ruling party business interests but refused to give a timeframe for when the decision would be taken or when the protests would be called. On Monday, MDC vice president Gibson Sibanda was arrested in connection with organising general strikes a fortnight ago. Chief police spokesman Wayne Bvudzijena said Mr Sibanda was arrested for "attempting to subvert a constitutional government". The MDC demands do not include calls for President Robert Mugabe to step down, or for new elections but things such as depoliticising the distribution of food aid and an end to political harassment. Mr Nyathi said the government's failure to respond to such "moderate" demands, would illustrate to African leaders backing Mr Mugabe, that the government was not serious about political freedoms. He said the next step would have to be carefully chosen because of the "risks involved". "We don't want to draw our people into an ambush," he said. Mr Nyathi said that Monday's victory in two Harare by-elections would not affect the MDC's plans. The weekend polls were described as largely peaceful by diplomats and the police, but marked by strong opposition claims of voter intimidation and ballot fixing. State radio said the MDC won 12,548 votes in the Kuwadzana constituency, against 5,002 votes for the ruling Zanu PF. In the Highfield constituency, the opposition won 8,759 votes against 4,844 for Zanu-PF. President Mugabe's party, with 95 seats, enjoys a comfortable majority in the 150-strong parliament, but is five seats short of a constitution-changing two-thirds majority. MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai has said the country could soon expect a "final push for freedom". The recent strikes brought the capital and other urban centres to a halt in a huge show of support for the opposition.
Top
From IRIN (UN), 1 April
Election reform needed, say poll observers
Johannesburg - Independent electoral observers have noted with concern "serious anomalies in the conduct" of the latest by-elections in Zimbabwe, prompting them to call for an independent electoral commission and impartial enforcement of voting laws. The Zimbabwe Election Support Network (ZESN), an umbrella body of 36 civic organisations, fielded 34 observers in the weekend by-elections at Kuwadzana and Highfield constituencies of the capital, Harare. The opposition Movement for Democratic Change won both seats. ZESN's report on the polls said "the pre-election period was marred by violence, visible vote buying and the failure of the registrar-general's office to release the voters' roll to contesting candidates in time". "The actual polling days were characterised by vote buying, violence, abductions of observers and party polling agents, intimidation, denial of access to the polling stations by accredited observers... Also of grave concern was the disruption of the voting process by the riot police on the second day of polling in Kuwadzana," ZESN added. On the last day of polling at Kuwadzana, ZESN had to withdraw its observers an hour before the end of polling "due to security considerations as the riot police were throwing teargas and bashing people". Such events "denied citizens their right to freely choose their leaders", the organisation said.
However, the official Herald newspaper quoted authorities as saying the two days of voting were peaceful and without incident. Electoral Supervisory Commission spokesman Thomas Bvuma was quoted as saying the situation was peaceful at all polling stations in both constituencies. Police spokesman Assistant Commissioner Wayne Bvudzijena said the situation had been very calm. "We did not receive any adverse report during the voting days and we commend the voters for displaying a high level of maturity," the Herald quoted him as saying. But Dr Reginald Machaba-Hove told IRIN that ZESN was concerned about the conduct of the weekend by-elections as three more by-elections were on the horizon. The rural Mashonaland West constituency of the late higher education minister Dr Swithun Mombeshora was to be contested, as well as two more Harare constituencies. Machaba-Hove told IRIN elections would most likely be held on the same day in the MDC Zengeza constituency of Tafadzwa Musekiwa, who resigned his seat, and the Harare Central constituency of Mike Auret, who has been suffering ill health and decided to quit. Ahead of these by-elections, ZESN called on the authorities to enforce electoral laws. "We also urge Zimbabwe to abide by the SADC [Southern African Development Community] and other international electoral norms and standards which Zimbabwe is party to," the organisation said in its report. "In view of all these anomalies that have become part of our election [processes], we re-emphasise our call for an independent electoral commission, and the need for electoral laws that encourage citizens to participate freely and peacefully in any elections," ZESN added.
Top
From The New York Review of Books, 10 April
The Jewel of Africa
By Doris Lessing
The Jewel of Africa - Part I
Internationally acclaimed author Doris Lessing, 83, grew up on a farm in Southern Rhodesia, an experience which inspired her first novel, The Grass is Singing. She was a fierce critic of racial injustice under white rule in Southern Rhodesia and South Africa and in 1956 was banned from both countries. Here she contemplates Zimbabwe's tragedy. "Nothing," she writes of Robert Mugabe, "is more astonishing than the silence about him for so many years among liberals and well-wishers - the politically correct. What crimes have been committed in the name of political correctness. A man may get away with murder, if he is black. Mugabe did, for many years."
"You have the jewel of Africa in your hands," said President Samora Machel of Mozambique and President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania to Robert Mugabe, at the moment of independence, in 1980. "Now look after it." Twenty-three years later, the "jewel" is ruined, dishonored, disgraced. Southern Rhodesia had fine and functioning railways, good roads; its towns were policed and clean. It could grow anything, tropical fruit like pineapples, mangoes, bananas, plantains, pawpaws, passion fruit, temperate fruits like apples, peaches, plums. The staple food, maize, grew like a weed and fed surrounding countries as well. Peanuts, sunflowers, cotton, the millets and small grains that used to be staple foods before maize, flourished. Minerals: gold, chromium, asbestos, platinum, and rich coalfields. The dammed Zambezi River created the Kariba Lake, which fed electricity north and south. A paradise, and not only for the whites. The blacks did well, too, at least physically. Not politically: it was a police state and a harsh one. When the blacks rebelled and won their war in 1979 they looked forward to a plenty and competence that existed nowhere else in Africa, not even in South Africa, which was bedeviled by its many mutually hostile tribes and its vast shantytowns. But paradise has to have a superstructure, an infrastructure, and by now it is going, going - almost gone. One man is associated with the calamity, Robert Mugabe. For a while I wondered if the word "tragedy" could be applied here, greatness brought low, but Mugabe, despite his early reputation, was never great; he was always a frightened little man. There is a tragedy, all right, but it is Zimbabwe's. Mugabe is now widely execrated, and rightly, but blame for him began late. Nothing is more astonishing than the silence about him for so many years among liberals and well-wishers - the politically correct. What crimes have been committed in the name of political correctness. A man may get away with murder, if he is black. Mugabe did, for many years.
Early in his regime, we might have seen what he was when the infamous Fifth Brigade, thugs from North Korea, hated by blacks and whites alike, became Mugabe's bodyguards, and did his dirty work, notably when he attempted what was virtually genocide of thousands of the Ndebele people (the second-largest tribe) in Matabeleland. Hindsight gives us a clear picture of his depredations: at the time mendacity ruled, all was confusion. But the fact was, we knew the Fifth Brigade: it had already murdered and raped. It was confusion, too, because Mugabe seemed to begin well. He was a Marxist, true, but like other politicians before and since he said the right things, for instance, that blacks and whites must flourish together. And he passed a law against corruption, forbidding the top echelons of officials from owning more than one property. When his officials only laughed, and bought farm after farm, hotels, businesses, anything they could grab, he did nothing. It was at that point that everyone should have said, "This is no strongman, he is a weakling." From the start Mugabe has been afraid to show his face out of doors without outriders, guards, motorcades - all the defenses of paranoia. When Queen Elizabeth visited, refused to ride with him in an armored car, and insisted on an open one, people jeered as the frightened man clung to the sides of the car while the insouciant sovereign smiled and waved.
Here is the heart of the tragedy. Never has a ruler come to power with more goodwill from his people. Virtually everybody, the people who voted for him and the ones who did not, forgot their differences and expected from him the fulfillment of their dreams - and of his promises. He could have done practically anything in those early years. When you traveled around the villages in the early Eighties you heard from everyone, "Mugabe will do this.... Comrade Mugabe will do that...." He will see the value of this or that plan, build this shop or clinic or road, help us with our school, check that bullying official. If Mugabe had had the sense to trust what he heard, he could have transformed the country. But he did not know how much he was trusted, because he was too afraid to leave his self-created prison, meeting only sycophants and cronies, and governing through inflexible Marxist rules taken from textbooks. Someone allowed into his presence who came looking for evidence of Mugabe's reputation as a well-read man would have found only Marxist tracts. He had come to Marxism late, converted by the Mozambique independence leader Samora Machel, who was a sensible, large-minded man, unlike Mugabe, who tended to be narrowly doctrinaire. (Machel was murdered by the South African secret police in 1986.) There are those who blame Mugabe's wife Sally, from Ghana, for what seemed like a change in his personality. She was, this Mother of the Nation, corrupt and unashamed of it. Departing the country for a trip home to Ghana and stopped at customs with the equivalent of a million pounds' worth of Zimbabwean money, she protested it was her money, and only laughed when she had to leave it and travel on without. But that was when laws were still enforced.
Mugabe gave refuge to the brutal dictator Mengistu from Ethiopia - he is still there, safe from the people who would try him as a war criminal. And excuses were being made, as always. Mugabe had been in a brutal prison under Ian Smith, the repressive prime minister of Rhodesia, who refused him permission to attend his son's funeral. He had experienced nothing soft and kind from the whites: Why should he now show kindness? As for Mengistu, well, it was in the finest tradition of chivalrous hospitality to shelter refugees from justice. Mugabe became a close friend of Mahathir bin Mohammed, the infamous prime minister of Malaysia, and attempted to sell him a controlling interest in Zimbabwe's electricity, but the quid pro quo was not enough and the deal fell through. In the early Nineties there was a savage drought in Zimbabwe. When members of Mugabe's government sold the grain from the silos and pocketed the money, by then the popular contempt for these ministers was such that the crime was seen as just another little item of a much larger criminal record. United Nations officials were saying as early as the mid-Eighties that Mugabe's government was the most rapacious bunch of thieves in Africa. Well, said his defenders, often members of his bureaucracy, corruption was not unknown in Europe. The secret police were arbitrary and bullying? "But you can't expect democracy of the European type in Africa."
If you visited Zimbabwe after Mugabe took control and met only the whites and blacks who hardly ever leave Harare or Bulawayo, you heard laments for the corruption, the incompetence, the general collapse of services. But if you took the trouble to visit the villages then it was impossible not to be inspired by the people. The Shona are a sane, humorous, enterprising people, but they have a fault: they are too patient. I have heard a famous Zimbabwean writer complain: What is wrong with us? We put up with you whites far too long and now we are putting up with this gang of crooks. The villagers joked about their oppressors, and continued to dream about better times, which they were only too ready to help bring into being by their own efforts. In the early years, promised free primary and secondary and university education, they were helping to build schools, unpaid, though soon free education or, in some places, any education at all would be a memory. For education, they did much better under the whites. Denied a decent education, or any, they hungered for books. At least two surveys said that what they wanted was novels, particularly classics, science fiction, poetry, historical fiction, fairy stories, and while at the beginning these were books that were supplied, soon rocketing inflation made it impossible to buy anything but the cheapest and locally published instruction books. How to Run a Shop. How to Keep Poultry. Car Repairs. That kind of thing. A box of even elementary books may transform a village. A box of books, sent by a humanitarian organization, may be, often is, greeted with tears. One man complained, "They taught us how to read, but now there are no books." Three years ago a Penguin classic cost more than a month's wage.
But even with books that were so far from what was originally dreamed of, in no time study classes began, literacy classes, math lessons, citizenship classes. The appearance of a box of books released (will release again?) astonishing energies. A village sunk in apathy will come to life overnight. This is not a people who wait for handouts: a little encouragement, help, sets them off on all kinds of projects. In January I heard from a member of a book team with which I'm associated that distributes books in villages, "I was out this week. I was talking about books to people who haven't eaten for three days." And there it is, the tragedy, one that could not have happened if Mugabe had been even half the man people took him for. People say, "Get rid of Mugabe and we will get back on course." But he has created a whole caste of greedy people like himself. Get rid of him and there will be others as bad. If this is the merest pessimism and the crooks can be got rid of, then there will remain the damage that has been done. Sometimes an adage dulled with age comes startlingly to life. "There is a tide in the affairs of men...." Had Mugabe ridden the tide that was running at Independence, Zimbabwe could have been an example to all of Africa. But he didn't, and the shallows and the miseries are there as evidence. Nothing can now recover that opportunity. Those of us who are old enough can only mourn lost possibilities. Familiar words carry a history lesson as sharp as the bitterest experience. There are indeed tides that will never repeat themselves. The racial hatred that Mugabe has fomented will not die. Throughout the period from Independence onward, beginning in 1980, anti-white rhetoric went alongside the Marxist slogans that were as primitive as they would be if Marxism had been invented in Zimbabwe. Yet what everyone remarked on was the amiable race relations, friendliness between whites and blacks, compared to South Africa, where apartheid created such a bitter legacy. Fiery articles in the government press were read in the same perfunctory way as were the public pronouncements of the Soviet government, or any Communist government. The official rhetoric in Zimbabwe was worse than anywhere in Africa - so said a United Nations report. "Never has rhetoric had so little to do with what actually went on."
Top
From Business Day (SA), 3 April
MDC deputy chief battles for bail
Bulawayo - Gibson Sibanda, deputy president of Zimbabwe's opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), will know today if his bail application has succeeded. He was arrested on Monday on charges of contravening the Public Order and Security Act. A packed Bulawayo courtroom, surrounded by troops and police, heard the state tell the court yesterday why it should deny Sibanda bail. The prosecutor told magistrate John Masimba that Sibanda was a flight risk and if released he might not appear in court for his forthcoming trial. Sibanda's lawyer, Josephat Tchuma, told the court how Sibanda, on hearing that the police were looking for him on Monday had immediately presented himself to the police. The charges were in any case spurious, said Tchuma. "The right to peaceful protest is enshrined in Zimbabwe's constitution. Sibanda is being denied his constitutional right. Since his arrest his wife, Zodwa, has not been allowed to take him food or medication. I have only now been able to arrange that she can do this," said Tchuma.
Zodwa Sibanda, who is a human rights activist, said she was worried about her husband. "He suffers from hypertension, and has to take his medication regularly. I have been trying to see him since Monday," she said. "Apart from his medicine, I have been trying to take him food. The conditions in the cells are terrible. What little food there is, is inedible. This arrest has nothing to do with the law and has everything to do with politics. We feel that Gibson's arrest has been orchestrated by Jonathan Moyo, who is playing an increasingly active role in the repression of the opposition." MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai said yesterday that Sibanda's arrest was "arbitrary. Mr Sibanda is being held like a common criminal, barred from visits, even from his wife. "His only alleged crime' is to fulfil his duties as a leader of a legal and legitimate opposition party challenging an illegitimate, murderous and dictatorial regime," said Tsvangirai. When asked why Sibanda was denied access to his wife and medication, chief police spokesman Wayne Bvudzijena said he was unable to comment, as the matter was now one for the courts. On Tuesday he told the BBC that Sibanda was arrested for "attempting to subvert a constitutional government".
Top
From The Star (SA), 2 April
SADC unlikely to ignore tensions in Zim
By Brian Latham and Basildon Peta
Harare/Johannesburg - Regional foreign ministers have begun to arrive in Zimbabwe to discuss security at a time of a police clampdown by beleaguered President Robert Mugabe on his opponents. Yesterday, one of Mugabe's closest advisers, his powerful chief secretary Charles Utete, resigned, prompting speculation that Mugabe's cronies are starting to abandon him. Foreign ministers of the Southern African Development Community, including SA's Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, will meet tomorrow in Harare, which Mugabe has put on high alert. Police have mounted roadblocks on main roads leading into the city centre. Unofficial police sources said a shoot-to-kill order had been given to police in the vicinity of Mugabe's official residence. This appeared to be a response to fears that the opposition Movement for Democratic Change will make good on its warning to march on the residence. The MDC issued an ultimatum to Mugabe to restore the rule of law by Monday or face mass action. Mugabe ignored the ultimatum, and instead, police arrested MDC vice-president Gibson Sibanda, who was still in custody last night. Police said Sibanda would be charged under the Public Order and Security Act for his involvement in a successful stayaway called by the MDC last month.
But despite the very evident mood of crisis in Harare, it was not clear that the ministers will discuss Zimbabwe. They will meet as the Ministerial Committee of the SADC Organ on Defence and Security, and Zimbabwe is not on the official agenda. On the agenda is:
A review of international developments and their impact on the SADC region.
Evaluation of relations between SADC and co-operating partners with reference to USAid and the European Union.
It is difficult to imagine that the ministers could fail to address the all-too-evident crisis unfolding around them - especially after President Thabo Mbeki last week, for the first time, criticised Mugabe's human rights abuses and his land reform programme. Zimbabwe's economy also continued its nosedive when the World Bank told the government that dialogue between the two would not resume until it addressed its internal problems. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund fell out with Zimbabwe after Mugabe ordered the seizure of farmland, plunging the economy into crisis. "Zimbabwe's New Economic Reform Programme is a start, but more needs to be done," a World Bank official said. The cash-strapped, state-owned electricity provider, Zesa, has begun periodic cutoffs to once bustling industries and mines. The blackouts are threatening to drive many of Zimbabwe's already-reeling companies over the edge.
Top
From SABC News, 2 April
Cosatu condemns arrests, state violence in Zimbabwe
The Congress of SA Trade Unions (Cosatu) added its voice today to growing concern over new reports of politically-motivated arrests and state-sanctioned violence in Zimbabwe. "Cosatu condemns the continued brutal repression of activists, through arrests, beatings and torture, by the government of Zimbabwe, following the two-day general strike on March 18 and 19, organised by the opposition MDC (Movement for Democratic Change)," Patrick Craven, a union spokesperson, said in a statement. Gibson Sibanda, the MDC vice-president, was arrested by police on Monday on subversion charges after the opposition won two by-elections in Harare. Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, the South African Foreign Affairs Minister, meanwhile, is scheduled to travel to the Zimbabwean capital today to attend tomorrow's meeting of the ministerial committee meeting of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Organ on Defence and Security. Yesterday, the New National Party said SADC should call an urgent heads-of-state meeting to discuss the ongoing deterioration in Zimbabwe. Craven said Cosatu believed those participating in last month's national strike were exercising their right to protest in support of democracy and their socio-economic demands, and were not subverting the Zimbabwean government. "Cosatu demands the immediate release of MDC vice-president Gibson Sibanda and all other activists who have been arrested, including a number of trade unionists, several of whom were tortured." He said in one documented case, the husband of Viola Shamu, an official of the Agricultural and Plantation Workers' Union was kidnapped, severely beaten and left for dead. Her two young children were also assaulted and she herself has had to go into hiding.
Top
From IRIN (UN), 2 April
Upcoming by-elections crucial for Zanu And MDC
Johannesburg - Zimbabwe's ruling Zanu PF is within sight of a two-thirds majority in parliament that would enable it to make constitutional amendments. This makes three upcoming by-elections all the more important for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Zanu PF holds 95 of the 150 seats in parliament. The 150 seats include 30 that are appointed directly or indirectly by President Robert Mugabe - eight provincial governors, 12 non-constituency MPs and ten chiefs appointed by their peers and given final approval by Mugabe. According to Zimbabwe's parliamentary records, the MDC holds 54 seats. The Zanu-Ndonga party of the late Ndabaningi Sithole, veteran nationalist and Mugabe critic, has one seat. Five of the 150 seats are currently vacant. Two of these - the Mashonaland West governor's seat and a replacement for deceased chief Mukwananzi - will almost certainly be filled by Zanu PF members, said Greg Linington, lecturer in constitutional law at the University of Zimbabwe. The others are the constituencies of Harare Central, following the resignation of MDC Member of Parliament (MP) Michael Auret due to ill health, and Makonde in the northwest of the country, vacant due to the recent death of Education Minister Swithun Mombeshora of Zanu PF. Also up for grabs is Chiredzi South, in the northeast of the country, after the suspension of Zanu PF MP Aaron Baloyi. It was recently reported that MDC MP Tafadzwa Musekiwa had fled to London to escape alleged intimidation and had resigned his Harare seat. But a parliamentary official as well as MDC spokesman Paul Themba Nyathi said they had not yet received official notification of this, so his Zengeza constituency is not considered vacant.
According to the constitution, if the ruling party holds "two thirds of the full membership" of parliament, which is 100 of 150 seats, then it is entitled to make constitutional amendments, Linington said. Zanu PF are therefore five seats short of the 100 seats required. Analyst Chris Maroleng of the Institute of Security Studies Africa said the issue of constitutional amendments becomes relevant in the context of recent reports, denied by the government, of the search for an exit strategy for Mugabe. "The constitution currently says that within 90 days of the president's death or retirement, there has to be a presidential election to appoint a successor," Maroleng explained. "But a constitutional amendment could allow Mugabe to appoint a successor ahead of his departure and bypass an election." The upcoming by-elections therefore become all the more critical, with the attending risk of political violence and intimidation. "During the presidential election the [Zanu PF] strategy was to reduce the number of voters, as a high voter turnout benefited the MDC and low turnout benefited Zanu PF," Maroleng said. Other influences include whether a constituency is urban or rural - where traditionally it is more difficult for the opposition to campaign. Most rural seats are held by Zanu PF, while the MDC tends to be urban-based. Maroleng said that of the three by-elections, the Makonde seat was likely to be a "borderline" MDC/Zanu PF seat as it had been a close contest in the last election, with reported incidents of violence. The Electoral Supervisory Commission has yet to set a date for the closely watched contests.
Top
From The New York Review of Books, 10 April
The Jewel of Africa - Part II
By Doris Lessing
This anti-white rhetoric was directed at whites generally, but particularly at the white farmers, who owned sizable tracts of land and were growing most of the food and earning Zimbabwe's foreign currency. They were well aware of their anomalous position, and the Commercial Farmers Union, the organization representing white farmers and some black ones, was putting forward proposals for a redistribution of land that would not disrupt the economy. Not one of these proposals was ever even acknowledged by Mugabe. Meanwhile farms that had already been acquired by the government were not being turned over to the poor blacks; that happened only at the beginning. They were being acquired by Mugabe's greedy cronies. Why then, when there was no need for confrontation, did Mugabe unexpectedly launch an attack on the white farmers, in a clear attempt to drive them from the country? Mugabe had enjoyed seeing himself as the senior black leader in southern Africa: he did so at a time when he was increasingly seen as an embarrassment. When Nelson Mandela appeared and became the world's sweetheart, Mugabe, according to many accounts, was furious. There were ridiculous scenes where Mugabe imagined he was establishing himself as first in importance. At lunchtime during a conference of African leaders, Mandela got in line with everyone else at the buffet, while Mugabe sat at a table that had been moved so that it would be prominent in the room, and had his followers bring dishes to him. This made everyone laugh at him; but surrounded by flatterers, he never understood why people were laughing.
He became desperate to establish himself as the Great Leader. The issue of land had always rankled, not least because during the War of Liberation in the 1970s he had promised land to "every man, woman, and child." Why had he made such foolish and impossible promises? Ah, but then it was by no means certain that he would come first in the race to be leader. But now he, Mugabe, the great statesman, the father of his people, would throw out the white farmers, and Mandela, that paltry figure, would be forgotten. And in some backward parts of Africa, and other places, he became famous. He did so at the price of ruining his country, already so misgoverned by his regime that it was on the edge of collapse. And there remains an unanswered question: Why did he act so destructively? Mugabe isn't stupid. His cunning as he established his position showed a scheming, guileful man. For instance, the war in the Congo, which impoverished Zimbabwe when it was already on its knees, enriched him personally with the loot he got from its mines in return for his sending troops. And it enabled him to buy off his greatest threat, the army officers who are the only force that can dislodge him. Many people said he was mad - I among them. But perhaps one has to be a sentimental liberal to doubt that a leader, particularly one so prolific with resounding onward-and-upward rhetoric, could be making plans that would ruin his people. Did he really not foresee what his campaign of forcible acquisition of land would achieve? A friend of mine, meeting a former friend, black, a Mugabe crony, in the street, was told, "We never meant things to get out of hand like this" - this was spoken casually as if about some unimportant failure. "The trouble is that Robert can think of nothing but Tony Blair. He is convinced Blair wants to ruin him, even kill him." It is true that Blair has been critical of Mugabe, but, as my friend said, "I doubt whether Tony Blair thinks of Mugabe for as much as half a minute a week." "Ah, but Robert would not like to believe that," was the answer.
Now, with hindsight, it is easy to recall scenes and events that spelled danger. First, and above all, there were the masses of unemployed black youths. Anywhere in Zimbabwe, along the roads, in distant villages, outside schools and colleges and missions, were very young black men just standing about, or more often trying to sell pitiful carvings of wooden beasts - elephants and giraffes and so forth. Also, some sculptures. Zimbabwe has some fine black sculptors. Typical of the magical thinking that has always bedeviled Zimbabwe were such statements as "If he can make all that money from carving stone figures, then so can I." There are places in Zimbabwe where sculptures cover acres. Most of it is rubbish. The youths had no future because Mugabe's promises had come to nothing; they were hungry and idle. It was these youths that Mugabe paid to harass and take over the white farms (and the richer black farms too) in the name of the war veterans. And they are still hanging around, brutalized, drunk, and futureless, because if they have acquired a little plot of land, they have no equipment, or seeds, or, above all, skills. Many have already drifted back to town. They are heard to complain, "We did all these bad things for Comrade Mugabe but now he has forgotten us."
Another scene: it is 1982, two years after Independence, and there is still a sullen, raw, bitter postwar mood. But in an inn, formerly a white drinking hole, in the mountains above the town of Mutare a group of young black people are dressed for a night out. The men are in dinner jackets, the girls in dance dresses. They look like an advertisement in a glossy magazine from the Thirties. Nothing could be more incongruous in this homely rural setting, which has probably never before seen a dinner jacket or a décolleté in its life. But they are thinking that this is what the long war was about. Here they are in a hotel, formerly a white enclave, dressed to the nines - just like the whites, drinking fancy drinks, and, above all, waited on, like the whites, by black menials. For the ninety years of white occupation, the blacks, most of them roughly torn from their village life, had watched - unreachably above them - rich whites with their cars and their black servants. The white people they saw as rich included many poor ones, but most blacks were so far below an apparently cohesive white layer that they could see only riches. Effortless riches. Take the example of a white youth who left home in Britain because of unemployment during the depression of the 1930s and went to work as an assistant to an established farmer. Before he tried for a loan to make the gamble on farming on his own account, he was a man without more than his clothes; the family in Britain was probably only too pleased to get rid of him. To the black waiter who served that young man beer at a district Sports Day he seemed like some rich apparition for whom everything was possible. The whites were all rich. And the most enticing of the dreams, the unobtainable dreams, was the life of the white farmer, the life of the verandas. When they thought of Mugabe's promise during the War of Liberation, that everyone would have land, this is what they wanted. A house like a white farmer's, the spreading acres, the black menials - effortless ease.
A fact about the white farmers that must be recorded is that most of them were very good farmers, inventive, industrious, with an ability to make do and mend, even when Mugabe would not allow the import of spare parts, supplies, sufficient gasoline. To visit a white farm was to be taken around by people proud of their resourcefulness. "I invented this," one of them might say, referring to a process in the curing of tobacco or a bit of machinery. There was the farmer's wife who made a cottage industry out of delicious crystallized preserves from the gourds the cattle eat. Many built up their farms from nothing - from raw bush. By the Nineties their attitude toward their black employees was changing. I was brought up with the unregenerate white farmers of the early times. At best they had maternal and paternal attitudes toward blacks, running basic clinics or elementary schools. At worst they were brutal. Because of the enforced exodus of the white farmers, attempts are being made now to soften their history. This won't work; too much has been written and recorded about their domination of blacks. But visiting them in the late Eighties or the Nineties, I found that they were, most of them, making attempts to change. As the collapse of the country worsens, few, however, can resist saying, "We told you so. We always said they couldn't run a bicycle shop, let alone a country." Such remarks come from people who had made sure there was not merely a glass ceiling but a steel one, preventing blacks from rising, from getting education and experience. In old Southern Rhodesia, when there were too many blacks on the voters' roll for the whites' comfort, the qualifications for voters were adjusted upward to exclude them. At Zambia's independence celebrations, I saw a district commissioner radiant with malicious delight because the black newcomers had mismanaged a minor aspect of the festivities. Not very nice people, some of the white settlers and administrators. But changing. Alan Paton, in Cry the Beloved Country: "...By the time they have come to loving, we will have come to hating."
The reporting of the transfer of farmland has been biased. All the emphasis has been on the white farmers who are losing their land. Not nearly enough has been said about the hundreds of thousands of black farm workers who lost their work and their homes, and also were beaten up (and are still being beaten up), their wives raped, and their daughters too. Well-off black farmers - some assisted by their white neighbors - and more modest black farmers have had their land taken from them. A key fact, hardly mentioned, is that since Independence 80 percent of the farms have changed hands, and under the law they had to be offered first to the government, which refused them. Mugabe's rhetoric about white farmers grabbing land from the blacks is contradicted by this fact. As a result of his campaign of misinformation, moreover, you meet people who will tell you, "The whites threw my grandparents off their farm and took their house." At the time of the whites' arrival in the area that is now Zimbabwe there were a quarter of a million blacks, and they lived in villages of mud-walled, grass-roofed huts. The women grew pumpkins and the maize imported from South America, and gathered plants from the bush. The men hunted. When I was a girl you met the men walking through the bush, dressed in animal skins, carrying assegais, people a step or two up from hunter-gatherers. On a BBC program you hear a young woman, in all sincerity, saying that the playing of the mbira (thin strips of metal on a sounding gourd, which whites called the hand piano) was formerly forbidden under white rule. Yet when I was growing up the tinkling of the hand piano could be heard everywhere, including black villages. It will take a long time for Mugabe's version of history to be corrected, if it ever is.
Top
From Business Day (SA), 4 April
Magistrate defers MDC leader's trial
As Southern African Development Community (SADC) ministers met in Harare yesterday under the auspices of the ministerial committee of the SADC organ on politics, defence and security, Zimbabwe's official opposition's deputy president was told he would have to return to prison. Gibson Sibanda of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) has been charged under the Public Order and Security Act for the part he played in organising a recent peaceful protest. Minutes before the bail hearing in the Bulawayo Magistrate's Court yesterday, Magistrate John Masimba excused himself from delivering judgment, saying he had to go to Harare on urgent personal business and adjourned the case until Monday. Sibanda was returned to Khami Prison, where he is being held in solitary confinement, under heavy armed guard. The reason for this, says his wife, is that the authorities fear that if he is put in a shared cell, he may influence others. "It is ridiculous, but at least he does not have to share his two metre square cell with 20 other inmates, as is currently normal in Zimbabwean prisons," she said.
In what has been described as a crackdown on the Zimbabwean opposition, the MDC MP for Kadoma, Austin Mpandawana has been held in the police cells at Kadoma for two weeks. He was arrested during the two-day stayaway two weeks ago and like Sibanda, also faces charges relating to the Public Order and Security Act. He was denied bail and his appeal against this judgment was referred to the high court. His legal counsel have now been informed that his case is not urgent, which means he could wait indefinitely for it to be heard. Morgan Tsvangirai, president of the MDC described the recent stayaway yesterday as the Zimbabwean people's Rubicon and said the party was now ready to "finish the job". Tsvangirai, whose treason trial has been adjourned until next month says the MDC has never been in better shape or been more determined to "complete the change".
Spokesman for the MDC, Paul Themba Nyathi, said, "SADC ministers must not waste this crucial opportunity to unequivocally condemn the inhumane behaviour of the Mugabe regime. "SADC ministers cannot ignore the current reign of terror against innocent civilians that has been sanctioned and encouraged by Mugabe himself. "No one can deny the brutality and the scale of the crimes that are being committed here. To turn a blind eye, for the purposes of multilateral cohesion, would be a distinct abdication of moral responsibility," he said. Nyathi also expressed concern and disbelief that Zimbabwe was not on the official agenda for the meeting, "given that the meeting is taking place in our country amidst the background of an unprecedented political and humanitarian crisis, the omission of Zimbabwe from the official agenda is bewildering and deeply disappointing". Meanwhile, Zanu PF activists in Harare have evicted all vendors at the Mbare Musika market and forced the market to close because of Zanu PF's poor performance in the Highfield and Kuwadzana parliamentary byelections last weekend.
Top
From SABC News, 3 April
Southern Africa team to probe Zimbabwe crisis
A southern African task force will visit Zimbabwe next week to investigate the country's political crisis which the opposition says has seen a crackdown on its supporters by Robert Mugabe, the Zimbabwean President. Zimbabwe's main opposition movement earlier urged southern African ministers meeting in Harare to condemn what it called Mugabe's intimidation campaign against the opposition. Leonardo Simao, Mozambique's Foreign Minister, said later the political crisis formed part of the agenda of a meeting in Harare today to discuss security issues within the 14-member Southern African Development Community (SADC). "We are worried because... we want to see peace, stability and harmony in every member state and in Zimbabwe you don't live under this," Simao told journalists. "The in-depth discussion on Zimbabwe will be carried out next week by the SADC task force on Zimbabwe... where all different stakeholders will be invited to voice their opinions about the current situation of the country," he added. Earlier, the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) had urged the foreign ministers meeting in Harare to condemn the arrest and alleged torture of its members in the aftermath of protests against Mugabe's rule last month. The MDC has accused the army and supporters of Mugabe's ruling Zanu-PF party of intensifying a campaign in which hundreds of opposition backers have been detained or assaulted since the strike. Authorities deny allegations of violence. "SADC ministers cannot ignore the current reign of terror against innocent civilians that has been sanctioned and encouraged by Mugabe himself," the MDC said earlier. Morgan Tsvangirai, the MDC leader, currently on trial on charges of plotting to kill Mugabe, yesterday accused the president of trying to sow the seeds of civil war and warned other southern African nations it could affect the whole region.
The opposition says authorities stepped up their crackdown by arresting and charging Gibson Sibanda, MDC vice president, with plotting to overthrow the government. Sibanda was arrested on Monday over his role in the staging of a two-day strike last month that turned into one of the biggest protests in recent years against Mugabe's 23-year rule. Earlier in the day, the MDC said a magistrate had postponed for the third time a hearing on Sibanda's bail application to Monday in what it called "a deliberate ploy by the Mugabe regime to unjustifiably lock up MDC officials". Simao declined to comment on Sibanda's continued detention, telling journalists: "I'm not familiar with the detail of your legal procedures in this country." Western governments have condemned the crackdown, in which the MDC says over 500 people have been arrested, 250 taken to hospital and scores beaten and tortured while in police custody. Police say they arrested scores of people in connection with violence during last month's strike, but deny allegations of torture. The army has also denied that its members are involved. Mugabe (79) won re-election in polls in March last year, deemed fraudulent by both the MDC and some Western governments. The MDC and Western countries say fellow African leaders, mainly Thabo Mbeki, the South African President, have turned a blind eye to Mugabe's alleged human rights abuses. Mugabe says the MDC is a puppet of the West, which he says wants to oust him in retaliation for his seizure of white-owned commercial farms to give to landless blacks. He denies that his land grab is to blame for food shortages affecting half of Zimbabwe's 14 million people, or that he has mismanaged an economy beset by fuel and foreign currency woes.
Top
From The Zimbabwe Independent, 4 April
Chefs panic over land audit
Blessing Zulu
Frantic moves to provide a semblance of order to government's land resettlement programme are under way as the prospect of a new audit looms. Ministers and senior Zanu PF officials are understood to be "regularising" their land holdings after revelations of multiple-farm ownership in the interim report by Minister of State for Land Reform in the Vice-President's Office, Flora Buka. President Robert Mugabe announced at Heroes Acre on March 21 that government was setting up a new land audit team, remarks he repeated to Zanu PF youths the next day. The United Nations Development Programme has asked for a land audit before donors can be brought on board. And as the agricultural crisis mounts government appears prepared to comply but wants to get in first with its own reckoning. The international community has refused to fund land reform saying it was chaotic and non-transparent. Zanu PF bigwigs are understood to be scrambling to put their houses in order ahead of Mugabe's probe. This will in many cases involve putting their farms in the names of family members and friends. "There is unconcealed panic in some quarters," a politburo member told the Zimbabwe Independent this week. The Buka report revealed that some governors, ministers and other well-connected beneficiaries owned up to five farms. There has been an indignant response from those named, claiming the report is inaccurate or driven by hostile agendas. Buka told the Independent this week that her full report would still appear despite plans for another audit. "When my report is ready it will be published and it will be availed to you," she said. She refused to comment on the proposed new audit saying it was premature to do so. "I cannot comment on something that has not been set up as yet," she said. "I have not yet been approached by the president and I cannot say whether I will be part of the committee," she added.
A source in the President's Office said the executive regards the Buka document as only a "surveillance report", hence the need to constitute a team to do a more thorough job. The source said the committee would be co-ordinated from the President's Office. Government sources said the audit team would be supervised by a cabinet committee, which would in turn report to the president. Observers said the setting up of another audit team was an attempt by government to show it was transparent in its land reform exercise. But there was scepticism as to its findings. "This report is going to be filed away like others produced by previous commissions set up by the president," said a diplomat. The UNDP has proposed the setting up of an independent audit of the resettlement programme to identify areas where international donors can assist. Diplomatic sources said the government was keen to pre-empt that initiative by coming up with its own probe. And that there could be public reprimands and even confiscations to impress the international community. However, most donors are likely to remain unimpressed by this "window dressing". Patrick Nyaruwata, acting chairman of the war veterans, said his association had not been included in the Mugabe committee. "We are not included in the presidential committee," he said. "The committee, we understand, has been appointed from the cabinet and what we will be doing is to monitor the proceedings. When we are unhappy with the proceedings we will let them know," he said.
Top
From The Financial Gazette, 3 April
Zim High Commissioner to Tanzania threatens lawyer
Staff Reporter
The United States-based Lawyers' Committee for Human Rights (LCHR) has asked the Tanzanian government to ensure the safety of human rights lawyer Gabriel Shumba after he allegedly received threats from Zimbabwe's ambassador to that country, Chipo Zindoga. In a letter to Tanzania's home affairs and foreign affairs ministers, LCHR senior associate Lorna Davidson said Shumba' s safety could be at risk. Shumba fled Zimbabwe earlier in February, citing death threats from state security agents, which were denied by the police. "We wish to bring this matter to your attention and request your immediate action to ensure that Gabriel Shumba is provided with adequate protection from threats and other forms of persecution from Zimbabwean agents inside Tanzania," reads part of the letter. "We are most disturbed to learn that he has continued to be persecuted by Zimbabwean state agents. We would greatly appreciate your prompt response and further information about the action taken by your office to address our concerns," Davidson said.
Shumba, who now works for the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal in Tanzania, this week alleged that Zindonga phoned him on Tuesday and warned him he could face "serious consequences" because of his involvement with the UN tribunal. According to Shumba, the diplomat accused him of using the UN tribunal to have President Robert Mugabe charged with crimes against humanity under international law. "She told me that I had come to the UN to work out the logistics on how Mugabe can be brought to a British-inspired justice in the form of a UN tribunal, like the one I work for," said Shumba. "She then warned me that I had neither hovel nor haven on earth to hide in and I was dead meat if I thought I had escaped Zimbabwe's style of dealing with hooligans like myself." However, Zindoga said she did not even know Shumba and therefore could not have threatened him. "I don't know anybody called Shumba. Who is he?" she said yesterday. "I don't know anything about it. It's news to me. I have never met this Shumba you are talking about so I couldn't possibly have threatened him."
But Shumba alleged that Zindoga had threatened to use her links within the Tanzanian government to engineer his deportation back to Zimbabwe "to defend Tsvangirai". Opposition Movement for Democratic Change(MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai is on trial for treason for allegedly plotting to assassinate Mugabe. "I was threatened with deportation back to Zimbabwe on the allegation that I am not a genuine UN employee, but I had come to advance the interests of the MDC, an issue that was also raised by my tormentors when I was being tortured in Zimbabwe," Shumba said. Shumba and St Mary's Member of Parliament Job Sikhala were detained and allegedly tortured by the police, who accused them of planning to topple Mugabe's government. The lawyer fled to South Africa after he was acquitted of the charges, saying he had received death threats from state security agents.
Top
From The New York Review of Books, 10 April
The Jewel of Africa - Part III
By Doris Lessing
He has recently set up compulsory indoctrination classes in villages throughout the country, mostly for teachers, but for other officials too, where they are taught that they should worship Mugabe and be totally obedient to Zanu, the ruling party. All the ills of Zimbabwe are said to be caused by machinations of Tony Blair in cahoots with the opposition parties. The students learn useful skills like how to murder opponents with a blow to sensitive parts of the body, and how to strangle them with bootlaces. This type of sadistic cruelty is not part of their own traditions and history, to which lip service is continually paid. Many blacks I've talked to and heard about do not like their own history, although they talk about "our customs." In fact, many I have seen and known cannot wait to wear dance dresses, behave like whites, live the white life, put the bush far behind them. A group of sophisticated, urban blacks will make sentimental remarks about photographs of a traditional village, but they haven't been near their villages for years. If you want to see just how much "our customs" really mean, then visit the park in Harare on Saturday or Sunday, where dozens of wedding groups arrive, the brides in flouncy white and veils, with bridesmaids and pages. The woman may be very pregnant, or with several small children. But this rite of passage into the modern world, the white man's wedding, they must have, and the photographers are there to preserve the beautiful sight for posterity. (It should perhaps be asked why a ritual invented by middle-class Victorians should have conquered the world from Japan to the Virgin Islands.) In fact, "our customs" are strongly valued when they have to do with the subjection of women. The law of the land may say one thing on paper - Zimbabwe's early Marxist phase, as in other Communist countries, imposed many kinds of equality. But "our customs" still make sure that a woman has no right to the money she has earned, or to her children. She is her husband's vassal. When Mugabe was met at the airport by hand-clapping and kowtowing maidens, and he was criticized (in the early days) for this sign of backwardness, the reply was "it is our custom." A man in a three-piece suit, in a government job, will still beat his wife - or try to; the women are fighting back. And he will consult soothsayers and shamans. Superstition still rules. It is "our custom" to look for the evil eye when a family member gets sick or a cow falls lame and then pay the witch doctor to exact revenge. It is becoming "our custom" to try to find virgin partners if you are HIV-positive, for to have sex with them will cure you of AIDS. (AIDS has spread widely in Zimbabwe.) The use of human parts in medicine goes on; it is the custom.
By now the expulsion of the white farmers is nearly complete. It should be evident that what we have been seeing is not principally about race; it is a transfer of property. Many of the poor people who settled on white land have been thrown off again by powerful blacks. Those still there may grow maize and pumpkins and the plant called rape on their patches-when it rains, that is. There is a bad drought again. The poor settlers are farming without machinery or even, in some cases, basic implements, such as shovels. The irrigation systems have broken down. I remember another prophetic scene from the Eighties: a water tank of a certain school was not working. A valve had gone. No one replaced it. The women went back to getting water from the river, which was infested with bilharzia. Two years later the water tank had not been mended. The recent settlers who had depended on Mugabe ("Comrade Mugabe will look after us"; "Comrade Mugabe will...") have no chance of getting their children into school because school (unlike under the whites) costs a lot of money; and how will they get money for clothes, even if they survive this terrible time when there is nothing to eat and people are dying
of hunger? If they manage to stay on the land they will be as poor as subsistence peasants anywhere in the world.
Every telephone conversation with people in Zimbabwe, every visitor from there provides tales as bizarre as anything else out of Africa. The black elite drive around the white farms and say, "I'll have that one." "No, I want that one." Mugabe's wife had herself driven through the countryside, picking among farms like fruit on a stall. She chose a really nice one. A white farmer's wife watched a black woman arrive in her smart car. She was pushed out of the way, while the interloper began measuring for curtains. "Are you going to live here?" inquired the dispossessed wife. "Me? I wouldn't live in this dump," the black woman said scornfully. "I'm going to let it. I've already got three houses in Borrowdale" (the most fashionable suburb in Harare). Around Harare and Bulawayo, during weekends on the farms taken over by blacks, cars arrive and out pile the city dwellers enjoying a rural excursion. They set up a barbecue; music blares across the veld; they sing and dance and eat, spread themselves for the night through the empty house, and depart next morning back to Harare. A farmer from Matabeleland, third generation, whose bore holes supplied water not only to his laborers but to those on nearby farms, now black-owned, saw a car driving up and some drunk black men get out. "We are taking your farm," they said. "I shall take you to court," he said. "But we are the law now." They had parked the car outside his gate. He asked them to move it. "That's where the cattle come across to the dam," he said. "We know why you want us to move. You don't like to look at black people." "But I look at black people every day from sunup to sundown." They drove off, returned drunk, and took over a wing of his house, where they drank and caroused, day and night. After months the farmer gave up: he had been maintaining the water machinery, but after he tried to show the interlopers how to look after it, and failed, he simply left. "Why are you taking away those ladders?" he was asked. "They are my ladders," he said. "No they aren't. They are our ladders. You are sabotaging us." A farmer, observing how the white farmers around him were being stopped from planting crops by the black mobs, thought he would accept his fate and simply leave. But one of the leaders asked him to plant his crop, tobacco, the chief currency earner. "What's the point, you'll only take it." "No, you plant, you'll be safe." He planted, the crop was a good one, and when it was reaped, baled, and ready, the mob leader told him that now he must get off the farm. "I am taking your farm and your tobacco."
Some white farmers are in Mozambique; they had to begin again without capital, implements, machinery. Skilled and hard-working, they will survive. They are in Zambia, invited by the black government: white farmers in Zambia produce nearly all the food. They are also in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, while the people in Zimbabwe are starving. A month ago the black occupiers of a white farm, a ranch, drove dozens of cattle into a dam and drowned them. Traditionally Africans in Zimbabwe have loved cattle, their "mombies" as they call them. Cattle are currency, riches, links with the past, a promise for the future. It is hard to believe that Africans would harm them. Another story is more hopeful. On a pig farm the animals were dying because they had not been fed and watered since the white farmers were thrown off the land. Drunken blacks had hacked pieces of meat off some of the pigs and left them to die. A white woman vet stood by weeping, forbidden to help the pigs. But then one of the new black settlers, unseen by the others, came to her and said, "We are townspeople, we have these animals now and don't know how to look after them. Please help us." They had taken a couple of the dying pigs and put them in a shed. The white woman went with him and began showing him and his wife how to look after the animals. The latest news is that Mugabe, under a contract with a Chinese company, is importing Chinese farmers to grow food, since the forcibly acquired white farms are not producing. He says this is because there is no farm machinery. Yet all the expelled white farmers had been forced to leave behind their machinery. If lack of machinery is the problem, then why not import some? But is the story true? It has the tone of zany, brutal, hasty improvisation that characterizes news from Mugabe. We can pity the Chinese, who may not be protected against Mugabe's arbitrary cruelties. And what about the poor blacks who will yet again watch their land being taken from them?
Top
From The New York Times, 5 April
Africa mission to investigate tensions in Zimbabwe
By Ginger Thompson
Johannesburg - Representatives of a southern African task force are scheduled to visit Zimbabwe next week to investigate intensifying political tensions that threaten to push the country toward further unrest and economic ruin. Leonardo Simão, foreign minister of Mozambique, told reporters that the task force had been established Thursday in discussions among the 14-member Southern African Development Community. "We want to see peace, stability and harmony in every member state, and in Zimbabwe you don't live under this," Mr. Simão said. President Robert Mugabe, who has ruled Zimbabwe since the end of white-minority rule more than 20 years ago, has accused his political opponents of serving Western governments by attempting to overthrow him and to incite violence, most recently with a mass strike that crippled industry and business for two days last month. Leaders of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change consider Mr. Mugabe an authoritarian leader whose government has undermined democracy and devastated the economy. The group has said that President Mugabe responded to its strike with a crackdown against opposition leaders and supporters. In the days after the strike, Western diplomats and human rights groups reported that soldiers and police officers arrested as many as 500 people. They said emergency rooms were filled with people who had been injured by security forces.
Over the last week, Mr. Mugabe stepped up security patrols around important government offices, and set up police checkpoints across the capital, Harare. The police also arrested the vice president of the Movement for Democratic Change, Gibson Sibanda, accusing him of plotting to overthrow the government. The group's president, Morgan Tsvangirai, has threatened to organize more mass action against the government because Mr. Mugabe failed to accept a list of 15 demands, most of them calling for government compliance with basic civil liberties. Meanwhile, millions of Zimbabweans struggle against hunger and unemployment. A South African military official said that the number of Zimbabweans illegally crossing into South Africa had become a "drain on already overburdened services," especially hospitals and employment. He said that the military would soon double its force along 170 miles of the Zimbabwe border to 280 soldiers. The Zimbabwe crisis has also become a drain on President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, who has advocated a policy of "quiet diplomacy," in Zimbabwe. In daily newspaper columns and radio talk shows, critics charge that President Mbeki, who is committed to a vision of a unified Africa, has publicly played down evidence of human-rights violations by President Mugabe's government. Western governments have put pressure on South Africa to take a stronger stand.
"No one can deny the brutality and the scale of the crimes that are being committed here," said a spokesman for the Movement for Democratic Change, Paul Themba Nyathi. "To turn a blind eye, for the purposes of multilateral cohesion, would be a distinct abdication of moral responsibility." Political analysts said it seemed unlikely that either President Mbeki or the newly established task force would buckle under the pressure to join Western condemnations of the Mugabe government. The South African government, analysts said, does not believe the opposition is prepared for power. Instead, President Mbeki will probably press behind the scenes for a transition that would allow Mr. Mugabe, 79, to eventually turn power over to a member of his ruling party. "This is not going to be a deal made through some formal peace process," said one analyst who spoke on condition of anonymity. "This is a deal that will get made in some backrooms with lots of smoke and whiskey."
Top
From SAPA, 5 April
Zim fact-finding mission welcomed
Zimbabwe's opposition Movement for Democratic Change cautiously welcomed an initiative by regional governments to send a fact-finding mission to examine the crisis in the country. Said MDC spokesman Paul Themba Nyathi: "When Paul saw his light on the way to Damascus, it didn't matter how late it was, what mattered was that he eventually saw the light. It looks like there is finally some realisation that they cannot continue the soft pedalling." Mozambican foreign minister Leonardo Simao announced after a meeting of the security committee of the Southern African Development Community that a "task force" would visit Harare next week to hear the views of "all stakeholders" in the country. Observers said it was an indication that the regional body was shifting from its position of general support of President Robert Mugabe's government. The SADC move came in the wake of the Commonwealth's decision last month to extend Zimbabwe's suspension from the body until the end of the year because of the regime's failure to restore the rule of law and end state-directed violence against Mugabe's opponents. It also followed the state's vicious crackdown against the MDC after the pro-democracy party demonstrated its massive support by shutting down the country for two days last month with a national stayaway.
Despite international outrage against the violence, mostly by uniformed soldiers armed with whips and clubs, attacks on MDC members and officials have continued. Nyathi confirmed a gang of 15 men in military uniform descended on the home, in the sprawling southern township of Seke, of MDC MP Fidelis Mhashu and assaulted his wife, Monica, and three relatives staying there. Mhashu is away, on study leave in the United States. "They said they were looking for Mhashu because they wanted to kill him," Monica Mhashu said. "They beat us with batons, whipped us and stole money and food." They also took away the MP's pistol. The independent Daily News reported yesterday that a ruling Zanu PF party supporter appeared in court in the western city of Bulawayo, charged with raping a woman inside the local Zanu PF party offices. State prosecutor said Richard Munthuli grabbed the woman, carried her on his shoulders into the offices and raped her twice, because he was angry over the MDC's victory in two by-elections against Zanu PF in Harare. The country is faced with a famine affecting seven million, the economy is in a state of accelerating collapse and business and industry are being ground down by critical fuel and power shortages. Diplomats say that Mugabe's failure to arrest the crisis in the country has finally begun to turn even staunch supporters like South African president Thabo Mbeki against him.
Top
From The Daily Telegraph (UK), 5 April
Task force acts on Zimbabwe
Harare - A southern African task force will go to Zimbabwe next week to investigate political violence following an alarming wave of arrests and beatings of opposition activists. The Southern African Development Community, SADC, usually supportive of President Mugabe, finally reacted to mounting violence with an announcement that it was sending a "task force" to Harare "to evaluate the situation". More than 500 people have been arrested, 300 taken to hospital with injuries and scores beaten and tortured while in police custody following a general strike called by the opposition Movement for Democratic change two weeks ago. SADC, southern Africa's equivalent of the EU, has frequently been criticised for not putting enough pressure on Robert Mugabe's government to end political violence. Part of SADC's mission will be to look into the detention of Gibson Sibanda, the MDC's vice-president. A United Nations delegation in Harare said it would be making its concerns "known to Mr Mugabe". An official said: "Something is going to be done. We know what is going on."
Top
From The Mail & Guardian (SA), 4 April
Zimbabwe launches charm offensive
Harare - Zimbabwe's foreign minister said Friday that the government had invited a special regional task force to the country to counter what it calls negative propaganda. Stan Mudenge told a press conference that a task force of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) was due to visit Zimbabwe, but said it was not as a result of a meeting of regional foreign ministers held in the capital, Harare on Thursday. Mozambique Foreign Minister Leornado Simao, who chairs the SADC organ on politics, defence and security that met on Thursday, had said the task force would come to the country next week to look into issues in Zimbabwe, including claims of human rights abuses against the opposition. But Mudenge told reporters the task force was coming at his invitation. "All is my initiative and my strategy," Mudenge said. The minister said this was "to ensure that my colleagues in SADC, who are subjected to so much propaganda, a lot of it untrue, do come and get a better view, and a better impression of the situation in Zimbabwe." The opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) has been issuing daily reports of alleged human rights abuses against its supporters, mainly in the politically tense, low income suburbs of Harare. The MDC recently retained two Harare suburban seats after hard-fought by-elections that President Robert Mugabe's Zanu PF had vowed to take back. On Thursday the MDC issued a statement urging the SADC ministers gathered in Harare to condemn the alleged human rights abuses against its members. Mudenge told reporters that Thursday's meeting also resolved to get SADC to make representation to the European Union (EU) to lift targetted sanctions against the Zimbabwe government for its alleged abuse of democracy and human rights. The sanctions include a ban on Mugabe and 71 of his associates from entering EU territory. Mudenge said SADC would "engage the European Union, with the objective of persuading the EU to remove its so-called smart sanctions against Zimbabwe."
Top
From The Herald, 5 April
Story pure fabrication - Zim diplomat
Herald Reporter It is not the Government's business to determine who should work for the United Nations or to order another country to deny anyone a working permit, the country's High Commissioner to Tanzania, Ms Chipo Zindoga, said yesterday. She was reacting to a story in the Financial Gazette on Thursday alleging that she threatened with death, a Zimbabwean human rights lawyer, Mr Gabriel Shumba, who is now based in Tanzania. "It is not the business of the Zimbabwe Government, which I represent in Tanzania, to determine who should work for the UN or dictate to the host government to deny someone a working permit. The story is pure fabrication meant to promote Shumba's own interests. The Zimbabwean State agents said to be harassing him in Tanzania are just a figment of his own imagination as there are no such operatives here. The story should be treated with the contempt it deserves as it is not based on facts." Ms Zindoga said she did not know Mr Shumba and did not have any knowledge of his presence in Tanzania until Farai Mutsaka, a reporter with the Financial Gazette, called to ask about the issue. The mission has a register of all registered Zimbabweans based in Tanzania and Mr Shumba is not on the list. The mission's officials interact with all Zimbabweans and extends its services to them, she added. Mr Shumba alleges in the Fingaz article that Ms Zindoga had accused him of using the UN tribunal to have President Mugabe charged with crimes against humanity under international law. He claimed that his life was now at risk. According to the Fingaz, Mr Shumba is now working for the UN tribunal. But the High Commission has since established that Mr Shumba was on a short internship at the tribunal, receiving just an allowance. "He is not the first Zimbabwean to go to the tribunal on internship nor is he going to be the last. Several Zimbabweans have been on this programme as are citizens of many other countries. A number of Zimbabweans have worked and continue to work for the tribunal on a contractual basis, as is the case with all UN employees," the High Commissioner said.
Top
From The Daily News, 4 April
Costly blunder haunts Air Zimbabwe
By Precious Shumba
Air Zimbabwe was set to collapse if the deal to secure two commuter aircraft on hire had not been shelved last week. Aviation experts say the deal would have compelled the airline to pay out large sums in foreign currency for almost everything that had to be done on the planes. The deal was heavily tilted in favour of Air Littoral Industrie SA of France, which dictated everything from maintenance to payment, leaving Air Zimbabwe without any option but to abide by the unfavourable conditions. Air Zimbabwe wanted to hire two ATR 42-500 aircraft from the airline and was ready to pay US$147 000 (Z$117,6 million) for each plane for the next three years. But the deal collapsed after The Daily News published details of the contract, which had reportedly not been disclosed in full to the government, according to Air Zimbabwe. David Mwenga, the airline's spokesman, last week issued a statement playing down the implications of the collapsed deal. Mwenga said they were now in the process of demanding back the US$630 000 (Z$504 million) Air Zimbabwe claimed to have paid to Air Littoral Industrie SA for the ATR 42-500 aircraft. He said: "The airline management is conveying this decision to the French company and will be claiming back the deposit and commitment fee as provided for in the leasing arrangements. The airline also continues to explore alternative arrangements with appropriate commuter aircraft suppliers in order to enhance the viability of the airline." The airline's efforts to recover its money from the French company might hit a snag following revelations this week that the Air Zimbabwe management reportedly signed a memorandum of understanding with the French company a fortnight ago. Although Mwenga insisted that Air Zimbabwe paid Z$504 million as commitment and deposit fee, the airline paid for the training of two pilots for over one month at Air Littoral Industrie's base in France to familiarise them with the 50-seater ATR planes. The pilots on induction received US$350 (Z$280 000) every day of their stay in France and about Z$16,8 million was spent on their allowances. Ironically, engineers who repair and maintain aircraft were kept out of the deal until the last minute. It remains unclear how the airline will recover all the foreign currency it paid to Cornwell Muleya, an aviation consultant and a former manager with Air Botswana who they engaged to link them up with Air Littoral. Engineers who spoke on condition they remained unnamed said the collapsed deal was pregnant with aviation inconsistencies that had the potential to destroy Air Zimbabwe. If the deal had been sealed, Air Zimbabwe would have paid about US$250 000 (Z$200 million) as a maintenance reserve figure. This amount would have covered spare parts and maintenance of the planes.
At the same time that Mwenga was telling the world that Air Zimbabwe's team of negotiators had recommended that the Air Littoral deal be shelved, two additional pilots who were supposed to leave for France failed to do so following the publication of the deal. The engineers said the airline's management did not consult them when it began talks with Air Littoral Industrie for the acquisition of the two ATR planes. "The deal was strictly between the airline's management and Air Littoral Industrie SA," one engineer said. "The engineering manager, Phineas Ndlovu, was only brought into the picture when the deal was at an advanced stage. The management ignored the input from engineers and relied on lawyers to make serious decisions on the type of planes to be acquired. The problem we have at Air Zimbabwe is that we have a management that is led by lawyers and a board that has no aviation expertise. The board accepts without questioning the viability and essence of the decisions taken by the management." If the deal had been sealed, it would have bled Air Zimbabwe to the point of collapse, leaving the country without a national airline. According to the contract, Air Littoral was supposed to bring to Harare replacement aircraft spares for the ATR. This meant that every time Air Zimbabwe wanted to replace worn-out spares, they would pay Air Littoral labour charges at one-and-a-half the normal hourly rate in foreign currency. The engineers alleged the management lacked a clear working plan to revive the national airline because if they had one, they would have taken their time before rushing into what the engineers said were "impossible" deals. "We have many aviation experts who can run Air Zimbabwe," said one engineer. "There has been a trend at the national airline where managers make blunders in order to be fired and go away with a golden handshake. Huttush Muringi, the third managing director for the airline was fired after he entered into a Fokker 50s deal without consulting the government." Muringi later challenged the dismissal in court and received several millions of dollars as an exit package. Livingstone Gwata, the airline's board chairman has come under fire from Air Zimbabwe employees for his alleged failure to stamp his authority on the parastatal.
Top
From BBC News, 4 April
Police blamed for Zim stadium deaths
Steve Vickers in Harare
Police in Zimbabwe have been blamed for the country's worst-ever stadium disaster and some officers face prosecution. Thirteen people died and many more were injured at a World Cup qualifier between Zimbabwe and South Africa at the National Sports Stadium in July 2000. Tragedy struck when disgruntled fans began throwing objects onto the pitch when the visitors took a 2-0 lead with seven minutes of the match remaining. Police responded by firing teargas into the crowd, resulting in a stampede as fans pushed towards the exit points, many of which were closed. Following an inquest into the disaster, Harare magistrate Faith Musinga ruled that police were entirely to blame for the loss of the 13 lives. She said: "May the case be thoroughly investigated with prosecution in the next two months." One of the fans at the stadium on the fateful day, Aleck Fidesi, testified at the inquest as to how his six year-old son died of asphyxiation from inhaling teargas. "I asked the police to protect my son and daughter from the stampede, but instead they threw teargas at us," said Fidesi, who broke down while testifying. At the inquest, the police blamed fans for throwing objects onto the pitch, and claimed that a coloured flare let off from the terraces caused panic among fans. But the magistrate dismissed the police evidence as "inconsistent and unreasonable." Musinga said: "There were a handful of hooligans, who should have been identified and arrested. The police were negligent and overreacted." "Before firing (teargas) they should have ensured that the gates were open. How can you disperse a full stadium if the gates are closed?"
Top
From The Daily News, 5 April
US tightens screws
By Brian Mangwende, Chief Reporter
The United States Agency for International Development (USAid) has withdrawn its funding - channelled through the Southern African Development Community (Sadc) - from 76 government and ruling Zanu PF officials. This was disclosed by Stan Mudenge, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, yesterday. The funding enabled Zimbabwean ministers to attend Sadc meetings. Mudenge said the aid agency had threatened similar action on Sadc member states if they continued to invite Zimbabwe to regional conferences on politics, security and defence. A US official in Zimbabwe, who declined to be named, confirmed the move yesterday. This latest development comes at a time when several southern African countries, including Mozambique, have broken their silence on the Zimbabwe crisis. On Thursday, Sadc foreign ministers grilled Mudenge over reports of gross human rights abuses, muzzling of the Press through draconian laws like the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act and the Public Order and Security Act, general lawlessness and the collapse of the economy. At a Press conference at his Munhumutapa Building offices, Mudenge said: "As you may know, USAid funds Sadc conferences. They have taken a position that their money must not be used by Zimbabwe at Sadc conferences. But the Sadc countries said they will not accept any funding if Zimbabwe is excluded from Sadc conferences. The Sadc Troika should engage the European Union to remove 'smart' sanctions against Zimbabwe. Sadc countries have made it clear that there would be no EU-Africa meeting without Zimbabwe." The Sadc Troika is made up of Angola, Malawi and Zimbabwe. But because the spotlight was on Zimbabwe, the country would not participate in the initiative. The troika is chaired by Angola. Mudenge said all Sadc countries had opposed Zimbabwe's continued suspension from the Commonwealth councils and "besides, we don't recognise the suspension". Last month, the US government and the EU renewed targeted sanctions against President Mugabe and his inner circle, while the Commonwealth extended the country's exclusion to December. Zimbabwe was initially suspended from the 54-member group of mainly former British colonies for 12 months last year. The suspension, which ended on 19 March, was extended for another nine months.
As pressure mounts against Mugabe's dictatorial regime, the umbrella Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) added its weight behind dissenting voices against the Zimbabwean government amid growing concern by the international community and other African leaders over renewed State-sponsored violence. Hundreds of people labelled "enemies of the State", a term used by government supporters to justify persecution of opposition supporters, have been assaulted allegedly by the army, police and Central Intelligence Organisation operatives. These, in conjunction with the ruling Zanu PF's storm troopers, the Green Bombers, have allegedly unleashed an orgy of violence and intimidation against suspected opponents of the government. Over the weekend, armed men claiming to be members of the army were reportedly forcing residents to sing Tongai Moyo's hit song, Samanyemba, in English. Sadc foreign ministers who met in Harare on Thursday said they would send a task force to the country possibly by next week to assess the Zimbabwe situation. However, Mudenge said yesterday it was not their initiative, but his alone to counter "adverse media reports". Mudenge said: "I invited the Task Force to Zimbabwe so they can see for themselves. It was my initiative and my strategy so that my colleagues in Sadc come and get a better view on the situation in Zimbabwe. I took that decision while I was in Luanda, Angola, so it was not a decision arrived at when we met on Thursday." According to the South African Broadcasting Corporation, Patrick Craven, the Cosatu spokesperson, said: "Cosatu condemns the continued brutal repression of activists, through arrests, beatings and torture, by the government of Zimbabwe, following the two-day general strike on 18 and 19 March, organised by the opposition MDC." On Monday, Gibson Sibanda, the MDC vice-president, leader of the opposition in Parliament was arrested in Bulawayo for allegedly organising the stayaway. His bail application ruling is set for Monday. Craven said: "Cosatu demands the immediate release of MDC vice-president Gibson Sibanda and all other activists who have been arrested, including a number of trade unionists, several of whom were tortured." He said Cosatu believed those who participated in last month's mass action were exercising their right to protest in support of democracy. They were demanding their socio-economic rights, and were not subverting the Zimbabwean government, he said.
Top
From The Independent on Sunday (UK), 6 April
UN brings food aid to cities as Zimbabwe's plight worsens
Hunger spreads to urban areas as drought and economic crisis take their toll
By Basildon Peta, Southern Africa Correspondent
The United Nations has started two pilot projects to distribute relief food in urban areas in Zimbabwe as shortages continue to worsen. Even people in cities and towns who have the money to pay for food cannot find supplies. The UN's World Food Programme (WFP) has been distributing food for some time in rural areas, which have suffered worst from drought and economic collapse under President Robert Mugabe's regime, but its decision to start giving aid in the urban areas is unprecedented. The humanitarian situation in Zimbabwe is continuing to deteriorate, said Judith Lewis, the WFP's regional director for southern Africa and regional co-ordinator for UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's special envoy on humanitarian crises. Some people were even approaching UN storage centres and offering money or possessions in exchange for relief food. Asked why the UN had to spread its operations to cities and towns, where many people still have jobs, she said: "The issue is access to food. What we are seeing now is less and less food available, even to people who still have resources. That is a sign of vulnerability. If people are starting to suffer because they don't have access to food, we must look to that. We want to help people who need assistance, not because they have a label one way or the other." The government has been accused of using food as a political weapon in the rural areas, where aid has been denied to people unable to produce a membership card of the ruling Zanu PF party. Whole districts known to support the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) have been deprived of food. Ms Lewis said the UN had adopted a "zero tolerance policy" and had stopped food distribution in 12 places where there had been interference by government agents.
But Urban Johnson, Unicef's regional director for southern and eastern Africa, said malnutrition among young children was accelerating fastest in Harare and Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's two largest cities. The plight of those like Tim Chikwate, a security guard who earns £12 a month, illustrates why the WFP is moving into the urban areas. "From my salary I can only buy a 10kg bag of maize meal - if I ever find it on the black market," he said. "That leaves me with nothing to buy any other food, and I walk more than 18 miles to and from work every day. It's unbearable." Emmanuel Muchagonei works in a financial institution. He holds a degree in economics but wants to leave Zimbabwe to work in another country. "I have given up dreaming of a decent flat in town or owning even a battered car. My salary can't buy anything," said Mr Muchagonei, who lives in the slum township of Highfield. Inflation in Zimbabwe has soared to 230 per cent and the supermarket shelves continue to empty. Ms Lewis said the government "needs to have a plan", especially for the black farmers settled on land seized from whites, many of whom now have to be fed by the UN. But instead of focusing on the food crisis, say Mr Mugabe's critics, the President has launched a crackdown against opponents while the world's attention is focused on Iraq. More than 1,000 people have been arrested since the MDC organised a protest against his rule two weeks ago. Last week the President ordered his police to "shoot and kill" anyone who entered his official residence, amid threats that protesters would march to his house to demand his resignation. The MDC's deputy head, Gibson Sibanda, has spent a week in jail and will remain there this weekend on charges of treason for helping organise the anti-Mugabe protest.
Top
From The Sunday Times (UK), 6 April
Commonwealth plotters try to exclude Charles
Nicholas Hellen and Christopher Morgan
The Prince of Wales has been warned of a plot to prevent him succeeding the Queen as head of the Commonwealth, one of the monarch's most influential surviving functions. Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe, is fomenting demands to sever ties that have bound the royal family to the Commonwealth since its foundation in 1949. Under one option, leadership of the club for former territories of the British empire would be rotated among its 54 members after the death of the Queen. Mugabe's allies insist that their aim is not to humiliate Charles but to prevent Britain from abusing its historic influence over other Commonwealth countries. They blame it for Zimbabwe's suspension from the organisation. The position of Don McKinnon, a New Zealander who is the Commonwealth secretary-general, is also under attack by Mugabe's allies. South Africa has accused him of improper behaviour in securing a 10-month extension to Zimbabwe's one-year suspension. Dr George Shire, speaking for the Zimbabwean high commission in London, said: "The way the Commonwealth has been run recently takes us backwards by 20 years. African heads of state have called for reform of the club. They think the (Queen's) titular role has become tainted by being seen to coincide with the Labour government's position on Zimbabwe. This is not a slight on Charles."
It is thought unlikely that a formal motion on severing the link to the British throne will be discussed in December at the biennial conference of Commonwealth heads of government in Nigeria. But Mugabe's plan, which has been discussed with some other African leaders, may gather momentum. Derek Ingram, an author and veteran observer of Commonwealth politics, said: "This is a cunning move to embarrass Britain." George Kirya, chairman of the Commonwealth Africa group and high commissioner for Uganda, said: "One could argue for rotating the leadership to show that the old (white) Commonwealth and the new have become an alliance of equals." One authoritative source said that Charles was "devastated" at the prospect of being edged out. The Queen regards the post as one of the most important and enjoyable of her duties. One friend said: "She throws herself into it with an enthusiasm and verve I have not seen her show elsewhere." The Queen is credited with playing a vital role in ensuring that divisions over South African sanctions in the 1980s did not lead to the organisation's break-up. She also helped to achieve debt write-offs for Third World countries to mark the turn of the millennium.
Palace sources say Charles is anxious to step up his involvement in Commonwealth business after years of apparent indifference. One courtier said: "He once told me that the future of Britain lay in Europe and he wouldn't mind never going to Australia again." During the 1990s his absence from the Commonwealth Day Observance at Westminster Abbey was noted by politicians, and officials at Marlborough House, headquarters of the secretariat, suspected at one point that Charles wanted to move into the building. Last month the prince attended the service at Westminster Abbey but failed to show up at the evening reception at Marlborough House. The Earl and Countess of Wessex attended instead. The Queen and the Foreign Office have approved several initiatives to improve Charles's standing overseas, under the guidance of McKinnon. Last month the prince attended lunch with the Caribbean group of high commissioners and there will be more such occasions. One insider said: "Those high commissioners will send back a cable saying, 'I talked to Prince Charles and he's showing a fantastic interest in what's happening in Trinidad,' for example." Another said: "Of course, it would be undignified to be seen to be lobbying." A tour of sub-Saharan Africa has been shelved for security reasons, but Charles will increasingly take over the burden of overseas tours from the Queen. His new role as president of the British Red Cross will increase his links with Africa, and the Prince's Trust, his charity for young people, will announce an expansion into Commonwealth countries. A spokesman for the Commonwealth secretariat said: "The heads of government will decide who they want as their next leader when the time comes."
Top
From The Daily News, 5 April
Masipula Sithole dies
By Columbus Mavhunga
Prominent nationalist and political scientist Professor Masipula Sithole is no more. Sithole, 56, died yesterday in the United States. He succumbed to a stroke he suffered on Saturday when the airplane he was travelling in was touching down at Dulles Airport in Washington DC. Sithole's elder son, Chandiwana, 27, yesterday said his father's body was expected to arrive in Zimbabwe next week. Sithole was on a Jennings Randolph Fellowship programme since last year. The programme was due to end in July. Masipula was a younger brother to the late Reverend Ndabaningi Sithole, a veteran nationalist and founder president of Zanu. Rev Sithole was ousted from that party's leadership during the liberation struggle when what is now known as Zanu PF was conceived. Chandiwana said: "Many Zimbabweans will remember my father for his courage and fearlessness in his fight for democracy in Zimbabwe. He believed in Africa, Africans and their right to self-determination. He was an affable and congenial character, a friend to many. His legacy to the people of Zimbabwe is that the fight for democracy must continue."
Sithole was professor of political science at the University of Zimbabwe from 1980, and director of the Mass Public Opinion Institute, Zimbabwe's first opinion polling organisation, from its inception in 1999. Earlier in his career he served as an assistant professor in the African-American Studies Centre of the University of Dayton (1974-78). Sithole was a visiting research fellow at the Hoover Institution (1985-86), a Fulbright Fellow (1983), and a research fellow at the Centre for Applied Social Sciences at the University of Zimbabwe (1978-80). He served as an international elections monitor in Namibia, Zambia and South Africa, and participated in conferences addressing internal and ethnic conflict in Burundi and in other African countries. His many publications include a recent book on the internal politics of Zimbabwe's independence movement, Zimbabwe: Struggles Within the Struggle. He wrote a weekly column in The Financial Gazette. Sithole received his PhD in political science from the University of Cincinnati, in the USA.
Professor Elphas Mukonoweshuro, a colleague of Sithole at the University of Zimbabwe (UZ), yesterday said: "It is a really loss for me and the nation at large. I will miss his great sense of humour. He was extremely professional and there are thousands of people who were nurtured and mentored by Masipula. "I joined the UZ in 1982 when he was already there and he was helpful to young and upcoming professionals who wanted to develop their careers." Sithole is survived by his wife, Alice, and two sons - Chandiwana and Masipula (Junior). Chandiwana said mourners would gather at 29 Northwood Rise, Mount Pleasant, from Wednesday.
Top
Comment from The New York Times, 5 April
The world's other tyrants, still at work
By Aryeh Neier
With international attention focused on Iraq, despots are seizing the opportunity to get rid of their opposition - real or imagined. In Zimbabwe, Cuba and Belarus, independent journalists, opposition leaders and human rights advocates have been thrown in prison. Absent scrutiny, the leaders of these rogue regimes have been emboldened, aware that their actions are causing little more than a ripple of protest beyond their countries. The outside world has ignored Zimbabwe, which is holding critical parliamentary elections whose outcome could help determine whether President Robert Mugabe will be able to amend the Constitution and handpick his successor. Since the start of the war in Iraq, Mr. Mugabe has intensified a campaign of intimidation, arresting more than 500 democracy advocates and opposition leaders, including Gibson Sibanda, vice president of the main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change. The campaign of state-sponsored violence is not limited to the opposition leaders in Zimbabwe. A worker on the farm of an opposition parliamentary deputy died of injuries after being beaten by Mr. Mugabe's security agents for participating in a two-day general strike. Other farm workers have also been beaten by men in army uniforms who claimed that the farms were being used as staging grounds for opposition activities. Hundreds of people accused of taking part in the strike were treated for broken bones in private clinics, fearing more reprisals if they sought care at public hospitals. Meanwhile, Zimbabwe, once a breadbasket for southern Africa, falls ever further into poverty and famine.
In Cuba, the war is giving Fidel Castro cover for an unprecedented assault. Over the past two weeks his state security agents have arrested about 80 dissidents. Prosecutors are seeking life sentences for 12 of those detained and 10- to 30-year prison terms for the rest. They include the economist Marta Beatriz Roque, the poet and journalist Raúl Rivero and the opposition labor activist Pedro Pablo Álvarez. The list of arrests reads like a Who's Who of Cuban civil society - with the obvious exception of those who were already in jail when the roundup started. They are the unsung heroes of a movement to liberate the minds of Cuba. But the names do not mean much to a world public now concentrated on becoming more and more expert on the latest in military equipment and on the geography of Iraq. In Minsk, the capital of Belarus, the authorities last week detained 50 opposition protesters who had gathered for the 85th anniversary of the declaration of the short-lived Belarusian Democratic Republic. On Thursday, demonstrators supporting the Iraq war - which President Aleksandr Lukashenko opposes - were arrested. It seems clear that Mr. Lukashenko, Europe's sole remaining dictator, is intent on tightening his grip on Belarus.
Sadly, Zimbabwe, Cuba and Belarus are not alone. Other countries have used the Iraq war to step up human rights abuses. Vietnam's most renowned dissident, Nguyen Dan Que, a 60-year-old writer who is a physician by training, was arrested late last month. Hardly anyone protested. In Egypt, hundreds of war protesters were detained, with dozens beaten and tortured. In Thailand, the government has justified what appear to be summary executions in the name of a war on drugs. At least 1,900 people have been killed, including innocent bystanders. These crackdowns, too, all passed with little notice or comment. That dictators move in times of world crisis comes as no surprise. The Soviets crushed the Hungarian revolution in 1956 during the Suez crisis. In 1968, when the Johnson administration was preoccupied with Vietnam, and Germany and France as well as the United States were convulsed in antiwar demonstrations, the Soviets moved into Czechoslovakia. In January 1991, just as today, the international community was focused on a war in Iraq. As the Persian Gulf war was starting, the Soviet Army took advantage of the international community's inattention to crack down on an independence movement in Lithuania. More than 200 people were wounded and 15 killed as Moscow seized control of the television broadcast center in Vilnius. If we let tyrants escape the international condemnation that is often the only way to protect their critics against abuses, the brutal campaigns in Zimbabwe, the clean sweep of dissidents in Cuba, and the arrests of demonstrators in Belarus may have to be added to the list of unintended consequences of the war in Iraq.
Aryeh Neier, president of the Open Society Institute, is author of "Taking Liberties: Four Decades in the Struggle for Rights.''
Top
From The Daily News, 7 April
Mass action to go ahead, says Ncube
Staff Reporter
Welshman Ncube, the MDC secretary-general, said yesterday the party would go ahead with its mass action that would take any form - a stayaway, mass demonstration, march or a boycott of Zanu PF businesses. He denied a report in The Standard yesterday which said some MDC top officials had said they had abandoned plans for more stayaways as a means of protest against President Mugabe and would now try the negotiating table. Yesterday Ncube said: "Following a report in today's edition of The Standard which states that the MDC has abandoned the mass stayaway and other forms of protest, we wish to state that the correct position is that all forms of lawful democratic resistance designed to ensure that the people of Zimbabwe regain their freedoms, human rights, peace and prosperity remain firmly on the table. These include mass demonstrations, marches, stayaways and boycotts." Ncube said the form, content and timing of such action were yet to be determined. He said what had so far been determined was that whatever action was to be taken would be lawful, peaceful and sustained. It would take the form of all or a combination of some of the options stated. Ncube said: "The people of Zimbabwe need to remain focused and united, knowing that the day is coming soon. Everyone of us will need to play their part to ensure its success."
Top
From News24 (SA), 6 April
White farmers 'lawless': report
Harare - The Zimbabwe government has rounded on white farmers here, accusing some of being "British-sponsored lawless elements" behind recent mass action in the country, a newspaper said on Sunday. In comments carried by the state-controlled Sunday Mail Information Minister Jonathan Moyo accused some white farmers of defying government orders to leave their land. The comments are likely to be seen as a slap in the face for the white-dominated Commercial Farmers' Union (CFU) which last year chose to drop most legal challenges against the government's acquisition of their land in favour of dialogue. Moyo also accused the farmers of being "part of the brains" behind an opposition led job stay-away last month that saw urban areas closed down across the country. "The time has come for them to be dealt with in terms of the full wrath of the law. Their lawlessness will no longer be entertained," he said. Relations between the government of President Robert Mugabe and Zimbabwe's 4 500 or so white farmers have been testy since the controversial land reform programme was launched three years ago. The CFU has recently expressed its concern over the continued eviction of farmers and the acquisition of farms even though the government last year declared that land acquisition was over. Last week, the CFU claimed a farmer in the southern district of Mwenezi was abducted and beaten by a group of around 200 "settlers" who forced him to sign a document agreeing to leave his farm. The union's concerns were included in a letter recently sent to Agriculture Minister Joseph Made, the Sunday Mail reported. The letter prompted an angry response from the government, the paper said. Moyo was quoted as saying that the CFU no longer represents commercial farmers "but in fact now represents unrepentant Rhodie (former white minority Rhodesian) farmers and other lawless elements". Around 11 million hectares of previously white-owned land has so far been seized by the government for redistribution among new black farmers. Only around 600 white farmers are reported to still be on their farms. Moyo accused the farmers' union of being behind the March 18-19 job stay-away called by the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) to protest alleged misgovernance. The government has received widespread criticism, including from the US government, for its alleged crackdown on domestic opponents in the wake of the mass action. Hundreds of opposition supporters were arrested.
Top
From The San Francisco Chronicle, 6 April
Politics and food make volatile mix in Zimbabwe
Dina Kraft, Associated Press writer
Bulawayo - A shiny BMW and two government vans pull up in front of a tangled line of dusty trucks at a Zimbabwe grain depot. Trunks and doors are opened and plump sacks of grain swiftly loaded under the gaze of armed guards. The transaction, witnessed by journalists, takes place by a row of towering grain silos at one of the distribution sites controlled by the government grain monopoly in this southern African nation. The centers are at the heart of claims by opposition groups and human rights activists that the government is using food as a political weapon in a country where over half the people are at risk of starvation. Critics charge that food supplies are being funneled mostly to buy support and pay off cronies as authoritarian President Robert Mugabe fights against a strengthening opposition threatening his decades-long hold on power. Zimbabwe was once known as the bread basket of southern Africa, but food production has been wrecked by erratic rains and the state's often violent seizure of most white-owned commercial farms. Vast tracts of farmland either lie fallow or have been carved into subsistence plots. Cornmeal, the staple food, is often distributed only to those with membership cards in the ruling Zanu PF party. Grain is milled almost exclusively by ruling party members and shipped to stores whose owners are known Mugabe faithful. "There is an assumption that most governments want to feed their people, (but Mugabe) realized that food is a very effective political weapon," said David Coltart, an opposition lawmaker and a top human rights lawyer. Government officials dispute the accusation, putting the blame for the food crisis on bad weather. "(It's) only in the imagination of those who want to politicize and demonize the food distribution system," Social Welfare Minister July Moyo told The Associated Press.
Yet in August, when food first became short in this country of 12 million people, Didymus Mutsata, Zanu PF's organizing secretary, said food should go only to those within the party's fold. "We would be better off with only 6 million people, with our own people who support the liberation struggle. We don't want all these extra people," Mutsata said. Diplomats also accuse the government of obstructing food deliveries to opposition supporters. At an angry confrontation with Moyo last December, Tony Hall, the special U.S. ambassador to the World Food Program, demanded: "Why do I get the impression, that I have to beg you to feed your people?" Physicians for Human Rights Denmark issued a report on cases of food being abused for political reasons, including rural opposition strongholds where U.N. food relief was reportedly withheld by the state grain monopoly. "If it is not possible to increase nonpartisan food supplies into the country, it is |
