Two MDC members killed
TWO members of the MDC were allegedly last week killed by Zanu PF militias and war veterans in Muzarabani at Dambakurima and Hoya wards. Shar Mhiripiri, the MDC youth chairman for Muzarabani, said one of their youth in the district, Robson Tinarwo Chirima of Hoya, was beaten up with heavy logs, had his eyes gouged out of their sockets and was killed instantly by Zanu PF youths and war veterans. Another MDC activist, Peter Mataruse, being chased by a group of 80 Zanu PF supporters, jumped into the flooded Musengezi River to escape his pursuers. He drowned. "His body was only discovered after one week and he was only buried last Friday in Dambakurima ward at Mukombwe village," he said.
Learnmore Jongwe, the MDC secretary for information and publicity, confirmed the incidents and said it was clear that Zanu PF is continuing on the path of violence against the people of Zimbabwe. Mhiripiri said Ezekiel Shumba, the MDC Chairman in the area, was assaulted while receiving food rations last Monday and sustained head injuries. He is still recuperating at St Albert's Mission Hospital.
From The Financial Gazette, 29 March
Zim tycoon in $2.8b deal with the Congo
Zimbabwean billionaire businessman John Bredenkamp this week formed a joint venture project with Gecamines, the state-owned mining company in the DRC, to mine cobalt and copper in and around the DRC's Katanga province. The Zimbabwean tycoon hopes to invest US$50 million ($2.8 billion) in the venture, named Kababankola Mining Company (KMC), over time. Bredenkamp will control a majority 80 percent stake in KMC through his firm called Tremalt Limited. The tycoon's partners in Tremalt Limited are Collin Blythe-Wood, who will be managing director of KMC, and another businessman known as Gary Webster. Bredenkamp is the chairman of KMC while both Blythe-Wood and Webster are directors of the joint venture firm. Gecamines will be represented in KMC by Jean-Louis Nkulu, Trudon Katende and Marcel Yabili.
Blythe-Wood dismissed reports in the South African media yesterday that another controversial business tycoon, Billy Rautenbach, was part of the project. The reports said Bredenkamp and Rautenbach had been granted rights to export some 200 tonnes of cobalt a month, out of the 5 600 tonnes that Gecamines has been exporting monthly. Blythe-Wood rejected the allegations as unhelpful. "Rautenbach is not part of our project. . .that's all rubbish. All I have heard is that he (Rautenbach) has had some problems with the Congolese and he has now gone to court over their differences. He is not part of our project at all," he told the Financial Gazette. Rautenbach's Ridgepoint Mining Company formed a joint venture with Gecamines around 1998 and the transport mogul was to be later elevated to the position of chairman of the parastatal by the late DRC president Laurent Kabila. But the two fell out and Rautenbach was kicked out of Gecamines last year.
Blythe-Wood said the DRC government would receive 68 percent of the profits generated by KMC. Quizzed how the joint venture would operate profitably when doling out a higher percentage of its profits to the DRC government, Blythe-Wood said the nature of the investment was such that it would operate profitably. He also rejected charges that his firm had any political links, saying the project was purely a business investment. "The venture is falling within the framework of the policy of the DRC government to realise the extensive mineral wealth of the country and to promote and raise living standards of the people of the DRC through job creation and training in new technology and processes", he said.
Mining sources say Gecamines, which has debts totalling US$1 billion, has been run down by successive governments in the DRC, particularly Mobutu Sese Seko's regime which was ousted by Laurent Kabila in 1997. The parastatal has been the cash cow for the DRC government's war machine against Uganda and Rwandan-backed rebels in the past two years. Blythe-Wood conceded that Gecamines was facing problems but insisted that the KMC project would be run professionally. "We will not be giving money to the DRC government randomly as you are suggesting. If they ask for money, we will tell them to wait until the end of the year when we declare a dividend," he said.
Bredenkamp has made investments in Zimbabwe worth hundreds of millions of dollars in the tourism, oil and farming sectors and created thousands of jobs. In the past two weeks he was linked to a faction of the CFU led by Nick Swanepoel which has been seeking a negotiated settlement with the government over Zimbabwe's unresolved land question.
From The Star (SA), 28 March
Ex-Zanu politician charged with beheading man
Harare - A Zimbabwean High Court has charged a former top politician with the 1994 murder of a man whose decapitated head was found in his car six years ago, press reports said on Tuesday. Faber Chidarikire, who was a powerful figure in the ruling Zanu-PF party and mayor of the town of Chinhoyi, northwest of Harare, at the time, denied the charge, saying the allegation had been made up by his political opponents. Chidarikire told police in 1994 that the head belonged to a pedestrian he had knocked down in an accident, but after the mayor was charged in 1999 with the murder of a 12-year-old girl in 1987, the head was exhumed and pathologists concluded that it had been deliberately sliced from the body. Murders to obtain body parts for use in magic rituals that are believed to enhance success in business are not uncommon in Zimbabwe.
From The Financial Gazette, 29 March
MDC blasts foreign funding ban
Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the opposition MDC, yesterday castigated attempts by the ruling ZANU PF party to push through Parliament legislation that will ban Zimbabwean political parties from receiving financial support or donations from outside the country. Dismissing the ban as unconstitutional and draconian, Tsvangirai said the move was aimed at preventing the MDC from getting aid from what he said were progressive forces outside Zimbabwe. "The Bill fits into the whole scenario where ZANU PF seeks to stifle any assistance which the MDC can get from all progressive forces that want to see the demise of Zimbabwe's tyranny," he said in a statement.
The Bill, which went through its first reading in Parliament yesterday, provides for government funding for any political party that garners five percent of the vote but makes it criminal for political parties to receive monetary donations from foreigners. It also makes it illegal for Zimbabweans abroad to contribute to political parties in the country while parties or their representatives who receive foreign donations will be fined $100 000 or the market value of the donation, or whichever is higher.
Even aid given to politicians for use in poverty alleviation programmes in the country is not spared under the Bill. Cash or equipment donated is also forfeited to the state under the proposed law, which political analysts have dismissed as a desperate attempt by the government to pre-empt foreign donors who are shunning it and preferring to work with civic groups and opposition parties that promote democracy in the country. Many European governments have already indicated that they are scaling down direct aid to the Harare government while legislation is being considered in the United States to bar co-operation between Washington and Harare while making available American aid to Zimbabwean opposition parties and other pro-democracy groups.
Tsvangirai said: "It is shameful for a government that has brought this economic collapse, leading to millions of job losses, to pass legislation that makes it criminal for MPs to seek international assistance for poverty alleviation projects. It confirms our fears that the government has little regard for the wellbeing of Zimbabweans and is only concerned about clinging to power against the people's will." ZANU PF is expected to use its numerical superiority in Parliament to push the Bill into law.
Comment from The Financial Gazette, 29 March
A question of double standards
Nothing more starkly illustrates the double standards and the shifting of goal posts that are constantly being used by the government than its proposed ban on foreign funding of Zimbabwean political parties.
Until now the government found nothing immoral with foreign funding because only ZANU PF was the beneficiary of such aid, a large slice of which still comes from a select group of exiled white Rhodesians who enjoy special ties with the ruling party. But because the tide of international opinion is gathering against a party that has been exposed for its unmitigated lawlessness and violence, the government has shifted the goal posts. The message is clear to all: if ZANU PF cannot be given aid by foreign individuals and organisations, no one else should.
And yet even if the ban becomes law, it is now common cause that it will not be applied fairly or evenly to all parties, with ZANU PF always finding an excuse why its donations should be exempted. The ban is being singularly imposed to prevent the opposition MDC from being aided by wellwishers abroad, who share the indignation of all right-thinking Zimbabweans about the precipitate collapse of a once prosperous, peaceful and promising country. The ban is meant to financially hobble the MDC crucially ahead of do-or-die presidential elections due next year. It is the government's hurried response - as always - to the impending economic and other sanctions that are being mapped out by an increasingly exasperated international community against the tyranny that ZANU PF has become.
Significantly, the ban seeks to forestall any aid being given to democratic forces and institutions in the country by the American legislature, which is cobbling up select measures to rightly punish all those behind a wave of anarchy engulfing Zimbabwe. That this and other panicky measures will fail is not in doubt. The ban will fail because Zimbabweans, after enduring 21 years of dictatorship, will see through the smokescreen of the desperate action and do what is right for their country. If anything, the ban might just trigger many more Zimbabweans than ever before to contribute whatever they have to a just cause, knowing as they should, that the hour to change the guard has finally come.
After all, it is not the foreigners who will vote in the coming plebiscite but Zimbabweans, a lesson lost on a government only pre-occupied with its survival. Political change in Zimbabwe is no longer an option but an inevitability and no amount of terror or government bans on legitimate political activity can ever change that now. All that these hasty measures merely do is add impetus to a tide of popular discontent that is gathering momentum each passing day. While the measures will buy ZANU PF another day in power, it is just another day and no more. The grim reality could not be starker.
From The Star (SA), 29 March
Troops set to deploy in DRC, says UN mission
Kinshasa - A first contingent of UN troops sent to monitor the disengagement of rival armies in the DRC will deploy in the east on Thursday, the military chief of the UN mission said on Wednesday. General Moutaga Diallo announced that 100 soldiers from Uruguay were to head for Goma, headquarters of one of the main rebel movements, before going on to Kalemie in south-east Katanga Province. A further contingent of 100 Uruguayans is to follow, Diallo told a press briefing at the UN Observer Mission in the DRC (Monuc). A small advance group was already in Kalemie. Rival forces, who have battled over the vast DRC since August 1998, are due to complete a 15km pullback from the front lines by midnight on Friday. Diallo said forces backing the Kinshasa regime had not moved at Kananga in central Kasai Occidental Province. "The commander of the (government) Congolese Armed Forces in Kananga says he has received no order to withdraw, (while) the high command has told us and told us again that the order was given," he added.
Meanwhile, Jean-Pierre Bemba, leader of the rebel Congolese Liberation Movement (MLC), strong in northern Equateur Province, has "set two conditions for his disengagement", Diallo said. Bemba had asked Monuc "to deploy to protect the local population" in areas where the MLC withdraws, and was also "linking disengagement to the start of inter-Congolese talks", called for under a mid-1999 peace accord. "I think Mr Bemba will allow himself to be persuaded to co-operate", Diallo added, saying that the rebel leader's position "will be made known to the UN Security Council".
The disengagement exercise formally began on March 15. It involves Kinshasa's troops, its military allies from Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia, and the two rebel movements that control up to half the country, with their backers from Uganda and Rwanda. By May, the arrival of further contingents is expected to take the number of UN soldiers to about 1 500, half the planned total.
From Business Day (SA), 29 March
Hoping for peace or a job
Goma - The 50 young men who gather every day at a UN office in the heart of Africa have dreamed for years that peacekeepers will fly in and somehow end the war in their country. For now, though, a job is the most they dare to expect from the UN as it steps up peacekeeping in the DRC. And even that appears a forlorn hope.
Each morning young men come looking for work at the UN peacekeeping headquarters in the eastern town of Goma, but every day they are disappointed. A small sign says simply: "We are sorry. No job to offer." But still the men come, month after month, from seven in the morning until six o'clock at night. It is a poignant symbol of the big hopes many Congolese have placed in the UN Mission to the Congo. "We believe they have come to organise our country politically, economically and financially," said 25-year-old Caleb Kabanda outside the mission's gates.
Today the first detachment of armed UN troops, 110 "blue berets" from Uruguay, will arrive in Goma and continue south to the rebel-held town of Kalemie. More than 200 UN military observers have already been deployed in Congo to monitor a cease-fire first signed by the warring parties in 1999 but violated many times since then. In total, the UN will send 500 unarmed observers into Congo, backed by 2500 armed troops. The UN talks of a "limited, clearcut and realistic" mandate to stabilise the shaky cease-fire. But few countries are willing to send peacekeepers into the Congo.
The UN is not there to organise the country, police its frontiers or disarm the Rwandan Interahamwe militia that led that country's 1994 genocide before fleeing into the Congo and are the main reason Rwanda is involved in the war. But will "observing" be enough? The mission had observers in Kisangani last year when Rwanda and Uganda fought for control of the town, killing hundreds. "I don't know if they are really concerned about the problems," said Bandu Kisasa, 23. "If it really wanted to, the UN is capable of making the Interahamwe go home, and we would have peace."
The war began when Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi invaded in 1998, backing rebels seeking to overthrow then President Laurent Kabila. Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia sent armies to defend him. The UN mission says it would have deployed observers earlier if the warring parties had co-operated. This is an argument largely lost on Goma's unemployed, who say they feel as though their country has been abandoned by the outside world.