| The ZIMBABWE Situation | Our
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In Zimbabwe, even the farmers are going hungry
By Michael Wines
Marondera - The
grasslands surrounding Harare, the capital, are blessed with
rich soil, good
drainage and a temperate climate that comes from sitting a
half mile above
sea level. Amon Zimbudzana raises corn on four acres of it.
Yet on a recent
morning, he walked the mile from his thatched hut to a
clearing in the bush
here to collect sacks of free corn for his family from
international relief
workers. Mr. Zimbudzana is destitute - so destitute
that the family
celebrated the New Year with a 20-cent pack of Zimbabwean
Kool Aid; so
destitute that two children are unable to attend school for
lack of the $6
tuition; so destitute that he cannot buy food to tide his
family over until
his own harvest, in April. Soon after the harvest, he will
be destitute
again. He expects to harvest about 100 pounds of corn, enough
to last about
two weeks. "This is prime farmland," one relief worker said as
Mr. Zimbudzana
and 900 others waited to collect their sacks. "If people are
suffering here,
imagine what it must be like in other parts of the country."
One need
not imagine. As January ended, the United Nations and other relief
agencies
here quietly raised their estimate of Zimbabwe's "food insecure"
population -
essentially, those who have no ready access to a bare-bones
daily diet - from
nearly half its 11.6 million citizens to two-thirds. No
other nation in
Africa has such a high proportion of hungry citizens, the
officials say. It
is one more testament to the three years of economic and
social
disintegration here. Zimbabwe's farm output - and in particular, its
harvest
of corn, the core of every diet - is plummeting. Last year's April
harvest
totaled 900,000 tons, nearly a million tons short of what was
needed. This
year, crippled by inflation and seed shortages, farmers planted
barely
three-fourths of the corn sown in 2003. The Famine Early Warning
System, an
American-financed hunger watchdog, said in mid-February that
recent heavier
rains could erase some of that deficit. But even the most
sanguine harvest
forecasts leave Zimbabwe 40 percent short of its needs.
"The harvest is
causing us great concern," said Makena Walker, a spokeswoman
for the United
Nations World Food Program in Harare. "The rains have been
very patchy," she
added, and some of the areas that are worst off are those
that produce the
food.
Two years of drought are partly to blame for the food
shortages. Most
experts say, however, that more responsibility rests with
President Robert
Mugabe's government, whose seizure of commercial farms in
recent years has
destroyed large-scale agriculture, sent foreign investors
fleeing and caused
economic panic. The resulting hyperinflation, pegged
lately at 620 percent,
has savaged family food budgets. One unpublished
survey by relief
organizations found that 9 in 10 urban households now
survive on the
equivalent of less than a dollar per person per day. The
effect is not the
kind of famine that Sudan and Ethiopia suffered in the
1980's. Rather,
Zimbabweans are slowly wasting away from chronic hunger and
the diseases
that feed on it. Half the children under age 5 suffer from
chronic
malnutrition, the United Nations Children's Fund says, double the
percentage
of just five years ago. One in four children is stunted. At least
1 woman in
10 is malnourished. Zimbabwe's AIDS pandemic - at least one in
four people
is H.I.V.-positive - works in synergy with such deprivation, for
the weak
and underfed are often the first to fall ill. In interviews in
Harare and
elsewhere, health experts said that as many as 8 in 10
malnourished children
brought to clinics and hospitals for emergency
nutritional treatment were
H.I.V.-positive.
"Normally," said one
expert, "if you're treating kids under 5 with a
therapeutic feeding program
for malnutrition, your mortality is less than 5
percent. In theory, they
should walk away with their parents after a couple
of weeks. Instead, we're
getting mortality rates between 20 and 30 percent."
The need is evident in
Marondera, with about 4,100 people, where Mr.
Zimbudzana lives, and its
surrounding district 60 miles southeast of Harare.
By Zimbabwean standards it
is relatively prosperous: fewer than one in three
is officially classified as
scrambling for the next meal. But by 10 a.m. on
a Thursday morning in
January, people were streaming to the
corn-distribution center, knots of
donkey carts and barefoot pedestrians
following a yellow dirt road through
the scrub to a grassy clearing where
hundreds already patiently waited. The
reward for most, this month, was 10
kilograms - 22 pounds - per person of
ground corn, to be boiled with water
and a few vegetables to make sadza, the
national staple. The World Food
Program had halved that allotment for
December, citing a slowdown in
donations from governments apparently wary of
appearing to assist Zimbabwe's
government. The rations of ground nuts and
vegetable oil the needy once also
received have been suspended for lack of
stocks. The neediest of all get an
extra dollop of high-protein corn and soy
flour. Mr. Zimbudzana and his
wife, Gertrude Chokurongwera, were among
them.
Mr. Zimbudzana is unemployed - hobbled, he says, by a
slow-moving prostate
cancer that he is too poor to treat. He and his wife
nevertheless have taken
in four children, two from a relative's broken
marriage; two orphaned by a
mother's AIDS. They live in three tiny huts next
to his cornfields and a
handful of peach trees, surviving on donations from
World Vision and the
World Food Program, the few bottlefish he catches in a
nearby stream and
whatever they can earn from begging and selling
possessions. "Sometimes,"
Ms. Chokurongwera said, "we sell our clothes."
Sometimes neighbors give the
family food, Mr. Zimbudzana said, but not often.
"We're all the same," he
said during a chat in the hut that serves as the
family kitchen. "There's no
food." The last two harvests, like the
forthcoming one, were tiny. Drought
was one problem, but Mr. Zimbudzana is
also too poor to buy fertilizer,
which has skyrocketed in price as the
country's ability to buy raw materials
for farming has imploded. He tills his
plot with a hoe. The daily diet for
the household is sadza in the morning and
again in the evening, mixed
occasionally with some okra or one of the 16
scrawny chickens he has raised.
There is tea in good times, but no sugar, and
there is no cow, so no milk.
Ms. Chokurongwera said the family would be in
dire straits without the
relief agencies. "Now, at least, the children's
health is improving because
of the corn-soya blend." she said. "They were so
lean before. Even my
husband and myself are gaining some weight
now."
Mr. Mugabe's government blames a conspiracy of what he calls
racist Western
governments for Zimbabwe's food woes. Yet today, all that
separates this
nation from starvation is the donated corn, sorghum and
high-protein soy
flour, 80 percent of it from Europe and the United States,
funneled through
the United Nations and global charities. It is not enough.
World Food
Program officials say their workers and global charities will be
able to
feed only about 5.5 million Zimbabweans until the harvest comes in.
That is
2 million fewer than the number in need. It was disclosed recently
that
Zimbabwe, which had restricted those aid programs to the governing
party's
rural strongholds, was holding more than 300,000 tons of grain. Most
of it
had been seized from farmers trying to sell it on the black market
because
government-set prices were too low to recover their costs.
Under
international pressure, officials said they would release some of it
to
address hunger in cities.
Reuters
BBC says film exposes Zimbabwe militia camps
Sun 29 February,
2004 15:28
LONDON (Reuters) - Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe's
government has set up
youth militia training camps in which thousands have
been brutalised to
ensure their loyalty, according to a BBC documentary to be
screened today.
"In their training camps the Zimbabwean government is
subjecting thousands
of innocent youths to rape, brainwashing and brutality,"
the BBC said in a
statement about the programme on Sunday. "It is all part of
a horrific
process designed to mould youths loyal to Robert Mugabe and his
ZANU party."
Mugabe's supporters and security forces have clashed in
recent years with
opponents from the Movement for Democratic Change, which
has emerged as the
most potent challenge to Mugabe in 24 years of
rule.
The BBC's Africa reporter, Hilary Andersson, said the programme
team and
human rights groups had interviewed almost 100 former camp youths
for the
Panorama documentary, "Secrets of the Camps", due to be broadcast on
Sunday
evening.
Around 50 percent of the girls said they were
regularly raped in the camps.
One, Debbie, said she was raped nightly for six
months after being forced
into a camp aged 20, and contracted HIV and fell
pregnant before fleeing to
South Africa.
"Youths testified to being
taught how to torture with electricity, or by
hanging victims upside down and
lowering their heads into buckets of water
below until they nearly drown,"
Andersson wrote in Britain's Sunday
Telegraph.
She said a former Youth
Ministry official had confirmed that killings and
hit lists were discussed
openly at ministry meetings, and a camp commander
interviewed said youths
from his camp had been sent out to kill opponents of
the
government.
Andersson said six large camps housed thousands of
Zimbabweans aged 11 to
30. An estimated 50,000 youths had already passed
through the camps, and
Mugabe wanted to make the training compulsory for all
young Zimbabweans in a
bid to help him secure victory in parliamentary
elections in 2005.
Mugabe, accused by the opposition and several Western
countries of rigging
the 2002 presidential polls, rejects charges that his
mismanagement is to
blame for Zimbabwe's critical shortages of food, fuel and
foreign exchange.
Instead, the former guerrilla leader, who has ruled
Zimbabwe since
independence from Britain in 1980, accuses Western powers of
seeking his
overthrow because of his seizure of white-owned commercial farms
for
redistribution to landless blacks.
Zimbabwe Judge Suspended After Ruling Against Govt
Copyright © 2004, Dow Jones Newswires
HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP)--A Harare High
Court judge who repeatedly ruled
against the government has been suspended
pending a judicial inquiry into
allegations of misconduct, news reports said
Sunday.
Judge Benjamin Paradza, who was briefly detained last year,
will be
investigated by a tribunal scheduled to convene in April, the
state-run
Sunday Mail newspaper reported.
The tribunal will make
a recommendation to President Robert Mugabe on
whether to dismiss Paradza,
Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa told the
paper.
Paradza was
arrested in his chambers last February on allegations he
attempted to
influence a case involving a business associate accused of
murder. He was
held overnight in police cells he said were lice-infested.
Paradza
denied the charge and filed a damages suit against police and
the justice
ministry for wrongful arrest.
The business associate was convicted
and will serve 15 years in
prison.
Zimbabwe has been wracked by
political and economic turmoil since the
government began a program to seize
white-owned farms for redistribution to
blacks in 2000.
The
government has cracked down on the judiciary, human rights groups,
opposition
leaders and the media. Eight judges have resigned and two retired
after
coming under fire for ruling against the government, which has been
accused
of packing the courts with judges loyal to Mugabe.
Paradza's arrest
came after he ruled against the government in a
number of cases, including
ordering police to release the head of the
opposition-controlled Harare
municipal council when he was detained for
allegedly holding an illegal
political meeting.
Paradza also struck down government eviction
notices against 54 white
farmers on the grounds that they were improperly
served. And he ordered the
government to issue a passport to a prominent
human rights activist after
she was stripped of her Zimbabwean
citizenship.
Paradza, who fought in Mugabe's guerrilla army during
the bush war
that led to independence from Britain in 1980, has said he was
warned not to
embarrass the government.
The judicial inquiry
into his conduct will be only the second of its
kind since independence. A
similar tribunal cleared Judge Feargus Blackie of
allegations he favored
whites and held a secretive "night court" to hear a
case involving
them.
Blackie was arrested on separate allegations in 2002 that he
changed a
ruling in favor of a woman with whom the state claimed he had an
affair.
Those charges were dropped on lack of evidence, and he retired from
the High
Court soon afterward.
(END) Dow Jones
Newswires
February 29, 2004 07:15 ET (12:15 GMT)
Bad policy to support Zimbabwe
Kenya Times Tuesday, February 24,
2004
Global Views
The whole Zimbabwe scenario - the
arguments for and against President Robert
Mugabe - has corrupted and
poisoned African politics.... South African
President Thabo Mbeki's support
for Mugabe has swayed the bulk of black
opinion in his country in Mugabe's
favor. It has been helped in large
measure by the impression that the United
States and the United Kingdom are
vociferous in their criticism of Mugabe
simply because it is white farmers
who are suffering. It may be white farmers
who are making the headlines, but
the majority of Mugabe's victims are black.
They are at the mercy of
unnecessary starvation, and that is if they survive
Zanu-PF thuggery....
.
Supporting Mugabe is tantamount to betraying the
interests of the region.
What is asked of Mbeki is not much. He is not asked
to send troops across
the Limpopo. What people want is for him to express his
and this country's
displeasure at what is happening in Zimbabwe. - Editorial
comment
The Boston Globe
Zimbabwe's woes spill across border
S. African town,
neighbor team up to handle influx
By John Donnelly, Globe Staff,
2/29/2004
MUSINA, South Africa -- Around southern Africa, many countries
are working
hard to stop "border jumpers" -- Zimbabweans who illegally sneak
into
surrounding nations to seek jobs or escape political persecution as
their
nation slips further into chaos.
This border town has crafted
some imaginative agreements with its Zimbabwean
counterpart, Beitbridge,
across the bridge over the Limpopo River, to cope
with the impact of the
worsening miseries in Zimbabwe since the government
began seizing land from
white farmers in 2000.
Still, Zimbabwe's problems are literally spilling
into South Africa.
Beitbridge's waste treatment plant's main pump is broken
and the facility is
spewing sewage into the Limpopo, the source of water for
both towns. During
the last six months, patient visits have doubled at Musina
Hospital, and
half of those patients are from Zimbabwe. Its maternity ward is
swamped with
Zimbabwean women, who deliver nearly 70 percent of the babies
born at the
hospital.
In communities around Musina, social workers are
reporting a large increase
in orphans in recent months. Almost all the
children are from outside South
Africa -- Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique, and
Zambia. Their parents have died
largely from AIDS-related diseases, and they
have gravitated toward South
Africa's relative wealth. It means many orphans
here are alone, with no
relatives to care for them.
And there are
legions of Zimbabwean children who slip into South Africa to
earn money, some
of them selling their bodies.
"Many children think of going to Musina to
work," Alice Nsingo, a Zimbabwean
child protection officer based in
Beitbridge, said in a telephone interview.
"We need to come up with
strategies that combat the problem."
An estimated 3.4 million
Zimbabweans, or perhaps one-quarter of the
country's population, are living
outside the country, according to a recent
study by an advisory board to
Zimbabwe's Central Bank.
The group, which is trying to find ways to get
those exiles to send hard
currency home, found that more than 1.2 million
Zimbabweans were in South
Africa; another 1.1 million in Britain, the
country's former colonial ruler;
and the rest scattered in southern Africa,
the United States, Canada,
Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.
Some
Zimbabweans in South Africa, such as Gabriel Shumba, 29, a human
rights
lawyer, say they have fled President Robert Mugabe's regime because
they
feared for their lives.
"I have scars on my head, on my chest,
from the torture I received," said
Shumba one day recently, sitting on a
bench at the University of Pretoria
and opening his shirt to show the marks.
"I've been arrested 14 times since
1993 for protesting the regime's policies.
I finally left seven months ago
after receiving death threats."
And
because Zimbabwe's inflation rate has soared over 600 percent, making
basic
goods unavailable to poor people, and there is little chance to find
work,
many have fled their country as economic refugees.
In Gaborone, the
capital of Botswana, recently, 11 young Zimbabwean women
allowed the founder
of an HIV/AIDS support group, Helen Ditsebe Mhone, to
enter their shared
hovel in a tiny concrete room.
The women were all prostitutes. The floor
was covered with bare mattresses,
heaps of clothes and shoes, and small tanks
of propane, used for cooking.
"I know you guys have a problem in
Zimbabwe, but the thing is, you're taking
big risks with AIDS," Mhone said,
sitting on the floor among them. Before
she could say more, several women
spoke up.
"How can you get a job in Zimbabwe?" said one.
"How can
we live?" said another.
"We get into a man's car, and we know we are
risking our lives," said a
third, "but tell us, what is our
choice?"
In Musina -- formerly known as Messina -- the stories are
different, but
hardship remains the common theme.
At the town's
vegetable market, Ishmael Moyo, 33, sells bags of South
African onions and
tomatoes to local people. His wife and four children are
nearly 200 miles
north in Zimbabwe, but he said he couldn't support them
there. Now he earns
roughly $300 a month in the market among other
Zimbabwean sellers, some of
them doctors and lawyers.
"I start work at 7 a.m., and I end at 5 p.m.,
and at night I read my Bible
and pray," he said. "I am grateful for my faith.
It is very hard to be away
from my family. But there are more terrible sides
of South Africa for us
Zimbabweans, especially on the farms. It is almost
like slave labor. They
earn 150 or 200 rands ($22 to $30) a month from the
farmers. It is nothing."
Musina officials confirmed his story. They say
they have confronted farmers,
who have denied employing
refugees.
"Some of us in South Africa are benefiting from this crisis,"
said David
Phologa, the mayor. "It's just like a war situation, where some
people
benefit by selling weapons. We benefit from taking advantage of cheap
labor.
It's not right."
In response to these problems, representatives
from Musina and Beitbridge
have reached a series of agreements in quiet
meetings over the last few
months. The accords call for easing cross-border
travel for local residents
and jointly facing other problems stemming from
Zimbabwe's troubles.
While the impact of two towns that combined have a
population of 75,000
people may not be earth-shattering by itself, officials
in both communities
hope their countries take notice and learn from their
cooperation.
"The fact is even if you improve security on the borders,
people from
Zimbabwe will still come and be with us," said Phologa. "The
crisis there is
affecting us in every way -- the economy, the HIV rates,
social matters,
jobs."
The Musina and Beitbridge officials met under
the approval of provincial and
national governments, which two years ago had
encouraged communities to form
"twinning," or sister-city,
relationships.
Phologa is hopeful that both national governments will
approve the
recommendations from the towns' officials, including granting
border passes
for residents to facilitate trade and approving initiatives
aimed at
attracting tourists.
Still, he and others acknowledged,
events in Zimbabwe are not predictable.
Earlier this month, for instance,
Zimbabwe slapped a 500 percent increase on
duty charges at the border, which
overnight stopped most of the imports.
But the joint effort by the two
border towns reaches deeper than simply
improving trade. One great concern is
the impact of so many Zimbabweans
seeking care at the Musina Hospital. "The
systems have collapsed in
Zimbabwe," said David Mokobi, Musina's community
liaison officer. "They have
no medicines, and so if they are sick, they come
here."
Another initiative is building "safe houses" for children in
Musina. One of
the most remarkable passages in the towns' draft agreement
concerns the
protection of children, especially orphans.
It reads, in
part, "We are saying if a child is seen in the street of Musina
or
Beitbridge, we as the community will have failed and committed a
crime."
The author of that passage is Nsingo, the Zimbabwean child
protection
officer. "The words are very strong, I know," she said. "But if
there are
orphaned children wandering in the streets, we will have failed as
parents,
as a community, as two communities. We will have committed a crime.
We now
agree to work together on this."
John Donnelly can be reached
at donnelly@globe.com.
Business Day
SACC urges action from Mbeki on
Zimbabwe
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
The
South African Council of Churches has written an urgent letter to
the
presidency requesting President Thabo Mbeki send a delegation to
Harare,
Zimbabwe to help restore talks between Zanu-PF and the opposition
Movement
for Democratic Change (MDC).
"It is our wish that President
Mbeki makes a public statement to the South
African public as to whether or
not it is true that President Robert Mugabe
is committed to the talks with
leader of the MDC, Mr Morgan Tsvangirai.
"We are anxious to have the
president help to restore the talks," SACC
general secretary Dr Molefe Tsele
said in a statement.
The news that Mugabe had ruled out the possibility of
talks taking place was
not only worrying, but seemed to be a grave setback
and loss of opportunity
to normalise the boiling political and economic
climate in Zimbabwe.
"As the Council of Churches, we have been listening
to the cries and
prayers of our brothers and sisters in Zimbabwe, placing
their hope and
faith on the proposed talks and negotiations between Zanu-PF
and MDC.
"We hear them tell us time and time again that the future hope
for Zimbabwe
is in the commitment of the two parties talking to each other,
and not in
any political stand-off.
"President Mbeki has publicly said
he had been personally told by President
Mugabe that Zanu-PF is committed to
the talks, and that, in fact, the talks
are underway.
"The people of
Zimbabwe, especially the churches, have repeatedly told us
that they are
counting on us to assist them in finding a resolution to their
acute economic
and political crisis.
"We will be failing in our moral obligation to be
with them in their hour of
need," Tsele said.
In another statement,
Democratic Alliance national chairman Joe Seremane
said Mbeki's policy of
"quiet diplomacy" on Zimbabwe had been exposed as an
embarrassing and costly
disaster.
This was shown by Mugabe's statement that he would not hold
talks with
Tsvangirai for as long as the MDC were "allies of the Western
countries" -
along with his earlier statement that he would hold on to power
for the next
five years.
Mbeki had developed a disconcerting tendency
of making behind-the-scenes
assurances to Western leaders, which later
turned out to be patently false,
Seremane said.
Only last month,
Mbeki told reporters in Pretoria, after meeting German
Chancellor Gerhard
Schroeder, that formal talks would soon begin between the
MDC and Zanu-PF in
an effort to resolve thecrisis in Zimbabwe.
He also told said in an
interview on February 8 that "formal negotiations"
between the two parties
would begin soon.
"Mugabe's recent statement gives the lie to these
claims," Seremane said.
Sapa
VOA
Southern Africa Faces Famine, Warns UN
Lisa
Schlein
Geneva
29 Feb 2004, 16:01 UTC
United Nations agencies are
warning that southern Africa is again facing
famine because of drought and a
lack of money from international donors. At
risk, say the aid agencies, are
6.5 million people in Lesotho, Malawi,
Mozambique, Swaziland, Zambia and
Zimbabwe.
U.N. aid agencies say they have received only half of what they
need to
support critical food, health, water, sanitation, and education needs
in the
six southern African countries. They say millions of people
remain
vulnerable to the whims of nature and to the lack of interest
from
international donors.
Rashid Khalikov, deputy director of the
Geneva office that coordinates U.N.
humanitarian assistance, says that there
was some optimism that the
situation would improve when the United Nations
launched its
multi-million-dollar appeal on behalf of these countries last
year.
"However, this optimism is fading fast for two main reasons," said
Mr.
Khalikov. "One is erratic rainfall that has negatively impacted on
food
production resulting in a significant deterioration of the food
security
situation. And second is lack of funding for critical assistance
activities,
particularly in the social service sectors which continues to
expose
millions of people, in particular children."
U.N. aid agencies
say they need $318 million to provide critical services
for 6.5 million
people until the end of the year. They warn they will be
forced to scale back
crucial projects across the region if they do not get
the
money.
Dermot Carty, senior program officer for the U.N. Children's Fund
(UNICEF)
says children - in particular, the three million AIDS orphans - will
be the
main victims. He says urgent and massive action is needed immediately.
If
this is not forthcoming, he warns, there will be a generation of
lost
children, a legacy which the region cannot afford.
"Youth and
early primary school age children, highly susceptible to
infection, and they
are the futures of these countries," he explained.
"Young children not
infected by HIV and AIDS, primarily age five to 13, are
the hope for the
viability of countries devastated by HIV and AIDS. At
present, this has
largely been an invisible group both in terms of their
needs and their
vulnerability."
Mr. Carty says orphaned children face enormous hardships.
He says many are
cared for by over-stretched relatives. Many, increasingly,
are heading their
own households. He says the children frequently lack access
to food and
health care and often are forced to drop out of school.
Stuff, New Zealand
Environment looms as major security threat
01 March
2004
JOHANNESBURG: US President George Bush may feel al Qaeda is the
mother of
all threats but a growing number of analysts and policymakers say
Mother
Nature could unleash bigger and scarier security
concerns.
Ten years after Robert Kaplan wrote a seminal article
arguing that the
environment would emerge as the security threat of the 21st
century, global
warming and a host of other green ills are seen as major
destabilising
forces.
Canadian Environment Minister David Anderson
said this month that global
warming posed a greater long-term threat to
humanity than terrorism because
it could force hundreds of millions from
their homes and trigger an economic
catastrophe.
Natural disasters
caused by extreme weather, including heat waves and
tornadoes, claimed more
victims in 2003 than the previous year and the trend
is set to continue, the
world's biggest reinsurance company Munich Re said
last week.
"The
nature of changes now occurring simultaneously in the global
environment,
their magnitudes and rates are unprecedented in human history,"
said Jenny
Clover, a researcher at the Pretoria-based Institute for
Security
Studies.
"We see these different stresses, poverty, diseases,
water scarcity ... what
one needs to understand is how these stresses
increase vulnerability to
environmental change."
Disruptive
environmental changes include surging urban populations, wild
weather
patterns and depleting fish stocks.
Environmental change is also seen as
a trigger for conflict.
"All sorts of places with political unrest will
be made worse if millions of
rural people are displaced or lose their
livelihood because of climate
change or soil erosion," said Steve Sawyer,
political director for the
environmental group Greenpeace.
Global
warming, blamed widely on emissions of gases like carbon dioxide from
cars
and factories, is expected to raise global average temperatures by
1.4-5.8C
by 2100.
This could melt polar icecaps which would push sea levels
higher, sparking a
mass exodus from areas vulnerable to flooding like
Bangladesh. Such a
scenario would raise tensions on the heavily-populated
Indian sub-continent.
Using West Africa as his launch pad, Kaplan painted
a bleak picture of an
unravelling planet in The Coming Anarchy, published in
the February 1994
edition of the Atlantic Monthly.
"For a while the
media will continue to ascribe riots and other violent
upheavals ... mainly
to ethnic and religious conflict. But as these
conflicts multiply, it will
become apparent that something else is afoot,"
he wrote.
"It is time
to understand the environment for what it is: the national
security issue of
the 21st century."
To Kaplan, soaring populations, deforestation, soil
erosion, rising sea
levels and the spread of diseases such as Aids would all
conspire,
especially in parts of Africa, to destroy the fabric of society and
make
many states ungovernable.
He said these developments "will prompt
mass migrations and, in turn, incite
group conflicts".
A number of
African states have - to use the political science jargon -
"failed" since he
wrote these words.
Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of
Congo - all scenes of
deforestation, unsustainable urban growth and other
environmental problems -
have been ravaged by war and all but collapsed while
Ivory Coast and
Zimbabwe are imploding.
Just months after Kaplan's
piece appeared, densely populated and
ecologically stressed Rwanda exploded
in an orgy of violence that saw
hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and moderate
Hutus slain by Hutu extremists.
But analysts also see positive
developments - including the return of peace,
even if fragile - to countries
such as Liberia and Sierra Leone and the end
of Angola's long civil
war.
"Kaplan is very provocative but if you follow his logic you have a
dead end,
the coming anarchy," said John Stremlau, the head of the
International
Relations department at Johannesburg's University of the
Witwatersrand.
"You have a lot of work being done in Africa to get away
from the coming
anarchy," he said.
Still, many African countries and
other developing nations are saddled with
the problems Kaplan highlighted,
including eroding farmland and burgeoning
populations in urban areas which
cannot provide basic services such as clean
water.
Combined with
demographic trends that are swelling the ranks of the young
and unemployed,
such urban centres are feeding crime and instability and
becoming recruiting
grounds for groups like al Qaeda.
The United Nations is now taking a
closer look at possible environmental
causes of instability and
conflict.
"We have been looking at gaps in our scientific knowledge and
we have been
given the green light to do more research on the links between
the
environment and conflict," said Nick Nuttall, spokesman for the
United
Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
"There are some countries
where the environment has gone to hell where they
don't have conflict. Then
there are places like Haiti where land degradation
seems to have been a
trigger."
Some analysts have speculated that the struggle for scarce
water supplies
could become a major source of international tension this
century but one
UNEP study found that 3600 water agreements had been recorded
over the past
4500 years.
"It appears that water, far from being a
source of conflict is a source of
cooperation," said Nuttall
Zimbabwe Mirror
Msika in grain scam allegations
Innocent Chofamba
Sithole
ACTING President Joseph Msika and several prominent politicians
named by a
South African television programme as having been involved in the
scandalous
exportation of grain and externalisation of foreign currency have
denied the
allegations and threatened legal action against the news
channel.
M-net's Carte Blanche programme recently presented a story which
claimed
that Msika, retired army commander Solomon Mujuru, local government,
public
works and national housing minister Ignatius Chombo, former
Mashonaland West
governor Peter Chanetsa, Chinhoyi MP Phillip Chiyangwa, and
prominent farmer
Cyril Muderede exported grain at the height of Zimbabwe's
food woes and
externalised the proceeds therefrom.
Quoting a former
customs official and a serving Central Intelligence
Organisation (CIO)
operative, the programme claimed the six had allegedly
used their political
clout to flout standing regulations barring exportation
of maize and
wheat.
"The people . . . mentioned as being involved are Ignatius Chombo,
minister
of local government; General Solomon Mujuru, the ex-commander of
the
Zimbabwe National Army; Peter Chanetsa, the former governor of
Mashonaland
West; Phillip Chiyangwa, MP for Chinhoyi; and the current vice
president,
Joseph Msika," a transcript of the programme
reads.
Responding to the allegations last night, acting president Joseph
Msika said
the allegations were inspired by malice, as he had not engaged in
any such
unscrupulous activities.
"I have not exported grain, it's all
malicious, it's all intended for
malicious purposes, so I dismiss that story
with the contempt it deserves,"
he said.
Mujuru and Chombo, in
separate interviews, informed this newspaper last
night that they had begun
consultations with their respective lawyers with a
view to suing Carte
Blanche over the allegations, which they described as
patently
false.
"I have never exported grain since I was born, actually I intend
to sue
Carte Blanche for defamation," Mujuru said.
Chombo, who
confirmed that he had seen a transcript of the programme, also
categorically
denied any involvement in the grain exportation scam. "I have
never exported
grain nor imported anything, I have never done that
business," Chombo said.
He argued that the reason why the programme had
included him on its list was
probably to do with the programme producer's
assumption that since Muderede
also hailed from Mashonaland West, he had
therefore received the blessings of
senior political figures in the
province, Chombo included.
In the
Carte Blanche transcript, whose contents were also published by the
Herald
last Tuesday, a former customs official based at the Chirundu border
post
claimed he had been pushed out of his job by his superiors who felt
they
could not expose the graft in grain exportation fearing reprisals from
the
named prominent politicians.
"At first you would be doing your job in a
proper way, but unfortunately
there is too much political interference,
especially for example,
politicians. They are the biggest smugglers at the
(Chirundu) border.
"There was this guy, Muderede, he was one of the
biggest smugglers, if not
the biggest at the border but he is politically
connected, he is very
powerful. Those guys don't use papers, they bulldoze
in. If you go in their
way that will be the end of you," said the customs
official, who was not
named.
When he wrote a report on the alleged
smuggling activities he was
immediately summoned to Harare by his boss who
advised him to resign with
immediate effect because something was going to
happen to him if he did not
leave.
"I did exactly that," said the
customs official.
The Carte Blanche article also mentions customs sources
revealing massive
smuggling of grain across the Chirundu border. A customs
official said seven
trucks laden with wheat passed through the border post
and another four
trucks carrying sugar but purporting to be carrying cement
were impounded on
22 May 2003. A customs official said she had witnessed more
than 30 trucks
that had gone across the border laden with grain.
Basic
foods like maize and wheat are subsidized and the Grain Marketing
Board has
the monopoly to sell and move grain in the country.
Over five million
people are in need of food aid in Zimbabwe.
The CIO operative said his
team of private investigators had followed
several leads, finally pinning
down the smugglers to a farm in Mashonaland
West. At the farm trucks were
loaded with maize before heading for Chirundu
border post.
"I had
received reports that Cyril Muderede was illegally exporting wheat
and maize
to Zambia and Zaire, or now the DRC. Perhaps you might want to
know that
Cyril Muderede is a former CIO bodygurad," the CIO
source
revealed.
Muderede's farm, Shankuru Estates, is well known and
is often touted as a
successful model of the land reform programme. A
Commonwealth team once
visited the farm on a guided tour which was addressed
by Msika. The CIO
operative also alleged that Muderede and Msika have been
working in cahoots
in the grain exportation scam.
"He then started
doing things with Joseph Msika, the Vice President, who is
related to his
wife, and Chanetsa, who was then governor of Mashonaland
West," he
said.
But the Vice-President flatly denied the
allegations.
"That's rubbish, I have never worked with anybody. I don't
have that
culture," Msika said.
Muderede was arrested recently by
police for illegally exporting maize and
depositing the proceeds into an
account in Luxemborg.
A subsistence farmer interviewed by Carte Blanche
claimed that the maize
being smuggled out of the country was sourced from
communal farmers who sold
it for well over the price offered by the GMB.
Carte Blanche also obtained
copies of three cheques made out to the communal
farmers, which were signed
by Muderede on behalf of Shankuru
Estates.
"He goes everywhere and collects. He does the weighing, bagging
and sewing
of the bags at his farm, and it's been rumoured that that grain is
exported
outside the country," revealed one communal farmer.
Efforts
to get Muderede, Chanetsa and Chiyangwa to comment were fruitless
last night
as their mobile phones were not reachable.
Zimbabwe Mirror
ANZ journalists stage demo against Nkomo
Phillip
Chidavaenzi
JOURNALISTS from the Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe (ANZ),
publishers of
The Daily News and The Daily News on Sunday, who on Friday
staged a
demonstration against their chief executive Sam Sipepa Nkomo, have
accused
him of being a key player in the closure of the paper.
The
workers, numbering between 60 and 70, accused the paper's management
of
refusing to adhere to the law, thereby punishing them in the
process.
AIPPA was recently deemed constitutional by the Supreme Court,
forcing the
ANZ - which has secured a temporary relief after an appeal - to
close shop.
After a turbulent five-year spell, the stable was shut down in
the wake of
its failure to register with the government-appointed Media and
Information
Commission (MIC) under the provisions of the controversial media
law, the
Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act
(AIPPA).
A reporter who refused to be named saying he was not a member of
the workers
' committee said the workers were going to stage another
demonstration at
the Supreme Court which would coincide with Wednesday's
hearing of the ANZ
appeal to have its scribes accredited.
He said in
as much as Information and Publicity Minister in the President's
Office,
Professor Jonathan Moyo was the force behind the stable's fate,
Nkomo was
"the conspirator from within".
"Through this demonstration, we want
everyone to know the true story behind
the closure of the ANZ. We want the
public to know that in as much as Moyo
played a role in closing the paper, he
found friends at The Daily News. We
want them to know that Nkomo is a
charlatan and a crook that can't manage
anything," he said.
He
dismissed Nkomo's allegations that the workers were demanding over
900
percent salary increments, saying it was management that had offered to
give
them that raise.
"Nkomo does not cherish the charlatans of press
freedom," said the reporter,
seething with anger.
Asked why the
workers had to play along and continue working for ANZ without
registration,
the workers' committee secretary general, Columbus Mavhunga
said they were
waiting for all legal processes to take their course before
adopting a
position.
"We did submit our registration as the journalists to the MIC,
which refused
to register us because our organisation was not registered with
them. So we
continued to work waiting for that clarification," he
said.
He also said the journalists were yet to be advised on who would
remain in
the "core group" of between 40 and 50, adding that management was
yet to
make its proposals for their retrenchment packages.
"We have
been told that the executive committee is meeting next week to
decide on the
criterion of the retrenchment packages. But we haven't been
told as yet who
is remaining and who is going and the criteria that would be
used. So at the
moment it is difficult to map out a plan," he said. A former
reporter at The
Daily News said as long as Nkomo remained in charge should
the paper
re-emerge - then it would be doomed for failure. He accused the
stable's
former corporate affairs director, Gugulethu Moyo, as another
conspirator in
the plot to destroy the paper.
"She also played a crucial role in the
destruction of The Daily News, a
paper for which we were tortured and
suffered," he said.
Moyo has since relocated to Botswana where she has
reportedly secured
employment with the Media Institute of Southern
Africa(misa).
Nkomo himself had since dismissed allegations that he was a
government
impostor who came to destroy the media house, saying those were
baseless
rumours emanating from the paper's disgraced former editor-in-chief,
Geoff
Nyarota.
The two were alleged to have had a long-running
vendetta, which was to
climax when they came to work under the same
stable,the ANZ.
Samuel Sipepa Nkomo is believed to be a brother to John
Nkomo, minister
responsible for land reform and resettlement.
News24
Nam land grab 'like death'
29/02/2004 16:13 -
(SA)
Windhoek - An umbrella group for Namibian commercial farmers,
the Namibia
Agricultural Union (NAU), says the announcement that farm
expropriations
will take place in the country has sent has sent shock waves
through its
agricultural community.
"It is shocking, just like death
which is always inevitable but people get
shocked, frustrated and
disorientated when it occurs in a family. It is the
same (as) this news: it
causes sorrow and disturbances in the farming
community," said the union's
president, Jan de Wet.
On Wednesday last week, Prime Minister Theo-Ben
Gurirab said on state
television that a number of white-owned farms would be
expropriated to
accelerate the process of land reform.
This was
because the existing policy of "willing seller, willing buyer" was
not
delivering results.
"The process has become too slow because of
arbitrarily inflated land prices
and unavailability of productive land,"
observed Gurirab.
Namibia is saddled with racial imbalances in land
ownership that date back
to the colonial era.
Fourteen years after
independence, more than 240 000 people are still
in need of land.
The Namibian Parliament last year passed a land reform act
allowing
government to acquire properties in the public interest, with the
payment of
just compensation.
Although the Prime Minister did not say which land
would be expropriated, it
is believed that farms belonging to absentee
landlords are likely targets.
De Wet called on the government to make
clear the criteria that would be
used to select properties, as the current
situation was creating uncertainty
that could spill into unrest.
"The
situation also affects the surety of the farms, because
financial
institutions now regard them as risky investments, and farmers
might in
future have to struggle to get loans from banks. The question is:
are we
going the Zimbabwe way?"
Discontent over land ownership in
Namibia has been stirred up in recent
months by the dismissal of certain farm
workers who have stayed on the
properties concerned for decades.
The
layoffs have led to clashes between farm owners and unions, and angered
the
government.
The Secretary-General of the Namibia Farm Workers Union,
Alfred Angula,
welcomed the government's announcement - and highlighted the
need for
further reforms in the farming sector.
"Farmers need to
realise that they do not pay pension or any other
compensation to their
workers who sometimes work on such farms for decades,
and when they become
old they want to evict them and make it the
government's problem," he
said.
Late last year, Angula's union called for farm occupations in those
areas
where the evictions were taking place.
New Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe gangs target SA banks
By Dominic
Mahlangu
29/02/04
MILLIONS of rands have been lost in South African bank
robberies to highly
trained gangs from Zimbabwe, police said this
week.
These gangs, which are responsible for about 80 percent of bank
robberies in
the country, have been traced to Zimbabwe.
It is believed
that in the past five years these gangs have targeted South
African banks in
daring operations that have dented the banking industry.
Senior police
intelligence officers within the serious crime units said
these organised
syndicates were operating throughout the country.
Police say they are
currently looking for more than 100 suspects, who they
believe are moving in
and out of South Africa using fraudulently acquired
South African
identification documents.
The suspects are wanted in connection with
major bank robberies.
Police said some of the video recordings recovered
after bank robberies
showed that most of the suspects entered the banks
without concealing the
faces.
"Some of them even wave and smile to
short-circuit cameras inside the banks,
but what must be remembered is that
they are violent and will not hesitate
to kill," said police.
This
week, City Press publishes pictures of some of the gang members wanted
by
police.
One of those on the wanted list is suspected Zimbabwean national
Reginald
who uses the surnames Msibi, Motloung and Mgwekaze. According to his
crime
sheet he has been linked to three bank robberies, two murders and
one
hijacking.
His accomplices include other
Zimbabweans.
Gauteng provincial deputy commissioner Afrika Khumalo said a
high-level
meeting of the crime intelligence units was scheduled for this
week to
discuss, among other things, the involvement of foreigners in
bank
robberies.
He said there was clear evidence linking some of the
highly trained gangs
from Zimbabwe to many bank robberies carried out in
South Africa.
Khumalo, who revealed last week how police were cracking
down on
cash-in-transit heists, said a number of meetings have taken place
between
South African police and Zimbabwe's authorities.
The meetings
concentrated on how to stop the movement of gangs from Harare
to South
Africa.
"It has taken our units time and dedication to arrive at a
conclusion that
gangs from Zimbabwe are behind some of the bank
robberies.
"We believe they have military training . . . Through our
intelligence and
contacts with the Zimbabwe police we have been able to get
information,"said
Khumalo.
He said that in the coming weeks police
would launch a massive operation
against these Zimbabwean gang
members.
Khumalo said police had established that most operations were
planned
outside the country. Once in South Africa, the syndicates link up
with other
Zimbabweans already in the country, who then supply them with
firearms.
"What is evident from the intelligence we have gathered is that
these
individuals do not even hide their faces once inside the banks. They
think
that we cannot identify them. They are in for a shock - we have their
names
and pictures," said Khumalo.
A suspect involved in a cash-in-transit
heist was arrested this week by
police after four years on the
run.
Lucky Cebekhulu was sentenced to 28 years in prison in 2000 for
his
involvement in cash-in-transit heists but he managed to escape while
still
in court.
But his freedom ran out on Monday when police finally
cornered him.
His arrest follows closely on heels of the arrest of other
syndicate members
involved in cash-in-transit heists.
Meanwhile, Port
Elizabeth magistrate S K Liebenberg this week refused bail
to the five
suspects accused of the R12,4 million FNB burglary in January.