• Mbeki 'promises too much on Zimbabwe'
• Sharp Divide Over Mugabe
• Visitors be warned
• Mugabe government similar to Ian Smith regime: ANZ boss
• Hijackings on the rise in Bulawayo
• Zimbabwe Doctors Insist on Pay Increase to Return to Work
• 'Zimbabwe is not trying to oust McKinnon'
• SADC must intervene in Zimbabwe: LSSA

Johannesburg, South Africa - Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe may be
pilloried as a dictator by international media, but Nkrumah Mulmi was among
a crowd of New Yorkers who cheered him last year as he addressed the New
York City Council.

Mulmi, a prosecutor in the office of the Manhattan district attorney,
recently came to southern Africa to check conditions in Zimbabwe for
himself. After visiting Harare, the capital, and meeting Mugabe, Mulmi has
made up his mind: Mugabe is "a true African leader."

"I feel he's done a better job of empowering his people than [former South
African President] Nelson Mandela," said Mulmi. "He's given land back to his
people."

Across a picnic table from Mulmi at a brunch gathering of African-Americans
in Johannesburg on a recent weekend, Gayla Cook-Mohajane disagreed.

"I lived in Zimbabwe shortly after its liberation" from white minority rule
in 1980, said Cook-Mohajane, an Ohio native married to a South African. "We
used to ask, 'Could this turn into another banana republic?' The answer was
no. But Mugabe has turned it into one now."

Mulmi and Cook-Mohajane represent a sharp divide among African-Americans
over whom to blame for Zimbabwe's crisis. Once one of Africa's most
prosperous and promising nations, Zimbabwe has fallen into food shortages
and hunger amid civil upheavals caused by Mugabe's 3-year-old program to
give land to the poor.

In the United States, black leaders have divided over the U.S. policy of
isolating Mugabe with sanctions and pressing him to resign. While the Rev.
Walter Fauntroy, president of the National Black Leadership Roundtable,
traveled to Zimbabwe in June to publicly toast Mugabe, nine African-American
labor, church and advocacy organizations issued a statement criticizing the
country's human rights record.

After leading Zimbabwe to independence, Mugabe ruled for 20 years without a
serious challenge until 2000, when voters rejected a referendum giving him
more powers. Mugabe accused his opponents of joining with the small, white
minority to betray him and turned to the land issue in an effort to
remobilize political support.

Mugabe's most powerful weapon was the whites' domination of arable land, 70
percent of which was in the hands of 1 percent of the population. Mugabe
encouraged "war veterans" - former fighters in the militia that helped him
battle for independence years ago - to occupy white farms.

In fighting that followed, white farmers and black farm workers have been
killed. Courts have ruled that the government has overstepped laws on land
reform, but Mugabe's administration has ignored their rulings. The best
farms have been handed to Mugabe's cronies.

In fighting his critics, Mugabe has benefitted from open public support by
some prominent African-Americans, notably Andrew Young, former U.S.
ambassador to the United Nations. "Mugabe is the only one who is making any
effort to deal with poverty in Africa," Young declared in an interview last
year, one of many public defenses he has made of Zimbabwe's leader.

Mugabe uses such support as a psychological weapon against his domestic
political opposition, which he accuses of being a pawn of Western
governments and neo-colonialists.

In July, Zimbabwe's ambassador to the United States, Simbi V. Mubako, met
Fauntroy and other African-Americans to "brainstorm means and ways of
influencing U.S. policy makers to stop their anti-Zimbabwe crusade,"
according to a Zimbabwean embassy account posted on the embassy's Web site.
Mubako urged participants to build support for Zimbabwe by using "the Black
media in the U.S. since the mainstream media had already taken an
anti-Zimbabwe stance."

That Mugabe retains support in the black diaspora after his political
crackdown is proof of Zimbabwe's honored place in the annals of the
anti-colonial struggle of the last century. For Pan-Africanists, Zimbabwe
remains the icon celebrated by reggae legend Bob Marley when he sang
"Africans a-liberate Zimbabwe" in his 1970s anthem "Zimbabwe."

The fight against Rhodesia's white minority government was a prelude to the
wider anti-apartheid movement that liberated South Africa. Mugabe, as leader
of the freedom fighters who forced Rhodesia's whites to the negotiating
table, was hailed as a hero.

Bill Fletcher Jr., a former AFL-CIO official who heads the Washington-based
advocacy group TransAfrica Forum, says speaking out against Mugabe was "far
from easy" for him. "President Mugabe had been a hero of mine," Fletcher
wrote in a letter to TransAfrica's members this summer explaining why he was
speaking out. "Nevertheless ... it became clear that silence and inaction on
the deteriorating situation in Zimbabwe was no longer acceptable."

As Mugabe has turned more despotic - manipulating the 2002 presidential
election, shutting down the nation's only independent daily newspaper and
charging his presidential challenger with treason - true believers such as
Mulmi have held firm, blaming Western media for distorting Zimbabwe's
crisis.

"I support Robert Mugabe's ideology," said Mulmi, who lives in Harlem. "Not
on every issue, but generally on what he stands for."

Harare - Zimbabwe on Monday dismissed as "desperate fiction" suggestions
that President Robert Mugabe is campaigning for the ousting of Commonwealth
Secretary-General Don McKinnon over the African country's suspension from
the group.

Zimbabwe was suspended from the 54-member union of mainly former British
colonies in March 2002 after Mugabe's re-election in a poll condemned as
unfair by a Commonwealth observer team, but which Mugabe maintains was free
and fair.

Zimbabwe Foreign Affairs Minister Stan Mudenge was quoted by the official
Herald newspaper on Monday as saying Mugabe was not involved in any campaign
to stop the re-election of McKinnon as secretary-general at this year's
December Commonwealth summit in Nigeria - a meeting to which Mugabe has not
been invited.

In the past two months, media reports in Australia, New Zealand and Britain
have said that Mugabe is lobbying fellow African leaders to stop McKinnon
from getting a second four-year term because Zimbabwe blames him for its
suspension.

Mudenge told the Herald that Zimbabwe was the victim of a media
disinformation campaign sponsored by former colonial power Britain.

"A few weeks ago my president was accused of plotting a Commonwealth coup by
campaigning for the ouster of Mr McKinnon," he said, adding that "phantom"
alternate candidates were created to back up the allegations.

"I know that my president has equally not spoken about such a cheap subject
with any of his colleagues in SADC (Southern African Development
Community)," he said, dismissing the charges against Mugabe as "desperate
fiction."

Regional political analysts say Mugabe will find it difficult to be
readmitted into the Commonwealth as long as he continues to face charges of
human rights abuses, and stifling opposition to his rule.

Mugabe, in power since Zimbabwe gained independence from Britain in 1980, is
struggling with a severe economic crisis which many critics blame on
government mismanagement and on his controversial political policies.

The veteran leader says his domestic and international opponents have
sabotaged the economy to punish him mainly over his policy of seizing
white-owned farms for redistribution to landless blacks.