Robert Mugabe shuts church over Movement for Democratic Change link

The Telegraph

By Peta Thornycroft in Harare and David Blair
Last Updated: 11:50PM BST 23/05/2008
President Robert Mugabe's regime has shut down Zimbabwe's Anglican Church,
turning baton-wielding riot police on congregations and rendering it
impossible for priests to conduct services.
When Anglicans go to worship tomorrow, they will not venture inside their
own churches, almost all of which have been closed by police.

Instead, for the first time, they will join Catholics, Methodists and
Presbyterians, who will open their services to embattled Anglicans.

The prime cause of the Church's collapse is Nolbert Kunonga, the renegade
Anglican Bishop of Harare and a staunch supporter of Mr Mugabe who once
called his leader a "prophet of God".

Last year, Mr Kunonga withdrew from the Anglican Communion, supposedly to
protest against homosexuality. But the Church says he was sacked and a new
Bishop of Harare, Sebastian Bakare, appointed in his place.
Mr Kunonga, 58, refused to leave office. Instead, he occupied Harare's
Anglican cathedral of St Mary's and All Saints, seized the Church's bank
accounts and made dozens of his friends priests or bishops.

Despite being officially excommunicated on Monday, he still conducts
services for a handful of followers inside the cathedral. Most importantly,
he has accused Bishop Bakare of supporting the opposition Movement for
Democratic Change and plotting with Gordon Brown to overthrow Mr Mugabe.
Consequently, the state has intervened on Mr Kunonga's side.

When Anglicans gather for services, the regime believes they are backing
Bishop Bakare – and therefore the MDC. Riot police have duly been turned on
congregations.

Tsitsi Guramatunhu was among 400 worshippers when police raided St Francis
church two weeks ago. First they beat the choir with batons. Then they
assaulted people kneeling before the altar.

"They stormed into the church and beat people as they went. They told us we
must either worship at the Kunonga service or not at all," said Mrs
Guramatunhu, 44. "I tried to take a picture of them with my cell phone so
they beat me."

Last Sunday, riot police deployed again and surrounded St Francis church.
"We will worship at another church on Sunday. We will not give up," said Mrs
Guramatunhu.

Bishop Bakare, 66, told The Daily Telegraph that riot police had attacked
"nearly all" of Harare's 58 Anglican churches last Sunday. "People are too
scared to try to worship in their churches in case they are beaten," he
said. "Other faiths have offered us their churches and their halls. So the
police may want to follow the Anglicans to beat them up in those places. But
then they will also have to beat up Catholics, Methodists and
Presbyterians."

Mr Kunonga has been rewarded for backing Mr Mugabe with a formerly
white-owned farm.

A Flawed but Enduring Leader Plans His Return to Zimbabwe

New York Times

By CELIA W. DUGGER
Published: May 24, 2008
JOHANNESBURG — Morgan Tsvangirai, the chief rival of Zimbabwe’s
authoritarian president, Robert Mugabe, drove up to a Harare police station
last year to check on dozens of his supporters inside on their bellies,
being kicked, clobbered and stomped.

The policemen quickly stopped and grabbed the moon-faced opposition leader.
Witnesses said the station reverberated with the sickening thwack of blows
to his buttocks, back and head. “They were fighting with each other to beat
him,” said Tendai Biti, his deputy in the opposition party.
Mr. Tsvangirai, whose thrashing made him an international symbol of
resistance to Mr. Mugabe’s repressive rule, now plans to return to Zimbabwe
on Saturday for a showdown with his nemesis in a June 27 runoff after six
weeks of self-imposed exile. He bested Mr. Mugabe in a Mar. 29 election,
then fled the country in the middle of the night on April 8 after his staff
said it got word of a plot to kill him.

Mr. Tsvangirai is a flawed leader who has sometimes been naive and too
conciliatory, according to critics and allies alike. And yet, they agree, he
has always managed to endure.

Over the years, both sides say, he has credulously fallen into traps laid by
Mr. Mugabe, too often avoided aggressively confronting the country’s
strongman and lacked the finesse to heal a bitter rift in his own party
before the March election.

In recent weeks, he has come under increasing criticism for staying out of
the country while his supporters have been attacked, tortured and even
killed in a sweeping state-sponsored campaign to intimidate all who dare
challenge Mr. Mugabe’s reelection. William McGee, the American ambassador in
Harare, said there is evidence an assassination plot was threatened, but he
believes it was disinformation meant to keep Mr. Tsvangirai from coming
home.

Still, Mr. Tsvangirai’s allies and many of his detractors credit him with
withstanding excruciating physical and psychic pressure from ZANU-PF, the
governing party, and persisting stoically over years of arrests, beatings,
assassination attempts, a treason trial, fraud-ridden elections and his own
tactical blunders.

In the election itself, he vanquished a breakaway faction of his own party
and an independent candidate, earning his own scarred claim to leadership.

“He’s been imprisoned, humiliated and accused of being a puppet of the
 West,” said George Bizos, a South African lawyer who represented Nelson
Mandela in the apartheid era and was Mr. Tsvangirai’s advocate during his
treason trial in 2004. “But I believe he is a Zimbabwean patriot in touch
with the vast majority of his people. He has shown he has stamina.”

The son of a bricklayer and the eldest of nine children, Mr. Tsvangirai, 56,
never went to college and labored in the nickel mines before rising through
the ranks of the union movement. He faces a very different opponent in Mr.
Mugabe, 84, a university-educated teacher who became the hero of his country’s
liberation from white rule and its first and only president since
independence in 1980.

Mr. Mugabe contemptuously mocks Mr. Tsvangirai for not having joined the
guerrilla struggle in his youth, and the state-owned paper — a mouthpiece
for the governing party — recently belittled him as a coward and Western
stooge with “a big black nose” and “chubby and pimply cheeks.”

But Mr. Tsvangirai can rightfully claim to be the first politician to win
more votes than Mr. Mugabe at the polls — and have it officially recognized.
On Thursday, he toured refugee camps here in southern Africa’s economic
capital where his countrymen — some of the millions who have fled their
nation’s imploding economy — have been subjected to xenophobic attacks in
Johannesburg’s impoverished townships.

“We have to finish off this work and the only way to finish is for us to go
back and vote the man out,” Mr. Tsvangirai told a cheering crowd through a
bullhorn, encouraging listeners to go home and exercise their franchise.

Mr. Tsvangirai was born into what he called “a very humble peasant family”
that survived on his father’s earnings as a bricklayer and what they grew on
their small farm. He quit school before college and went to work in a
textile factory and later in the mines to help pay school fees for his eight
siblings. As young men were joining the armed resistance in the 1970s, Mr.
Tsvangirai stayed on the job “to look after that brood of Tsvangirai kids,”
he said.

He rose through the ranks of the mine workers union and in 1988 became
secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions. Stephen Chan, a
professor of international relations at the University of London, describes
in his book, “Citizen of Africa: Conversations with Morgan Tsvangirai”
(Fingerprint Cooperative, 2005), how Mr. Tsvangirai, a pragmatic social
democrat, turned the congress into voice for workers at a time when the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were pushing “structural
adjustment programs” that required African governments to keep a lid on
spending, including wages.

Mr. Tsvangirai’s record, Mr. Chan wrote, was “nothing short of remarkable.”

In 1999, Mr. Tsvangirai helped organize and found the opposition party,
Movement for Democratic Change, which attracted support from trade
unionists, students, intellectuals and white commercial farmers. A year
later, the party handed Mr. Mugabe his first electoral defeat when it
convinced voters to reject a referendum that would have expanded his
presidential powers.

The opposition posed the first serious challenge to Mr. Mugabe, but the
wily, ruthless president wasn’t ready to go. In 2002, Mr. Tsvangirai ran for
president, and many believe victory was stolen from him through fraud,
intimidation and violence.
But Mr. Tsvangirai and his party had already made a costly misstep. Just two
weeks before the 2002 election, he was charged with treason in an alleged
plot to assassinate Mr. Mugabe. It turned out the opposition party had
unwittingly hired a lobbying firm led by an accused swindler and a former
Israeli intelligence agent. Mr. Bizos, the lawyer, said later in court that
the man had been hired by Zimbabwe’s intelligence service and paid $650,000
to discredit and entrap Mr. Mugabe’s opponents, including Mr. Tsvangirai.

Ultimately, in 2004, Mr. Tsvangirai was cleared, but for nearly two years,
the task of combating the capital charges consumed much of his time and kept
him under virtual house arrest. Mr. Bizos said Mr. Tsvangirai had been too
trusting, giving Mr. Mugabe “an opportunity to spring a trap.”

In 2005, the party, already damaged by internal discord, fractured, with
some accusing Mr. Tsvangirai of having authoritarian tendencies and
tolerating violence against those who challenged him – allegations he
strongly denies.

But the opposition was divided, and at a critical time. Zimbabwe’s economy
spiraled downward and Mr. Mugabe’s government carried out a brutal strategy
to damage the opposition’s political base in 2005, destroying the homes of
hundreds of thousands of poor people in urban settlements.

Mr. Tsvangirai needed then to unite the opposition to counter the raw power
of the state, but “he didn’t find the statesmanlike leadership required at
the time,” said Brian Raftopoulos, research director for Solidarity Peace
Trust, a nongovernmental organization.

Had the breach in the opposition been mended before the March election, it
might have managed a decisive victory. Since then, leaders of the faction
that broke away have rallied behind Mr. Tsvangirai, improving his odds of
prevailing in a fair runoff, though one is unlikely under the current
conditions.

Now, Mr. Tsvangirai says he is heading back to Zimbabwe with a sense of
foreboding about his own safety and the prospects for democracy. Some
analysts believe a military coup would be likely if he won. Mr. Tsvangirai
warned that if Mr. Mugabe’s regime shuts down dissent “some of us who are
advocates of a nonviolent democracy will become irrelevant.”

As this pivotal moment approaches for Zimbabwe, a country reduced from the
days when it was once one of Africa’s most literate and successful, much
will depend on whether Mr. Tsvangirai can inspire people to go to the polls.
His wife of 30 years, Susan, and the youngest of their six children, the 13
year-old twins, Millicent and Vincent, are now living in Johannesburg, safe
from the dangers he will soon be facing.

On Thursday, Mr. Tsvangirai, dressed nattily in a pinstripe suit, hardly
seemed like a man in the mood to rouse his people as he sped from township
to township in a silver Mercedes Benz, distractedly answering questions and
glancing at his talking points. He yawned in exhaustion and remarked
nervously, “What’s happening?” when his driver got turned around in the
narrow lanes of Alexandra, hemmed in by shanties, where the anti-foreign
riots started.

But when he mounted rickety chairs and tables to address woebegone
Zimbabwean refugees, some of them shoeless and carrying squalling babies,
his fatigue seemed to fall away. He spoke to them in Shona and in a
call-and-response like that of a preacher and his congregation, they
answered him.

They told him about seeing their houses destroyed in Zimbabwe, only to come
to South Africa for sanctuary and meet the same fate.

“We’ve been fighting for you,” said one man “Should we go back now and be
killed?”

“No one must be killed fighting for me,” Mr. Tsvangirai replied. “We all are
in the line of danger fighting for our country.” But he reminded the
murmuring crowd, “This is the opportunity to go and vote Mugabe out.”

As he climbed into the Mercedes to depart his final stop, the refugees
pressed in on the car, chanting “Morgan Tsvangirai is number 1, Zanu is
rotten.” They swayed in time to the chant, their arms waving over their
heads and their fingers splayed in the open-handed symbol of the opposition
party, a wordless reply to the ruling party’s closed fist.

Will Tsvangirai return bring change?

02:14 GMT, Saturday, 24 May 2008 03:14 UK

By Will Ross BBC News, Johannesburg MDC supporters say there has been an orchestrated campaign of violence Zimbabwe's opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, is due to return home to Zimbabwe in preparation for a run off election due on 27 June. During recent weeks Mr Tsvangirai has been jetting around Africa and beyond, drumming up support. But back in Zimbabwe he has been criticised from some quarters for abandoning his supporters in their hour of need. Since the inconclusive election of 29 March, which resulted in a humiliating defeat for the governing Zanu-PF party and for President Robert Mugabe, opposition supporters have been the target of a systematic campaign of violence. "People are asking 'Where is he? Where are our leaders?' They are missing in action", political analyst John Makumbe says. Mr Tsvangirai, nicknamed "chamatama" because of his chubby cheeks, had been due to return last weekend but at the final minute cancelled the trip for security reasons. The opposition Movement For Democratic Change, MDC, said it had learnt that the party's leader was the target of a military plot. Morgan over consults and sometimes he becomes as good as the last person who has talked to him which derails the decision making process Sydney Masamvu, International Crisis Group Although some suggest this excuse was perhaps a little far fetched and a convenient excuse for a change of plan, Mr Makumbe says that on the back of the ongoing violence, opposition supporters are all too aware of the need to put safety first. "People understand that there are murderers throughout the country and the crown of all their work would be to put a bullet through Morgan Tsvangirai and if they did that they would not mind anybody in the MDC taking over but not Tsvangirai - the man who humiliated Robert Mugabe so much." Shoring up credentials As the run off election approaches, the playing field is far from level and there are plenty of people keen to cling on to their positions in Zimbabwe at all costs. So levering Mr Mugabe out of office will still be a mountainous task. Key to Mr Tsvangirai's future is backing from African leaders especially amongst the regional grouping, SADC, from whom Mr Mugabe has traditionally received strong support. But that support is eroding as Zimbabwe's economic and political crisis deepens. Mr Tsvangirai has spent more than a month outside Zimbabwe "In the past Morgan Tsvangirai has been treated with a degree of scepticism by the nationalist political elite on the continent, including South Africa," Professor Adam Habib, deputy vice chancellor at the University of Johannesburg, says. "This is in part because of the white farmer's support for the opposition and in part because of the support it has in London and New York," Prof Habib adds. Over the past few weeks the Zimbabwean opposition leader has made inroads shoring up his credentials and gaining the support of at least some of the regional leaders. Mr Tsvangirai has been praised in the past for showing courage and his popularity was boosted after he was badly beaten whilst in police custody in March 2007. But there are plenty who suggest his leadership style needs a makeover. "He over listens and ends up failing to take the difficult decisions," says Sydney Masamvu of the International Crisis Group. "Morgan over consults and sometimes he becomes as good as the last person who has talked to him which derails the decision making process," Mr Masamvu suggests. This indecision was recently shown up when the MDC leader was asked about the future of Mr Mugabe. Robert Mugabe's downfall has been falsely predicted for many years "Judging from what is taking place now I think it would be very difficult to convince even the most forgiving to let him go scot free," Mr Tsvangirai told a news conference in Johannesburg last month. He suggested a UN court should be set up for crimes committed in Zimbabwe. But three weeks later there appeared to be a change of heart. "He is the founding president of Zimbabwe and you can't take that away from him. The nation must move forward and I think any attempt at retribution may actually cause further destabilisation," Mr Tsvangirai told the BBC. Some suggest he still needs to complete the transformation from being a trade union leader to political leader. Obvious candidate There is no guarantee that the run off election will take place at all - few rules have been adhered to during this drawn out election. There are growing calls for a negotiated settlement to the crisis at a time when Mr Tsvangirai has built up close links with the new ANC leadership in South Africa which is highly influential in the region. Whatever the outcome, few doubt that the opposition leader is still on the rise. "Morgan Tsvangirai is the obvious candidate to succeed Mugabe and the South African government is coming to terms with that," Prof Habib says. "But the big question is, will he do it in partnership with someone else like (former Zanu-PF minister) Simba Makoni or with someone else or alone? What is clear is Tsvangirai will be a major figure in post Mugabe Zimbabwe," he adds. But nobody needs reminding that false dawns in Zimbabwe have been about as common as presidential birthdays and Mr Mugabe's downfall has been falsely predicted for many years.

Zimbabwe is on a political precipice -- but to what?

Los Angeles Times

Mugabe's party intimates it will hang on to power even if it takes a
military coup. But the military is in danger of splitting. Meanwhile,
violence and poverty rack the country.
By Robyn Dixon, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
7:30 PM PDT, May 23, 2008
JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA -- Zimbabwe hangs in a dangerous political limbo:
A ruling party clique clings to power amid rumors of a coup if President
Robert Mugabe loses the upcoming presidential runoff. His opponent, Morgan
Tsvangirai, far from facing down military hard-liners, has been out of the
country for weeks, fearing assassination.

As regional leaders dither, a new wave of systematic abductions and killings
of top opposition activists suggests a regime that is unwilling to leave
office, even if it loses the second round of voting, scheduled for the end
of next month.

"There's no way we are going to lose the runoff," one senior ruling party
figure said. "We are going to make sure of that. If we lose the runoff, then
the army will take over.

"Never be fooled that Tsvangirai will rule this country. Never," the
official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said in an interview in
Harare, the Zimbabwean capital.

Rights organizations, such as Zimbabwe Doctors for Human Rights, say the
level and intensity of the violence far surpasses that surrounding elections
in 2000 and 2002. Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change says 43
activists are known to have been killed since the March 29 vote.

The opposition says the government is targeting its top activists and
officials and that at least six have been abducted in the last 10 days by
heavily armed security officials. Four have been found dead, it says, their
bodies showing signs of severe beating and torture. Ten others are missing
and feared dead.

MDC activist Tonderai Ndira was dragged from his bed last week by eight
security operatives. His body was found Wednesday, dumped in the bush. His
brother Barnabas said Ndira's face had been beaten so badly it was
unrecognizable.

Some analysts see the threat of a coup growing, convinced that the punitive
violence in Zimbabwe has only increased Mugabe's unpopularity since he was
shocked to find himself in second place behind Tsvangirai in the March vote.
But others predict the regime, wary of regional isolation, will opt for at
least the pretense of legitimacy, rigging the elections rather than using
military force to overturn a Tsvangirai runoff victory.

Mugabe is backed by a group of cronies that includes Rural Housing Minister
Emmerson Mnangagwa, Defense Forces Commander Gen. Constantine Chiwenga and
Police Commissioner Augustine Chihuri. Several elite units, including the
Presidential Guard, the Fifth Brigade and the National Rapid Reaction Force,
are loyal to his regime.

But with the military rank and file deeply disgruntled over their working
conditions and angry about the farms, SUVs and fancy lifestyles of their
commanders, some predict that a coup would split the army.

"What they also have to worry about is whether they can keep their troops
with them," said a Harare diplomat, also speaking on condition of anonymity.
"There's a great risk they will split the very institution they rely on for
support."

In fact, the rank and file are so alienated that they have not been called
in to intimidate and attack opposition members, as they have been in the
past.

"It's the senior officers running the terror campaign in the rural areas,"
said Morris, 35, an army captain who spoke to The Times by phone, declining
to allow his second name to be published for fear of reprisal.

"They're burning houses and beating people. It's being done by colonels and
lieutenant colonels. The lower ranks don't want what is happening. If the
Old Man lost, he should just give up. He should respect the wishes of the
people," said Morris, referring to the 84-year-old Mugabe. "Soldiers are
very much angry about him. They want him removed from power.

"Soldiers go about in tattered uniforms," Morris said. "Everything is
pathetic. Of all the general population, the people hardest hit are the
military. There's no food in the camps. The officers keep giving us empty
promises. At times there are no rations."

He said some senior officers were also no longer loyal to Mugabe.

"The problem now is they can't come out, because the higher ranks, the
generals, are loyal to the ruling party. They can't come out for fear of
their lives."

The ruling ZANU-PF party lost control of parliament in the March elections,
and, according to official results, Tsvangirai won about 48% of the
presidential vote compared with 43% for Mugabe, necessitating the June 27
runoff. The opposition insists that Tsvangirai won in the first round, with
50.3%, and the United States and Britain have questioned the credibility of
the official results.

Mnangagwa, the most powerful figure behind Mugabe, is the leader of one of
two rival factions in ZANU-PF that have been fighting over succession since
last year. As the president's heir apparent, Mnangagwa has the most to lose
from a Mugabe defeat. When Mugabe faced a potential challenge last year,
Mnangagwa swung his support to him on the understanding that he would
succeed him six months after the election.

Mnangagwa, like the so-called securocrats in the security apparatus, fears
prosecution if Tsvangirai wins. He was security minister during massacres in
Matabeleland in the early 1980s in which thousands of Mugabe's political
opponents were killed. The precedent-setting war-crimes prosecution of
former Liberian leader Charles Taylor has complicated the departure of
Mugabe's regime.

A recent report by the International Crisis Group, a watchdog organization,
said there was "a growing risk of a coup either before the runoff, in a
preemptive move to deny Tsvangirai victory, or after a Tsvangirai win."

Opposition lawmaker David Coltart said he believed there was a risk of a
coup, but he added, "I think they're intent on trying to give it some sort
of fig leaf of legitimacy through an election.

"Their first prize is obviously votes in the ballot box to get Mugabe to
win. Their Plan B, if they don't feel that will happen, is that they will
just blatantly rig the election. An openly declared coup would be very
difficult for the region to stomach."

The ZANU-PF runoff "campaign," which is under the control of top military
commanders, consists of ubiquitous newspaper advertising, state media
propaganda and the violence against the opposition.

Witnesses and victims interviewed by The Times have named ruling party
officials as helping oversee the violence, with beatings carried out mainly
by mobs of ruling party youths.

It is unclear what effect the violence will have on the voter turnout. One
aim seems to be to send a signal to voters that whatever they do, Tsvangirai
will never rule, making voting for him futile and dangerous.

If the regime does hold on to power, it would be "catastrophic," according
to the ICG report. It says the economy's decline would intensify, with more
Zimbabweans fleeing the country, "while inflation, unemployment and the
resultant massive suffering would increase."

Even if it stays in power through a coup or election fraud, said the
diplomat, "you have to ask yourself, 'Well, then what do they do?' They have
no options for any sustainable situation here. They have no resources.
There's not a great deal left to loot. You can't dig gold out of the ground
without electricity. They're completely isolated."

robyn.dixon@latimes.com

A special correspondent in Harare contributed to this report.

The Failures of Thabo Mbeki

New York Times

Editorial

Published: May 24, 2008
Crackpot and dangerous theories on AIDS. Extreme and widening levels of
income inequality. Enabling Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and only belatedly
trying to halt mob atrocities against desperate Zimbabwean and other African
immigrants. This is the legacy of South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, who
has one more year in his second term.

It would be hard to imagine a more depressing contrast with the leadership
of Nelson Mandela, Mr. Mbeki’s predecessor and one of the 20th century’s
great heroes.
History will laud Mr. Mandela for leading his country, peacefully, from
hateful apartheid to democratic majority rule, marvel at his commitment to
honesty and healing and celebrate his promotion of South Africa as a diverse
and tolerant “rainbow nation.”

If it remembers Mr. Mbeki at all, it will be for appointing a health
minister who favored garlic and beet root as treatment for South Africa’s
more than five million citizens infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes
AIDS, and for his stubborn refusal to use South Africa’s economic and
political clout to stop Zimbabwe’s horrors.

Instead, Mr. Mbeki declared that there was “no crisis,” even as Zimbabwe’s
electoral count was being hijacked, opposition supporters terrorized and
thousands of its citizens fleeing over the border to South Africa where they
still have not found safety. The only explanation is his misplaced loyalty
to Mr. Mugabe, who was once a hero for leading Zimbabwe to majority rule.

South Africa is the richest, most developed country south of the Sahara and
the continent’s largest, most exemplary democracy. Africa badly needs its
enlightened leadership. A decade ago, under Mr. Mandela, South Africa was
swiftly emerging as the respected leader of a proud, postcolonial Africa.

Under Mr. Mbeki’s leadership, the fruits of the nation’s hard-fought victory
over apartheid have gone mainly to officials and former officials of the
ruling African National Congress, not to the millions of poor people in the
townships who faced down the dogs, the bullets and the pass laws and still
must live without adequate jobs, education, housing or health services.

The resulting frustration and anger helps explain, though it cannot justify,
this week’s outbreak of xenophobic violence in the shantytowns. At least 42
victims have been killed — many beaten, stabbed, hacked or burned to death —
and some 25,000 have been chased from their homes.

Mr. Mbeki’s most likely successor, Jacob Zuma, the current leader of the
A.N.C., is no Nelson Mandela either. While more popular among the poor than
the arrogant and aloof Mr. Mbeki, he has offered few coherent ideas for
addressing their economic plight. He has been more willing to criticize Mr.
Mugabe’s electoral manipulations, but overly cautious in proposing solutions
(though that is Mr. Mbeki’s job, not his). His ignorance on AIDS and
appalling attitudes toward women — revealed in a 2006 rape trial that ended
in his acquittal — stained his personal reputation. Serious corruption
charges against him are still pending.

South Africa can ill afford another five years of failed leadership and
frustrated hopes. Whoever succeeds Mr. Mbeki must look long and hard at all
that has gone wrong and vow to do better. South Africans and all of Africa
need and deserve better.

Ndira’s mutilated body found in mortuary

Mugabe seeks treatment in China

www.thezimbabwetimes.com

May 24, 2008

By Raymond Maingire

HARARE - President Robert Mugabe, who is in the throes of a rigorous
election campaign quietly left Harare on Wednesday heading for Beijing,
China, where sources close to him said he was to undergo medical treatment.

Mugabe, who departed as his rival Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the MDC,
prepared to return to Harare after a five-week absence from the country has
been campaigning rigorously for the crucial presidential election run-off,
which is scheduled for June 27. Mugabe, whose recent pictures portray him as
aged and emaciated, is widely regarded as the underdog in the forthcoming
election.

He won 43, 2 percent of the national vote in the March 29 elections to
Tsvangirai’s 47, 9 percent. The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission delayed the
announcement of the presidential election result by five weeks.

Mugabe is scheduled to officially launch his presidential campaign at his
party’s headquarters on Sunday amid fears even within his Zanu-PF party that
he could be heading for another embarrassing defeat.

Mugabe departed soon after addressing a police pass-out parade at Morris
Depot, Zimbabwe’s national police training academy, on Wednesday afternoon.

His motorcade was seen heading for the airport amid speculation he had gone
to meet South Africa’s ruling ANC party president, Jacob Zuma who is
expected in Zimbabwe soon on a mission to help resolve the deepening
political and economic crises.

But sources say Mugabe, now 84, instead boarded a London-bound Air Zimbabwe
flight. The flight was, as has become routine, diverted to Beijing where he
is apparently due to receive unspecified treatment ahead of what is likely
to be a gruelling election campaign.

“Mugabe is ill and is feared he may not be able to last the distance when he
starts campaigning for the run-off,” a source said. “He left for China on
Wednesday to receive some treatment that will energize him for his
 campaign.”

Mugabe’s spokesperson, George Charamba could neither confirm nor deny his
boss’s absence.

“Who told you that?” he asked. “Is that person a medical doctor? I believe
only a medical doctor can confirm the President’s illness.

“But what you will be shocked to see is that the President will be strong
and raring to go, come Sunday.”

But Sports and Culture Minister, Aeneas Chigwedere, all but confirmed Mugabe’s
absence at a function in Harare this week when he addressed Vice President
Joseph Msika as Acting President.

Mugabe’s health has been the subject of both speculation and excitement
among both observers and his rivals over the past 10 years. But, undaunted
by his humiliating defeat at the hands of Tsvangirai in March, the
battle-weary Mugabe appears determined to defy both his advanced age and his
waning popularity to turn the tables on his opponent and win another term.

Chinotimba implicated in murder of MDC official

www.thezimbabwetimes.com

May 24, 2008

SW Radio Africa/Own Correspondent

HARARE - Harare municipal policeman, Joseph Chinotimba, who shot to
prominence for the leading role which he played during the violent farm
invasions, is back in the news again - this time for overseeing the murder
of an Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) official.

He has been implicated in the murder of Chokuse Mupango, the MDC chairman
for Ward 26 in the Buhera District of Manicaland Province on Saturday.
Mupango died allegedly as the result of a vicious assault on him by a group
led by Chinotimba at Mutiusinazita, close to Chinotimba’s rural home in the
Buhera District.

Widely regarded as a hatchet man of President Robert Mugabe Chinotimba, a
Zanu-PF candidate, who suffered defeat in the recent parliamentary election
in Buhera South constituency, allegedly led the group of Zanu-PF militias
who attacked and killed Mupango.

It is alleged that Chinotimba drove the assailants to Mutiusinazita in his
vehicle. After parking the vehicle at Mutero Clinic it is alleged the group
had then hunted for the ward chairman. Mupango was the election strategist
for Naison Nemadziva the MDC MP elect who defeated Chinotimba on March 29.
Mupango had been warned of the impending attack and had sought refuge at a
neighbouring homestead. But they found him.

Pishai Muchauraya, the MP elect for Makoni South (MDC) and party spokesman
for Manicaland said the alleged assailants had searched the houses of both
Mupango and his neighbour but had failed to locate him.

“As the group was about to retreat from the area, someone suggested they
search the toilets,” Muchauraya said. “After a while they found him hiding
in his neighbour’s toilet. He was dragged out and they attacked him using
knives as well as sticks and knobkerries.

“After they had beaten him badly, the group decided to take him to
Chinotimba for further interrogation. But because of the nature of his
injuries Mupango collapsed and was by now gasping for air. Instead of
seeking help, the group fetched a wheelbarrow and took him to Chinotimba,
who was in the company of five policemen at Mutero Clinic.”

Mupango reportedly failed to respond to Chinotimba’s questions and died
while under interrogation.

“The sad thing is what they said after they realized he was dead. Chinotimba
(allegedly) started calling him a pig, raving to the crowd that the pig had
died before he had even started on him,” Muchauraya said. “His body was
loaded onto Chinotimba’s vehicle and was dropped off at the Birchenough
Bridge Hospital mortuary.”

The MDC has since filed a report with the police. Muchauraya said there were
so many witnesses to this murder that “one day it would certainly come back
to haunt the self-anointed leader of the war veterans”.

Chinotimba, the municipal policeman turned politician, and the late Dr
Chenjerai “Hitler” Hunzvi were in the forefront of the violent commercial
farm invasions by the war veterans back in 2000. While both men assumed
positions of leadership within the war veteran community they were of
dubious war veteran pedigree.

A letter from the diaspora

www.cathybuckle.com

24th May 2008

Dear Friends.
During the Middle Ages in Europe there was an outbreak of an unknown
infection which became known as the Black Death. It was so called because
the sufferers developed horrible boils in the armpit and groin. These boils
turned black, hence the name Black Death. If the patient was lucky he/she
died within twenty-four hours; if not the sufferer would linger for a week
in dreadful agony.

The authorities had to find an explanation for this catastrophe which was
killing thousands of citizens from all classes of society. There had to be
someone to blame. So the authorities tapped into popular prejudice and
blamed the Jews even though the Jews themselves were dying in their
thousands. The Pope in Rome, not known for his defence of Jewry, pointed out
this anomaly; why would the Jews kill their own people was the Pope's
question. There was of course no answer; when propaganda enters through the
front door, truth and logic leave by the back.

We had a vivid reminder of this truth in Zimbabwe this week as Mugabe and
his coterie of cerebrally challenged ministers sought to provide an
explanation for the horrendous violence that has gripped the country. They
have to find someone to blame. They can no longer deny that it is happening
since the First Lady herself and the Lady Vice-President visit the victims
and distribute largesse. Such rank hypocrisy defies all belief but it was
left to Nathan Shamuyarira to follow up on the claim Mugabe himself had
already made that it was the MDC behind all the violence.

' MDC-T are the ones who have been unleashing the violence on our members,'
Shamuyarira claimed, 'so it's not true that Zanu PF is clamping down on
opposition members.' Setting aside the question of who exactly is the
opposition since Zanu PF lost the elections, Shamuyarira blithely ignores
the fact that it is MDC members who are the victims of violence. The
question to ask is why would the MDC punish its own supporters? The answer
according to Zanu PF's twisted rhetoric would be 'to make Zanu PF look
bad' - the same reason white farmers wrecked their own properties, no doubt.
When propaganda enters through the front door, truth and logic leave by the
back.

The South African Mail and Guardian carried an interview with a Green Bomber
this week which shed further light on ZanuPF 'thinking'.The lad had been
through the so-called Youth Training Programme, designed we are told to
instil patriotism and a knowledge of history. The reporter asked the young
man if he was willing to maim and kill to instil patriotism. His answer
illustrates perfectly the blind allegiance to outdated 'Liberation
credentials' that are driving the vicious onslaught against the forces of
democracy. ' Do you think we would have won (the liberation war) if the
comrades were soft with people who refused to support the struggle?' adding,
'We never kill. I've attacked only those who attacked me'.

And for this he is paid 1 billion Zim dollars a day and his mother comments
that she is just happy he has a job…but unsurprisingly she doesn't want to
know what he does to earn his money. The total of slaughtered MDC people has
reached 48 and still the regime claims it is MDC spearheading the violence.
Yesterday the decomposing body of a young MDC activist was found with his
tongue torn out and his lips cut off. In a village I know well a six months
pregnant woman was beaten to death, so badly beaten that she was
unrecognisable and in Murehwa an MDC official was abducted in broad daylight
by known state agents who inflicted a savage beating and then threw him into
the back of a truck. He has still not been found. Witnesses saw the incident
and recorded the vehicle's registration number. One way or another, these
killers will pay the price for their inhumanity.

And meanwhile Zimbabweans in South Africa are in the forefront of horrific
attacks on immigrants. Three million people have fled across the border from
the economic and political collapse in Mugabe's Zimbabwe. (Inflation has
this week surpassed1 million percent) The undeniable truth is that those
three million people would never have been forced to flee their homeland if
Thabo Mbeki had acted decisively to bring his influence to bear on Mugabe.
Instead, Mbeki has protected him from all attempts by the international
community to restore order in Zimbabwe and prevent the economic collapse
that has driven four million Zimbabweans to seek refuge all over the world.
In his blind support for Mugabe's Liberation credentials Thabo Mbeki has
betrayed the people of Zimbabwe; he too has the blood of innocent Africans
on his hands. His brother, Moeletsi Mbeki, interviewed on Channel Four this
week spelled it out. The current wave of violence in South Africa was
inevitable, he said. We have warned him repeatedly. 'It was bound to
happen'.

It remains to be seen whether these terrified victims of violence in South
Africa will return to the motherland to face the Green Bombers and other
merchants of death over the border. It is an agonising decision. Like Morgan
Tsvangirai himself as he returns tomorrow, thousands of ordinary Zimbabweans
face a very uncertain future. No need to look elsewhere for the cause of
Zimbabwe's suffering. Zimbabweans know exactly where the blame lies. Robert
Mugabe - with more than a little help from his friend Thabo Mbeki - is the
source of the infection that is killing our people.

Yours in the (continuing) struggle. PH

Chamisa faces Chinamasa over land on TV

www.thezimbabwetimes.com

May 23, 2008

By Our Correspondent

BULAWAYO - The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) has said that Zimbabwe’s
land redistribution programme has remained largely unresolved because of
multiple farm ownership and lack of capacity to produce by resettled
farmers.

Speaking on Wednesday night during a television programme, Zimbabwe Today,
MDC spokesman, Nelson Chamisa, dismissed out of hand Zanu-PF’s oft-stated
claim that his party opposed equitable land redistribution and ownership.

Chamisa, who shared the platform with Patrick Chinamasa, Zanu-PF’s chairman
of information and publicity, said if, as widely- expected, the MDC won the
presidency in the forthcoming run-off, it would decisively deal with
multiple farm ownership as well as with the issue of lack of farming inputs.

“The MDC fully supports equitable land ownership,” said Chamisa, “but we
regard it as unfinished business.  It is unfinished business for us because
there are many challenges to address especially multiple farm ownership and
lack of machinery and other inputs. We want our farmers to be well-equipped
but not to own many farms as is the case with some well-connected people
now.”

Zanu-PF has always claimed that if the MDC formed the next government, it
will repossess land from resettled black farmers and return it to the white
commercial farmers, who were violently dispossessed of their farms during
government’s “land grab” campaign going back to 2000.

Then, so-called war veterans and militant Zanu –PF supporters waged a reign
of terror on farms countrywide, chasing the commercial farmers from the
land.  Dozens of white farmers and their workers were killed while valuable
property was destroyed.

Chamisa insisted that the MDC was mindful of the need for an equitable
redistribution of critical resource as well as for incapacitating farmers
through the timely provision of inputs such as fertiliser, seed, equipment
and machinery.

He said the undertaking to fair land ownership was reflected in the
political manifesto prepared by the MDC ahead of the March 29 elections. The
MDC MDC desisted from condemning the land reforms, but rejected the chaotic
manner in which the Zanu-PF has pursued the land redistribution since 2000.

The manifesto says, “Mugabe’s land reform scheme has compounded rather than
resolved the land issue as it destroyed the backbone of the national
economy.

“When the MDC forms the next government in Zimbabwe it will accept neither
the status quo that existed prior to 2000 nor the position it will inherit
after eight years of mayhem and destruction by a criminal elite.  The MDC is
fully committed to righting the historical imbalance in land distribution.

“An MDC government will bring the land crisis to closure through a
democratic and participatory process that achieves equitable, transparent,
just, lawful and economically efficient distribution and use of land, both
for agricultural and other purposes.”

The manifesto says the party will set up a Land Commission under an Act of
Parliament to oversee its own the land reform process.  At the outset, the
commission would audit the land ownership structure and move forward, guided
by its findings.

On the state of affairs in the MDC after the party contested the March 29
elections split, Chamisa explained that the two factions of the party had
reunited and were rallying behind Morgan Tsvangirai in the June 27 run-off.

“I strongly reject your reference to us as MDC-Tsvangirai,” said Chamisa to
Happison Muchechetere, the new Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation boss, who
anchored the discussion.

“The MDC is one.  The only political party in Zimbabwe that has a surname is
Zanu-PF.”

The MDC factions, which went separate ways after a dispute over whether or
not to participate in the 2005 Senate elections, have agreed to work
together again both in and out of Parliament.

Arthur Mutambara, who led the smaller faction, has said his group will also
support Tsvangirai in the run-off presidential election in which the MDC
leader faces Mugabe again after defeating him on March. Tsvangirai did not
win the majority required to form the next government.

Turning to political violence, which has engulfed the countryside after the
March elections, Chamisa reiterated that Zanu-PF was to blame. He said
so-called war veterans, Zanu- PF militia and supporters were perpetrating
retribution on the people as punishment for having voted for the MDC.

“Zanu-PF is to blame,” said Chamisa. “Just this afternoon (Wednesday
afternoon), we buried one of our supporters who was murdered by Zanu –PF
supporters.  We estimate that the death toll is now at 42 people.”

On the other hand, Chinamasa alleged that “a hidden hand” was fanning the
prevailing inter-party violence.  He alleged, without offering evidence,
that some US embassy officials in Harare, including the ambassador James
McGee were travelling to some areas in the country, inciting violence.

“There is evidence of a third force behind the political-motivated violence
cases.” Chinamasa alleged. We are aware that the US embassy and their allies
are bussing MDC youths to attack our supporters.”

Another violent loss for Zimbabwe's opposition

Globe and Mail, Canada

STEPHANIE NOLEN

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

May 24, 2008 at 12:10 AM EDT

JOHANNESBURG — The first time the Zimbabwe police arrested Tonderai Ndira
back in 1998, he didn't resist. In fact, he was smiling when they crammed
him into a tiny prison cell with other democracy activists, and his comrades
asked him why.

“He said we had to be strong because we were going to see such things,”
Reuben Tichareva, who has been one of Mr. Ndira's closest friends since the
age of 5, recalled yesterday. “He said such arrests will become a routine
thing as the struggle continues.”

Indeed they did. Mr. Ndira was arrested so often over the next decade – 35
times in all – that his friends and family started to believe he was
invincible. No matter how long the police held him, or how much they beat
him, he emerged alive and gentle and suffused with enthusiasm to educate
people about the need for political change.

Because Mr. Ndira led with such dignity and courage, “we called him our
Steve Biko,” Mr. Tichareva said, in a reference to the legendary South
African anti-apartheid activist.And now he and Mr. Biko have something else
in common: Mr. Ndira, too, has been viciously slain in his early 30s.

Tonderai Ndira's death is believed to be the work of pro-government forces
trying to immobilize the opposition before a vote in June.

He was dragged from his bed by six armed men on May 13, beaten savagely in
front of his wife and two children, and stuffed into an unmarked car.
His body, or most of it, was found Wednesday on the other side of town.

Mr. Ndira was part of a group of young people who helped found Zimbabwe's
opposition Movement for Democratic Change in 1999. But he had been
politically active long before that, campaigning for the rights of people in
Mabvuku, the slum neighbourhood where he grew up, then pushing for a
democratic constitution as the regime of President Robert Mugabe grew
increasingly autocratic.

Mr. Ndira rose through the ranks of the MDC, and for the past few years had
served as an irrepressible “advance man” for party leader Morgan Tsvangirai.

His slaying, and that of four other young MDC leaders in the past 10 days,
is widely believed to be the work of pro-government forces that have
launched a ruthless campaign to cripple the opposition as it tries to
prepare for a runoff presidential vote on June 27.

Mr. Tsvangirai is to return to Zimbabwe today, despite threats to his
safety, in part because he is determined to attend Mr. Ndira's funeral.
However, it is not yet clear that the government will allow the funeral,
scheduled for today, to go ahead.

From the time he was a child, Mr. Ndira stood up against the abuse of power.
Girls who went to school with him remember him for intervening when boys
taunted them. He abhorred violence. “He would say, ‘We are not fighting
people, but the system,'” Mr. Tichareva said.

Mr. Ndira had been in hiding since a wave of state-sponsored violence began
after it became clear that Mr. Mugabe's ZANU-PF party had lost the March 29
election, for the first time since Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980.

His family at first sought safety in rural areas, but when the violence
moved there, they came back to Mabvuku. Last Tuesday night, a worn-out Mr.
Ndira sneaked home to see them.

Shortly after dawn, as he lay sleeping, six men in dark glasses burst into
the house. One put a pistol to the head of Mr. Ndira's wife, Plaxedess
Mutariswa, who was in the kitchen, and ordered her to be quiet and show them
where her husband was.

Mr. Ndira awoke as they burst into the room, and for once, he did not go
willingly. “One of them said, ‘Let me hit him' and dragged him out of the
room,” Ms. Mutariswa said, weeping. “They started hitting him. He started
screaming for help. As they were busy hitting him I tried to run for the
door to call for help but I found another man with a gun on the door. He
said, ‘Just let a word out and I will blow your MDC head off.'” The men,
believed to be agents of the Central Intelligence Organization, carried Mr.
Ndira out to the car. His children Raphael, 10, and Linity, 7, watched from
the doorway.

“They threw Tonderai into the car as he pleaded with the people around him
to help save his life,” Ms. Mutariswa said. She saw two of the men sit on
her husband to keep him down inside the car as they drove off, saw another
stuff a cloth into his mouth and blindfold him.

“When they took him, I could feel a shiver down my spine,” said Ms.
Mutariswa. “I have seen police coming to take him 35 times, but this time
something in me told me that there was something very wrong.”

The family tried without success for a week to get information from the
authorities about where Mr. Ndira had been taken.

On Wednesday, a team from the MDC went to Harare's largest hospital to claim
the bodies of a pair of activists from the mortuary. The staff person on
duty told them there was another body, found on a farm outside the city,
which had not been claimed and suggested they try to identify it.

It fell to Mr. Tichareva to do that job. “It was horrific: his face had been
crushed and I could see a maggot on the left side. His left eye had been
removed, his nose was damaged, his tongue was missing. He had two holes, one
just below the ribcage and the other just near the heart. His body was black
with bruises. The murderers had used his boxers to cover his face.”

In fact, Mr. Tichareva, he would have been unable to say this body was his
friend's, but for the bangle he always wore on his left hand.

Ms. Mutariswa, who lapsed frequently into racking sobs at the wake,
described how, years ago, she tried to dissuade her husband from politics.

As she spoke, more than 100 people gathered outside the house, singing and
drumming in what became one of the largest opposition gatherings since the
election. Mr. Ndira's brothers emerged defiantly from hiding to attend;
inside, their mother could only sit and keen.

While those who gathered in Mabvuku for his wake yesterday vowed to fight on
in his name, they also said they didn't know how they could carry on without
his leadership. “We can only say we will try, but I don't think we can match
that level where Tonderai had taken this to,” Mr. Tichareva said.

With a report from Globe and Mail contributors in Harare

Mugabe diverts Air Zim plane to China

Zim Online

by Simplicious Chirinda Saturday 24 May 2008

HARARE – President Robert Mugabe this week grabbed an Air Zimbabwe plane to
fly him to China, leaving management at the national airline scurrying
around for alternative means to take passengers on a scheduled flight to
Singapore, sources told ZimOnline.

It was not immediately clear whether Mugabe’s rushed trip on Wednesday to
China was for personal or state business with other sources in the
government suggesting the 84-year old leader went to Beijing for routine
medical check up.

“We were told by management to fix the Boeing 767 on Wednesday morning for
the VIPs. Usually the fixing involves shutting down the business class and
removing seats and replacing them with more comfortable seats and a bed,”
said a source at Air Zimbabwe.

“The plane which was supposed to go Singapore that evening was then diverted
to take the President to China on Wednesday afternoon,” added the source,
who spoke on condition he was not named.

Mugabe’s spokesman George Charamba was not immediately available for comment
on the matter.

Air Zimbabwe chief executive officer Peter Chikumba confirmed that the
airline was this week requested to provide an aircraft to “fly VIPs” to
China. But he sought to downplay the matter saying it was normal for VIPs to
make such requests.

Chikumba said: “This is not a new thing. It is the norm that when VIPs are
traveling they make a request and in this case their request was granted and
they are paying for that. We have made alternative arrangements for
passengers who were affected.”

This is not the first time that Mugabe has diverted Air Zimbabwe planes from
scheduled flights. He often does this whenever he wishes to fly outside the
country and sometimes even when he is travelling on personal business – and
in the process leaving passengers stranded.

Zimbabwe’s national carrier has since the country’s economic crisis started
in 2000 lost its position as one of the best airlines in Africa due to
mismanagement and interference by the government.

Starved of cash for re-equipment, Air Zimbabwe uses mostly obsolete
technology and equipment while nearly all its planes are between 16 and 20
years old. – ZimOnline

Thousands flee as hatred spreads

Refugees huddle in churches and police stations as mobs threaten to attack

Chris McGreal in Johannesburg
The Guardian,
Saturday May 24 2008

George Mhanda came to Johannesburg to feed his family, struggling to eat
under Robert Mugabe's derelict rule. The Zimbabwean mechanic found a job in
a local garage and a room in a small house in Tembisa township, and sent
cash home every month.

This week he fled the house ahead of a baying mob hunting down African
immigrants, and made for the sanctuary of the Central Methodist Church in
the heart of Johannesburg. He thinks his job is gone but now his priority is
just to survive. At night he arms himself with a small pile of bricks for
defence against the hostile mobs roaming outside, and settles down to sleep
among hundreds of other unwelcome Africans on a flight of stairs in the
church.

Mhanda cannot quite believe it has come to this. He had heard of such things
in Rwanda and Kenya, of the killers going door to door in search of those
who are different. But he never imagined it in Johannesburg, one of the most
diverse and cosmopolitan cities on the continent and a beacon for
immigrants.

"There's crime here, we all know that. But people come from all over to
Johannesburg. It's that kind of city, not just a South African city but an
African city. I can't understand it," he said. "Now maybe I will have to go
back to Zimbabwe. I will wait a few days and see what happens but perhaps it
is worse to be here than there."

South Africa's bloodletting is a long way from the ethnic killings of Rwanda
and Kenya. But at least 43 people have been murdered and tens of thousands
forced from their homes as mobs hunted down African immigrants in a dozen
Johannesburg suburbs and satellite townships. With it has come looting and
rape.

Thousands of immigrants are fleeing home. About 15,000 Mozambicans crossed
the border back to their country on Thursday alone. Others packed
Johannesburg's bus and train stations looking for a way out. Many thousands
are crammed into police compounds and community halls.

More than 2,000 immigrants, mostly Zimbabweans, are sheltering at the
Central Methodist Church. They fill every space, sleeping on the pews, in
the corridors, on the stairs. About a third are women and children.
Makeshift defensive weapons are everywhere - bricks, wood from broken
chairs, metal bars.

There were skirmishes around the church as mobs attacked the refugees in
recent days, and plenty of threats and insults from passersby, before the
police parked a couple of cars outside. In one of the attacks a deaf-mute
man who did not hear the warnings of an attack was beaten around the head,
leaving a gash down to his skull.

Now the violence is spreading across the country to Cape Town, Durban and
the Free State.

Some of the scenes in the townships and squatter camps were disturbingly
reminiscent of hatred seen elsewhere.

The mob that drove Mhanda from his home consisted of hundreds of young men
armed with machetes, spears, knobkerries [clubs] and metal pipes fashioned
to look like guns. They danced their way through Tembisa in scenes evocative
of the bloody township wars when rival black political groups competed for
power with the twilight of apartheid in the early 1990s.

"There was hatred in their eyes," said Mhanda. "They were shouting things in
Zulu. I didn't understand but I knew what they wanted to do, to kill the
foreigners. It was very frightening. The people in the street told me to
run. They said that if those boys caught me I would be dead for sure."

Patrols

Two foreigners were murdered the night that Mhanda fled and scores of shacks
burned or looted. In other places the victims have been burned alive, or
chopped into pieces.

The attacks mostly come at night. Sometimes the mobs know where the foreign
families live but if they are in doubt they haul them out of their beds and
ask a simple question in Zulu, the lingua franca of the townships. Lack of
comprehension is dangerous.

The scenes in Tembisa have resulted in something else not seen since the end
of apartheid - South African soldiers patrolling the townships.

A Somali was killed yesterday when a mob in Du Noon in Cape Town attacked
shacks and looted shops, and pelted foreigners with rocks and bottles. The
police took about 500 immigrants to the protection of a police station.

Du Noon residents said they wanted all the foreigners out.

"We want them to leave by Sunday," Nonkululeko Sarlana told the South
African Press Association.

Moses Ndabihawenimana and his two brothers fled Burundi two years ago after
their parents were murdered there. Now he fears a similar fate in South
Africa. "This is war. They are going to kill us," he said.

The church's bishop, Paul Verryn, said ordinary South Africans had grown
hostile to African immigrants as Zimbabweans flooded into the country. By
some estimates there are 3 million Zimbabweans in South Africa and about 2
million other African immigrants.

"The numbers here created anxiety," he said. "You can't get away from the
fact that some of them are very educated with a substantial work ethic - the
Zimbabweans in particular. This is true of refugees the world over. They
will do whatever work they need to survive. If they are doctors and they
have to sell newspapers they will do it. And you watch them advance faster
and they're sitting ducks."

"Ask my boss why he employs me," said Mhanda. "He is a white boss. He will
tell you South Africans are lazy. They get up and start drinking beer. They
don't like to work. They don't do the job properly. They don't come to work
and still expect to be paid. He says he has had to deal with that all his
life."

That is not the view in Alexandra, a township of about 500,000 people living
in difficult conditions in the heart of Johannesburg where the violence
began two weeks ago. It, like Soweto, has been one of the beneficiaries of
large government spending to bring decent housing and schools to the
townships.

But what the uplift has not brought is jobs. Earning a living remained
difficult, and was not made easier as Zimbabweans fleeing their country's
economic crisis packed in to the township.

Many were well educated and found work that Alexandrans could not. The
bitterness grew until it exploded. Now about 1,000 immigrants are packed in
to the compound of the township's police station for protection.

Veronica Khoza, a street trader, has little sympathy. "They give the jobs to
Zimbabweans because they will work for cheap wages. We are South Africans.
We know our rights and we demand to be paid properly," she said.

There is also contempt for their failure to take on Robert Mugabe.

"They have run away," said Khoza "All they do is complain about how horrible
Mugabe is to them. Why don't they stay in their country and fight? We fought
apartheid. Many people were killed. Many people went to prison, even
children. The white soldiers were here, in Alexandra, and they shot people.
We didn't just run away."

Perhaps not, but large numbers of South Africans did leave the country to
join the liberation struggle and ended up living in Zimbabwe, Angola,
Tanzania and Mozambique. It is a source of bitterness among immigrants from
those countries that the hospitality they offered is not reciprocated.

More than 5,000 immigrants have stayed at Verryn's church since it opened
its doors to them four years ago. Some have slept there for just a couple of
nights. Others have remained for years. About one-third are women and
children who sleep in a separate part of the building although a number of
women have become pregnant and given birth while living in the church.

This, and allegations of criminal activity, has led to hostile coverage in
the South African press that Verryn says has contributed to antagonism
toward immigrants. He is exercised by an article in the Johannesburg Star
newspaper two years ago under the headline: "Place of worship now a den of
iniquity".

Appeal

It carried the story of a Zimbabwean immigrant, Andrew Khumalo, who was
stabbed to death in the church in a row over clothes. It quoted members of
the congregation as complaining that people had sex in the church, and there
was drunkenness and brawling.

"There are problems but look at the other people who have settled here who
are a credit to the country. Some are working in their professions. There
are builders, mechanics, accountants, teachers," said Verryn. "There's a
sense of solidarity, of family, in this building. People really help each
other."

The police raided the church in February, arresting hundreds of undocumented
immigrants. Verryn said the police behaved like criminals.

"They were assaulting people. They were stealing. Their whole demeanour was
aggressive," he said.

All those detained were later freed.

Many South Africans are ashamed of the violence. Desmond Tutu, the former
archbishop of Cape Town and anti-apartheid leader, appealed for an end to
the attacks. "We human beings, ever since the Garden of Eden, are looking
for scapegoats," he wrote.

The bishop receives a call about a church in the wealthy white Johannesburg
suburb which is less than enthusiastic about taking refugees. He quotes
Matthew's gospel at the caller - "I was a stranger and you welcomed me in"
and, after hanging up, smiles and says he might send a few homeless
immigrants up to the hesitant church.

UNHCR voices concern over SA attacks

Zim Online

by Jameson Mombe Saturday 24 May 2008

GENEVA – The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) has voiced
concern at xenophobic violence in South Africa that has killed at least 42
African immigrants and displaced more than 15 000 others.

The world refugee agency said it was particularly concerned that the attacks
against foreigners had also targeted genuine refugees and asylum seekers
such as Zimbabweans who fled their home country because of political
violence and persecution.

"UNHCR remains deeply concerned about the xenophobic attacks against
foreigners in South Africa, including refugees and asylum seekers who fled
to South Africa seeking protection from persecution in their own countries,”
Pagonis told journalists in Geneva.

The UNCHR spokeswoman said reports from the agency's teams on the ground in
South Africa indicated that a large majority of foreigners displaced by the
xenophobic violence were Zimbabweans who she said could not return home
because of political turmoil there.

"While thousands of Mozambicans are reportedly streaming home, many
Zimbabweans cannot consider returning home due to the well-known situation
in their country," said Pagonis, who called on South African authorities to
consider ways to regularise Zimbabweans’ stay in that country.

The violent attacks on foreigners started last week in Johannesburg’s
Alexandra township of the poor. The attacks quickly spread to other
townships in Diepsloot, Hillbrow, Jeppe, Cleveland, Thokoza and Tembisa
leaving thousands of African immigrants without shelter or food after their
homes were looted and burnt down.

The violence has also spread to the provinces of KwaZulu-Natal, North West
and Mpumalanga and on Friday more attacks against foreigners were reported
in South Africa’s second largest city and tourism capital, Cape Town.

President Thabo Mbeki earlier this week ordered the military to help the
police curb the xenophobic violence, a move analysts saw as an admission by
the government that the attacks on foreigners had become a national crisis
that could destabilise Africa's largest economy. – ZimOnline

2010 World Cup chief slams attacks on foreigners

Zim Online

by Own Correspondent Saturday 24 May 2008

JOHANNESBURG – World Cup chief organiser Danny Jordaan on Friday condemned
xenophobic attacks in South Africa but said the violence would pass before
the football showpiece takes place in 2010.

Xenophobic violence that broke out last week in Johannesburg’s poor
townships has killed more than 40 African immigrants, some being brunt alive
in scenes that have shocked South Africa’s leadership and unsettled foreign
investors.

At least 25 000 immigrants, most of them from Zimbabwe, Malawi and
Mozambique, were displaced in the attacks and many were this week fleeing
South Africa, returning home where economic conditions are tougher but their
lives are safer.

Jordaan told the media in Beijing that both China and South Africa were
under the microscope because they were scheduled to host two of the world’s
biggest sporting events. China is due to host the 2008 Olympics and was
recently hit by a powerful earthquake that devastated the city of Sichuan.

"We can see the focus of attention on our countries, for completely
different reasons, both of them tragic," he told the International Football
Arena conference.

"Our standpoint is that this World Cup must be a celebration of Africa's
humanity. Africa has too often been a continent of division, of wars, of
humiliation. And certainly we condemn any situation that continues to
inflict on African people humiliation, suffering, war, disease.

"So our position is crystal clear and we ask that every action must be taken
to stop inflicting on displaced people further displacement."

Jordaan said South Africa hoped the football extravaganza would help
increase the country’s tourism figures from 7.4 million last year to 10
million tourists in 2010 and he was confident the violence would not be a
problem by then.

The violent attacks on foreigners started last week in Johannesburg’s
Alexandra township of the poor before spreading quickly to other townships,
leaving thousands of African immigrants without shelter or food after their
homes were looted and burnt down.

"It's something that will pass . . . South Africans are not xenophobic," he
said.

Jordaan assured the football fraternity that South Africa was working flat
out to ensure that all the stadiums would be ready in time for the
tournament, although he conceded that finishing a new stadium in Port
Elizabeth in time for the Confederations Cup in July next year was "a
challenge".

He said South Africa hoped to emulate 2006 host Germany in welcoming
visitors without match tickets at "Fan Parks", where they would be able to
watch games on big screens in a secure environment.

"Our view is that fan parks should be as important as the stadiums," he
said. "It must be structured, organised and that includes security. We see
it as another World Cup site."

Jordaan said he thought the litmus test of a big sporting event was how well
the local community embraced it.

"I don't think there are any football fans like African football fans, with
painted faces, with colourful dress with song and dance and celebration," he
said – ZimOnline

African Activists Launch Campaign Against Zimbabwe

This Day On Line, Nigeria

05.24.2008

Thousands of people in dozens of cities across Africa and the rest of the
globe will tomorrow demonstrate their solidarity with victims of rights
abuses in Zimbabwe.
The “Stand Up For Zimbabwe” campaign by a coalition of  African civil
society organisations including the Southern Africa Litigation Centre, East
Africa Law Society, Treatment Action Campaign, the Crisis in Zimbabwe
Coalition and the Congress of South African Trade Unions,  is highlighting
the continuing political crisis in Zimbabwe and calling on people across the
globe  to press the Southern African Development Community,  African Union
and the United Nations to act decisively to end systematic political
violence in the country and  resolve the country’s long-standing  political
crisis.
“The  situation in Zimbabwe  continues to deteriorate because world leaders
have let Zimbabwe’s rulers to persecute opposition activists and subvert
democratic principles with impunity,”  he said.
This makes people lose faith in democratic processes,’ said Regis Mtutu,
spokesperson for the Treatment Action Campaign of South Africa.
“Zimbabweans opposed to ZANU-PF face horrific violence every day. As African
civil society groups, we are saying there has been enough hand-wringing,
division and ineptitude in dealing with the crisis in Zimbabwe.”
 The consequences of the crisis reverberate across the region and we cannot
sit idly while our Zimbabwean brothers and sisters are beaten, raped and
driven away from their homes because they dare to exercise their democratic
rights. African political and civil society leaders and other world leaders
must act to stop the violence and other human rights violations.”
May 25, a day traditionally marked to celebrate the establishment of the
African Union (formerly the Organisation of African Unity), is the start of
a series of campaign calling all to “Stand up for Zimbabwe.”
 Events are scheduled for: South Africa, Tanzania, Nigeria, Kenya, Zambia,
Namibia, Burkina Faso, Botswana, Lesotho, Benin, Cote d'Ivoire, Gambia,
Ghana, Liberia, Niger, Sierra Leone, Togo, Cameroon and Senegal, to name a
few.

Zimbabwe: Forcing the Media Back on Message

Institute for War & Peace Reporting (London)

23 May 2008
Posted to the web 23 May 2008

Jabu Shoko
London

As Zimbabwe braces for what many fear will be a bloody run-off election next
month, ZANU-PF’s powerful central committee has shifted into top gear to
make sure President Robert Mugabe reverses the electoral defeat he suffered
on March 29.

In addition to widespread intimidation spearheaded by militias in areas
where voters backed Morgan Tsvangirai and the Movement for Democratic
Change, MDC, the authorities are tightening up control over the state media.

On May 14, the government dismissed Henry Muradzikwa, chief executive at the
Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation, ZBC, apparently for failing to slant
coverage towards President Mugabe and ZANU-PF ahead of the first round of
elections, held on March 29.

Insider sources say the ZBC got the blame for carrying MDC political adverts
that were better than the ones produced by ZANU-PF.

Muradzikwa’s replacement was named as Happison Muchechetere, a senior
broadcast journalist at the station and a staunch ZANU-PF loyalist.

Within days of taking over at ZBC, Muchechetere rejigged its programming,
replacing popular soap operas at prime viewing time with documentaries from
the archives, mostly glorifying Mugabe’s role in the 1970s war of
liberation, but some of them demonising Tsvangirai and his alleged western
backers.

ZANU-PF has beefed up its own PR and media arm ahead of the second-round
presidential election, scheduled for June 27. A revamped sub-committee on
information and publicity will be led by Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa,
a hardline Mugabe ally.

According to ZBC insiders, the committee has effectively taken over the
running of the state media including the broadcaster, and has a brief to run
a sustained propaganda campaign in support of Mugabe.

Other members of the media committee include Webster Shamu, Mugabe’s
minister of policy implementation, Chris Mutsvangwa, a former chief
executive of ZBC, and George Charamba, the permanent secretary for
information and publicity, who writes a vitriolic weekly column in the
government mouthpiece, The Herald.

Journalists say Charamba recently read the riot act to the editors of all
the government-run newspapers, telling them in no uncertain terms they
should not publish stories which “put Tsvangirai and the MDC in a good
 light”.

Useni Sibanda, a political analyst who works as a coordinator for the
Christian Alliance, said the government had moved to close off the small
amount of media space afforded to Tsvangirai and the MDC prior to the March
29 polls. He said the sacking of Muradzikwa showed that ZANU-PF would not
tolerate any view other than its own.

As well as its new media body, ZANU-PF has also established special
committees to improve the availability of food and public transport – seen
as key election issues.

These committees are clearly intended to push through quick-fix economic
measures in the hope that this will encourage wavering voters to support
Mugabe.

ZANU-PF’s food committee is already distributing maize meal, the staple
diet, and is setting up “People’s Shops” where scarce basic commodities are
being sold at controlled prices.

"We have realised that people were hungry when they went to the polls,”
party spokesman Nathan Shamuyarira told The Herald, according to AFP news
agency.

The distribution of basic foodstuffs follows last week’s scrapping of import
duty on groceries, and the May 2 decision to float the Zimbabwean dollar
which succeeded in persuading many people to change their foreign currency
at the banks at the attractive new rate, rather than on the black market.
This ensured an influx of much-needed foreign currency into the banks, where
the authorities can access it to fund their pre-election strategy.

Finally, the party has instructed the monopoly Grain Marketing Board to
regularly review the price it pays farmers for maize. With effect from this
week, farmers are now being paid cash for consignments of up to five tonnes,
with transport laid on for no cost.

Meanwhile, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, RBZ, has reportedly been ordered to
print money to underwrite the regime’s new-found largesse and finance
procurements of fuel, maize and farm machinery, as well as wages for the
security services and paramilitaries who are carrying out a campaign of
intimidation on the ground.

A new unrestrained emission of money is unlikely to help the Zimbabwean
dollar, which has plunged from 30,000 to the US dollar, at which it was
artificially held from September 2007 to May 2, to reach 255 million to one
on May 16, the last day for which the RBZ website published rates. (See
Pre-Election Sweeteners for Zimbabwe Voters, ZCR No. 146, 16-May-08.)

Mugabe made clear his intention to galvanise his party in a speech to its
central committee on May 16.

In the March 29 joint elections, which the MDC won more seats in parliament
than ZANU-PF and Mugabe performed worse than Tsvangirai, although election
officials ruled that a run-off was necessary because neither candidate got
over 50 per cent of the vote. It was, Mugabe told central committee members,
“a dismal result”.

"As [party] leaders, we all share the blame, from the national level to that
of the branch chairman. We played truant; we did not lead, we misled; we did
not encourage, rather we discouraged; we did not unite, we divided; we did
not inspire, we dispirited; we did not mobilise, we demobilised,” he said,
arguing that ZANU-PF went into the elections a "bickering and divided party"
and failed to mobilise a “sleeping vote” that rightfully belonged to it.

"We have a crucial run-off ahead of us. We must use it to repair the damage
and shortcomings which we suffered in the harmonised polls,” he said.

Mugabe’s call appears to have been heeded. Sources in ZANU-PF have told IWPR
that key personnel both in the party and in government are being replaced in
a bid to deliver an election victory.

“Money is not a problem,” said a senior ZANU-PF insider, speaking on
condition of anonymity.

The formula of tighter control over ZANU-PF and government agencies like the
media and economic sweeteners for the population augment the authorities’
strategy of intimidating its opponents, especially in constituencies once
seen as ZANU-PF strongholds but captured by the MDC in the parliamentary
polls.

Analysts say the violence has created no-go areas for the opposition in much
of rural Mashonaland, Manicaland and Masvingo.

MDC spokesman Nelson Chamisa says the death toll of opposition supporters
and sympathisers is rising day by day, reaching 42 as of May 20. He has also
alleged that injured opposition supporters have been denied medical
treatment at government hospitals, at the same time as thousands of others
are displaced by the violence, thus ensuring that they cannot vote.

“We have cases where people perceived to be opposition supporters have their
identity documents confiscated or burnt,” added Chamisa.

Eldred Masunungure, a professor of political science at the University of
Zimbabwe, said the range of strategies deployed by ZANU-PF showed how
determined it was to get Mugabe re-elected.

Masunungure said that if the outcome of the June 27 election was to be
accepted as legitimate, it was essential for the Southern African
Development Community, SADC, the African Union, AU, and other international
observers to be allowed to supervise and monitor the polls,

“But every fair-minded person realises that the current volatile political
climate is not conducive for free and fair elections,” he added. “ZANU and
Mugabe are determined to win at all costs. They are leaving nothing to
chance to bag this election.”

Masunungure believes the mood of optimism that preceded the first round has
now changed, and argued, “The psychological make-up emanating from the
violence is that prospective voters are not likely to vote. They are already
being guided by fear of retribution.”

Sibanda agreed, noting, “There is so much violence that it is impossible to
talk of free and fair elections. ZANU-PF is using all manner of tricks to
win the polls.”

Chinamasa has ruled out inviting western observers or anyone else perceived
to be sympathetic to the opposition. He has also said the election observers
invited to the first round will have to be re-accredited.

There are concerns that non-governmental organisations like the Zimbabwe
Electoral Support Network, ZESN, will not be allowed to do their work this
time around. ZESN organised a vote tabulation in parallel with the official
count.

Jabu Shoko is a pseudonym for a journalist in Zimbabwe.

Zimbabweans Fleeing South Africa

Friday, May. 23, 2008 By MEGAN LINDOW/JOHANNESBURG

Morgan Tsvangirai, is greeted by Zimbabwe refugees effected by the recent xenophobia attacks in Alexandra Township while on a tour of the worst effected areas, in Johannesburg, South Africa, May 22, 2008.

Kim Ludbrook / EPA

 

For the past two weeks, Zimbabweans in South Africa have cowered in fear as xenophobic mobs have rampaged through townships splitting heads and burning flesh to send them a simple, ugly message: Go home. On Thursday, they heard the same message echoed from an unlikely quarter. Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai made a surprise visit to a police station in Alexandra township, where hundreds of his compatriots have sought refuge from the mobs, and urged them to follow him home. Tsvangirai is facing an increasingly violent political challenge at home, with supporters of President Robert Mugabe unleashing a campaign of intimidation against opposition supporters ahead of a runoff presidential election scheduled for June. Tsvangirai told the crowd he would return to Zimbabwe in the next few days, despite fears that he could be assassinated, and he invited the refugees of Alexandra to join him. "Let's go back home, let's solve the Zimbabwean problem," he told a jubilant crowd.

A couple of weeks ago, most of the Zimbabweans who'd managed to establish themselves here in Africa's richest economy might have scoffed at Tsvangirai's invitation. But amid ongoing violence against immigrants in different parts of the country — and the South African authorities resolved to deploy the military to restore order where necessary — areas such as Alexandra have been rapidly emptied of foreigners. For now, most of the 15,000 people displaced in the attacks have sought refuge in police stations, churches and community centers. (Though thousands more refugees have likely found their way to friends and families living in other areas.) But at these emergency shelters, many have begun talking of returning home to the impoverished and strife-ridden countries they fled.

Already about 10,000 people have opted to return home to Mozambique, an official from that government — which has laid on buses for would-be returnees — told Reuters. At the police station in Primrose east of Johannesburg, where about 5,000 people are camping in tents in an adjacent field, cheers erupted Wednesday as five buses arrived to take people back to Mozambique. On the opposite side of the field, 26-year old Mozambican Domingos Ubsse was sitting inside a minibus taxi, waiting to leave for Maputo. After 20 armed men barged into the room he shares with four others, breaking everything, he decided to leave: "My work is here, but I am going home because I don't feel safe here," he says.

Even Zimbabweans, who face not only poverty but also hunger and persecution in a country in economic and political free-fall, are choosing to return home rather than face more anti-immigrant violence in South Africa. In central Johannesburg on Thursday, a bus depot buzzed with scores of Zimbabweans desperate to get on buses bound for home. While these buses typically depart for Zimbabwe only half full, the past few days have seen them filled beyond capacity, says Victor Ramaphosa, an inspector with the Revival Bus Company.

Tinei Murimbechi managed to escape from the small convenience store he owned in Tembisa with just 250 rand ($35) — just enough to afford the bus fare back to his home near Bulawayo — before a crowd of South Africans brandishing fighting sticks and spears looted it, singing "Out with foreigners." Before he fled, he says he watched the mob kill three men: one of them was shot and the other two bludgeoned.

Running his small store in Tembisa, east of Johannesburg, had enabled Murimbechi to support three younger siblings back in Zimbabwe, he says. "Maybe I will come back here," he adds desolately. "Or maybe Morgan Tsvangirai will win the election, and maybe the economic situation will improve." About a dozen other Zimbabweans at the bus depot shared similar stories with TIME, while others seeking shelter in the Central Methodist Church in downtown Johannesburg — where around 3,000 mainly Zimbabweans are have found a makeshift refuge — said that they would return home if they could afford to.

Meanwhile, in the squatter camp of Ramaphosa east of Johannesburg, scavengers sifted through the charred wreckage where foreigners' shacks once stood, carting away sheets of twisted and blackened metal. One neighbor stepped out of his shack to claim that the Mozambicans chased out two days ago had provoked the attacks by planning revenge attacks on South Africans after hearing of the violence in Alexandra. "They want to rule here in South Africa," said the man, who declined to give his name.

A few meters away, two South African men sit guarding their own shacks from looting by their countrymen. One says he has stayed away from his job as a mechanic for two days in order to protect his property. "I'm afraid to sleep here," says one of the men who only gives his first name, Alpheu. "These foreigners can come in the night to kill us." When the anti-immigrant mobs began their rampage, he says, they pounded on his door, saying, "Why are you sleeping?" and demanding that he join them. But he refused. "They are still our brothers," he says.

As the men talk, the retreating form of an older man in a gray coat walking hastily down the road in the direction of the police station catches their eye. "He's a Shangaan," explains the other man, who gives his name as Sidney. (Shangaans are a South African ethnic group also found in Mozambique, and a number of them have been victimized during the anti-immigrant violence.) "Maybe he was going to see if he could rescue some of his stuff. If they see him here, they can kill him now. You can see he's afraid."

The last adventurer