SADC probe team expected in Botswana today

http://www.zimonline.co.za

by Cuthbert Nzou Thursday 18 December 2008

HARARE - A top Swaziland defence official will lead a team of regional
officials expected in Botswana on Thursday to probe allegations Gaborone is
training insurgents to overthrow neighbouring Zimbabwe's President Robert
Mugabe, sources told ZimOnline.

Sources in Harare said John Kunene, principal secretary in Swaziland's
Ministry of Defence, and his team will spend two days in Botswana searching
for military camps where Zimbabwe alleges youths from opposition leader
Morgan Tsvangirai's MDC party are receiving military training.

"The SADC (Southern African Development Community) probe team will be in
Botswana for two days beginning Thursday," said one of the sources, speaking
on condition he was not named.

"They want to find out if indeed the MDC-T has bases in Botswana where it is
training bandits," said our source.

Kunene is expected to submit a report on his mission to the interstate
defence and security committee of SADC's special Organ on Politics, Defence
and Security.

But SADC chairman, South African President Kgalema Motlanthe, openly
questioned the probability that Botswana could train a rebel army to fight
Mugabe, adding the bloc had ordered the claims investigated because they had
been officially raised by a member-state.

"We do not think there is any substance to the allegation . . . but of
course because the allegation was made officially, that is why it had to be
investigated but I have no doubt that it will come to naught," Motlanthe
told journalists in Pretoria on Wednesday.

The South African leader would not say what could have prompted Harare to
make the claims that the opposition was plotting to use violence to
overthrow Mugabe but appeared to suggest that deep-seated "mistrust" between
the Zimbabweans rivals could be behind the allegations.

Relations between Harare and Gaborone have been sour for many years but took
a dangerous twist last month when Zimbabwe first raised the allegations that
Botswana was training MDC youths into a rebel army to oust Mugabe.

Harare said this week it had collected irrefutable evidence that Botswana
and the MDC were plotting war on Mugabe's government and attempted to link
the shooting of Zimbabwe Airforce chief Perence Shiri by unknown gunman to
the alleged plot to effect illegal regime change in the country.

Botswana and the MDC have denied training bandits to fight Mugabe, while the
Zimbabwean opposition's secretary general Tendai Biti this week dismissed
the allegations as a ploy by Mugabe to justify declaring a state of
emergency and crack down on the opposition to force it to join a unity
government as a junior partner.

"We have no doubt as a party that they (government) are going to declare a
state of emergency," Biti told journalists in Harare.

A unity government outlined under September power-sharing deal between
Mugabe's ruling ZANU PF, the MDC and a breakaway faction of the opposition
led by Arthur Mutambara has failed to take off because the political rivals
cannot agree on how to share key ministries and other top government posts.

Analysts had hoped the proposed unity government would help easy the
political situation and allow Zimbabwe to tackle an unprecedented economic
and humanitarian crisis marked by acute shortages of food and basic
commodities, amid a cholera epidemic that has killed 1 000 people since
August.

While Mugabe's government suggested this week it could call fresh elections
if the unity government deal flops, Botswana has went a step a further by
calling for new elections in Zimbabwe to be held under the supervision of
SADC, African Union and the United Nations.

Harare has said such calls were unwarranted interference in Zimbabwe's
affairs, while also attempting to use claims that Botswana is training
anti-Mugabe rebels to silence its foremost critic in the region. -ZimOnline

We don't believe Botswana is training rebels: Motlanthe

http://www.zimonline.co.za

by Nokuthula Sibanda Thursday 18 December 2008

HARARE - Southern African Development Community (SADC) chairman and
President of South Africa Kgalema Motlanthe on Wednesday poured cold water
on Zimbabwe's claims that Botswana was training military insurgents to drive
President Robert Mugabe from power.

Zimbabwe last month told SADC that Botswana was training youths from
opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai's MDC party into a rebel army to oust
Mugabe. The region has since appointed a taskforce to probe the allegations
denied by both Botswana and the MDC.

Motlanthe, speaking publicly for the first time on the Zimbabwean
allegation, told journalists in Pretoria the regional bloc did not believe
Botswana was training insurgents to fight Mugabe.

He said: "We do not believe that. We do not think there is any substance to
the allegation.

"But of course the Zimbabwean authorities would sight an explosion at a
police station and that kind of stuff to actually claim that the government
of Botswana could train the MDC cadres - its against the SADC principles
that is why we really take it with a pinch of salt."

The Zimbabwe government this week stepped up its accusations against
Gaborone claiming it had gathered irrefutable evidence that Botswana and the
MDC were plotting war on Mugabe's government.

The Harare authorities also attempted to link the shooting of Zimbabwe
Airforce chief Perence Shiri by unknown gunman to the alleged plot to effect
illegal regime change in Zimbabwe.

But Motlanthe seemed unconvinced, suggesting the only reason the SADC
ordered an investigation into the Zimbabwean claim was that it had been made
by a member-state.

He said: "But of course because the allegation was made officially, that is
why it had to be investigated but I have no doubt that it will come to
naught."

Motlanthe added that it did not make sense that an opposition party that is
properly registered and has participated in several elections could now
choose war as a means to gain political power.

"It (MDC) is represented in parliament . . . there would really be no logic
in that at this late hour they are planning for a military option. There is
an army in Zimbabwe which cannot be confronted with people who are trained
over weekends," said Motlanthe. - ZimOnline

President Kgalema Motlanthe takes swipe at UK over Robert Mugabe

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/

December 18, 2008

Jonathan Clayton in Johannesburg
South Africa, the only country with real influence in Zimbabwe, yesterday
distanced itself from growing international calls for Robert Mugabe to step
down.

President Kgalema Motlanthe instead took a swipe at Britain for seeking to
impose its will on its former colony and clung to the hope that a moribund
power-sharing agreement would be revived and implemented this week despite
the main opposition's repudiation of the deal unless real concessions are
made.

Asked how bad things had to get before South Africa, the region's economic
powerhouse, joined calls for the 84-year-old dictator to leave office, Mr
Motlanthe told journalists: "It's really not for us. I mean I don't know if
the British feel qualified to impose that on the people of Zimbabwe, but we
feel that we should support and take our cue from what they [Zimbabweans]
want."

Mr Motlanthe, who took over after Thabo Mbeki, who was much criticised for
what was seen as onesided mediation efforts in Zimbabwe, echoed the views of
his predecessor that a government of national unity remained the priority
and the best solution to the crisis.

"It is our wish that an inclusive government be established as soon as
yesterday because only then will it be in a position to deal with the
problems facing the people of Zimbabwe. The issue of whether President
Mugabe should go or not has never been raised by the parties. That is why in
the agreement they agreed he should serve as President," Mr Mothlanthe said.
"Once it is in place we believe it will create the possibility of dealing
with the real problems."

Mr Mugabe reluctantly agreed a power-sharing deal in September after winning
rigged elections in March and June, but has refused to hand over key
ministries to the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

The MDC, backed by all election monitoring groups, claims that the people
made clear at the polls what they wanted but were cheated. It says that it
accepted the deal as second best in the interests of peace and stability but
accuses Mr Mugabe of continuing to cheat by offering them only minor
ministries and portfolios.

The Mugabe Government this week announced plans to amend the constitution to
allow the creation of an inclusive government in line with the accord - a
move that its neighbours have applauded as a step in the right direction.
The opposition dismiss the change, which would allow the MDC leader Morgan
Tsvangirai to be sworn in as Prime Minister, as another ploy.

Mr Motlanthe, widely seen as a caretaker president until elections next
year, was speaking after a meeting of southern Africa countries in Pretoria
decided to launch an urgent humanitarian campaign to help its neighbour
fight a cholera epidemic and overcome acute food shortages. All 15 members
of the Southern African Development Community pledged to contribute to the
aid initiative.

Zimbabwean Parties Dismiss Pretoria Call To Form Unity Government

http://www.voanews.com



By Blessing Zulu
Washington
17 December 2008

South African President Kgalema Motlanthe, currently chairman of the
Southern African Development Community, said Wednesday that SADC has created
a special purpose entity called the Zimbabwe Humanitarian and Development
Assistance Framework to relieve misery in the member country, now sorely
afflicted by a cholera and widespread hunger.

Motlanthe also dismissed charges lodged by Harare that Botswana is training
members of the Zimbabwean opposition to stage a coup, as Benedict Nhlapho
reported from Pretoria.

Mr. Motlanthe also urged the immediate formation of a national unity
government in Harare to address the expanding cholera epidemic which has
claimed some 1,000 lives in recent weeks, and other humanitarian crises
including widespread food shortages. The United Nations World Food Program
warned this week that its resources to provide aid are running out.

But President Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF party and the Movement for Democratic
Change of Morgan Tsvangirai, designated prime minister in the government
that has failed to materialize since the Sept. 15 signature of a
power-sharing agreement, both rejected Motlanthe's call for the formation of
a government as premature and difficult to implement at this time.

The parties were also cool to the recommendation by the International Crisis
Group, a think tank based in Brussels, that Mr. Mugabe and Tsvangirai both
step aside to make way for a transitional administration that would tackle
the crisis and prepare elections in 18 months.

The ICG report, entitled "Ending Zimbabwe's Nightmare, A Possible Way
Forward," described the power-sharing talks as "hopelessly deadlocked" and
the impasse intractable.

Mr. Mugabe and ZANU-PF "will not accept genuine power sharing" and
Tsvangirai and his dominant MDC formation "are unwilling to join a ZANU-PF
dominated administration as a junior partner, responsible for ending
international isolation but without authority to implement needed reforms
and emergency humanitarian relief," the ICG states.

The International Crisis Group proposes "a transitional administration, run
by non-partisan experts, in which neither Mugabe nor Tsvangirai would have
any position. It would be mandated to implement fundamental political and
economic reforms to stabilize the economy and prepare new presidential
elections in eighteen months."

The ICG said former South African President Thabo Mbeki would have to step
down as crisis mediator "in favor of someone perceived as more neutral."

ZANU-PF Chief Parliamentary Whip Joram Gumbo tells reporter Blessing Zulu
that his party cannot deal with unity proposals this week as faces a crucial
national conference.

Spokesman Nelson Chamisa of the Tsvangirai MDC formation said Mothlanthe's
call for the formation of a government ignores fundamental differences
between the two parties.

In letter, Mugabe appoints Tsvangirai Prime Minister

Mugabe appoints leading ZANU-PF crony as new Attorney-General

http://www.hararetribune.com

Wednesday, 17 December 2008 22:42 Trymore Magomana

Robert Mugabe, in line with the the powers accorded to him by the fraudulent
GNU deal signed September 15, swore into office Johannes Tomana as the new
Attorney-General.

There swearing in of Tomana into office is the clearest indication yet that
the ZANU-PF government has accepted the call by the South African government
that there should be a government in Zimbabwe before this week is out.

At the swearing in ceremony, Tomana, rewarded by Mugabe for his sterling
work in keeping ZANU-PF in power following the March 29 election, vowed to
fight crime.

"I am sure that Zimbabweans are not prepared for rhetoric, they have had
enough of it. All that they want now are solutions. I will not claim to be
the solution, but I shall say that Zimbabweans are the solution," Tomana
said.

He stated that the reason people were suffering in Zimbabwe was rampant
crime, not runaway inflation, povety, hunger, cholera or the denial of their
human rights by the ZANU-PF government.

"In my own assessed view, the reason why Zimbabwe is suffering is because we
have allowed crime to dominate our lives. I want to promise everyone that
the security services are ready, the judiciary is ready and I am more than
prepared to help the nation fight crime." During the years Tomana was
chairman of the Anti-Corruption Commission in Zimbabwe, very few ZANU-PF
cronies accused of corruption where prosecuted.

Tomana, a native of Chinhoyi and graduate of the University of Zimbabwe Law
School, takes over as the country's chief prosecutor from Justice Bharat
Patel who as the acting Attorney-General following the unceremonious
dismissal of Sobusa Gula-Ndebele.

Ndebele was dismissed from his day job by the ZANU-PF government in May this
year after his office failed to prosecute MDC supporters arrested on trumped
up charges by the pro-ZANU-PF police. The MDC supporters were arrested in a
crackdown by the ZANU-PF government following its defeat by the MDC during
the March 29 election.

In June this year, Tomana, who makes no apology for his support of ZANU-PF,
is the same person who advised, in his capacity as deputy AG, the ZANU-PF
government that it was legal to detain MDC supporters without trial. At the
time, Tomana claimed that the move was intended to curb political violence
and lawlessness.

"Bail is opposed as a matter of policy. It (the "tough stance") is going to
choke the prison population, but what do we do? Do we allow them to continue
burning down people's homes? Jail is not nice. It is not meant to be nice,"
Tomana explained at the time why it was relevant to detain suspects until
their trail date.

"Bail is not a right, but a privilege that can be withdrawn if the
circumstances are deemed prejudicial to society and/ or justice," he added.

Following the election of Lovemore Moyo to the powerful speakership position
in parliament in September, Tomana was a leading figure in the Attorney
General's office and the spy Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO)'s plot
to secure convictions against MDC MPs in a desperate bid to shrink the MDC's
simple majority in Parliament.

In 2004, Tomana represented the Media and Information Commission (MIC) in
its fight to keep the Daily News closed. At the time, Tomana asked the high
court to set aside a judgement by a lower court ordering the commission to
grant the ANZ, the publisher of the Daily News, an operating licence.

Tomana defended AIPPA, a law that requires registration, and barring
foreigners from investing in the media sector, saying that other countries
had similar laws.

Over the years, Tomana has gone to court to defend high profile ZANU-PF
figures. Just two weeks ago, Tomana was intrumental in the dismissal of
wife-bashing charges against Mugabe's spokeperson, George Charamba.

Tomana forced the police to halt the prosecution of Charamba who was accused
of beating his wife on February 24 this year following a domestic dispute at
their Mandara home in Harare.

The Tribune heard the the appointment of an AIPPA defender, a man who
supports the denial of rights to Zimbabweans, and a chief ZANU-PF crony does
not bode well for the country. Even if a government is appointed in the days
ahead, it is unlikely that change will come to Zimbabwe, especially with the
likes of Tomana holding the reins of who can be prosecuted.

Tomana is a partner in the Harare based, politically connected law firm
Muzangaza, Mandaza and Tomana.

UN Sec-Gen urges Zimbabwe to receive his envoy

http://www.stuff.co.nz

Reuters | Thursday, 18 December 2008

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told Zimbabwe's government it should urgently
receive the UN special envoy for the country, which he said faced "economic,
social and political collapse."

At a news conference, Ban also issued thinly veiled criticism of efforts by
the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to mediate in the Zimbabwe
crisis, saying they had failed to deliver results.

Zimbabwe is suffering from runaway hyperinflation, shortages of food and
fuel, and a cholera outbreak that has killed nearly 1000 people. A September
power-sharing agreement between the ruling party and opposition has not been
implemented.

Ban said he had told President Robert Mugabe at a meeting in Doha late last
month that Zimbabwe's humanitarian situation "grows more alarming every day.
Zimbabwe stands on the brink of economic, social and political collapse."

The United Nations says 5.8 million people, more than half the population,
will need food aid in the first quarter of next year.

"I told (Mugabe) things needed to change, urgently, and that I and the UN
stand ready to help. The president agreed to receive my envoy, Haile
Menkerios. Now we are told that the timing is not right. If this is not the
time, when is?" the UN chief said.

Echoing remarks he made to the Security Council on Monday, Ban said the
world needed a "fair and sustainable political solution in Zimbabwe . . .
and we need it fast."

In pointed comments, he said that for the past eight months, the SADC had
"insisted on leading international diplomatic efforts - with little result.

"When the international community or a regional organisation takes on a
mission, it also takes on the responsibility to deliver," he said.

South African President Kgalema Motlanthe said on Wednesday the SADC would
"launch an urgent international campaign to mobilise financial and material
resources to help the people of Zimbabwe. . . overcome the challenges facing
their country."

Abductions of Zimbabwe activists could ruin talks

Desperation mounts: Children and their parents on Sunday picked up corn kernels spilled on the side of the road in Masvingo, Zimbabwe, by trucks carrying maize imported from South Africa. Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi/AP Twenty activists from the Movement for Democratic Change opposition party have been abducted since October. Their whereabouts are still unknown. By Scott Baldauf – Staff Writer and a correspondent from the December 18, 2008 edition JOHANNESBURG, South AFrica; and HARARE, Zimbabwe - Zimbabwe's chances of resolving its eight-month-long political stalemate and patching together a power-sharing government seems to be in jeopardy after a spate of armed abductions of key opposition and human rights activists. Twenty activists for the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) opposition party and four activists for the Zimbabwe Peace Process human rights group have been abducted from their homes and businesses since October, in circumstances that mirror similar abductions of dozens of opposition members during national elections held last March. Coming at a time when the MDC is under pressure to accept a power-sharing agreement with the long-ruling party of President Robert Mugabe, the ZANU-PF, these abductions have forced many MDC activists into hiding and prompted leading MDC leaders to allege a complete breakdown in trust with the ruling party. "It puts the talks in jeopardy," says Tendai Biti, the MDC secretary general and a participant in negotiations with the ruling party. He calls the abductions a "breach" of agreements signed between the two parties in September, when MDC and ZANU-PF agreed in principle to share power. "Zanu-PF has no respect for the documents that it signs," says Mr. Biti. Beset by 280 million percent inflation, food and cash shortages, and a deadly outbreak of cholera, Zimbabwe is a country in desperate need of a functioning government. But a campaign of terror, which many human rights activists say bears the earmarks of similar state-sanctioned abduction campaigns of the past, could undo months of painstaking negotiations between the MDC's Morgan Tsvangirai and Mr. Mugabe. Is Mugabe sending a message? Some experts say that may be the point. "One of two things is happening, and they are not mutually exclusive," says Steven Friedman, a political analyst at the Institute for Democracy in Southern Africa in Tshwane, as Pretoria is now called. "One is that there are people within the security services who don't want there to be even a shred of a power-sharing agreement. The other is that if the Zimbabwe elite is forced to have the opposition in government at all, they [the MDC] are going to be fully aware of who is in charge." In theory, MDC and ZANU-PF should now be allies in a coalition government, after having signed an agreement to share power last September. The South African President Kgalema Motlanthe raised hopes of a settlement on Tuesday, saying there might be a power-sharing agreement as soon as this week, but MDC spokesmen said the talks remain in a stalemate. But the abductions of 20 MDC activists starting in October, and culminating with the abduction of Zimbabwe Peace Process leader Jestina Mukoko, her lawyer, and two of her co-workers, seems to have diminished, if not broken down, any chance of joint-rule. The abductions of Ms. Mukoko and the activists of Zimbabwe Peace Project were well planned and targeted, carried out by armed men in civilian clothes, driving unmarked cars. Human rights activist Tiseke Kasambala says the abductions resemble those carried out by pro-Mugabe supporters during the March elections. Mukoko's group was known for its work in documenting the pre- and postelection violence against political activists, and for naming the perpetrators. "We believe there is evidence that people operating on the instigation of Zimbabwe authorities have carried out these abductions," says Ms. Kasambala, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch in Johannesburg, South Africa. Because Mukoko's reports are critical of Zimbabwe authorities, she adds, it's possible that "the authorities were looking for them because of the nature of their work." Mugabe's stronghold targeted Besides Mukoko, another 20 MDC activists have been abducted from the capital of Harare and from the region of Mashonaland West. Shona-speakers have always formed the strongest base of support for Mugabe's ZANU-PF party, but voters in Mashonaland rebelled at election time in March 2008, giving the MDC party control of Parliament for the first time in 28 years, and making Mr. Tsvangirai the leading vote-getter for president, with nearly 49 percent of the vote. For its part, the Zimbabwe government alleges that the MDC has unleashed a terror campaign of its own. Zimbabwe authorities claimed this week that the neighboring country of Botswana was training insurgents to overthrow the Mugabe regime, and they have also blamed MDC members in the firebombing of homes of ZANU-PF officials. When Air Marshal Perence Shiri, a cousin of Mugabe's who led a counterinsurgency campaign in the early 1980s that killed nearly 20,000 civilians, was shot near his farm this weekend, police were quick to cast blame on the MDC. Biti called the government's charges "illogical." "As a matter of fact, we are not training bandits," he told the Monitor. "In fact, the MDC is a de facto government of the day." "We control Parliament," Biti said. "The chairman of the MDC, Lovemore Moyo, is the speaker of Parliament and the president of the MDC is the prime minister-designate. So how does the MDC, which is controlling government, want to destroy that?" • Our correspondent in Harare could not be named for security reasons.

Harare Launches New Crackdown On Business, Alleging Price-Gouging

http://voanews.com

By Jonga Kandemiiri
Washington
17 December 2008

Zimbabwe's National Incomes and Pricing Commission has launched a new blitz
against businesses which it accuses of overpricing, arresting a number of
retailers.

Authorities last week declared price increases unjustified, and told
retailers to return prices to Dec. 3 levels. But retailers said doing so
would put them out of business.

Director Sam Ncube of the Affirmative Action Group in Matabeleland told
reporter Jonga Kandemiiri of VOA's Studio 7 for Zimbabwe that the Reserve
Bank of Zimbabwe rather than retailers was to blame as it printed money and
fueled inflation, sending prices higher.

Charamba goes ballistic on Swedish Ambassador

http://hararetribune.com

Wednesday, 17 December 2008 23:22 Thomas Shumba

Hardly a week goes by without George Charamba, the Secretary for Information
and Publicity and the official spokesperson for Robert Mugabe, crossing
swords with people from various quarters, be they from the UK or the US or
anywhere else for that matter.

Last night, he was at it again, frothing at the mouth accusing Sten
Rylander, the Swedish Ambassador, for double standards for his stance on the
proposed UN intervention force and his relationship with Morgan Tsvangirai,
the leader of the MDC.

"He is a bad ambassador, plain and simple," Charamba, author of the acidic
Manheru Column, told the Herald.

Charamba, who now uses the Herald as his personal Blog, accused Rylander of
working by night for regime change in Zimbabwe in coalition with the US and
British envoys.

Charamba, as he always does to perceived enemies, put words in Rylander's
mouth, claiming that Rylanders was pushing for a UN intervention force to be
sent to Zimbabwe, even though publicly Rylander had stated otherwise.

"Their plan for intervention has come to grief partly because they have no
nerve for war here. He (Rylander) should not sound like he is doing us a
favour by appearing not to want intervention," Charamba speculated.

"That (UN intervention) is the last resort. Sadc and the Africa Union should
help solve this crisis. We are encouraging the formation of an inclusive
Government," rylander had said at a press conference in Harare on Wednesday
night.

At the press conference, Rylander has revealed that he had told Morgan
Tsvngirai to return home, a titbit Charamba seized as evidence that Rylander
was working part-time as Tsvangirai's adviser.

Tsvangirai has been sequestered in Botswana since November 9th, positing
that he couldn't go back to Zimbabwe since the ZANU-PF government had
refused to give him a passport.

Charamba said instead that Tsvangirai was afraid to come home because his
emergence travel document (ETD) had expired.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday the South African President Kgalema Motlanthe urged
Robert Mugabe to constitute a government as soon as possible, before the
week is out preferably.

Asked if it was time for Mugabe to step down, Motlanthe claimed that his
government was not in any position to ask Mugabe to step down.

He said South Africa will only follow the will of the people of Zimbabwe,
not as expressed in the March 29 election, but in the GNU document inked on
September 27 this.

Aid agencies step up appeals for Zimbabwe on eve of Christmas

http://www.monstersandcritics.com

Health News
Dec 17, 2008, 22:08 GMT

Johannesburg - As the festive season gets into full swing, aid agencies are
stepping up their appeals for donations for Zimbabwe, where a cholera
epidemic has killed hundreds and there are mounting reports of people dying
of hunger.

British-based development agency Oxfam on Thursday launched an appeal for 4
million pounds (6.1 million dollars) to provide clean water, sanitation and
food to over 1 million people in Zimbabwe.

Since August, around 1,000 people have died of cholera in Zimbabwe and more
than 18,000 people have been infected in an outbreak blamed on the breakdown
of water supply, sewerage and refuse collection systems.

Oxfam, the Red Cross and other agencies are distributing hygiene kits and
drilling boreholes to obtain clean water.

Some families interviewed by Oxfam said they were keeping their children
indoors for fear of cholera contamination.

Hunger is killing others. Close to 4 million Zimbabweans, over a quarter of
the population, needs food aid, according to the United Nations. That figure
is expected to reach 5.1 million in January as food production grinds to a
halt for lack of inputs.

Some people have resorted to picking grains of maize in fields for food.

'Zimbabweans are no strangers to food shortages, but we have now reached
desperate levels,' Peter Mutoredzanwa, Oxfam Zimbabwe Country Director, said
in a statement, launching the appeal.

While aid agencies are still avoiding the famine label, Oxfam quoted an
elderly man named Nkosana Mudhindi as saying two of his 14 children had
already died of hunger. Another man said he knew of at least six people who
died for lack of food.

Other lobby groups and NGOs have also reported hunger-related deaths.

Until now, Western and regional governments, including South Africa, have
been withholding hefty rescue packages for Zimbabwe until a credible, unity
government was in place.

The United Nations World Food Programme has warned it may have to cut its
food rations in Zimbabwe because its appeal for 140 million dollars has gone
largely unanswered.

'While the international community battles for a political solution in the
country, millions of Zimbabweans are going hungry,' Oxfam's humanitarian
director Jane Cocking said.

The Red Cross, the United Nations children's agency UNICEF and British
charity, Save the Children are also appealing for millions of dollars for
their Zimbabwe operations.

Germany, the European Union and the United States have all pledged extra aid
to Zimbabwe in recent weeks. The Southern African Development Community has
also asked its 15 members to contribute money and material resources through
a new non-partisan agency for Zimbabwe.

Don't neglect Aids crisis, warn health workers

*  Widespread shortages of food and clean water
*  Weak population more susceptible to diseases
Chris McGreal, Africa correspondent
The Guardian, Thursday 18 December 2008
Health workers in Zimbabwe are warning that international alarm over the
spreading cholera emergency, which has claimed nearly a thousand lives, is
overshadowing the Aids crisis, which is killing as many people every three
days.

The rising death toll from cholera, brought on by collapsed sewerage systems
infecting drinking water, has become the most visible sign of Zimbabwe's
extraordinary implosion and the indifference of its leaders. As the disease
spread across the border into South Africa, alarmed foreign governments
promised to pour in aid to contain the outbreak.

But cholera and the failure of the sewerage system are symptoms of the wider
collapse of the state and its devastating consequences.

Aid workers speak of a silent catastrophe in which people are dying of Aids
by the hundreds every day for want of medicines and sufficient food to fight
off the disease, and because a cynical government has blocked foreign aid
workers from reaching many of the most vulnerable.

About one in five Zimbabweans are HIV-positive. The UN says Aids kills more
than 400 Zimbabweans each day.

"This cholera is just one issue," said Meine Nicolai, director of operations
for Médecins Sans Frontières Belgium, which is working in Zimbabwe.

"It is a disease with a risk of high mortality, so we have to pay special
attention to treat the patients with cholera because it can spread very
rapidly. But it is just one of the problems and the result of a collapsing
system that is claiming many more lives.

"The situation of the wider population is more worrying in terms of a
collapsing healthcare system, very high HIV prevalence and the nutritional
situation."

Although Aids has been claiming increasing numbers of lives for years in
Zimbabwe, health workers say people have been made more vulnerable to the
disease by widespread malnutrition.

Many Zimbabweans, particularly in rural areas, eat one meal every two or
three days because of the collapse of agriculture following the
redistribution of white-owned farms and drought. Some are living off nothing
more than berries and roots. With chronic malnutrition comes weakened immune
systems and much greater vulnerability to Aids. Undernourishment also erodes
the effectiveness of drugs that keep the disease at bay.

Some health workers say that the working-age population of entire villages
has either left for South Africa to look for work or died of Aids.

The World Health Organisation says the disease is responsible for two-thirds
of all adult deaths in Zimbabwe. More than 40% of deaths in children under
five are Aids-related, six times the average in a region where the disease
is rife. Life expectancy is among the lowest in the world. More than a
million children have been made orphans as a result of Aids.

The dead are buried in overcrowded cemeteries where the graves are bunched
together to make room for the next day's dead. Costly headstones have given
way to wooden markers for men and women who have barely made it to
adulthood.

Government distribution programmes for drugs such as the one that prevents
HIV-positive women from passing the virus to their babies at birth have
largely collapsed. According to the Global Fund for Aids, only about one in
five of those who need antiretroviral drugs to keep the disease at bay are
receiving them. Those who do are generally reliant on foreign aid
organisations.

The cholera crisis is not detached from Aids. Nicolai says those most at
risk from dying from the disease are undernourished and HIV-positive.

"A weakened population that is undernourished, a population that has a high
HIV prevalence, is even more at risk from cholera. So cholera is important,
but it's only one of the problems," she said.

Starving family eats rug to survive

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Langton, 17, holds the piece of hide which his family has resorted to eating to fend off starvation

Starving families have been feeding on the skin of a cow that was slaughtered six years ago as the famine in Zimbabwe worsens.

It is just one sad example of the deepening crisis engulfing the country.

Children as young as two have been eating the skin and one man has died. The hide was originally used as a rug in a village near Bulawayo, hit by starvation and haunted by a cholera outbreak.

Families, who cannot get hold of grain, have also resorted to eating pois­onous plants, while others have died after eating wild fruits.

Grandmother-of-seven Ellinah, 66, told Metro: 'Since the summer, we've had no harvest. We had nothing to do but eat the unthinkable.

'Whatever we can get our hands on these days, that goes down. Our ancestors used to keep the skin of their beasts, in case of drought or famine. We just didn't know what else we could eat any more.'

The desperation of starving villagers emerged during an undercover Metro visit.

We also visited towns and villages hit by the cholera outbreak, which has killed hundreds, maybe thousands.

In Ellinah's village, two separate shreds of the hide remain. For three months, it has been sliced at the edges and boiled in salted water and shared by families living in neighbouring mudhuts.

One of Ellinah's sons, Dumisan, 43, died a fortnight ago, leaving three children. All the villagers admit to feeling unwell, many having diarrhoea, after eating the hide.

The creeper plants are more often crushed and used as shampoo by poor families. Church group Zimbabwe Orphans through Extended Hands (ZOE) has a warehouse in the nearby town of Nkayi but it is now empty.

Tearfund-backed ZOE workers have seen a feeding programme for 35,000 families double in cost in 12 months to £2million.

Health Experts Report New Outbreaks Of Cholera In Zimbabwe

http://voanews.com/

By Patience Rusere
Washington
17 December 2008

Swedish Ambassador to Zimbabwe Sten Rylander said Wednesday in Harare that
Sweden is donating another US$5 million in funding for humanitarian relief
efforts in the country.

At the same time Rylander urged the administration of President Robert
Mugabe and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change to end the
political deadlock that has blocked the formation of a unity government in
order to relieve the population.

Correspondent Thomas Chiripasi of VOA's Studio 7 for Zimbabwe reported from
Harare.

The cholera epidemic continues to spread, meanwhile, though the
state-controlled Herald newspaper said cases have declined since late
November.

Member of Parliament Blessing Chebundo, representing Kwekwe, Midlands, for
the MDC wing led by Morgan Tsvangirai, said that in house debate, Health
Minister David Pariretyetwa said outbreaks have occurred in new locations
including Chirundu and Chegutu.

Communications Officer Heron Holloway of the International Federation of Red
Cross in Southern Africa told reporter Patience Rusere of VOA's Studio 7 for
Zimbabwe that new cases have fallen off in some areas, but there are new
outbreaks in urban zones.

Photojournalist missing in Zimbabwe

http://cpj.org/

New York, December 17, 2008--A journalist who disappeared in Zimbabwe on
Saturday may be in police custody, journalists in Harare told CPJ.

Accredited freelance photojournalist Shadrack Manyere disappeared after
taking his car to a garage in Norton, 19 miles (30 kilometers) west of
Harare, local journalists told CPJ. Police raided Manyere's home the
following day and confiscated equipment related to his work, his lawyer and
local journalists said. Family members and colleagues became worried when
Manyere did not return home that evening and his phone had been switched
off. A number of them told CPJ that they believe he was abducted, possibly
by the police.

At 1 a.m. on Sunday, men who said they were police officers went to the
photojournalist's home in Westgate, a suburb west of Harare, and asked
through the closed door if they could search the premises, local journalists
told CPJ. They told his family members that Manyere had died in a car
accident, but his relatives refused to let them in, the journalists said. At
10 a.m., police returned with a search warrant and ransacked the house,
taking Manyere's laptop, video camera, and tapes, lawyer Andrew Makoni told
CPJ.

"We believe that Shadrack Manyere has been illegally abducted and is in the
custody of Harare police," said CPJ Africa Program Coordinator Tom Rhodes.
"We hold the Zimbabwe government responsible for his safety and well-being,
and demand his immediate release."

A spokesman for the national police, Oliver Mandipaka, told CPJ that he
could not confirm whether Manyere was in police custody and would inquire
into the matter. Police at Harare Central Police Headquarters told CPJ that
they were unaware of Manyere's case.

More than 20 people have been abducted from their homes and offices over the
past two weeks, according to international wire reports, including former TV
news anchor and Zimbabwe Peace Project Director Jestina Mukoko. Suspected
secret police raided Mukoko's home in Norton on December 3 and he has not
been seen since, the reports said.

Local journalists described the time during this year's presidential
elections in May and June in Zimbabwe as the harshest state-sponsored
crackdown on the media in the country's history.

Zimbabwe: extinction looms in a paradise lost to guns, greed and hunger

http://www.timesonline.co.uk

December 18, 2008

Martin Fletcher
At first it seemed a paradise. Baboons played on the dusty track ahead of
us. Impala and zebra, wildebeest and spiral-horned kudu bounded into the
bush as our vehicle approached. We stopped to admire a 3,000-year-old baobab
tree with a trunk that dwarfed our four-wheel drive, and spotted a herd of
African elephants. It seemed scarcely possible that this semi-arid land in
the Lowveld of southeastern Zimbabwe could support so much wildlife.

It was only as we approached the eastern edge of the million-acre Save
Valley Conservancy that we began to encounter the problems besetting this
idyll. "Resettled farmers" had moved in - burning trees, building huts of
mud and thatch, and clearing land in an improbable attempt to grow crops.

Soon Clive Stockil, chairman of what is the biggest private conservancy in
Zimbabwe, turned off the track and stopped. We were hit by the stench of
rotting flesh. A few yards away was the decomposing carcass of a black
rhinoceros, one of the world's most endangered species, shot by poachers
three days earlier.

In life this 15-year-old bull was a magnificent creature weighing a tonne.
Now it had been stripped of its meat by hungry villagers, writhing maggots
feasted on the contents of its belly and clouds of flies hovered overhead.
Its head was intact except where its second horn had been hacked off. That
was what the poachers had been after because, thousands of miles away in
eastern Asia, rhino horns are prized for their alleged medicinal value and
fetch a small fortune.

What made this rhino's death even more tragic was that the conservancy had
removed its horns last year to stop it becoming a target for poachers. The
horns for which it was shot were regrown stumps barely two inches long. The
same was true of the young female rhinoceros whose remains festered near by
in the summer heat. Her horns were also mere stumps.
The cow was in season and the pair were probably in the process of mating
when they were slaughtered. "You feel angry. You feel bitter. You have the
urge to get even," Mr Stockil said. "It sounds silly to say, but it's almost
like a member of my family. I can recall when she was born and watching her
give birth, and giving birth again 28 months later, and you come here and
see this.

"My tears, they came down," added Jackson Kamwe, head of the conservancy's
rhino surveillance unit, recalling the moment he found the corpses. The
conservancy knows its rhinos so well that it even has names for them. The
bull was Enoch, the cow Gladys.

Sadly, this massacre was far from isolated. Last month poachers used an AK47
to kill Ice, a young cow whose mother, Natalia, was shot in 2007. This year
16 black rhinos have been killed in Save, and Mr Stockil admits that he is
losing his battle to protect the 120 others that the conservancy has
nurtured so lovingly since it was established in 1991.

Nor is this "onslaught" confined to Save. In the past two years criminal
syndicates have begun targeting the rhinoceros. Experts believe that between
50 and 100 black rhinos have been shot in Zimbabwe this year, twice as many
as last year, and between 50 and 60 in neighbouring South Africa - up from
30 in 2007. There were once hundreds of thousands of the rhino, with their
distinctive prehensile upper lips, across Africa. Today there are barely
4,000. One of the four sub-species was declared extinct in 2006. The rest
have been designated "critically endangered" and Mr Stockil says that "the
countdown to extinction" has begun.

Zimbabwe's hunger, poverty and collapsing law and order make it a
particularly soft target for the syndicates, and nowhere more so than Save.

Some 10,000 "resettled farmers" have seized a quarter of the conservancy in
recent years, giving them easy access to the rhinos' habitat. Like millions
of other Zimbabweans, they are destitute and starving, making it easy for
the syndicates to recruit poachers and guides for paltry fees.

When the poachers are caught, the syndicates use their wealth to subvert
justice. Not one Zimbabwean rhino poacher has yet been prosecuted
successfully. Many are caught, freed and return straight to poaching.

The three men who killed Enoch and Gladys are good examples. They had
removed just one of the pair's four stumpy horns before they were surprised
by Mr Kamwe and his scouts. They ran away but the scouts recognised two.
They had been arrested for killing another black rhino earlier this year but
somehow managed to "escape" - unseen and unhandcuffed - from the police van
taking them to court.

Save goes to great lengths to protect its rhinos. It employs a scout for
every 20sq km (8sq miles), each armed and with radios. It has airdropped
leaflets over villages bordering the conservancy offering $1,000 rewards for
information about poachers, and has established a network of informers - one
of whom alerted Mr Kamwe to the killing of Enoch and Gladys. It has built up
dossiers on poachers and their firearms, micro-chipped each rhino, and
sought to co-opt the surrounding villages by establishing a trust that would
make them beneficiaries of its success.

It would like to do much more but it is hamstrung by another problem unique
to Zimbabwe: the tourist trade on which the conservancy depends for its
finances has collapsed.

Before the white farm seizures began in 2000, Mr Stockil's Senuko Lodge had
an occupancy rate of more than 60 per cent. Today it is almost empty. "We're
in a very serious financial crunch," says Mr Stockil who, in desperation,
recently began catering for wealthy hunters of non-endangered species such
as elephants. Without that, he says, "we would have had to close".

Mr Stockil believes, though, that no amount of scouts would be able to
protect the rhinos over such a vast area, and that more drastic measures are
needed.

The conservancy de-horns the rhinos that live nearest to the encroaching
settlers to minimise their value to poachers but that has been ineffective:
sometimes the poachers cannot even see a rhino's head before they shoot. He
now wants all Zimbabwe's rhinos de-horned, and the wildlife authorities
agree, but that would be vastly expensive, requiring helicopters, drugs,
four-wheel drives and huge manpower. Moreover, it would have to be repeated
every two years.

He believes that the poachers would still kill for mere stumps, and
advocates an even more ambitious scheme that would destroy the five to ten
syndicates behind the rhino poaching.

As Mr Stockil points out, the actual poachers are mere pawns - he knows of
one who has made just enough to buy himself a motorbike. The real money is
made by the middle men who spirit the horns across Zimbabwe's borders to
South African ports and airports or up to the fast-growing Chinese community
in Harare. From there they are shipped to the Far East, some in diplomatic
bags. A Vietnamese Embassy receptionist in Pretoria was photographed
recently taking delivery of a rhino horn from a dealer.

Mr Stockil wants African states to establish how many horns the end-users in
China, Vietnam and North Korea require, to provide that number themselves,
and to use the proceeds to protect the world's last black rhinos before they
vanish forever. "You would stop poaching, raise money for conservation,
increase the rhino population, do away with the illegal trade and provide a
legal product that for centuries has been used by cultures that say they
need it," he argues.

In the meantime the black rhino population is in danger of shrinking to a
level that is barely sustainable, and at Save, and across Zimbabwe, poaching
of all sorts is escalating rapidly as the human population grows hungrier.

Near Senuko Lodge two tall poles support 6,000 snares that scouts have
discovered on the conservancy over the past six years. Today they are
finding between 30 and 50 a week, the more recent made of copper stripped
from telephone wires. A few are for rhino. Most are designed for impala and
other "bushmeat" but they trap animals indiscriminately - giraffes, zebras,
lions, cheetahs. The conservancy has put down half-a-dozen maimed elephants.
But it is another highly endangered species, the carnivorous African wild
dog or Lycaon pictus, that the snares threaten most.

There used to be half a million of these brightly coloured dogs in Africa,
but they were hunted almost to extinction as vermin. Today there are fewer
than 5,000. In three years Save's wild dog population has shrunk from well
over 150 to barely 100.

The victims of Zimbabwe's implosion are not just its people. They include
some of the world's rarest animals. The difference is that the human race
will outlast Robert Mugabe.

THE MIGHTY FALLEN

65,000 rhino in Africa 35 years ago. Now there are an estimated 3,600

2,000 black rhino in Zimbabwe before the peak of poaching in the 1980s

370 at the lowest point in 1993

201,000 overseas vistors to Zimbabwe in 2005, down from 597,000 in 1999

Sources: International Rhino Foundation, Times archives

Marching on to a free Zimbabwe

The World Bank can have Gono

http://www.thezimbabwetimes.com/?p=8854

December 17, 2008

By Sibangani Sibanda

It seems to me that out of date publications have some therapeutic
properties. How else can one explain why doctors' surgeries' receptions seem
to always have very old magazines and newspapers that are several days old.
Thus, it was at the doctor's surgery that I found myself reading a week-old
copy of The Herald - a newspaper that I normally avoid like the plague. I
therefore learned two startling facts about our Reserve Bank Governor, Mr.,
or rather, Doctor Gideon Gono.

Apparently, Dr Gono has done such a wonderful job of turning round the
Zimbabwean economy that he was offered a senior post at the World Bank by
none other than Zimbabwe's arch-enemy, President George W. Bush. Why the job
offer should have come from the White House rather than from the World Bank's
head office, he did not say. He only expressed surprise that the job offer
came at a time when his name was being included on the targeted sanctions
list.

Having received the offer from Bush, through the US ambassador to Zimbabwe,
Dr Gono, inexplicably, responded by letter to the World Bank ".asking how
the bank, controlled by the US and its European allies, would offer him a
job when he was on its targeted sanctions list". They responded with a
promise to remove Dr Gono from the list and to "see what they could do with
his friends already on the sanctions list". He did not say if this response
was contained in a letter.

Dr Gono, it seems, would have us believe that his policies that have seen
unprecedented record inflation, wholesale printing of the now worthless
Zimbabwe dollar, poverty beyond imagination even for a continent that is
known for its poverty, are so admired that they have a chance of being
unleashed on an unsuspecting world! He wants us to believe that he holds so
much sway that the world will change its policy on sanctions simply to make
sure that he can become senior Vice President of the World Bank! Either the
world has gone crazy or Dr Gono is delusional.

I prefer to believe that the job offer probably came from a practical
joker - remember how US Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin
succumbed to a practical joker from a Canadian radio station? Dr Gono would
do well to check his sources - as would The Herald. Both may find that while
the inclusion of Dr Gono on the sanctions list is factual and will happen,
the proverbial Hell will probably freeze over before Dr Gono can become
senior Vice President at the World Bank!

At the same press conference, Dr Gono revealed another startler. He had
re-written economic theory in sixty days. In what he calls "my humble book",
Dr Gono tells us that he did not dwell on "my personal history" (Surprise,
surprise). Rather he had concentrated on "shedding light on the deep
philosophical drivers that shaped the orientation and conduct of the RBZ's
monetary policy programme under my watch over the past five years". So he is
actually driven by a philosophy!? The book should make interesting reading.
I have not yet managed to lay my hands on a copy, and the publishers have
not been answering their phones - which may mean that they have closed down
for the Christmas break, or they are not taking calls, or their telephones
are out of order. Or, there has been a numbers mix up.

In our area of Harare, we currently have a situation where telephone numbers
have been swapped round, so that we are receiving someone else's calls, and
when we try to call our regular business contacts, we are getting through to
complete strangers. TelOne, our one and only service provider, have been
promising to reset our phones for about a week now. I am not sure whether to
make as many overseas calls as I want on this number while it lasts,
assuming that whoever has our number will be doing the same, or to be a good
citizen and leave it unused. TelOne will have a job unraveling this one!

Anyway, back to Dr Gono. His book is called, "Zimbabwe's Casino Economy:
Extraordinary Measures for Extraordinary Challenges". It was conceived while
he was on a plane coming from an African Development Bank board meeting in
Morocco and took less than sixty days to write.

As in any Casino, "The House" and its proprietor (the Reserve Bank and its
governor) appear to be doing very well thank you, at the expense of the
gamblers (ordinary Zimbabweans), some of whom go home with only the clothes
on their backs. Now they are expected to part with their money to read about
the governor's side of the story on the philosophical drivers responsible
for their misery.

The World Bank can have Dr Gono. Please!

Zimbabwe - A story about a once-thriving tourism destination

http://travelvideo.tv/news/more.php?id=16250_0_1_0_M

Dec 17, 08 | 4:11 pm

By Gill Staden: ETN | Dec 17, 2008
The news has been a bit shocking this week in its reporting of life in
Zimbabwe. At first we hear that the cholera epidemic is getting worse. And
then Robert Mugabe says that it is under control and that there is no
epidemic. Now we are told by one of his Ministers that Mugabe was just being
"sarcastic" and another minister has announced it is the result of
"biological warfare" by Britain.

Probably some people actually believe this - I wonder if they would also
believe it if the spokesman had announced cholera was being spread by blue
aliens from the planet Zog and it was not the government's fault in any way
at all. By some accounts, Mugabe is very clever so the week's outpourings
from him and his government on the cholera epidemic seem confusing.

Having just stayed in Harare for a couple of weeks, I can honestly say that
life there is awful. The only people who seem to be doing well are the
government officials who drive around in large cars and live the life of
luxury. Huge mansions are being built in the exclusive areas. But, the town
is filthy. In certain areas you can smell the sewage running along the side
of the road. There is very little water supply and some homes have not had
water for months. Electricity is more off than on.

There are people sitting on the side of the streets selling whatever they
can - a few tomatoes or onions, firewood, eggs. The children are ragged and
look hungry. The beautiful parks and gardens are all overgrown. The
streetlights are falling over at angles; the traffic lights often don't
work.

Harare had been quite dry; not a lot of rain. Now that the rains have come
we can expect the cholera (sorry - which doesn't exist) to increase rapidly.
Of course, the cholera is affecting the poor people in the townships of
Harare. The hospitals have no medicine, so, even though cholera is easy to
treat, the people are dying.

We didn't go to any shops because there is a new system now. Some people
have set up shops in their houses. They bring stuff from South Africa sell
it from home. If the Revenue Authority catches them they are going to be in
dire trouble. But they keep their gates locked and only let in people who
they know. Of course, all these sales are in US dollars because Zim dollars
are not accepted by anyone and are impossible to use anymore. There isn't
enough of it and inflation means that it loses half its value every day.
Fuel was available in limited supplies. Some petrol stations now openly sell
in US dollars.

Driving through Zimbabwe there is only a little farming going on. The
government has been handing out new tractors to its favored few and, I am
told, giving out seed, fertilizer and fuel. Many of the inputs are being
sold in the towns so that the "farmers" can make a quick profit. Maybe they
are too hungry to wait for the crops to grow, or maybe they are rich enough
not to need to plant. We did see a few tractors ploughing and . one tractor
working . as a taxi. But, basically, many of the farms that used to be so
productive are overgrown and going back to bush.

There were roadblocks at every town along the way. There are usually about
four policemen at each. I think we went through 12-15 roadblocks from Harare
to Vic Falls - a couple only a few hundred meters apart - each wanting to
examine the same documents and ask the same questions. Only once did we meet
up with one particularly venomous police officer but, as all the papers for
the car were in order, there was little that he could do.

That is my story from Zim. It makes me so sad. And this has all happened in
the name of "one-man-one-vote." I think that if we asked the people who have
lost their jobs; who are starving; who are sick, what they think of being
able to vote, they wouldn't care a hoot. And, whatever people think about
the old Rhodesia, the country worked; the people were fed, educated and
cared for. We should be ashamed of ourselves that this situation has arisen
in Zimbabwe, especially now that there is nothing that we can do. We can
only watch and cry. Maybe it will change one day.

What can be done to protect Zimbabweans

http://search.japantimes.co.jp

Thursday, Dec. 18, 2008

By RAMESH THAKUR
WATERLOO, Ontario - The responsibility to protect (R2P) norm, embraced
universally at the world summit in New York in 2005, remains operationally
elusive. Calls are growing for international intervention to lift the shroud
of Robert Mugabe's ruinous reign from Zimbabwe's body politic.

A country that was once a prosperous breadbasket has become a basket case
with nearly total unemployment, stratospheric inflation, widespread
brutality and a cholera epidemic. The official death toll is 500; unofficial
estimates run into the thousands. With the collapse of the country's health
system, growing food scarcity and the approaching rains, the toll will climb
steeply.

All this because one aging tyrant would rather rule by thuggery than give up
power. Mugabe gets ever more delusional, declaring the epidemic is over
while blaming it as a conspiracy hatched in London to provide the pretext to
invade.

Neighboring Botswana expresses frustration. Kenya's Prime Minister Raila
Odinga is urging the African Union to authorize emergency U.N. intervention
to take control of the situation and ensure humanitarian assistance.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu calls for intervention under the R2P norm. U.S.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is appalled at our collective inability
to deal with tyrants. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown says it is time
for the bloodstained regime to be ousted.

R2P holds that every state has the responsibility to protect all people
inside its borders. When its failure to do so results in ethnic cleansing,
war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide, world leaders promised in
2005, the international community, acting through the U.N. Security Council,
will take "timely and decisive action."

The United Nations and "timely and decisive action" have an estranged
relationship. Yet the secretary general has a responsibility to bring
situations of international concern to the attention of the Security
Council. He could do so based on advice and information from his genocide
prevention adviser, human rights chief, emergency relief coordinator or
chief political and peacekeeping advisers. Robust U.N. action by an
independent-minded secretary general was not the uppermost qualification in
former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton's mind when he maneuvered Ban
Ki Moon into the office.

The Security Council can launch investigations on its own or receive
informal briefings from nongovernment organizations in the field.
Unfortunately, as the Global Center for R2P notes, "the Council can never
bring itself to act before a situation becomes catastrophic."

Once atrocity crimes are being perpetrated, the Security Council has the
choice of taking far more costly, complex and difficult interventions or
doing nothing - and it has a grand tradition of inaction that the major
powers who run it are manifestly reluctant to disturb.

The recurring cycle is to urge and follow a wait-and-see policy until the
bodies pile up in the streets and waterways, are shown graphically on
worldwide TV, and a general wringing of hands ensues along with repeats of
"never again."

The alternative is to launch preventive action that is robust and effective
in averting man-made tragedies. In retrospect, in our original R2P report we
blurred the salient moral difference between incapacity and perpetration.
Where states have the will but lack the capacity - Afghanistan, Kosovo, East
Timor, Nepal - prevention measures can include humanitarian relief, economic
assistance, rule-of-law and security sector reforms, and democratic
institutional machinery.

But when despots inflict grave harm on their people, international
prevention should cross the threshold from consensual to coercive measures.
In Zimbabwe it should include broad global pressure, coordinated with
regional organizations like the Southern African Development Community
(SADC) and the African Union (AU), in the form of targeted financial,
educational and travel sanctions on all high-ranking officials and their
families; their removal from all positions of authority in international
institutions; arms embargoes; and the threat or actual referral of officials
to the International Criminal Court.

Should these measures fail, as a last resort but only at the request and
with the support of SADC and the AU, an international military intervention
should be authorized. Making it time-bound and benchmarking progress will
prevent it from turning into an occupying force.

Zimbabwe's defense force is unlikely to offer formidable resistance. By
refusing to sanction international intervention, African countries reinforce
outside skepticism about their capacity for good governance as the key to
lifting them out of conflicts, poverty and other pathologies. But without
African backing an international intervention becomes a colonial enterprise.

It raises the further question of who will provide the necessary troops.
Combat-capable Asians with military slack will not consider the idea without
African backing. Western countries are already overstretched and
domestically queasy about the existing engagements. U.S. moral leadership,
having sunk in the morass of Guantanamo, the Iraq invasion, Abu Ghraib,
international renditions and torture, is in no position to wage war on
another country that exercises the same powers within its territorial
jurisdiction.

Having failed to establish lasting good government, order and peace after a
hundred years of direct colonial rule, from South Asia to the Middle East,
Cyprus and Zimbabwe, Britain cannot return and solve the problems with a few
quick military jabs to the same societies.

Many other Western governments too were passively complicit in the practice
of rendition of captured prisoners to countries known to torture suspects.
In Canada, policemen trained, tasked and armed to protect the innocent
turned into killers of a lost and confused Polish visitor at Vancouver
airport. The incident was captured on video and broadcast around the world,
yet no one will be charged. Nor will anyone be held criminally accountable
for the police killing of an innocent Brazilian in London.

Isolated incidents are not commensurate with the scale of repression in
Zimbabwe. Even so, others notice the hypocrisy when we lecture them on their
responsibility to protect.

Ramesh Thakur, a former U.N. assistant secretary general, was one of the
international commissioners who produced the "Responsibility to Protect"
report.

The nightmare Mugabe created

http://www.trinidadexpress.com

Editorial

    

Thursday, December 18th 2008

There are people - those who harbour a very simple view of the world -
who have bought into the Zimbabwean president's claim that that country's
continuing crisis is a black and white issue, Mr Mugabe putting out that he
is a victim of neo-colonials both home and abroad who want to see the back
of this aging freedom fighter.

It is not that he does not have a justified grievance. Britain, after
all, did renege on its pledge to buy out the land held by Zimbabwe's white
minority, all of it having been stolen from the black majority, most of whom
found themselves landless in their own land.

But the people who actually turned against Mr Mugabe were large
numbers of Zimbabwe's black population, possibly even the majority given the
government's hold on the election process and its predilection for
vote-rigging, which meant that his days in office were becoming increasingly
numbered.

Mr Mugabe wasn't about to go easily so, instead, he hit out against
white Zimbabweans who had grown relatively fat off the land on the basis of
colonial exploitation, the white farmers now made to appear as the
incarnation of Mr Mugabe's political enemies, black though the majority of
them happened to be.

In pursuit of his politics of victimhood, Mr Mugabe drove them off the
farms which he turned over to his old freedom fighter and political cronies,
with the almost inevitable result that a country that had once been the
breadbasket of Africa now finds itself unable to feed its population in an
era where rampant corruption, brutality and disease is now the ongoing order
of the day.

Mr Mugabe's supporters, both here and elsewhere, delude themselves by
claiming that what is happening in Zimbabwe is a continuation of the old
Rhodesian war of liberation but they conveniently ignore the bloody reality
which is that the people who are being oppressed are members of the
indigenous population, tens of thousands of ordinary men and women whose
lives their leader has made a nightmare.

The truth is that bitter a pill as it might have been for him to
swallow, Mr Mugabe, had he placed the interests of his people ahead of his
own, would have realised that he had to restrain his revolutionary zeal to
win all the points at whatever the cost and seek, instead, a political
solution that would have redounded to the continued well-being of his
people - even if that solution necessitated him riding off into the African
sunset, yes, but still proud of his people's freedoms that he had helped to
win. Tragically for Zimbabweans what he is doing instead is throwing away
the very gains they had once made.

To offer Mugabe immunity would not give us long lasting peace

The culture of impunity that began in the 1980s sowed the seeds for today's
crisis, says Mpho Ncube

Mpho Ncube
The Guardian, Thursday 18 December 2008

Jonathan Steele's suggestion that Robert Mugabe and his henchmen/women might
just relinquish power if they are offered a "soft landing" will not bring a
lasting solution in Zimbabwe (Softly, softly oust Mugabe, 15 December).

Essentially, Steele is proposing the perpetuation of Zimbabwe's culture of
impunity, and we have been here before. When Mugabe came to power in 1980, a
similar soft-landing deal was signed by the three warring armies of Zanu-PF,

PF-Zapu and the Rhodesian Front, where human rights abuses in the just
finished brutal guerrilla war were swept under the carpet. It wasn't long
after that, in 1982, that Mugabe unleashed a crack unit dubbed the
Gukurahundi (the wind that washes away the chaff) to maim and murder more
than 20,000 civilians in Matabeleland and Midlands.

The seeds of today's political and human rights crises in Zimbabwe therefore
have their roots in the culture of impunity that was sown when a deal to end
the massacres was signed by Mugabe and his political rival, Joshua Nkomo of
PF-Zapu. The so-called Unity deal of 1987 gave a blanket amnesty to all
members of the armed and security forces who were involved in the
Gukurahundi atrocities, together with their political masterminds. It is
therefore no wonder that the same people who masterminded the Matabeleland
massacres are in charge of the violence and murder that has enveloped
Zimbabwe in the past decade.

The reason Mugabe and his hench-people are so defiant is that they have
benefited from previous orgies of violence and have no fear of the
consequences. To call for "guarantees of retirement in safety", as Steele
does, will be music to Mugabe's ears. Zimbabweans are once again being held
hostage by his regime, and so to talk of immunity deals is to reward those
who see violence and murder as a legitimate policy tool.

Steele's article makes no reference to the wishes of the many thousand
victims of Mugabe's ruthless 28-year rule in Zimbabwe, and herein lies the
other problem. Too often, in the discourse on the future of Zimbabwe, the
victims' cries for truth and justice are seen as an impediment to a
political deal to end the crisis. Steele himself argues that the threat of
criminal action may make Mugabe more desperate to cling to power. Yet truth
and justice are a prerequisite of any lasting solution. The reward of
immunity, retirement in safety, or jobs for Mugabe and his henchpeople is
the wrong mechanism for building long-lasting peace and stability.

My organisation is campaigning, on behalf of the victims of Gukurahundi and
other state-sponsored abuses, for a Truth, Justice and Healing Commission.
Without the direct input of victims of Mugabe's murderous reign, any
top-down, expedient political fixes will not prevent abuses by future
leaders.

A deterrent must be set in very clear and visible ways, which is why the
lesson of the Nuremberg trials after the second world war is very apt. What
is required now is for the "never again" principle to be institutionalised
in Zimbabwe.

. Mpho Ncube is director of communications for the Mthwakazi Action Group on
Genocide in Matabeleland & Midlands, a British-based campaigning group for
Zimbabwean exiles ncubem@maggemm.org

Madness in Zimbabwe

http://www.washingtontimes.com/

Mugabe has created a basket case
Charles R. Larson
Thursday, December 18, 2008

"The cholera cause doesn't exist any more," Zimbabwe leader Robert Mugabe
said recently. It is a statement which shouldn't surprise anyone who has
been following his career for the past 28 years. Then a day later, his
information minister, Sikhanyiso Ndlovu, said the outbreak was a "genocidal
onslaught on the people of Zimbabwe by the British." Mr. Ndlovu elaborated,
calling the cholera a "serious biological chemical weapon . a calculated,
racist, terrorist attack on Zimbabwe."

Fortunately, there's a groundswell calling for Mugabe to step down - British
Prime Minister Gordon Brown, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and President
Bush in recent days have all called for his departure. Add to the list
within the past few weeks, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Kenyan Prime Minister
Raila Odinga and others - enough names of important people that you would
think that Mugabe might get the message.

He won't.

The current raging cholera epidemic has U.N. officials worried not simply
because of further contagion within Zimbabwe (16,000 cases and still
increasing) but into neighboring countries, especially Zambia and
Mozambique, where medical facilities will be unable to deal with the
scourge. The cholera has already spread into South Africa, but that country
has the ability to deal with the contamination, at least at the moment.

The cholera outbreak is simply the latest example of Mugabe's inability to
face reality. For years, he's been in a state of denial about his actions
and he's been enabled by other African leaders who continue to believe "Once
a war hero, always a hero." Shortly after he took office in 1980 (after,
granted, what was a terrible struggle against Ian Smith's renegade
government), Mr. Mugabe eliminated political opponents and permitted the
slaughter of thousands of Zimbabweans in order to put down the opposition.
Mugabe has had blood on his hands for decades.

In the last 10 years, he's appropriated the farms of white landowners and
tossed them to his ZANU-PF cronies, who certainly had legitimacy for the
land but who also knew nothing about farming. The devastation has led to a
continual downhill slope; the so-called breadbasket of southern Africa today
has to import food for its starving millions. Millions of other Zimbabweans
have fled the country. Huge numbers of others have become infected with AIDS
(which Mugabe denied for years). And now cholera.

We are all incredulous about the country's hyper-inflation, currently at 231
million percent per annum. Recent elections have been rigged. There is
massive unemployment, estimated at 80 percent. All social services have
broken down - education, health, food distribution - but Mugabe and his
henchmen hang in there, as the country slowly takes on the stench of a
gigantic graveyard.

Mugabe and his cronies in the upper echelon of the government, including
ZANU-PF members, soldiers, and policemen, keep holding on because they
realize that once he loses power they'll have to stand trial in the Hague
(like Liberia's Charles Taylor and, hopefully, Sudan's Omar al-Basher).
They're willing for everyone else in the country to succumb in order to
retain their power. If that isn't political genocide, what is it? So what
can be done?

First, a clear ultimatum like Mr. Bush gave Taylor. Step down or face
immediate consequences. And if the West doesn't have the resolve to make
that demand, then cyber assassination. Hire a few computer hackers and empty
out the bank accounts of ZANU's leaders (along with Mugabe's, of course).
Close down the country's central bank, crash all government computers,
destroy government offices from the ability of using the internet and cell
phones - all by cyber attacks. Deny landing rights to Mugabe's presidential
jet anywhere outside of the country. In short, stop Mugabe's government dead
in its tracks. All of these tactics should have been employed long ago, but
as a Zimbabwean friend of mine once told me, "The West doesn't know how to
deal with African leaders."

We remember how President Clinton looked on as Rwanda exploded into genocide
in 1994. Mr. Clinton admitted years later that the incident was his worst
foreign policy failing. Mr. Bush waited way too long before he put pressure
on Taylor, and Liberia's destabilization spread to neighboring countries.
Without drastic tactics, the situation in Zimbabwe will only get worse (yes,
that is still possible). Cholera will spread into those neighboring
countries.

Above all, let Morgan Tsvangirai know that he will be supported by the West
and the country will be rebuilt once Mugabe and his devils have been
crushed. After all, Mr. Tsvangirai won the country's last legitimate
election.

If we continue to do nothing, the blood will be on our hands also.

Charles R. Larson is professor of literature at American University.

Increasingly bizarre

http://www.thezimbabwean.co.uk


Wednesday, 17 December 2008

The utterances of the Mugabe regime grow increasingly bizarre with
each passing day. The man is now unmistakably certifiable.
As far as Mugabe himself goes one can, quite logically, put his
lunatic ravings down to senile dementia.
As Britain's Minister for Africa Lord Malloch-Brown said, "Mugabe is
in a state of exaggerated paranoia. The arrests of the human rights
activists are part of that. But it is certainly the case that Mugabe's
actions this year have exposed him as never before. The day he falls he has
huge future vulnerability."
What defies logic are the pronouncements of the young people around
him like unelected action information minister Sikhanyiso Ndlovu and chief
propagandist George Charamba, who, for the sake of power and money continue
to echo - and even embellish - this crazed octogenarian's ludicrous
statements.
"Gordon Brown must be taken to the United Nations Security Council for
being a threat to world peace and planting cholera and anthrax to invade
Zimbabwe," pronounced Ndlovu last week.
Charamba excelled himself with: " .. a lady American intelligence
officer from Pretoria who is in a number of newsrooms in the so-called
private Press, including inhabiting the heart of a well-known editor."
Absurd falsehoods peddled by Mugabe and his henchmen recently include
the Botswana conspiracy - whereby they seem to believe Botswana is preparing
a military invasion of Zimbabwe and the MDC is sending people to that
country to be trained to fight regime change.
Backed by this ridiculous fantasy has come the suspension of issuing
passports and emergency travel documents - effectively imprisoning
Zimbabweans in their own country.
As if guerrillas need passports! Mugabe himself should know very well
that one does not need a passport into order to leave one's country to fight
for freedom.
For the benefit of any idiotic supporters of Zanu (PF) who actually
believe their dear leader, we would like to state unequivocally that Cholera
is both a preventable and a treatable disease that has been caused by Mugabe
and Zanu (PF).
If they used Zimbabwe's wealth for the benefit of all by buying water
purification chemicals, spare parts for crumbling infrastructure in our
cities, medicines for our hospitals and clinics, fuel for refuse collection
trucks - instead of buying luxury vehicles and plasma tv's for judges,
chiefs, police and army officers and guns and tanks to kill Zimbabweans -
there would be no cholera in Zimbabwe today.
It's a question of priorities.
The causes of cholera are to be found in Harare - not in London or
Washington. We take a particularly dim view of Charamba's threats to
journalists this week One has already been reported missing. Charamba must
understand that the people of Zimbabwe will hold him personally responsible
for whatever happens to the journalists he named. When they face the music,
people always say "I was following orders."
Charamba is not following orders, he is giving them. He is a
relatively young man. He should not forget that there will be life in
Zimbabwe after Mugabe.

Zimbabwe: state of hopelessness

http://www.nationmultimedia.com/

Thailand

EDITORIAL

By The Nation
Published on December 18, 2008

It is sad to witness what has been going on inside Zimbabwe and the state of
hopelessness that the international community, including the United Nations
and the African Union, finds itself in. Horrible regimes - like President
Robert Mugabe's in Zimbabwe, especially - know full well that the
international community is fickle and indecisive. Those outsiders looking in
tend to be emotional and lack consistency of view.
 The crisis in Zimbabwe has been going on for years, under the close
scrutiny of foreign observers. Sad but true, nobody can really do anything
to bring about positive change inside the disintegrating country. The
ongoing cholera epidemic has already killed nearly a thousand people in the
past month and it may become even more widespread. International health
experts have warned that without proper and comprehensive measures to tackle
the outbreak of the disease, more people will die.

Mugabe made a mockery out of Western countries' concerns over cholera in his
country, saying that the West wanted the disease to spread so that it could
justify military intervention. Which begs the question: What can the
international community and world leaders do in the face of such an evil
man? Wait, or just wait some more?

When the United Nations approved the doctrine of "Responsibility to
Protect", or "R2P", it was hoped that this measure would allow the world
body and its international agencies to help save humanity from genocide and
abuse committed by heartless dictators. Unfortunately, there are many such
rogue leaders in the world today who are willing to let their people die of
disease and hunger as they cling on to power. Apart from Mugabe, General
Than Shwe of Burma immediately comes to mind.

The Zimbabwean leader will not yield because he understands the psyche of
the international community very thoroughly. It is a Darwinian world in
which the survival of the fittest is paramount, and in this case, the worst
and the ugliest as well. So, Mugabe will not budge and victory will be his
as always.

Recently, the respected International Crisis Group recommended that both
Mugabe and his rival Morgan Tsvangirai step down to end the current
political impasse. If both were to do so, it would allow an interim
administration to implement much-needed political and economic reforms. The
ICG also suggested that certain Zimbabwean politicians and senior officials,
including Mugabe, be given immunity from future prosecution. Furthermore,
the think-tank proposed that Zimbabwe's parliament be allowed to draft a
constitutional amendment and prepare for a new presidential election in 18
months. This proposal looks pragmatic enough as it follows a middle path,
realising that the ongoing impasse will adversely affect the well-being of
nearly all Zimbabweans.

The UN Security Council should agree to invoke the "R2P" principle to ensure
the Mugabe regime does not get away scot-free. What he has done to his
country and his citizens is tantamount to crimes against humanity. It is sad
that nothing has been done to reverse or rectify this situation. Rogue
regimes like Burma and North Korea are watching closely how the UN and the
world's powers react. Without any tangible joint action taken on Zimbabwe,
they will emulate Mugabe - not that they need any encouragement to do so.
The African Union, which has become more vocal against Mugabe, has limited
resources to intervene in the country. But a combined effort by the UN and
the AU would provide a full mandate for whatever actions or measures these
organisations deemed fit to take.

Without any concrete action, there will be more cases like Zimbabwe. Given
the global financial crisis, Western countries have become more inward
looking and are concentrating on their immediate problems. This represents a
win-win game for Mugabe, who continues to cherish every moment of his reign
amid world condemnation.

When donor aid becomes a dance of zombies

 

Written by George Ogola

Ugandans displaced by floods carry their belongings December 18, 2008: As Zimbabwe edges towards the precipice following the recent outbreak of cholera, calls for emergency donor aid have been swift. It follows nearly two weeks of media focus on the Aids epidemic in developing economies, especially in Africa, and a general assessment of just how much donor aid has achieved. While the positive response towards these two epidemics cannot be understated, the limited success generally of donor aid invites urgent attention. In Africa, as with much of the developing world, donor aid remains the mainstay of an alternative economy providing employment to some but ironically condemning millions to years of dependence. Poverty remains rampant, unemployment is unparalleled, disease continues to stalk the continent and basic needs such food and clean water are yet to be guaranteed. A powerful documentary recently aired by the BBC’s Panorama programme and aptly titled Addicted to Aid provided a brutal assessment of the pitfalls of donor aid to Africa. Watching the programme was a distinctly unsettling experience, largely because of its revealing contradictions on the need but also futility of donor aid. While the programme only focused on two countries, Sierra Leone and Uganda, the narrative was essentially told as an African story. Wanton accumulationTypically, it was a narrative of state failure, of wanton accumulation, unparalleled corruption, of disease and death always lurking in the shadows. But it was also a powerful critique of inherent weakness of the premises upon which donor aid is made and its inevitable failure to prompt sustainable change. The programme debunked the myth of magnanimity, instead painting a picture of a lawless alternative economy, run not on the basis of things as they are but on how they are perceived to be. It was a sad story of donor and recipient turning each other into “zombies” unable to see beyond the aid. Since independence, the Western world has contributed billions of dollars in the form of aid to Africa. But failure stares at these efforts defiantly. This remains a function of various factors both local and localised but also international and internationalised. In part, the failure of Western aid in Africa can rightly be explained on existing weak structures largely open to manipulation and abuse by locals, yet sustained only as such by equally weak monitoring mechanisms by the donors.   Indeed, the focus on the spectacle of what this aid seeks to do has become far more important than what it actually does. Websites are now splashed with pictures of boreholes and of health centres built in the remotest parts of Africa. Expensive hospital equipment are taken into villages with no electricity and the accompanying pomp broadcast worldwide with a sense of silent gratification. Meanwhile, pictures of smiling children and women are splashed across the Western press to entice even more aid. Decisions are made without any consultation with the very people such aid is meant to assist. Models are assumed to be uniform as developing countries are not disaggregated despite obvious and specific differences. Not surprisingly, failure is almost always guaranteed. What this means is that the reliance on the aid becomes ever more critical, with millions made to believe they cannot survive without it.  As a matter of fact, it compels recipients to remain needy. Today, there are generations who have never known how to work to fend for themselves, not so much because they cannot do so but because they have been indoctrinated to believe their survival relies on aid and nothing else. Rather than wean them off dependency, the aid makes them even more dependent. The Panorama reporter visited Mulago Hospital in Uganda, a living example of the failures of donor aid. The footage contained overflowing wards with women in labour lying under beds due to lack of space. The emergency unit was full to the door with bleeding patients lying on the floor unattended, blood splattered all over the floors, used syringes improperly disposed, water taps tied with ropes and nurses working without gloves. Outside the hospital were several 4x4 vehicles bought by donor money, a rather contradictory spectacle. The country’s Health ministry through the permanent secretary responded apace, arguing that health service in the country should be measured against the country’s difficult history “not where we should ideally be”.  It was a moronic excuse to defend a ministry able to buy tens of 4x4s, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars from a donor funded health budget when its main referral hospital has taps tied with ropes, inadequate beds and no gloves for nurses. Why basic hygiene must be tied to a ‘difficult history’ demonstrates the depth of ineptitude of the state bureaucracy usually given a near carte blanche to use this aid. But perhaps even more disturbing was a scene in an Economics class at Makerere University. Asked about their potential future careers, an overwhelming majority of the students expressed their burning ambition to work for the donor funded NGO sector rather than start their own businesses. Difficult timesIn many ways, it was a premonition to the difficult times that lie ahead. Clearly, these students have seen the lifestyles this money sustains. Indeed, by ensuring the aid money does not actually work, some are able to perversely sustain this alluring donor-funded lifestyle of which a sports utility car has become the emblem. A blanket condemnation of donor aid is certainly not the point; indeed such an argument is spurious on many grounds. But when nearly 40 years of aid does not seem to have changed much, it is time to sit back and rethink the premises upon which this aid is actually given. There are far too many problems with current models, far too many assumptions made by the donor community which must now be radically revised. Panorama’s title perhaps only captured part of the crisis. This addiction to aid is mutual and complementary. Africa is not only addicted to aid, the West is just as addicted to giving. It is a waltz of the zombies.