We are a week away from a further bi election – this time we are defending a seat we took with a narrow margin in the June election. A friend of mine was the candidate back then and I campaigned for him on one weekend. The candidate before him had been murdered and Amos was very courageous. During his campaign, armed men ambushed him at night and he spent the whole night in a ditch – his wrecked car nearby and his guard seriously wounded lying next to him. The Police station was a few hundred meters away but no response or help was forthcoming and in the morning they took the guard to hospital. The night he won, Amos called me at three a.m. to tell me the news. The margin was a few hundred votes. Amos died from cancer two months ago and now we are back in the fray again.

This time round we again have a local businessperson running as our candidate. The Zanu PF candidate is an ex soldier. The tactics of Zanu PF as revealed in Marondera West have been the same. They moved a considerable task force into the constituency – up to 200 CIO officers with about 1800 support personnel plus tents and vehicles. Then a number of well known thugs – Border Gezi, Hunzvi, Chinotimba et al. They proceeded to visit homes throughout the constituency at night with threats and beatings and intimidated all known MDC activists. They disrupted MDC meetings and prevented people from attending MDC meetings. These tactics included police roadblocks that were withdrawn whenever Zanu PF held rallies. Many of the Zanu people carried arms and were clearly not worried about the police.

When finally the MDC people in the area (outnumbered by about 10 to 1) decided that enough was enough and attacked the Zanu PF people disrupting their activities, the police opened fire and last week they started arresting all MDC activists on sight. So much so that by the weekend we had to start sending in more people as locals felt they were simply too exposed to campaign. We also took the decision to tell the candidate that he should lie low until the election as we feared for his life. Under mysterious circumstances (and in front of two cabinet Ministers) a local political activist that both camps claim as a member, was killed. Our own people do not know the details at all. MDC was blamed and now a dozen MDC people are in detention awaiting a hearing where they will be "charged" with the murder. We understand the actual charge will be political violence. No Zanu PF people are in detention and no charges are pending. Morgan has toured the constituency, held rallies and meetings with local leaders and no mention has been given on national television or radio. Radio is particularly important and over 4 million people listen to Radio 2 every day. Because of the limited resources on the independent press (all located in Harare) even they carry only limited coverage.

Bikita is important because of the following factors: -

1. It is a rural constituency, which has a long history of loyalty to Zanu PF.
2. It is in the Masvingo Province where the Zanu PF leadership has been split and two prominent Karanga leaders (Zvobgo and Mavaire) have been displaced by Mugabe in favour of people who are loyal to him personally.
3. It is yet another test of the real trend in local politics and whether or not the Mugabe strategy for retaining power by violence and intimidation, still works.

This past week we also learned that elections have been called in all 52 Rural District Councils. This will involve about 500 elections in rural areas all over the country. Nomination date is the 9^th of January and the elections will be at the end of January. It is likely that Mugabe and his spin-doctors will watch the outcome of Bikita and the RDC elections and then decide if they should go for a snap presidential election. They might do so and try to catch the MDC napping and take advantage of the present conditions – we have no money with which to fight the campaign and the situation in business and in the cities with unemployment is terrible. If they wait until 2002 they might face an election in an environment where they cannot protect the rural voter from the ravages of their economic policies. Food shortages will be rife and the economic melt down in an advanced stage. We are now struggling to get ready for the RDC elections and have little or no resources for this additional campaign.

Talking about murder and mayhem, we got details this week of two incidents – one from the June election involved the background to the murder of three MDC activists whose killers were released from jail this week for "insufficient evidence" and the other the killing of Henry Elsworth just before Christmas. In the case of the former incident we are now informed that during the June election three MDC officials – the chairman of the constituency (a man working for the power utility (ZESA) as a linesman; his vice chairman (the lady manger of Power Sales in Kariba village) and the secretary of the constituency (a guard on a local banana plantation) were all rounded up and taken to the plantation. There they were paraded before locals gathered for the purpose (the Zanu PF candidate was present we understand) and then they were stoned to death. One of their bodies was displayed on a storefront for two days before being taken down and buried. No arrests were made despite the overwhelming evidence and witnesses to the killing, for 4 months. Now the killers that were eventually arrested are free for lack of evidence!

In the case of the killers of Henry Elsworth (you will recall that he was a farmer killed outside his gate in the evening by several shots from automatic weapons) no arrests have been made. We are now holding information on the actual weapons used, their numbers and the armory from which they were drawn. We also know the identities of the killers. As always this information comes to us from sources that cannot be disclosed for their own safety but the issue is what do we do with this information. Its of little comfort to the family and it simply confirms what we already know, that these killings are politically motivated, directed from the highest level in government and executed by professionals. The police will do nothing as usual.

The local media picked up my report of maize meal shortages in the south of the country last week. They went to the millers and were told there are no problems – they are meeting demand. I am afraid that is still not true, in Matebeleland on Saturday there were no stocks at the major millers – one small miller told us he had stocks. There were no stocks at Gwanda and Beitbridge and wholesalers and retailers told me there had been near panic the previous week when supplies ran out. What is going on? After 30 years in agricultural marketing in this country, I fear the worse. There is no transparency on the government side of the equation. We do not know what stocks the GMB holds or their condition and we do not know what exports have taken place or have been committed. We simply know that free market supplies are drying up and it is now that the GMB should step in with supplies from stocks. If they do not or cannot, we are in trouble and it will be worse than the fuel crisis. Only 10 per cent of the population drive motor vehicles, 98 per cent depend on maize meal for their daily sustenance.

As for the current season, we are hot and dry in the south. The north has had good rains and the tobacco crop looks good – if we can get the coal industry off their butts to deliver farm needs. However the food crop situation does not look at all good. Travel around the country and you see very little maize in the ground and often the crop looks poor. Cotton so far looks OK as well but the eastern districts are also dry and unless we get another cyclone, they may not get enough rainfall to support timber, tea and coffee crops.

On the legal front the government has tried two tactics to hold up or nullify the MDC challenges to the June election results. They are trying to delay the hearings and are also trying to prevent them altogether. The Supreme Court allowed a limited delay until the 19^th of January for these preliminary hearings to allow the government time to hire South African based lawyers to represent them. These lawyers better not be white with Afrikaans sounding names!! In addition to these cases we are also pressing ahead with the case on funding and also a legal challenge on the issue of urban council elections. If we do not get satisfaction on the former perhaps we should attach Zanu PF property to get our money back from them. In the case of the latter, if we do not get change shortly, lets put a rates boycott in place and see how long the local authorities can last without our financial support.

Eddie Cross

7th January 2000.

Please note that this note is personal and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Movement for Democratic Change.

From The Washington Post, 2 January

Desperate Battle Defines Congo's Warlike Peace

Massive Government Attack Turns Into Bloody Retreat

PWETO, Congo - At the southern extreme of a ragged front line that winds 1,400 miles across Congo lies a ferry, dirty pink and half-submerged in the muddy Luvua River. Facing it on a gravel ramp stand the burned-out husks of 33 military vehicles - armored personnel carriers, trucks, an ambulance - waiting in a line that never moved forward. Unopened syringes lie underfoot, amid charred tires and a trampled note that a fleeing Congolese junior officer left behind: "Attaque," reads the neat cursive French.

But by the time Rwandan forces approached Pweto on Dec. 3, the Congolese government army was in no position to attack. It was in panicked retreat, leaving a tableau of ruin on the riverbank and opening a rare window on a war usually fought out of sight. In two months of back-and-forth fighting here in the southeastern corner of Congo, all the elements that make this country's 21/2-year-old war such a dangerous puzzle came into play: foreign armies, ethnic militia groups, remote terrain and villages utterly emptied of civilians who, from the safety of refugee camps in a neighboring country, repeat matter-of-fact accounts of massacres. This is the "situation on the ground" that has kept the UN Security Council from dispatching 5,500 peacekeepers to monitor a cease-fire that appears to exist only on paper.

This lightly populated, mostly forested stretch between Lake Tanganyika and Lake Mweru had been one of the few corners of Congo where both sides had essentially honored a peace agreement signed 18 months ago. The Lusaka Accord, named for the Zambian capital where it was signed, was meant to arrest the cycle of advance and retreat that has marked a sprawling conflict that pits the Congolese army and allied troops from Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia against an assortment of rebel forces bolstered by Rwandan and Ugandan troops.

But Congolese President Laurent Kabila, who signed the Lusaka pact in a moment of military disadvantage, has swept it aside whenever he spied what looked like a military opening. Last spring, his forces pushed back rebels sponsored by Uganda in Congo's far northwest, only to lose the same ground months later. And on Oct. 15, Kabila's armies launched a massive assault on Rwandan-held positions in the southeast, striking 100 miles north of Pweto at the town of Pepa. Six weeks later, just as happened in the northwest, Kabila's forces once again lost far more than they gained. Now the Rwandans have driven them out of Pweto, clambering onto captured armor as their commander pointed out the escape route by which the Congolese army chief of staff, Joseph Kabila, the president's son, fled the battlefield. "We have a cease-fire," Col. J.B. Mulisa said with a dry chuckle, "a forced cease-fire."

In a war that has been stalemated for so long - Congo was broken into factional spheres of influence mere weeks after the war began, and so it remains - such lightning gains might have finally given the Rwandans the upper hand. But senior Rwandan officials, when asked if they plan to push beyond Pweto farther into Congo, say they did not want to come even as far as they have. In fact, the forces occupying Pweto showed no sign of massing earlier this month. Officials of Rwanda's Tutsi-led government say, rather, that their focus is on eradicating the Interahamwe, the ethnic Hutu militia that orchestrated the 1994 massacre of Tutsis in Rwanda and fled into neighboring Congo. The farther into the vast Congo the Rwandan troops go, the harder that becomes. "We were really talking about withdrawing" 120 miles to an operational zone closer to Rwanda, said Col. Charles Kayonga, a defense adviser to Rwandan President Paul Kagame. "Kabila must have misread our position. He apparently thought we were weak."

The battle began at Pepa, a town of neat stone houses in the center of a vast cattle ranch near the southern end of Lake Tanganyika. Rwandans had held the town since March 1999, nine months after launching the current war by encouraging a rebellion in the Congolese army's ranks, then pouring its own forces into Congo to topple Kabila - the same leader Rwanda had installed barely a year earlier by backing a rebellion that drove dictator Mobutu Sese Seko from power. At issue, according to Rwandan officials, was Kabila's support for the very forces Rwanda had put him in place to eradicate: the Interahamwe - thousands of ethnic Hutu extremists who had fled into Congo in 1994 after leading an attempted genocide against Rwanda's minority Tutsi tribe that left more than a half-million dead.

The Interahamwe were now allied with Kabila, and more formidable as a result. What had been degenerating into a ragtag guerrilla force was receiving new weapons from the Congolese government and new training from the army of Zimbabwe, which also rushed to support Kabila against the Rwandan invasion. But when shells began exploding behind the Rwandans' Pepa foxholes in the predawn hours of Oct. 15, the charge was led by yet another force. Hutu extremists from Burundi - another tiny country divided by the Hutu-Tutsi chasm - made up the brunt of the eight brigades that pushed across the rolling rangeland, according to Rwandan commanders. The Congolese infantry also advanced, reinforced by armored personnel carriers and British-made Hawker combat aircraft, both from Zimbabwe.

"They were coming in big numbers, really very big numbers," said Lt. Col. John Tibesigwa, the Rwandan commander at Pepa. With a much smaller force on hand, the Rwandans slowly pulled out of Pepa, along with the Congolese rebels they sponsor, a force known as Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD). In fact, Rwandan commanders maintain that they were already pulling some units back when the attack came. "While we were disengaging, they were massing troops," said Tibesigwa. "To keep them from coming back, we had to take Pweto."

The Rwandan counterattack began on Nov. 5 and raged for four days. Tibesigwa described the fighting as the most intense he had seen in Congo. At the Pepa hospital, Congolese nurse Justine Kaimba Puta said fighting that started 15 miles away moved steadily closer, bringing with it a stream of wounded that eventually covered the hospital floor. When the Rwandans were two miles away, government soldiers brought a warning to flee. The town emptied promptly, but several Pepa residents interviewed in Zambia, where thousands have gathered in a UN refugee camp, said they feared more than the fighting. When Rwandan forces first took Pepa last year, local residents were punished for allegedly supporting the Congolese government troops, the residents said.

Two refugees described a massacre that year in Mazembe, a village near Pepa, in which dozens of residents were ordered into their huts, which soldiers then set afire. Both residents named people killed in the fire, including old men and small children. One described seeing the charred bodies. The residents were uncertain whether the soldiers were Rwandan regulars or the RCD rebels they sponsor. Both have been accused by international human rights groups of similar atrocities in territory they occupy, but the charges surface most often against the rebels. "With the RCD, there are some undisciplined elements," acknowledged Nicephore Kimpinde, the assistant district commissioner installed in Pepa by the rebels. "But you can't say the whole RCD is undisciplined." Kabila's forces, too, slaughtered civilians when they occupied the area in October, he said. "We collected 10 civilian bodies and buried them," said Patrick Murlambui, another Pepa official. "They were accused of belonging to the RCD intelligence. They were innocent. There was no proof. Everybody who stayed in this region is looked at as an RCD sympathizer." "It's a war on civilians," said Puta, the nurse.

The Rwandans and the rebels took the countryside as well, exploiting a degree of mobility that would prove decisive. The Rwandan army is essentially an all-infantry force that by a shrewd collusion of economy and design carries no weapon heavier than one man can handle. Kabila's retreating forces, by contrast, were tethered to the road. Their armored vehicles required the Congolese alliance to move predictably, confined to a tree-lined track that runs across the handsome cattle ranch like a country road through rural Belgium, its owners' ancestral home. When open range gave way to elephant grass, the Rwandans attacked. The village of Mutoto Moija, a decrepit Interahamwe base whose name translates as One Child, fell after six hours. "At midnight, we heard sounds like they were retreating," said Mulisa. "In the morning they were no longer there. We followed."

What ensued, according to Rwandan and Congolese soldiers alike, was a three-week running battle across the 100 miles between Pepa and Pweto. Weeks later, the road south toward Pweto remained speckled not only with green and white butterflies, but with corpses - here the body of a young man cut down clutching an AK-47, here a splayed green poncho topped by a skull. But veterans of the battle said most of the fighting took place in the surrounding woods. The Congolese and their allies sought the high ground above the road. The Rwandans and RCD rebels moved through the woods behind them and caught them in crossfires.

"The Rwandans are very strong; they do flanking actions," said a Congolese soldier, Selester Mbanza, 30, from a hospital bed in Nchelenge, Zambia, where he was being treated for a bullet wound in the buttocks. "They get around behind people. That's how they fight. They used the right tactics. They came when we were resting, and we'd be distracted." There was a major engagement at every village, half of which had been fortified by bunkers or other defenses that the Congolese in each case ended up abandoning. "We would pursue them very closely," said Mulisa, the Rwandan commander. "That's the secret. We don't give them any time."

By Dec. 1, the Rwandan forces had Pweto nearly in sight, approaching the lakeside plain around the town of perhaps 50,000 on an abandoned road along an encircling ridge. By the evening of Dec. 3, when the Rwandans entered the town, the civilian population had pushed en masse down a muddy road into Zambia, and Kabila's forces were betraying something like panic. The Mi-17 helicopter that had carried Joseph Kabila to Pweto was burned on the soccer field that doubled as a landing pad, apparently too unreliable to use but too valuable to leave to the Rwandans. The president's son escaped by water, taking a ferry named the Alliance with senior Zimbabwean commanders and Burundian Hutus to the far side of the Luvua River. When the boat returned, a 40-ton, Soviet-made T-62 tank was loaded onto the port side. Dozens of soldiers scrambled to starboard. "It was imbalanced," said Mulisa, "and the ferry got drowned."

With the Rwandans' gunfire audible across town, the stranded troops splashed diesel fuel onto the line of 33 waiting vehicles and set them afire. Then they split up, some setting off along the riverbank deeper into Congo, others joining the throng of refugees fording the small stream that marks the Zambian border. On the other side, Zambian soldiers collected arms and counted heads. At least 3,000 Congolese regulars were assembled in primary schools about 75 miles south of the border in Nchelenge, where last week they were still waiting for a lift back to Congo.

Zimbabwe sent a plane for several hundred of its troops, a return load lightened considerably by the sheer tonnage of armor left behind in Pweto. Two howitzers, two T-62 tanks and at least a half-dozen armored personnel carriers were left intact for the Rwandans, as well as three ammunition dumps and a weapons cache with 1,000 rifles. The total does not include a tank submerged about 200 yards upstream from the ferry, its turret just visible in the middle of the river, which its desperate driver thought was shallow enough to ford.

Close to 4,000 Congolese soldiers with thousands of civilians running away from rebel RCD offensive fled into Zambia about a month ago. And President Chiluba speaking at Mukuba hotel at the official opening of the security talks on the DRC expressed concern on the influx of refugees as they had contributed to the depletion of foodstuffs and drugs in health centres. He told journalists the war had also affected other neighbouring countries politically and economically. Kabila also told Zambians to guard the peace they were currently enjoying saying if war broke out in Lubumbashi it would spill over to neighbouring Zambia especially on the copperbelt. Only Zimbabwe, of all the belligerents in the Congolese war had expressed its willingness to withdraw its troops in accordance with the Lusaka peace protocol. Three hundred of the more than 10,000 Zimbabwean troops fighting alongside the DRC government had returned to Harare. The Zimbabwean repatriated soldiers were part of fleeing people from Pepa and Pweto over two months.

Kariba Spillage Causes Floods in North Mozambique