Posted on 12/05/2001 12:08:25 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
The representatives of the multidenominational National Pastors Conference were waiting to hand in their petition when riot police arrested them, said Brian Kagoro, an official with the reform group Crisis in Zimbabwe. They were accused of holding an illegal protest under the Public Order and Security Act, the legislation they were protesting, and taken to Harare's Central Police Station, Kagoro said. ***
President Bush on Friday imposed economic sanctions on Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and 76 other high-ranking government officials, accusing them of undermining democracy in the impoverished southern African country. Bush, following the lead of the European Union, issued an executive order freezing their assets and barring Americans from engaging in any transactions or dealings with them.
The Zimbabwean official said the new sanctions were part of a well-coordinated attack on Mugabe by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who he said was angry over Mugabe's seizures of white-owned farms in Zimbabwe, a former British colony. "All these sanctions being imposed on us are unjustified because they are part of a racist campaign against our land reform program," said the official, who declined to be named.***
The BBC's Lewis Machipisa in Harare says that police have fired live ammunition to disperse opposition activists who were throwing stones at cars in the suburb of Glen View. Correspondents say this has been the most successful strike for several years.
It was called by the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), with the aim of paralysing the economy and forcing President Robert Mugabe to step down. MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai has been accused by some party activists of not doing enough to make life difficult for Mr Mugabe since his controversial re-election a year ago.
'Ringleaders sought'
The government has not yet commented on the strike but the police described it as illegal and a total failure, saying that more than 60 arrests were made after clashes with protesters.
Two MDC lawmakers were among those arrested. Police spokesman Wayne Bvudzijena said detectives were investigating what he described as "ringleaders who are paying youths to participate in illegal activities."
The second city of Bulawayo is also shut down.
Government offices and banks are open but many workers are unable to get to work because of the lack of public transport. Our correspondent says that the police have set up roadblocks on major routes into central Harare and are searching cars. ***
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.***
The State Department has called on the Zimbabwe government to "cease its campaign of violent repression" and to bring to justice the perpetrators of "serious and widespread human rights abuses." Amnesty International, in a March 21 report, issued a warning: "The alarming escalation in political violence is a clear indication that the Zimbabwe authorities are determined to suppress dissent by any means necessary, regardless of the terrible consequences. We look upon the next 10 days with fear."
Sunday, voters in two important townships controlled by the opposition are supposed to go to the polls to elect new representatives to the Parliament. In a news conference Thursday in Harare, opposition leaders showed reporters copies of the government's voter rolls and said dozens of people on the lists did not exist. Government officials dismissed those charges. Monday will mark the deadline set by the opposition for Mugabe to accept and begin addressing a list of 15 demands, including disbanding government militias, restoring freedom of the press and releasing all political prisoners. ***
As many as 400 activists of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) have been arrested following a largely successful two-day general strike last week in Harare and Zimbabwe's second largest city, Bulawayo. Many of those detained reported they were beaten, tortured and sexually assaulted while in police custody.
"What we are witnessing is much more than the government's usual tactic of raising the level of violence in the run-up to elections," said Amnesty International. "This is an explosive situation where there seem to be no limits to how far the government will go to suppress opposition and maintain its hold on power."
Some analysts believe that Mugabe is trying to strike hard at the opposition now that global media attention is focused almost exclusively on the war in Iraq. The State Department this week strongly criticized Mugabe and called for an immediate end to the repression, but neither the events in Zimbabwe nor State's comment received any coverage in major U.S. newspapers.
Attacks on important local MDC leaders have been particularly violent over the past 10 days.***
Opposition leaders warned that the only way the governing party would win the elections would be if it stole them. On Friday, opposition leaders accused the ruling party of fraud, showing reporters copies of government voter rolls that the opposition said listed some 19,000 fraudulent names. There were unconfirmed reports of scuffles at the polls Sunday night, but no reports of more serious incidents. Still, human rights advocates and foreign diplomats said the election campaigns had been marred by the same allegations of fraud and intimidation that tainted Mugabe's re-election last year. Mugabe has become increasingly authoritarian, spearheading media controls and takeovers of white-owned farms.
According to state television, the Electoral Supervisory Commission said close to 30,000 people cast ballots in the parliamentary election by the time polls closed in township districts of Kuwadzana and Highfield. Voter turnout was 30 percent. In the nationwide parliamentary election in 2000 and the presidential election a year ago, voter turnout was recorded at more than 50 percent. The opposition overwhelmingly won those elections. Independent election observers said the earlier parliamentary and presidential elections, both narrowly won by Mugabe and his ruling party, were deeply flawed.
…………… Police reported no serious violence during polling. The opposition, however, said five people were hospitalized after being assaulted and two of its officials were abducted. It said the whereabouts of one was still unknown late Sunday. The elections this weekend followed a violent crackdown by Mugabe against opposition leaders and supporters who had staged a two-day strike against the government that crippled business and industry. At least 500 people were arrested in the days after the strike.
At the end of the strike, the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai set today as the deadline for Mugabe to begin fulfilling a list of 15 demands, including disbanding government militias, restoring press freedom and releasing all political prisoners. In a statement titled "Countdown to the Final Reckoning," Tsvangirai indicated on Saturday that he did not expect Mugabe to comply with the opposition demands. He predicted a "long and hard struggle" that might call for "the supreme sacrifice."***
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. ***
A further 250 people have been taken to hospital and scores beaten and tortured in police custody, it said. Welshman Ncube, the party's secretary-general, said: "The attempt is to scare and intimidate the MDC leadership. "The government is labouring under the mistaken belief that, because each and every one of us is facing a charge or facing incarceration, the party will retreat from its obligation to organise mass protests against this dictatorship. Zanu-PF has learned nothing though history. They may postpone it, but eventually freedom will come."***
The official would not say whether Washington had gotten positive reactions to its call from any specific country in the region, but said generally the "neighborhood" was increasingly aware of the problems posed by Mugabe's rule. "The neighborhood -- meaning southern Africa -- is realizing that this is not going well, this is breaking bad," the official said. "The food situation is going to get nothing but worse, the economic scene is disastrous." ***
Next week, six former African leaders who left office standing up will meet at Boston University to talk about ways to strengthen Africa's emerging democracies. Billed as a summit to consider ''the short-term impact of the Iraq war on African economies,'' the meeting also will focus on the terrorism threat in sub-Saharan Africa.
''I think it has become increasingly clear that the folks who would do the United States harm view Africa as a staging area for terrorism and that this nation's national security is directly related to the economic security of African countries,'' Charles Stith, director of Boston University's African Presidential Archives and Research Center, said in an interview.
…………….
Stith hopes the summit, which also will be attended by U.S. business leaders, academics and midlevel administration officials, can focus attention on the problems that have made Africa a fertile breeding ground for terrorists. Let's hope so. If the awful events of Sept. 11, 2001 have taught us anything, it is that helping other nations attack the root causes of terrorism is far less costly than trying to weed out terrorist organizations once they're in full***
It's hard to stop once your feet are wet. There is no justification now not to.
They say that its silence over his abuses during most of the 23 years of his rule - including the persecution of the outspoken Archbishop Pius Ncube of Bulawayo - has lent him respectability and the ability to deflect censure from Western governments. In January 260 Catholic clergy denounced most of the Catholic bishops for "compromise with an evil regime". ***
The Zimbabwean leader was speaking in a special interview to mark Zimbabwe's 23 years of independence. But the celebrations have been marred for many by worsening economic hardships and widening political divisions. The country's main labour body has set Wednesday as the start of protest mass action over a massive fuel price hike announced last week. Inflation meanwhile has reached 228 percent and 7.8 million people have faced food shortages. Mugabe however claimed that most Zimbabweans are content. ***
US wants "Comrade Bob" out, transitional government in Zimbabwe: senior official***WASHINGTON (AFP) - The United States is urging Zimbabwe's neighbors to step up pressure on President Robert Mugabe to hand power to a transitional government to pave the way for new elections, a senior State Department official said. "What we're telling them is there has to be a transitional government in Zimbabwe that leads to a free and fair, internationally supervised election," the official said. "That is the goal, he stole the last one, we can't let that happen again," the official said, referring to a widely condemned election last March in which Mugabe won re-election. "It has to be internationally supervised, open, transparent with an electoral commission that works," the official told reporters on condition of anonymity.
The official would not say whether Washington had gotten positive reactions to its call from any specific country in the region, but said generally the "neighborhood" was increasingly aware of the problems posed by Mugabe's rule. "The neighborhood -- meaning southern Africa -- is realizing that this is not going well, this is breaking bad," the official said. "The food situation is going to get nothing but worse, the economic scene is disastrous."***
Pvt. Christopher Muzvuru, 21, was killed April 6 when his unit overran the town of Basra. But in Harare, the Zimbabwean capital, the state media have called him a mercenary and a sellout.
"For a Zimbabwean, whose country is virtually at war with Britain, to join the armed forces of an enemy is the highest level of selling out," was the comment from the Daily Mirror in Harare, a paper owned by a member of Mr. Mugabe's ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party.
"He should be buried in Britain," the paper said. The government-owned Herald newspaper likened Pvt. Muzvuru to the buffalo soldiers in Bob Marley's reggae song about former slaves who fought in the American Civil War.
Pvt. Muzvuru's parents have declined to comment, but a friend of the family told The Washington Times that they were living in terror in their hometown of Gweru, in central Zimbabwe.
"They have been visited by Mugabe's secret police and harassed by the government, and it is very painful for them," said the man, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal.
"They are in deep mourning for their son, and all the government can do is portray the young man as a traitor and his family as enemies of the state."
In London, a spokesman for the Ministry of Defense confirmed that Pvt. Muzvuru joined the army in February 2001 and was one of about 200 Zimbabweans in the British forces.***
…………. The South African government refused to comment on the bombers' presence here. But the increasing number of Zimbabweans coming to Johannesburg to escape political oppression and economic disaster is making the situation across the border increasingly difficult for the South African government to ignore. Officially, South Africa says Zimbabwe is on the mend and continues to protect its neighbor from international censure. Last week, with the backing of other African and Asian countries, South Africa stopped the United Nations Human Rights Commission from condemning Zimbabwe for human rights violations.***
The question of Zimbabwe's suspension has split the Commonwealth, which only reluctantly agreed in March 2003 to extend the sanctions until a summit of leaders in the Nigerian capital Abuja in December. "That doesn't mean to say the problem is going to go away. It still has to be dealt with comprehensively at the Commonwealth heads of government meeting," McKinnon said.
The leaders of South Africa, Nigeria and Malawi will travel to Harare next week to urge dialogue between the government and opposition. "They know full well the concerns of Commonwealth countries and Commonwealth leaders. I hope they can have a fruitful and useful discussion with President Mugabe. We not only wish to see commitments to changes but the implementation of changes," said McKinnon. ***
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