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Africa News
Oct 17, 2008, 22:41
GMT
Harare - A month after the signing of a power-sharing accord
in this
troubled southern African country, talks collapsed late Friday over
formation of a coalition government.
Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the
Movement for Democratic Change (MDC),
described the situation as a dead end.
He called for help from the African
Union and the 14-nation regional
political group, the Southern African
Development Community
(SADC).
The international mediation panel that has been involved in
the conflict
plans to meet Monday in the mountain kingdom of Swaziland to
confer.
MDC delivered the first election defeat ever to President Robert
Mugabe's
ZANU (PF) party in March, denying it the parliamentary majority.
Mugabe was
declared the winner of a run-off presidential election, the
legitimacy of
which has been called into question by the international
community.
'We are concerned by the attempt to push the MDC into a
meaningless position
in the coalition government,' Tsvangirai said late
Friday evening.
Earlier, Mugabe indicated the talks were not going in the
direction he had
wanted.
Under the agreement brokered on September 15
by former South African
President Thabo Mbeki, ZANU (PF) was to receive 15
cabinet posts, MDC 13 and
a smaller opposition group three.
ZANU (PF)
and MDC have been wrestling over which party gets what post in a
coalition
government that would leave Mugabe as president and Tsvangirai as
head of
government.
Mbeki returned to Harare on Monday to find the agreement on
the brink of
collapsing after Mugabe last weekend unilaterally allocated the
most
important cabinet posts to Zanu-PF - including the defence ministry and
home
affairs, which would give him total control of the country's security
forces.
The collapse of the talks come as aid organizations are
warning of a famine
catastrophe in the country once known as the breadbasket
of Africa.
The major stumbling block in negotiations has been the
ministry of home
affairs, which includes control of the police
force.
Tsvangirai insists that control of the uniformed forces has to be
balanced,
and has conceded the control of the defence ministry to the
84-year-old
Mugabe.
Under his control for the last 28 years since
independence, the country's
economy has collapsed with inflation
conservatively put at 231 million per
cent, while the currency yesterday
continued its headlong crash, reaching 50
million Zimbabwe dollars to the US
dollar on Thursday, from 100 Zimbabwe
dollars to the US dollar in early
August, when the regime redenominated its
currency by slashing off 10
zeroes.
Sponsored Links:
Sources said that Mugabe on Thursday night
agreed to cede control of the
finance ministry to the MDC.
MDC
sources said Friday Tsvangirai had been made an offer on Thursday night
of a
new home affairs ministry with control revolving between the two.
'Morgan
rejected it,' said the source. 'He is resolute, and so is his
negotiating
team. It's home affairs or nothing. ZANU(PF) has nothing new to
offer. They
are just trying to wear him down into accepting. Morgan says he
cannot
deliver to the people without home affairs.'
Observers say the impasse is
dramatically aggravating a humanitarian
catastrophe, as famine begins to
claim the lives of hundreds of starving
children whose parents have no
food.
By January almost one in two people will be dependent on food aid,
although
famine relief operations have barely resumed after a three- month
ban
imposed by Mugabe.
Late Thursday, James McGee, the United States
ambassador to Zimbabwe said
aid - except humanitarian - would not be
resumed, nor would targeted
sanctions against members of Mugabe's power
clique be lifted until there was
'evidence of long-term political and
economic reform. 'Until then, it will
not happen,' he said.
Yahoo News
2
hrs 21 mins ago
HARARE (AFP) - Former South African president Thabo Mbeki
denied late Friday
that Zimbabwe's power-sharing talks had hit a deadlock,
saying negotiations
would continue next week in Swaziland.
"The
negotiations are continuing. I wouldn't say there is a deadlock," Mbeki
told
reporters shortly after midnight, in his first public remarks on the
four
days of talks.
He said that talks would continue on Monday in Swaziland
with the three
nations known as the Troika, which make up a security panel
of the Southern
African Development Community (SADC).
"I know for a
fact that the Troika is very very keen that this matter is
resolved as a
matter of urgency," Mbeki said.
Mbeki brokered the power-sharing deal
signed one month ago by Zimbabwe
President Robert Mugabe and opposition
leader Morgan Tsvangirai, calling for
the formation of a unity government to
end months of deadly political
turmoil.
The deal hit the rocks over
disputes about how to divide control of the most
powerful cabinet posts, so
Mbeki flew to Harare this week to try to mediate
a solution.
Mbeki
insisted that he remained optimistic about the proposed unity
government,
saying the remaining matters in dispute "are capable of solving
themselves
quite easily."
"All the parties are committed to the process. Everyone
has an obligation
that this process does not collapse. All of them said they
will not walk out
and they are committed," he said.
Yahoo News
HARARE (Reuters) - Some southern African leaders will meet on
Monday to try
to help Zimbabwe's rival parties end a deadlock on forming a
new government,
opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai said on
Friday.
Speaking after four days of inconclusive talks mediated by former
South
African President Thabo Mbeki, Tsvangirai said his MDC party would not
walk
away from negotiations despite the difficulties.
The Southern
African Development Community's security defense and political
troika --
made up of the heads of state of Swaziland, Mozambique and
Angola -- will
meet in Swaziland on Monday to try to find a way of
overcoming the
stalemate.
"We call upon the SADC and the AU (African Union) to use their
collective
wisdom to help unlock the deadlock," Tsvangirai said.
The
power-sharing deal brokered by Mbeki a month ago is seen as Zimbabwe's
best
hope for rescuing an economy where fuel and food are scarce and
inflation
stands at 231 million percent, the world's highest.
Mugabe, in power
since 1980, said the talks were derailed.
"It went very well in the wrong
direction," Mugabe told reporters, adding
that Mbeki will make a statement
on Saturday on the way forward.
Tsvangirai threatened to pull out on
Sunday after Mugabe allocated powerful
ministries such as defense, finance
and home affairs to his own party.
Mugabe's long-time foe still seemed
hopeful after several rounds of failed
talks and relentless trading of
accusations.
When he was asked about the atmosphere in the talks,
Tsvangirai said: "There
is a hurdle accepted by all the parties. There was
no animosity. It was very
cordial, no rancor."
The MDC leader beat
Mugabe in a March 29 presidential election but fell
short of enough votes to
avoid a June run-off, which was won by Mugabe
unopposed after Tsvangirai
pulled out, citing violence and intimidation
against his
supporters.
Mugabe's victory in the run-off was condemned around the
world and drew
toughened sanctions from Western countries whose support is
vital for
reviving Zimbabwe's ruined economy.
Reuters
Fri 17 Oct
2008, 20:33 GMT
HARARE, Oct 17 (Reuters) - Zimbabwean President Robert
Mugabe said four days
of talks on forming a cabinet with the opposition
which ended on Friday went
in the wrong direction.
"It went very well
in the wrong direction," Mugabe told reporters, adding
that former South
African president Thabo Mbeki, who has been mediating in
the negotiations,
will make a statement on Saturday on the way forward.
(Reporting by Nelson
Banya)
Reuters
Fri 17 Oct
2008, 20:02 GMT
HARARE, Oct 17 (Reuters) - Opposition leader Morgan
Tsvangirai said on
Friday he was still committed to a broad power-sharing
agrrement with
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe despite four days of talks
that failed to
end a deadlock.
"We are not walking away from this. We
hope that with the spirit of
cooperation, there will be finality," he told
reporters.
http://www.zimonline.co.za
by Cuthbert Nzou
Saturday 18 October 2008
HARARE - Specialists doctors at
Zimbabwe state hospitals have gone on
strike, paralysing a public health
sector that is barely functional at the
best of times due to an overload of
HIV/AIDS-related cases amid an acute
shortage of drugs and
equipment.
The more senior and experienced specialist doctors had kept
public hospitals
running after intern doctors, known as junior doctors in
Zimbabwe, and
nurses stopped coming to work in August to press for more pay
and better
working conditions.
The specialist doctors, among them
surgeons, neurologists and gynecologists,
went on strike on Thursday after
reaching a deadlock on salary reviews with
the Health Services Board
(HSB).
Some of the country's biggest hospitals such as Parirenyatwa Group
of
Hospitals and Harare Central hospital both in the capital and Mpilo
General
hospital in the second largest city of Bulawayo were from yesterday
discharging some patients, advising them to seek treatment from private
doctors and hospitals.
The senior doctors are understood to be
demanding that their salaries be
paid in hard currency and not in the local
dollar, which hit by inflation of
231 million percent continues to lose
value faster than any other currency
on earth.
Hospitals Doctors
Association (HDA) president Amos Severengi on Friday
confirmed that
specialist doctors had embarked on an industrial action and
adding that they
would not return to work until their salaries are pegged in
foreign
currency.
Severegi said: "The specialists have joined junior doctors and
nurses on
strike. As I speak, Parirenyatwa hospital is discharging patients
because no
one can attend to them. Our demands should be met before we go
back to
work."
Severengi said the HSB told the doctors that the
government had no capacity
to pay them in foreign currency. State doctors
currently earn between $50
000 and $100 000 monthly which they want hiked to
US$2 000 per month.
A visit to Parirenyatwa and Harare Central hospitals
revealed the suffering
of patients because of the strike.
"I have
been asked to leave the hospital this morning because the doctors
and nurses
are on strike," said a patient at Parirenyatwa.
The patient, who
identified herself as Chipo Mutsago, said hospital
authorities had told her
"to consult private doctors and hospitals".
Doctors who spoke on
condition of anonymity vowed not to return to work
until all their
grievances were met.
"What I can tell you right now is that I am not at
work, and until we are
paid what I want I am not going to work," a
Harare-based doctor said.
Health minister David Parirenyatwa confirmed
the strike. "I was informed on
Thursday of the strike by the specialist
doctors. The government is looking
into their grievances and appeals to them
to return to work for the sake of
the suffering patients," he
said.
"We are working tirelessly to improve their remuneration and
working
conditions," he added.
State hospitals are the source of
health services for the majority of
Zimbabweans. But standards and service
at the health institutions that were
once lauded as some of the best public
hospitals in Africa have collapsed
after years of under-funding and
mismanagement. - ZimOnline
http://www.cathybuckle.com
17th October 2008
Dear Friends.
Zimbabwe
is not alone in its distrust of politics and politicians. In the
west too
there is widespread scepticism about politics; here in the UK a
commonly
heard remark is that 'Politics is a dirty game, it doesn't matter
which
party is in power, they're all the same.' Power is the key word and
the
ongoing impasse between the two sides in the current negotiations in
Zimbabwe is characterised in the media as a 'struggle for power' as if power
in itself was a dirty word and the two sides are no better than dogs
fighting over a bone. I would argue, however, that the desire for power is
not necessarily harmful in itself. The desire for political power for its
own sake, for personal gain and self- aggrandizement is very different from
wanting power in order to bring about change in people's lives; to make life
better for the majority of the population.
Robert Mugabe and Zanu PF have
been in power for twenty eight years. They
have become used to the trappings
of power; they are richer than their
wildest dreams. All of this has been
made possible through their
unquestioning support for Mugabe and the ruling
party. Personal integrity
has gone by the board; judges have delivered their
judgements not in accord
with justice but according to the political
dictates of Robert Mugabe and
Zanu PF; policemen have long forgotten their
true mandate to serve and
protect the people and have instead become no more
than party functionaries
willing to beat and kill the people they deem to be
the enemies of the
state. In Zanu PF's eyes they are the state, all power is
theirs and the
people are merely appendages to be used and abused as the
state sees fit.
Absolute power has corrupted Zanu PF absolutely. After
twenty eight years of
unchallenged power they simply cannot accept that any
other party is
entitled or competent to share power. A statement in the
government
mouthpiece, The Herald, this week claimed that: "The MDC is too
inexperienced to run finance.Government" they added "is formed by the
President .the MDC is not fit to oversee security agencies. We urge them to
get into government to learn the ropes and build trust." Unintended irony
perhaps, I wondered as I read the Herald comments alongside the list of
ministries that Robert Mugabe abrogated to himself in an Extraordinary
Government Gazette, issued late one evening just before Thabo Mbeki arrived
on yet another attempt to rescue the floundering negotiations. Could anyone,
even within the ruling party, with a modicum of intelligence claim that the
Ministries of Finance, Foreign Affairs, Defence, Home Affairs, Justice and
Information had been competently run by the present holders of power? The
evidence of financial mismanagement is clear for all to see. You don't need
to be an economist to know that inflation makes your salary worthless before
you have even withdrawn it from the bank or bought a loaf of bread or paid
the bus fare home again, let alone put food on the table or paid the school
fees. Are we seriously supposed to believe that the MDC is 'too
inexperienced (ie.incompetent) to run finance' as the Herald would have us
believe? And what of Home Affairs, the Ministry that runs the elections? The
electoral roll is stuffed with names of long dead voters and under the
hopelessly incompetent Mugabe puppet, Tobiwa Mudede, has reduced the
country's electoral system to a laughing stock. The police, the army and the
justice system have similarly been reduced to nothing but caricatures under
Zanu PF mismanagement but still Mugabe claims he wants all of them and his
puppets at the Herald and ZBC continue to spew out their poisonous lies to
the effect that 'no one could have done it better'
But, you can't
fool all the people all the time and this week there are
signs that Hungry
people are indeed Angry people. Civic society appears to
be on the move,
sporadic as yet and certainly not free of police violence.
It was the
students on Tuesday in Harare trying to present a petition as the
House
re-assembled and getting beaten and gaoled for their trouble; on
Tuesday and
Wednesday it was journalists thrown out of the Talks venue for
supposedly
not being accredited; on Thursday it was the Woza women in
Bulawayo,
inexplicably beaten and arrested this time despite last week's
peaceful demo
and today, Friday, the residents of Chitungwiza take to the
streets in an
action organised by NANGO and titled Do the Right Thing,
designed to send a
message to the government about the desperate lack of
water and sanitation
in their home town. "The government has always been
doing the right thing,"
claimed one Clever Mutukwa a senior civil servant
and war veteran, "The
crisis is directly linked to the imposition of
sanctions. Instead of calling
on the government to do the right thing it is
the NGOs and their allies in
the opposition who should do the right thing
and call for the lifting of
sanctions."
You have to hand it to Robert Mugabe; the one ministry he has
really run
well is his (mis)Information Ministry. Those pesky sanctions must
really be
hurting him and the other listed Zanu PF top people. For the rest
of
Zimbabwe, it is not sanctions that are making people's lives unbearable,
it
is one old man and his power hungry Zanu PF followers who are unable to
see
beyond their own greed. A heart-breaking story from the eastern district
of
Nyanga tellingly illustrates that very point. A group of MDC officials
had
managed to gather donations of food for starving AIDS orphans and were
busy
distributing the food when a lorry load of police and war vets in Zanu
PF
shirts arrived and drove the Good Samaritans out claiming they were not
licensed to distribute food. The biblical parallel is painfully clear:
Suffer the little children. Such gross inhumanity, such blatant abuse of
power defies belief; yet still Mugabe and Zanu PF claim they are the only
ones fit to govern Zimbabwe.
Yours in the (continuing) struggle PH
http://www.thezimbabwetimes.com/?p=6034
October 17, 2008
By Mxolisi
Ncube
JOHANNESBURG - Hundreds of African immigrants, displaced by
xenophobic
attacks which hit most parts of South Africa 's Gauteng Province
in May, are
now living under sub-human conditions, after the host government
razed down
their safety camps.
On Monday last week, the South African
government dismantled the last
remaining safety camp, Akasia, in the capital
Pretoria, which housed more
than 300 victims of the xenophobic violence,
which rocked Gauteng and left
more than 60 people, most of them foreign
nationals, dead.
Some of the immigrants, who spoke to The Zimbabwe Times
on Friday, accused
the South African government officials of trying to
forcibly re-integrate
them back into the communities which sent them packing
only five months ago,
without first making sure that they would be safe
there.
"I will stay here because there is nowhere else for me to go. I
cannot just
return to those people, who chased me away in such a violent
manner," said
Benson Shoko, a Zimbabwean father of two, who comes from
Masvingo.
"I saw people die like animals during that violence and it is
not fair for
the government to try to force us back there. We are living a
difficult life
here, but it is safe. Government should find somewhere else
for us to stay
because we hear that some of our colleagues who returned to
the suburbs have
been threatened again.
"We are not being stubborn,
but the government should know what we went
through," said a Somali
national, who only identified himself as Benny.
"We have very young
children and we also do not want them to remain here
under these conditions,
but we have no choice. We would rather have them
here where it is difficult
but safe than take them back to where they can be
killed any time. Already
some of our colleagues who returned there have been
killed, but government
tells us that it is safe."
There have been reports that some locals are
targeting Somali nationals,
with at least four of them having been killed in
suspected xenophobic
attacks countrywide within the past month
alone.
The immigrants, now living in the open, vowed that they would
resist any
government efforts to force them back to the local communities
until they
were sure that it was safe.
Many other foreigners, who
include Somalis, Ethiopians and Burundians,
echoed the same sentiments,
accusing government of abandoning them at their
greatest hour of need by
bringing down the camp.
On the other hand, the South African government
maintains that favourable
conditions now exist for the foreigners to return
to the communities they
lived in, and that a repeat of the May blood bath is
now highly unlikely.
"The camps have all closed and we are re-integrating
these people back to
their societies. There is no way they can remain in
isolation forever," said
Tshwane Mayor, Gwen Ramogkapa.
"Most of them
have already joined up with their former neighbours and there
been no
violence directed to them."
However, the latest action by the government
has seen South Africa 's human
rights record take a huge knock, as civil
society organisations maintain
that they have not received adequate support
or commitment from provincial
authorities in Gauteng province in their
efforts to engage local communities
for the safe return of the displaced
persons.
"The financial assistance offered by international agencies to
displaced
persons is seriously insufficient to find safe accommodation and
to meet
other aspects of a sustainable return," said Amnesty International,
a
humanitarian organisation last week.
"Violence against displaced
persons attempting to return to local South
African communities continues,
in particular against Somali nationals, with
police failing to accept that
these crimes are part of a continuing pattern
of xenophobic
attacks.
The displaced victims were each given R500 grants for them to
re-start their
lives back in the communities, but human rights groups say
the money is not
enough for people who lost almost everything during the
attacks, which were
also accompanied by a high degree of looting of property
by the locals.
They also called for an immediate halt to any deportations
of the displaced
people, most of who fled continuing political unrest from
their countries,
pending access to an effective appeal process with full
procedural
safeguards.
Lawyers for Human Rights, another organisation
that safeguards the rights of
vulnerable individuals, also raised fears of a
serious disease outbreak from
the camps, now an eyesore.
"There is no
proper sanitation in those areas and the conditions deteriorate
everyday.
Government should move in and curtail this before it is too late,"
said an
official from the LHR.
"This is a serious humanitarian crisis which
government created, when it
left these people during their hour of greatest
need. These people were also
not given post-trauma counselling and they will
always be haunted by fear of
what they went through. Remember that some of
them lost their close
relatives during the violent attacks"
The human
rights groups are trying to assist the victims with food, but they
seem to
be overwhelmed by the growing number of those in need.
Arguably Africa's
strongest economy, South Africa is home to millions of
foreign nationals
from other African countries, including Ethiopia, Burundi,
Malawi and
Zimbabwe, most of who would have fled either economic meltdown or
political
persecution from their home countries.