Zim Online
Monday 22 October
2007
By Simplisio Chirinda
HARARE -
The Zimbabwe government has intensified a drive to expel
white farmers
issuing eviction orders to more farmers and threatening to
arrest those that
have not vacated their properties after the expiry of a
September 30
deadline to do so.
Less than 600 white commercial farmers remain in
Zimbabwe after
president Robert Mugabe's government began seizing land from
white farmers,
then numbering about 4 000, for redistribution to landless
blacks seven
years ago.
The Commercial Farmers Union (CFU) that
represents white farmers, at
the weekend said the government had issued
eviction orders to more farmers
following a court ruling two weeks ago that
farmers still occupying land
after the 30 September deadline were in breach
of the law.
"About 10 of our farmers in different parts of the
country were served
with fresh eviction notices by officials from the
Ministry of Lands and also
received phone calls from the police notifying
them of the intention to
charge them and have them prosecuted in court,"
said CFU vice-president Deon
Theron.
The farmers ordered to
vacate are from the Karoi and Hurungwe farming
districts, according to
Theron.
A magistrate's court in the farming town of Chegutu two
weeks ago
rejected an appeal against eviction by 10 white farmers, ruling
that their
continued stay on farms earmarked by the government for
redistribution to
blacks was a violation of the law.
Some of
the farmers are believed to be considering appealing against
the lower
court's ruling at the High Court.
The CFU had said despite the
court ruling it would continue
negotiations with the government to try and
to find an amicable solution to
farm evictions.
Theron said:
"It's unfortunate, we have been trying to make efforts to
engage the
government but our members have already been given court dates
and are going
to be prosecuted for producing food for the nation on the
farms."
Lands Minister Didymus Mutasa was not immediately
available for
comment on the matter. But the government has since the
beginning of the
year given conflicting signals on the fate of remaining
white farmers, with
some officials saying they would be allowed to stay and
others saying they
would be evicted. Nonetheless, evictions have continued
sporadically.
Zimbabwe, also grappling with its worst ever economic
crisis, has
since 2000 relied on food imports and handouts from
international food
agencies mainly due to failure by new black farmers to
maintain production
on former white farms.
Poor performance in
the mainstay agricultural sector has also had far
reaching consequences as
hundreds of thousands have lost jobs while the
manufacturing sector, starved
of inputs from the sector, is operating below
30 percent of capacity. -
ZimOnline
Zim Online
Monday 22 October 2007
By
Hendricks Chizhanje
HARARE - War veterans at the weekend said the ruling
ZANU PF party would
only choose President Robert Mugabe's successor after
his death, raising the
stakes in the tussle within the party over the
Zimbabwean leader's
successor.
Mugabe, who is under pressure to step
down from rival factions within ZANU
PF, has of late received backing from
the ex-fighters who have been holding
countrywide marches in support of his
candidature in next year's polls.
Addressing a boisterous crowd of over
10 000 people in the Mashonaland
Central provincial town of Bindura on
Saturday, the leader of the war
veterans Jabulani Sibanda said ZANU PF will
only choose new leader after
Mugabe's death.
"One cannot just wake up
in the morning and (declare that one) wants to be
the presidential
candidate. Yes, you can be a president of a burial society
and not of ZANU
PF.
"The ruling party's constitution indicates that the President would
remain
President until he retires. To us retirement means death," said
Sibanda.
Sibanda was expelled from ZANU PF in 2004 after he attended a
clandestine
meeting in Tsholotsho that Mugabe claimed was meant to oust him
from power.
The war veterans' leader, who is tussling for control of the
former fighters'
body with Andrew Ndlovu, says he was reinstated to the
party by a faction
within ZANU PF backing Mugabe's candidature.
The
veterans have since last August held several marches across the country
mobilising support for Mugabe who they say is the only one fit to govern the
country despite a worsening economic crisis in the southern African
country.
Mugabe has already indicated that he will stand as his party's
candidate in
next year's presidential and parliamentary
elections.
There has been growing speculation that a faction within ZANU
PF led by
former army commander Solomon Mujuru could spring a surprise at
the party's
December congress by nominating a challenger to
Mugabe.
The Mujuru faction is said to be mobilising behind the scenes to
push former
finance minister Simba Makoni or Vice-President Joice Mujuru to
take a
strike at Mugabe's job.
Earlier this month, Sibanda said the
war veterans were planning a
"million-man" march in Harare in support of
Mugabe's candidature adding that
whoever did not back the veteran Zimbabwean
leader was a traitor.
Human rights groups and the main opposition
Movement for Democratic Change
(MDC) party, accuse the war veterans who
wield immense influence within ZANU
PF, of waging a campaign of terror
against Mugabe's critics. - ZimOnline
Zim Online
Monday 22 October 2007
Own Correspondent
JOHANNESBURG - The International Monetary Fund
(IMF) says a political
solution is the only way out of Zimbabwe's eight-year
economic crisis and
accuses central bank governor Gideon Gono of
exaggeration following his
comments about double standards by the
Fund.
Director of IMF's African Department Abdoulaye Bio-Tchané
said the
consensus within the international community was that a lasting
solution to
Harare's political feud would usher a new period of economic
stability.
Zimbabwe has been gripped by a political crisis and
economic decline
since 1999 following the birth of a stronger opposition
party to challenge
the rule of President Robert Mugabe.
The
crisis has worsened over the past eight years amid allegations of
gross
human rights abuses and deteriorating economic performance, with the
country
inflation being the highest in the world at nearly 8 000 percent.
"But at the same time, the encouraging thing is that we know the
solution.
So, when the political situation will be sufficiently
addressed-and I hope
it will happen soon-the players will clearly be able to
address it,"
Bio-Tchané said at the weekend.
A wisp of hope in the Zimbabwean
crisis emerged last September after
the ruling ZANU-PF party and the
opposition Movement for Democratic Change
(MDC) agreed a compromise solution
to the country's deepening crisis.
Legislators from both sides
unanimously approved constitutional
changes that clear the way for Zimbabwe
to hold presidential and
parliamentary elections simultaneously next
year.
The vote was a concession by the MDC, which had called the
proposal to
move to joint elections from separate elections a plot to dilute
its
electoral power.
The compromise was part of a deal crafted
in South Africa whose
president, Thabo Mbeki, was tasked by other regional
leaders to mediate in
the feud between ZANU PF and the MDC.
Bio-Tchané revealed that the Zimbabwean crisis was of major concern to
the
Fund and Zimbabwe's neighbours and that the issue recently featured
prominently during a meeting between the IMF and "the African Caucus" in
Mozambique.
He said Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) governor
Gono was not being
truthful when he said the Fund was overly harsh when
dealing with Zimbabwe.
Presenting his mid-year monetary policy on 1
October, Gono said the
Fund reneged on an understanding that Zimbabwe's
voting rights would be
restored once it cleared its arrears to the Bretton
Woods institution.
The RBZ chief also said there was consensus that
if the same kinds of
conditions that are being asked of Zimbabwe were
applied to the other
countries, probably half of them would not actually be
benefiting from
lending or support from the IMF.
Bio-Tchané
said contrary to Gono's comments, other IMF member
countries meet the same
conditions.
"So I think that that statement is certainly an
exaggeration by
Governor Gono. - ZimOnline
Zim Online
Monday 22 October 2007
By Lizwe
Sebatha
BULAWAYO - Zimbabwe's sole fixed telephone company has warned of
a further
deterioration of communication services, citing ongoing power cuts
and
shortages of fuel as seen making it difficult to make or receive
calls.
TelOne public relations manager Phil Chingwaru said the shortages
had been
so disruptive that the parastatal had regularly been forced to
temporarily
close some of its telephone exchanges.
He said the
prolonged power cuts and shortages of diesel are the main
reasons behind
current difficulties by Zimbabweans to make or receive calls.
"Most of
the disruptions are not as a result of network faults but are,
therefore,
related to the lack of energy resources," Chingwaru said in a
statement.
Zimbabwe has been experiencing rolling power blackouts
blamed on the
inability of the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (ZESA)
to meet
domestic demand and a critical shortage of foreign currency to
import
electricity from neighbouring countries.
Domestic power
generation by ZESA has been affected by lack of spares and
foreign currency
to repair ageing equipment at the country's power stations
and inadequate
coal supplies.
The country imports about 35 percent of its power needs
from the Democratic
Republic of Congo (DRC), Mozambique, South Africa and
Zambia.
ZESA has since May widened its load-shedding programme after
regional power
utilities reduced exports to Zimbabwe citing unpaid
debts.
Mozambique's Hidroelectrica de Cahora Bassa recently cut supplies
to the
country from 300 megawatts (MW) to 195 MW over a staggering debt of
over
US$35 million.
SNEL of the DRC also cut electricity to Zimbabwe
in June over non-payment of
a $5 million debt.
The TelOne spokesman
said back-up generators installed to minimise the
effects of power cuts have
failed to stem the disruptions due to the
shortage of diesel.
"In the
absence of electricity, our telephone exchanges use diesel
generators and of
late there has not been a steady supply of diesel
resulting in some
exchanges shutting down completely until electricity has
been restored,"
Chingwaru said.
This comes as Internet service provider M-Web has also
informed its clients
that they would be unable to browse the Internet at
night, citing the high
cost of keeping generators running at night to fire
its browsers in the
event of power cuts. - ZimOnline
Yahoo News
Sun Oct
21, 5:09 AM ET
HARARE (AFP) - Zimbabwe's home affairs minister summoned
main opposition
leader Morgan Tsvangirai to explain claims of escalating
violence against
opposition supporters, a state newspaper reported
Sunday.
Home Affairs Minister Comrade Kembo Mohadi summoned
Tsvangirai to a meeting
on Thursday "where the opposition party will be
given the opportunity to
substantiate claims that some of its members have
been killed or maimed in
incidents of political violence," The Sunday Mail
said.
The newspaper said there were reports that the opposition Movement
for
Democratic Change (MDC) was planning to pull out of talks with President
Robert Mugabe's ruling ZANU-PF party "and is trying to cite the purported
violence cases as a pretext for the withdrawal."
MDC spokesman Nelson
Chamisa said he was unanaware of the letter to
Tsvangirai. "I am not aware
of any such letter," Chamisa told AFP. "It has
not been delivered to
us."
The opposition party told journalists last week that they "have
witnessed an
increase in cases of violence and intimidations particularly in
rural areas
and also in urban areas."
Chamisa said the violence
threatened an initiative by the Southern African
Development Community
(SADC) to broker the talks between ZANU PF and the
MDC.
The MDC said
it was demanding more than 130 million US dollars in damages
for party
officials and activists arrested and tortured while in custody.
The claim
followed the dropping of charges, two weeks ago, against the last
of 33
opposition activists detained on terrorism charges in March.
An SADC
meeting in March tasked South African President Thabo Mbeki with
brokering
dialogue between ZANU-PF and the MDC. The two parties have held a
series of
meetings with South African officials.
IOL
October
21 2007 at 12:48PM
By Basildon Peta and Tabby Moyo
White Zimbabwean farmers have turned to the low-key and untested
tribunal of
the Southern African Development Community (SADC) in a
last-ditch bid to
stave off their impending evictions from their farms or to
receive
compensation.
But legal experts doubt that the farmers, who believe
they have
exhausted their options in the Zimbabwean judiciary, will get a
much better
deal from the tribunal. This would be its first case, and the
experts
suspect that even if it rules in favour of the farmers, Zimbabwean
President
Robert Mugabe will simply ignore the ruling.
Based in
Windhoek, the SADC tribunal was established in 1992 by
article 9 of the SADC
treaty as one of the central institutions of the
regional
body.
But it was launched only in 2005, when its 11
judges were appointed,
with Justice Luis Antonio Mondlane of Mozambique as
judge president. About
the only news it has made since was when its head
office in Windhoek was
gutted by fire recently.
Its mandate is
to ensure that member countries adhere to the treaty,
protocols and other
legal instruments which require member states to respect
the
law.
The tribunal has exclusive jurisdiction over all disputes
between
member states.
Nahas Angula, the Namibian prime
minister, who launched the tribunal,
said that to avoid making it a white
elephant, SADC citizens and
institutions should be encouraged to lodge cases
with it.
So Zimbabwean farmers have taken him at his word by
resorting to the
tribunal for the relief they have conspicuously failed to
get from their own
courts.
John Worswick, the chairperson of
Justice for Agriculture, a group
representing about 300 white farmers, said
the land seizure actions of the
Zimbabwean government were in violation of
the country's bilateral protocols
within SADC, as well as the regional
body's treaty principles and
objectives. The seizure actions also violated
many regional and
international protocols which Zimbabwe has
ratified.
"We are seeking a declaration that the failure by the
Zimbabwean
government to comply with its own laws concerning the obligation
to promptly
and without unreasonable delay pay compensation for the
improvements on
applicants' property is a violation of the SADC treaty's
principles, terms,
conditions and objectives," papers filed at the tribunal
by the farmers
state.
The farmers are also seeking to interdict
the government from
compulsorily acquiring farms without recourse to the due
process of law, as
allowed by Zimbabwean constitutional amendment No
17.
The farmers say this amendment removes their rights to equal
treatment
before the law; the right to a fair hearing before an independent
court or
tribunal; the right not to be discriminated against because of race
or place
of origin; the right to protection of property; and the right to
receive
prompt, fair and adequate compensation concerning an expropriation
of
property by the state.
Worswick said that from 2000, the
process of acquiring land for
resettlement purposes by the government was
directed solely at so-called
white persons, regardless of any other factors,
such as their proper use of
the land, their contribution to the national
economy, their citizenship,
their length of residence in Zimbabwe or any
factor other than skin colour.
Tinashe Ndokera, a Zimbabwean
magistrate, ruled last week that those
farmers still on farms targeted for
seizure after a September 30 deadline to
vacate the properties were in
breach of the law. He said any farmer still on
land after the expiry of the
deadline was "trespassing on state property".
Farmers believed this
ruling had exhausted their legal options in
Zimbabwe, and they turned to the
tribunal.
Lloyd Kuveya, of the Southern African Litigation Centre
in
Johannesburg, said the farmers' appeal would be a test case for the
tribunal.
The real test could be whether the tribunal's
judgments were binding.
"The problem is whether countries would
comply, whether they have the
political will," he said.
Given
Mugabe's recent record, that seems unlikely.
Some political
opponents believe Mugabe is now rushing to evict the
remaining white farmers
in order to get land to use for patronage purposes
ahead of elections in
March.
Parliament has also passed a "company seizure" law requiring
majority
indigenous ownership of all foreign-owned firms.
The
measures are likely to destroy the little that is still left of
the
Zimbabwean economy. - Foreign Service
This article was
originally published on page 5 of Sunday Independent
on October 21, 2007
IWMF Lifetime Achievement Award Winner Pursues Politics in Zimbabwe, Despite Risk In the face of a media crackdown in Zimbabwe, Peta
Thornycroft renounced her British citizenship in 2001 and became a Zimbabwean
citizen so that she could continue to report in the country. A journalist for
more than three decades, Thornycroft is one of the few remaining independent
journalists in Zimbabwe. She has also paved the way for and supported other
journalists. She helped to establish the Media Monitoring Project, an
independent trust that works to promote responsible journalism in Zimbabwe and
helped to form the Public Broadcasting Initiative, a project that brought
broadcast journalism training to journalists. --- Profile of Peta Thornycroft
By Peggy Simpson Peta Thornycroft, the IWMF’s 2007 Lifetime Achievement Award winner, grew up in the bush country of Zimbabwe. She rode horses or walked to get anywhere and never used an electric appliance until she married. Her childhood was good grounding for her dangerous reporting today in Zimbabwe, where she is one of the few freelancers gutsy enough to pursue political and economic stories. Thornycroft, 62, knows the country and the people. And she has gone to great lengths to continue her exposés, including giving up British citizenship in 2001 to become a Zimbabwean citizen in an effort to comply with the country’s new media law, which requires reporters working there to be citizens. She knows the risks of reporting are high because Robert Mugabe’s government “doesn’t want us anywhere in Zimbabwe,” she said. She means that the Mugabe government does not want reporters – black or white – covering the country’s economic collapse and the political repression. Dozens of Zimbabwean journalists have fled and are living in exile, including Sandra Nyaira, an IWMF Courage Award winner who had been political editor of the country’s leading independent newspaper, The Daily News. She now lives in Somerset, England. In March, the government issued unspecified reprisals against Thornycroft and Jan Raath of The Times of London. On March 29, four armed men abducted veteran cameraman Edward Chikomba, formerly with the state-run Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation; he was found beaten to death two days later. In May, a prominent human rights lawyer who often represents reporters, Beatrice Mtetwa, was beaten by police after a protest by more than 60 lawyers outside Zimbabwe’s High Court. And in August, Zimbabwe put in place a sweeping surveillance law. Thornycroft, who is white, ran up against the government in March 2002, weeks after the presidential election, when she traveled Chimanimani, 300 miles east of Harare, to pursue a story about “people having homes destroyed for being suspected of voting for the opposition.” She traveled openly as a reporter, despite not getting state accreditation and thereby violating the new media law. She already had talked to dissidents and had set up an appointment with a local Mugabe supporter. “You have to get two sides of the story,” she said. While waiting in a Chimanimani café for the appointment, Thornycroft noticed “that the guy opposite from me was on his cell phone and that he was making a phone call about me. But I didn’t run for my car. I didn’t try to avoid it.” Four policemen swooped in to arrest her. She spent five days in the country’s famously horrid prisons before being freed, after an outcry from the international media community about her arrest. No charges were filed against her. Since then, she rarely spends nights at home but moves from one location to another, continuing her reporting. She has “a sixth sense of how to stay safe,” including when to take risks. She sometimes tells people, “I’m leaving now, if you have not heard from me in five hours, call a lawyer.” She has been known to break her own rules by forgetting to call home after getting engrossed in a story. She also has myriad cover stories for when she is stopped by police, including stories about why she is in a particular place and the names of local whites she plans to visit. None of these precautions helped, however, with government spies or the “non-uniformed agents,” such as the one who turned her in. “The Zimbabwean CIA is bigger even than [the East German] Stasi. And because people are so much poorer, someone can make money from a tip-off – ‘a strange white woman is in town and here’s her license plate.’” It wasn’t being white, it was being a stranger in town, that put her at risk, she said, adding that a black reporter new to a town also would attract instant scrutiny. She often was the target of attacks from the government-owned media, including a columnist’s reference to her as a “grandma lesbian.” She treated this name-calling as a joke. “It’s when they accuse you of terrorism, something that carries the death sentence, then we went to a lawyer,” she said. She wanted to get across the message that “if you do that again, we’ll sue you. Then they turned to insults through columnists.”
Still, she said she can understand others’ fear. She said that Robert Mugabe has been more successful in stoking fear throughout his country than his predecessor, Ian Smith, or the worst of the South African apartheid chiefs. “You cannot live with fear, all the day. It’s exhausting. It’s not like the rush of excitement of a (shooting war), of covering people being killed. It’s a silent wall. You can’t see the guns. It’s the fear of not knowing what they are going to do, fear of the terrible discomfort in the state prisons.” And the blatant brutality toward protestors has shocked her, especially the March 14 parading before TV cameras of the “grotesquely injured” Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, “staggering around, trying to walk to the courthouse...I couldn’t even recognize his face.” In South Africa, she said, apartheid era police used to beat prisoners in the jail “but at least they were worried about their evil being seen. Here, they couldn’t care less about the cameras around. That was a terrible show.” Thornycroft never expected to become a reporter. Her parents left Britain when she a child, “missed the plane to South Africa” and settled instead in southern Rhodesia, where they worked to build up a transport business and a tea estate. She recalled a lonely but exciting childhood. “We didn’t live in fancy houses either, like I read of the early white Rhodesians,” she said. She married a Zimbabwean, had a child, moved to Durban, South Africa, where her husband had a job, had more children and started a data processing company with her mother. “But I had this thing burning inside my head. I had been reading a lot, was in the university then, and read about things that were familiar to me in Durban. I said to myself that I could do better than that.” In 1973, she talked her way into a job at the Durban Daily News covering yachting. This was not about fancy folks and their boats but about telling the drama of “seeing these families battered by the Indian Ocean,” who had struggled during ocean crossings “to keep their children alive.” She began to get an on-the-ground education about another drama: the revolt against apartheid. “The white reporters then were completely conscious; but I had been living as a housewife, in a suburb, without much money, doing my thing,” she said. Assigned to write a feature sidebar at a trial of a white man convicted of working with the African National Congress (ANC), she asked a colleague about a strikingly beautiful woman in the courtroom. He looked at her as if she’d been under a rock. He told her that the woman was Winnie Mandela. She learned fast. The rallies for the jailed black protestor Steve Biko and the uprising in Soweto in the 1970s meant “you couldn’t avoid what apartheid was. My mother, who by now was in Durban, had no idea that you couldn’t travel except on buses that were reserved for whites; she had no idea that she was breaking the law by traveling on a black bus – and she didn’t care.” Ultimately, Thornycroft worked for white-owned newspapers that challenged the government, including The Sunday Express, a sister publication of the Rand Daily Mail. Most were shut down or folded. Then, she became a fulltime freelancer for British, U.S., Canadian and South African outlets, covering hot spots in Angola, Namibia, the Congo, as well as continuing stories in South Africa in the dying days of apartheid, including exposes of its secret chemical and biological warfare project, called Project Coast, and its scientists’ international connections. She helped expose international gun runners and mercenaries working in the region and also wrote about the early land seizures in Zimbabwe. She returned to Zimbabwe to work from 1982 to 1991 and then continuously, after 2001. She was the first to write about Mugabe’s $10 million mansion, evidence of high living far beyond what his salary could finance, which most observers saw as tangible evidence of corruption in his regime. In addition to reporting, Thornycroft has helped create a variety of nonprofit groups both in South Africa, before the 1994 elections, and in Zimbabwe in 1999 to help groom broadcast and print journalists for reporting challenges ahead. She has mentored journalists over the years and continues to do so today. Thornycroft shies away from calling herself brave. She’s just a reporter, groomed in the “hard school of South Africa,” she said. Her definition of courage comes from her second husband, Peter Wellman, news editor of the Rand Daily Mail, who went to jail rather than telling government investigators the identity of a banned Catholic priest. “For many journalists, he set a benchmark,” she said. “ ‘You can’t collaborate with the state. We are journalists. They are policemen,’ ” she said. As a reporter, Wellman shunned activism and advocated balance and fairness, she said. Thornycroft holds high those same values, “of being able to tell the difference between good and evil, between lies and truth.” Peggy Simpson is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C. |
SABC
October 21,
2007, 19:00
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has assured President
Thabo Mbeki that
he has not tried to stop anyone from attending the
Euro-Africa summit in
Lisbon.
This follows earlier reports that Brown
would boycott the summit if
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe attends.
Mbeki and Brown had informal
talks just before the rugby game in France last
night.
"The British Prime Minisiter assured me that he hadn't tried to
discourage
anybody from attending and has said that he wants the summit to
go ahead,"
Mbeki said.
Mbeki, as the SADC appointed facilitator in
the Zimbabwean crisis also
briefed Brown about the situation in that
country. "I told him that the
Zimbabwe leadership is working hard to address
political challenges in
Zimbabwe. We are happy with the progress and very,
very confident," Mbeki
said.
French President Nicholas Sarkozy and
Brown are lobbying for the expansion
of the G8. "You have countries like
China, Brazil, India, Mexico and South
Africa, that if you really are at an
equitable world order those countries
need to come together so that the five
are not just invitees but you have a
grouping that might be called the G13,"
said Mbeki.
Being the rugby world champion South Africa has captured the
world's
attention. It could only be a matter of time before it takes its
place at
the table of the world's rich and powerful.
The Sunday Times
October 21, 2007
The
African state is reviewing all the mining licences that were issued in
murky
circumstances during the years of conflict. Nine London-listed firms
could
be affected
Ben Laurance
IN the eyes of the 19th century adventurer and
journalist Henry Morton
Stanley, the Congo offered unparalleled riches. "We
are banqueting on such
sights and odours that few would believe could
exist," he wrote after a trip
up the River Congo to assess the area's
potential.
King Leopold II of Belgium described the vast tracts of land
that were to
become his Congo Free State as "this magnificent African
cake".
As the European powers pursued their scramble for Africa, it was
the Congo's
ivory, timber, palm oil and rubber that so excited Stanley and
Leopold. But
the country would later reveal its other riches - enormous
reserves of
diamonds, copper, cobalt, uranium and a host of other
metals.
And now, almost a century after Leopold handed over his "cake" to
the
Belgian state, a new scramble is under way. The prize is no longer ivory
or
even rubber. It is the Congo's mineral wealth.
But the Congo - or
the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as it has been for
the past 10 years
- has been left in a desperate state. For more than three
decades it was
ruled by a corrupt despot, president Mobutu Sese Seko. A
collapse in the
price of copper in 1974 had a devastating effect on the
economy. So did
Mobutu's clumsy attempts to transfer control of key
industries into the
hands of his cronies. A succession of conflicts between
1998 and 2003 left
the economy crippled. A single statistic gives a glimpse
of the scale of the
Congo's economic collapse: in the mid1980s, the state
mining company
Gecamines produced as much as 470,000 tonnes of copper a
year; in 2005, the
figure was 14,000 tonnes.
International mining giants are now signalling
their interest in making
investments in the country. And last month, China
signed a deal of
extraordinary scale and ambition. It said it would invest
$8.5 billion (£4.1
billion) to help restore the Congo's shattered
infrastructure. China
undertook to pay for a 2,000-mile road between the
northeast region and the
southern border, and a railway link of similar
length to join the southern
mining heartland and the DRC's sliver of coast
on the Atlantic. Further
money would go into schools and clinics and into
rebuilding decrepit
state-owned mining facilities.
In return, China
obtains rights over copper and cobalt reserves that should
yield an
estimated $14 billion of the metals.
The Chinese deal has raised
eyebrows. But it is for the future. For now, the
most contentious issue is
the Congo's attempts to determine the legitimacy
or otherwise of existing
mining deals that were struck in the period of
near-anarchy that preceded
last year's elections.
A succession of United Nations reports have
high-lighted how the granting of
mining concessions were used to finance
warring factions and line the
pockets of corrupt officials. Then, ear-lier
this year, the Kinshasa
government announced that it would examine 65 mining
concessions. For a
clutch of Lon-don-quoted mining companies this review
could be crucially
important. The stakes are high.
Nine companies
with their shares quoted in London have Congo mining
concessions that are
now under scrutiny: Anglo-Gold Ashanti, Central African
Mining and
Exploration (Camec), Copper Resources Corporation, First Quantum,
Gem
Diamonds, Metorex, Moto Goldmines, Mwana Africa and Nikanor. Gold
Fields,
which gives up its London listing this weekend, also has a licence
under
review.
In essence, the government wants to find out which licences were
legitimately gained and which were the product of deals stitched up with
warlords and corrupt state officials during the years of
upheaval.
Victor Kasongo, the deputy mines minister, told The Sunday
Times: "The aim
is to bring the Congo to the stage where things are clear,
legal and
beneficial for all the parties." Within the next few weeks, been
"cleared" -
where the review has shown that they were properly gained and
the proper
share of royalties due to the state is being paid.
And
what about the rest? Kasongo said: "Some of the contracts will need
serious
thinking, serious negotiation to get all the parties' agreement. And
some, I
am sure, will be found to be simply unlawful."
In too many cases, mining
concessions were granted in murky circumstances. A
firm would announce that
it had secured rights to a minerals deposit, and
its shares would shoot up,
according to Kasongo. But on the ground, nothing
happened: nothing has
actually been dug up.
Since 2002, exploration permits have been granted
on more than 4,000 areas;
yet on fewer than 500 of those areas have the
operators applied to start
extracting minerals.
The Congo has now
employed international fraud investigators to try to piece
together who is
behind mining licences and under what circumstances they
were
granted.
"Nobody doubts that we have minerals," said Kasongo. "Now we
need to show
that we have law and order: that's what the big companies want.
I'm
positively happy to have my door knocked by Rio Tinto. BHP Bil-liton has
been there for a year. They want to be involved. We are becoming attractive
to the biggest of the biggest."
Clearly, the stakes for the Congo are
high. Even the diminished amounts of
copper and cobalt being extracted at
the moment do not yield what they
should for the government. By one
calculation, royalties in the last
financial year should have been about
$160m; in fact, the government got a
pitiful $32m.
For companies
waiting to see if their licences are given official blessing,
the review is
crucial.
Already, Kasongo has found himself at loggerheads with Camec,
the company
run by the controversial former cricketer Phil Edmonds and his
long-standing
ally Andrew Groves. The Congo authorities dispute the
legitimacy of a cobalt
and copper mining concession that was controlled by
Billy Rauten-bach, the
notorious Zimbabwe-based businessman who is wanted in
South Africa on fraud
charges and who has now been barred from entering the
Congo. The licences,
in the mineral-rich Katanga province, were later
acquired by Camec.
Two months ago, the Congo's public prosecutor revoked
the mining rights,
citing "serious irregularities in the original issuing of
the licences".
Camec, for its part, is arguing in a continuing court case
that the licences
were sound and that their transfer was properly
done.
The Camec dispute originated before the review of licences was
announced.
Indeed, the key mining concessions involved were originally owned
by
Gecamines. But it probably gives a taste of things to come as results of
the
Congo review are published and mining companies are forced to
horse-trade
over the legitimacy of their assets.
Nobody pretends that
the Congo has yet cleansed itself of the corruption
that has been endemic
for so many decades.
But as the deal with China shows - and with talks
under way with Brazil and
India over similar deals - the potential for
attracting new investment to
the war-ravaged country is enormous.
"We
are trying to get the Congo to be respectable," said Kasongo.
LAND OF
STRIFE
THE Democratic Republic of Congo is one of the most mineral-rich
countries
on the planet. But since gaining independence from Belgium in
1960, the
country has been blighted by political instability.
A coup
in 1965 brought Colonel Joseph Mobutu to power, and he remained
president
for 32 years. He gave himself a new name, Mobutu Sese Seko, and
renamed the
country Zaire. Under Mobutu, it became one of the most notorious
kleptocracies in Africa.
A civil war in the mid -1990s led to the
toppling of Mobutu in 1997. Laurent
Kabila became president, and the country
was again renamed - this time as
the Democratic Republic of Congo. Civil war
erupted, with rebels supported
by Rwanda and Uganda opposing Kabila, who had
the backing of Angola, Chad,
Namibia, Sudan and Zimbabwe.
Laurent
Kabila was assassinated in January 2001 and his son Joseph was named
head of
state. The years of war are reckoned to have claimed as many as 4m
lives.
In early 2003, a peace treaty was signed and a government of
national unity
was established. Elections were held last year, and Joseph
Kabila was
confirmed as president.
The country is vast, covering an
area the size of western Europe. It has
reserves of oil, cobalt, copper,
diamonds, gold, silver, zinc, manganese,
tin, uranium and coal. Under
Belgian colonial rule, the Shinkolobwe mine
provided the uranium for the
nuclear bombs dropped by America on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.
The
population is about 60m and average income is reckoned to be less than
£100
a year.
The Vigil began with a roar.
More than a thousand motorbikes passed in
convoy down the Strand in a
protest against proposals to extend London's
congestion charge to cover
motorbikes as well as cars. It made for a
spectacular parade - motorbikes
as far as the eye could see - some of them
with Halloween
broomsticks!
It's been another busy week for Vigil supporters. A group
was invited to
take part in a Black History event at City and Islington
College (Dumi
Tutani, Gugu Ndlovu-Tutani, Agnes Zengeya, Chipo Chaya, Simon
Mambongo,
Maria Semu and Moses Kandiyawo). They were the stars of the show,
particularly Dumi who engaged the audience with his exuberant high-stepping
dancing. College students jumped up and joined in the dancing.
We
were encouraged at the world wide publicity given to our fifth
anniversary
and there has been no let up in media interest in the Vigil.
This week we
had Sijabuliso Dube from a new Zimbabwe news service -
www.zimafricanews.com. He was keen to
do a story about the Vigil. It is
always a pleasure for us to meet young
Zimbabwean journalists who are trying
to establish themselves.
We
were surprised to see an opinion article in the Zimbabwe Herald about
last
week's Vigil. We were amused to be described as being led by Kate Hoey
MP,
Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Zimbabwe, to whom we
presented
our petition, and as an arm of the Gordon Brown government. We
must be
doing something right to be attacked by the Herald. The Herald
seems to be
particularly upset that we support Mr Brown's decision not to
attend the AU
/ EU summit in Portugal in December if Mugabe goes. Well here's
a scoop for
them - the Vigil's letter to the Portuguese Presidency of the
EU:
"Jose Socrates Carvalho Pinto de Sousa, Prime Minister of
Portugal, c/o
Portuguese Embassy, 11 Belgrave Square, London SW1X
8PP
Dear Prime Minister,
The Zimbabwe Vigil, which is campaigning
for free and fair elections in
Zimbabwe, respectfully submits to you the
following petition: "A PETITION TO
EUROPEAN UNION GOVERNMENTS: We record our
dismay at the failure of the
Southern African Development Community (SADC)
to help the desperate people
of Zimbabwe at their time of trial. We urge
the UK government, and the
European Union in general, to suspend government
to government aid to all 14
SADC countries until they abide by their joint
commitment to uphold human
rights in the region." The petition has been
signed by thousands of people
passing by the Vigil, which is held outside
the Zimbabwe Embassy in London
every Saturday. We must explain that the aid
we are discussing is not
humanitarian or food aid but balance of payments
support, which is all to
often misappropriated. We would like all the money
saved to go to help the
starving people of Zimbabwe.
We regret to
note that Portugal - Africa's oldest colonial partner - is
still to meet its
promised aid commitments and seems intent on inviting Mr
Mugabe to attend
the EU / AU summit in Lisbon in December. We believe there
is no
justification in lifting the EU travel ban on Mr Mugabe and cannot see
how
either Europe or Africa would benefit from the embarrassing spectacle of
this old fool strutting on the world stage and blaming everyone else for the
catastrophic situation in his country.
We ask Portugal to stand
shoulder-to-shoulder with the people of Africa and
not with leaders who
abuse human rights. Tell Mugabe to stay at home and
mend his ways. If other
African leaders choose to rally behind this tyrant
they will further expose
themselves to shame.
Earlier this year the Vigil interceded with the
French government which
proposed to invite Mugabe to a Franco-African summit
in Cannes. We are glad
to say that President Chirac decided in the end not
to invite Mr Mugabe and
African leaders did not go ahead with their threat
to boycott the meeting.
We do not expect them to pass up on a free trip to
your lovely capital on
this occasion. To update you on the suffering in
Zimbabwe, we enclose "Fact
Sheet - The Zimbabwean Crisis" (also on:
https://www.zimbabwesituation.com/old/oct9_2007.html#Z34.
Zimbabwe
Vigil Co-ordinators"
The Vigil was glad to be joined by Pat Bailey from
North Yorkshire, who
lived in Zimbabwe for 50 years. She has not cut her
ties as she is working
for an organisation supporting orphans in Zimbabwe.
She feels help for our
exposed children is crucial: they are in danger of
becoming a lost
generation torn loose from their culture because no one is
left from the
older generation to teach them. This is another tragedy that
we can lay at
the destructive Mugabe's door. Is their future in his youth
brigade where
they will be further brutalised and alienated from our family
culture?
For this week's Vigil pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zimbabwevigil/
FOR
THE RECORD: 106 signed the register. Supporters from Banbury,
Becontree,
Bedford, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Brighton, Chatham, Colchester,
Doncaster,
Dudley, Guildford, High Wycombe, Kettering, Leeds, Liverpool,
Luton,
Manchester, Milton Keynes, North Yorkshire, Reading, Rushden,
Southampton,
Southend, Stoke-on-Trent, Tunbridge Wells, Wolverhampton,
Worthing and many
from London and environs.
FOR YOUR DIARY:
- Monday, 22nd
October 2007, 7.30 pm. Central London Zimbabwe Forum.
The speaker is Elliot
Pfebve former MDC candidate for the Bindura
constituency. He will lead a
discussion on educational policy in the new
Zimbabwe. We will be meeting in
the downstairs function room of the Bell and
Compass, 9-11 Villiers Street,
London, WC2N 6NA, next to Charing Cross
Station at the corner of Villiers
Street and John Adam Street.
- Sunday, 28th October 2007, 1 - 5 pm.
Zimbabwe Association AGM.
Refreshments will be provided. Venue: Development
House, 56-64 Leonard
Street, London EC2A 4LT, tel: 020 7549 0355, email:
zimbabweassociation@yahoo.co.uk.
Vigil
co-ordinator
The Vigil, outside the Zimbabwe Embassy, 429 Strand, London,
takes place
every Saturday from 14.00 to 18.00 to protest against gross
violations of
human rights by the current regime in Zimbabwe. The Vigil
which started in
October 2002 will continue until internationally-monitored,
free and fair
elections are held in Zimbabwe. http://www.zimvigil.co.uk
mediaforfreedom.com
Posted on:
10/21/2007
Trevor Ncube, chief executive of the "only
private and critical
newspapers still published in Zimbabwe," and
journalists Hrant Dink and Anna
Politkovskaya, who were killed as a result
of their work, are this year's
winners of the International Publishers
Association (IPA) Freedom Prize.
Ncube was honoured for
his support of free expression and his
courage as publisher of "The Zimbabwe
Independent", "The Standard" and "The
Mail and Guardian". "Despite repeated
threats of violence and attempts to
strip him of his Zimbabwean citizenship,
Trevor Ncube's newspapers have
persistently continued to expose corruption
and human rights abuses in
Zimbabwe, thus encouraging healthy dissent and
criticism," said Ana
Cabanellas, president of IPA.
This
year, IPA is also honouring Hrant Dink and Anna
Politkovskaya with a special
Freedom Prize to "celebrate their courage,
their humanity, and their
witness." Previously convicted for "insulting
Turkishness," Dink was editor
of the Armenian-Turkish weekly "Agos", which
provided a voice for the
Armenian community. He was shot dead in front of
his Istanbul office in
January.
Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist for the
independent
Moscow paper "Novaya Gazeta", often experienced the wrath of
authorities for
reporting on human rights abuses by the Russian military in
Chechnya. She
was murdered outside of her home in Moscow in October
2006.
The IPA Freedom Prize will be presented during
the opening
ceremony of the 2nd Cape Town Book Fair on 15 June 2007. For
more on this
event, whose theme for 2007 is "More than Black on White", see:
http://www.capetownbookfair.com