The ZIMBABWE Situation | Our
thoughts and prayers are with Zimbabwe - may peace, truth and justice prevail. |
Human rights violations by the regime government in Zimbabwe should never be
treated with kid gloves by the free world! It's a pity African silidarity
ignores crying voices of the traumatised people of Zimbabwe and instead
appease a clever and cunning dictatorship.Why does the government ban
international journalists if it is not to prevent them from reporting its
evil machinations. 'Silent diplomasy' is silent assassination, a stub in the
back by fellow Africans without compassion of the victims of hatred. Urban
people are paying for the government's mismanagement and corruption and
challenge to their one party sate
dictatorship.
Who will protect the
poor if their own governmemt kicks them away as dirty (tsvina)."Operation
Murambatsvina" is wicked and callous, its motives are clearly to decimate
the population.The world shoud take the cues, Didimus Mutasa is on record
for saying Zimbabwe only needs a polulation of 6 million and so they will
kill.Do we wait for a genocide do take place then eveil can be stopped? How
can anyone justify the madness of throwing people out of their homes in the
coldest month of the year? This should treated as a a crime agaoinst
humanity.People's means of livelihood, shelter, children's education and
security all have been destroyed mercilessly with armed men! Imagine being
forced to distoy your own shelter at gun point! Think of the people now
starving, those who have died and those who will die! Think of all those
weakened by HIV /AIDS sleeping outsite homes out in the cold in June! The
leaders distroyed the economy, they distroyed people's jobs and now they
distroyed their homes and means of livelihood.
The world should never
be hoodwinked into thinking there is government
planning to help poor
people! You don't bring Youth militia, riot police and
armed soldiers with
guns beating up people making them refugees in their own
country then and
turn and say that this is good for the people! Right now
people are
frightened of their own governmemnt, is that an internal affair?
How many
millions have now become refugees and being are degraded in other
countries?Botswana is creating an electric fence to block Zimabweans and
introduced flogging of Zimbabwean refugees-Is that an internal problem?
People are being tortured home and away! Zimbabwe is now a police state and
people are not free!The African leaders are all pathetic in failing to
rebuke a clear case of human rights violations.They claim that it is an
internal problem when they are receiving an influx of refugees whom they are
mercelessly abusing in their countries.Somalia moved to the present state
bit by bit when the shameless OAU now callin itself AU watched at a distance
and dismissed as an internal problem.Now Somalia is no more and it has
disintegrated into War lords's territories sponsored by Arabs.
Let us
say "NO!" to dictatorship.Honorable men and women with conscience
should
resign from a cruel organisation. MDC is silent when all this
happening and
some are ven coniving with the ruling party!
Takamboreva
The Scotsman
Mugabe attacks Blair and turns back on 'useless'
Commonwealth
TREVOR GRUNDY
ROBERT Mugabe has ruled out ever
trying to get back into the "useless"
Commonwealth during a blistering
attack on Tony Blair and his "gay
gangsters".
In his first interview
for more than a year, Mugabe also insisted he had
discussed the issue at
length during a meeting with Prince Charles, where he
expressed his
admiration and respect for the Royal Family.
The 81-year-old did,
however, say he would open his doors to Foreign Office
diplomats in a bid to
restore relations between Zimbabwe and Britain.
Mugabe has been
ostracised by the international community after a million of
his own people
were made homeless in a campaign to punish opposition
supporters for voting
against his ruling party Zanu (PF).
The Zimbabwean president said in
Harare: "If Tony Blair wants to open his
doors and he wants us to open our
doors, fine. His people can come here. My
people can go to London and mend
our relations."
But he dismissed speculation that members of the
Commonwealth Secretariat
would be able to persuade him to try to rejoin the
53-nations 'club' that
takes in roughly a third of the world's
population.
He described the Commonwealth as "a useless body which has
treated Zimbabwe
in a dishonourable manner". Mugabe told the London-based
magazine New
African that he wants his rejection of the Commonwealth written
in the
hearts of the people of Zimbabwe.
"We will establish relations
with individual members of the Commonwealth;
there is nothing wrong with
that. And even if we get a Britain which is not
run in the same way in
regard to our relations as the Britain of Tony
Blair - fine.
"We will
mend our relations, and this is what I told Prince Charles when we
met in
Rome recently at the Pope's funeral."
It is the first reference Mugabe
has made to his handshake with the heir to
the British throne on April
8.
A Clarence House official said: "The Prince of Wales was caught by
surprise
and not in a position to avoid shaking Mr Mugabe's hand." But
according to
Mugabe, the two men had a long chat and recalled the night of
April 17,
1980, when the Prince attended Zimbabwe's independence
celebrations.
"We discussed relations and we said we have tremendous
respect for the
Queen. Every member of the Royal Family has been to Zimbabwe
and we have
tremendous respect for every member of that family.
"We
have souvenirs of their visits here. We respect them and we continue to
respect them." But that "respect" excludes Tony Blair, whom Mugabe says is
surrounded by people he refers to as "Blair's gay gangsters".
A
source close to the ruling Zanu (PF) party, who asked not to be named,
said:
"It's a typical Mugabe ploy. He is appealing to the British people
over the
head of Tony Blair.
"Mugabe is clever. He uses the same tactic with the
South Africans and
threatens Thabo Mbeki whenever he can. He says to African
leaders that
Mbeki - who is George Bush's point man in Africa - wants Mugabe
to go slow
on land reform because he [Mbeki] is a puppet of the white
man."
Last week Scotland on Sunday revealed that low-level talks between
Zimbabwean and British officials had already opened in Harare on the subject
of repairing long-damaged relations before the start of the G8 meeting at
Gleneagles.
Mbeki and his Tanzanian counterpart, Benjamin Mkapa, are
expected to tell
Britain and other G8 countries to seek a fast agreement
with Zimbabwe in
order to stave off hunger and chaos in a key southern
African country.
They would like to see Mugabe retire and live
comfortably with his young
wife Grace and their three children at a £7m
palace in the once all-white
suburb of Borrowdale in Harare.
The
understanding would be that Britain and the Commonwealth Secretariat
would
then deal with the next Zimbabwean leader Joyce Mujuru, the vice
president,
who is married to one of Zimbabwe's richest men, Solomon Mujuru.
He was
the commander of Mugabe's military machine during the war against
white-ruled Rhodesia between 1972 and 1979.
Meanwhile, diplomats in
Harare were stunned to hear that Anna Kajumulo
Tibaijuka, executive director
of the Nairobi-based UN-Habitat and a close
friend of Tanzania's president
Ben Mkapa, who supports Mugabe, had told the
People's Daily in China that by
demolishing thousands of shantytown homes,
Mugabe had declared war "not on
poor people but on poverty".
She was in Harare to study the scope of the
recent eviction of "illegal
squatters and dwellers" who, say Zimbabwean
insiders, supported the
opposition Movement for Democratic Change at the
election in March.
Television pictures showed her being handed a starving
baby at Porta Farm in
Zimbabwe.
"The baby is starving," she
exclaimed, handing it back immediately. "Give it
food." But a voice off
screen said - "There is no food."
The legal affairs spokesman for the
MDC, David Coltart, told Scotland on
Sunday that he expected Mugabe to start
demolishing the homes of anyone who
opposes him. "I have no doubt that if
the Mugabe regime can think of a
pretext that it can sell to Africa, it will
do anything to undermine the
opposition," he said.
"That could easily
include raiding homes of opposition figures. I suspect
that they will allege
that leaders are individually guilty of some serious
offence and use that to
justify further harassment."
He added: "Mugabe said that his intention
was to bury the opposition, and he
and his cronies will undoubtedly do
everything possible to destroy the
opposition."
Bay of Plenty Times, New Zealand
KAPAI: It's time to crack merciless
Mugabe for six
03.07.2005
When Elvis released his hit song In
the Ghetto it made the whole world
shiver with shame as you painted a
picture of the snow falling on a cold and
hungry child in the ghetto, with
his mama crying, because she couldn't feed
the little hungry mouth who cried
out for kai.
And so it is today in Zimbabwe where thousands of Mamas
and their
babies are about to face the freezing cold in a ghetto created by
Robert
Mugabe or should I say Robber Mudgarbage and his gutless government.
This
dictatorial dickhead is waging war on his own people while the world
watches
and waits for the next over to be
bowled.
Trouble is, if we wait and watch too long
this mudguardhead Mugabe
will destroy everything and everyone in his way and
before you can say Idiot
Amin, Pol Pothead or Slobbering Sonofabitch, we
have genocide knocking at
Zims door.
So what can little old land of
the long white cloud do to rain on
Rubbish Mugarbage's regime? Send over our
one warship our one warplane and a
truckload of get well soon cards? Yeah
right. That's like sending kittens to
Clive to fix up the
Lions.
Surely we can stand up to Zimbabwe in the same way as we
stood up to
South Africa not that long ago. What Graeme Mourie, a man of
mana did, by
turning his back on a test jersey for the peoples of the
rainbow nation was
a big ask. Now Stephen needs to stand tall in the same
way and stay home.
The other bad bugger in this sad movie is the
part played by the ICC
who refuse to see past profit and, just like other
fish heads who see human
suffering as some one else's sin bin, their refusal
to stop this cricket
tour is a stubborn reminder of who controls sport on
and off the field.
And that's what the ICC who don't see and
Rubberduck Mudguardhead who
won't see have in common, and that is control at
all cost. He is hell-bent
on revolution not resolution and when there is no
food, no whare and no
future but violence for the innocent citizens of
Zimbabwe then it's time to
pull up stumps and stay home.
Maybe
we should send Tana and the boys in black over there to do a bit
of spear
tackling practise on Mudguards head or maybe we should get Billy
Birmingham,
the 12th man to send him a song that would be the new national
anthem for
Zimbabwe. And maybe the words of Elvis will wake up the world
once again to
the hungry child in the ghetto.
If the voice is loud enough the
ears of the ICC will have to listen.
At the moment there is a murmur of
support for Zimbabwe here in Aotearoa New
Zealand that needs to be
microphoned by the voices in Parliament with a
choir of korero from our
Black Caps who will wear a black armband if they do
not boycott Mugabe's
madness.
To the uninformed, take the time to visit www.africantears.com and
when you
understand, then make a stand, for the mama who is crying for the
hungry
mouth she cannot feed in the ghetto. Arohamai to the many South
Africans and
Zim expats living here in Tauranga today who must be hurting
big time right
now.
Pai marire
tommy@indigenius.org
Graft campaign threatens Zambia's Mwanawasa
03 Jul 2005 01:10:17
GMT
Source: Reuters
By Manoah Esipisu
LUSAKA, July 3
(Reuters) - Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa has made his
anti-corruption
campaign the hallmark of his administration, hoping to
persuade voters to
give him a second term in next year's elections.
Now it may well secure
his ousting.
Mwanawasa's graft-busting drive has won Zambia backing from
Western
governments, who this year granted nearly $4 billion in debt relief
under
the World Bank and International Monetary Fund's Highly Indebted Poor
Countries (HIPC) initiative.
Bilateral donors have also poured
millions of dollars into the impoverished
southern African country,
burnishing its image as a can-do alternative to
chaotic neighbours such as
Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
But the campaign has also
won Mwanawasa powerful enemies within the circle
of former President
Frederick Chiluba, the man the anti-graft efforts have
largely targeted,
while some senior figures in his own administration are
unsure of whether
they may be next in line for investigation.
The ruling Movement for
Multiparty Democracy (MMD) last month expelled
former state vice president
Nevers Mumba after he called for an
investigation into accusations of
corruption he made against the president.
Significantly the party did not
say whether it would probe the allegations
and Mwanawasa cancelled the MMD's
internal polls planned in May to pick its
candidate in the 2006 polls,
telling a public rally that his enemies had
plotted to oust
him.
Mumba has rallied support around disgruntled MMD members while the
opposition is in talks to form a united front against Mwanawasa, a
combination which could pose a severe threat to the president's hopes for a
second term.
POLITICAL VENDETTA
Chiluba picked Mwanawasa as a
successor in 2001 after his own bid to change
the constitution so he could
run for a third term failed. He has since
called the anti-corruption
campaign a political vendetta and is known to be
close to the president's
opponents such as Mumba.
"We have a very uninspiring presidency.
Mwanawasa does not have the stature
and programmes that can deliver
prosperity to Zambia," Mumba told Reuters at
his home in
Lusaka.
"This so-called anti-corruption crusade has been a charade.
Nearly four
years later Mwanawasa's government has secured only one
conviction and he
has refused to respond to charges I made about corruption
within the party
he leads," Mumba added.
Zambia's Supreme Court this
year rejected a challenge brought against
Mwanawasa's 2001 election on the
grounds that it was rigged. While it
admitted that some state funding had
been used in Mwanawasa's electoral
campaign, it said graft was not
widespread enough to invalidate the poll.
Zambia's graft credentials were
tested last month when the government
withdrew corruption, fraud and abuse
of office charges brought against
Mwanawasa ally Kashiwa Bulaya, who was
accused by investigators of diverting
to private use millions of dollars
meant for AIDS drugs.
After weeks of vocal protests by foreign
ambassadors and opposition and
human rights groups, the government announced
a climbdown and said that
Bulaya's case would be reopened in the public's
interest -- but that failed
to satisfy critics.
EASE UP
"The
mere fact that they tried to withdraw a case such as this one speaks
volumes
about the government's commitment to fighting corruption," said
Alfred
Chanda, professor of law and president of the Zambia chapter of the
global
anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International.
Jotham Momba,
professor of politics at the University of Zambia, said he saw
Mwanawasa
easing off the corruption campaign as he started to prepare for a
re-election campaign that could see him turning for help to some of the very
people who have been prosecuted.
"Therein lies the problem. This
re-election saga could prove very costly,"
Momba said. "It could be
Mwanawasa's downfall."
Momba also said that Mwanawasa had not delivered
on promises to deliver a
new constitution that trimmed presidential powers
and removed colonial-era
oppressive laws.
Instead Mwanawasa says he
wants that constitution enacted after 2006
elections. Analysts say such a
move would allow him, assuming he wins the
poll, to argue that his
presidential term had only started under a new
constitution -- giving him a
chance to try for a third term of office
through the back door.
Years
of stringent fiscal discipline mean Mwanawasa has spent little on
social
sectors, given the civil service no pay rise in the last years and
has seen
doctors and nurses leave for better-paying jobs in South Africa,
Britain or
the United States.
But he has squeezed donors for cash for infrastructure
development and
reform of the state electricity company Zesco, ensuring a
sharp reduction in
power outages.
With new investment in the copper
and cobalt mining industries, investors
say new jobs are on the way, which
Mwanawasa is sure to trumpet on his
campaign trail next year.
"The
president is committed to fighting corruption, and despite all the
constraints Zambia is growing. We are living the mandate handed to the MMD
by the Zambian people," said Vernon Mwaanga, secretary-general of the MMD.
Plenty of aid, but no sign of payback
William Keegan
Sunday July 3,
2005
The Observer
Despite the hype - and has there ever been a Group
of Eight meeting so well
trailed? - these annual summits tend to be
overtaken by events. What world
leaders spend most time talking about are
the problems of the moment. It
will be interesting, in due course, to find
out how much time Gleneagles
devotes to global warming, debt relief and
overseas aid, and how much to
Iran, Iraq, China, the price of oil and a
potential international economic
crisis.
This is not to dismiss the
efforts of our Prime Minister and Chancellor, in
alliance with Bob Geldof,
Bono, Bill Gates, the economist Jeff Sachs,
various aid organisations, the
churches and many others. Your correspondent
is lost in genuine wonderment
that the worthy but traditionally boring
subjects of overseas aid and debt
relief have become headline news, and
captured the imagination and energy of
an entire generation.
With the interest in aid has come a reaction - and
a healthy dose of
scepticism. Problems with the distribution of the funds
raised by the
tsunami appeal have not helped. And President Mugabe's latest
outrage in
Zimbabwe has been a reminder of how the scramble to help Africa
now is still
blighted by the legacy of an earlier scramble for
Africa.
A package of debt relief has already been agreed by the Group of
Seven
finance ministers: the finance ministers and central bank governors of
the
US, Japan, Germany, France, the UK, Italy and Canada. (The G8 meeting is
the
heads of government of these countries, plus Russia, plus streams of
hangers-on and extra guests.)
Economists have been pointing out that
debt relief can, by definition, help
only the indebted and - trust the
International Monetary Fund to come out
with this the week before Gleneagles
- that aid does not necessarily assist
growth and can be counterproductive
if the inward flows of assistance raise
the exchange rate and make the
economy less competitive (always assuming the
recipient country actually has
an economy).
Nevertheless, the report by the Commission for Africa, after
a realistic
examination of the arguments about corruption, arrived at the
conclusion
that - given all the provisos about the need for good governance,
new
investment and the eventual need for African economies to stand on their
own
feet - massive doses of financial assistance were still
essential.
A lot has been learnt, and when hard-headed businessmen such
as Bill Gates
become involved in the aid business, you can be sure they are
concerned, as
President Bush clearly is, that aid really gets through. Even
so, the
sceptics are probably right that there has been a certain naivety on
the
part of public figures who suddenly discover a continent they knew
nothing
about and think they can solve its problems by ticking off a
list.
And at the heart of the debates between the UK and certain other
governments
(the US, Germany and Japan) about the form of debt relief and
the size of
aid packages is the plain fact that the G8 are way below the aid
targets set
by the United Nations decades ago - targets set well before pop
stars
discovered there was a humanitarian crisis in Africa. Indeed, the very
concept of the Chancellor's supposedly clever device of an International
Finance Facility is a confession of failure: it is because rich nations will
not cough up enough money for aid that recourse is made to borrowing in the
financial markets against the security of promises to raise aid budgets in
the future.
For all the bickering, at least some appreciable progress
has been made in
this area, which is more than one can say at the time of
writing for the
Prime Minister's attempts at a breakthrough with President
Bush on the
global warming front.
Did it not occur to our Prime
Minister that when he shamed our nation by
backing President Bush's invasion
of Iraq, the people behind Bush, namely
Cheney and Rumsfeld, were
principally interested in securing supplies of oil
in the Middle East, and
the reason they wanted to secure oil supplies is
that they do not, to quote
President Nixon, give an expletive deleted about
global warming?
The
debate is moving in the US, but Blair was rash to assume he had any
serious
influence on that debate, or that - obscene thought - this was
'payback
time' for Iraq. What we do have are the immortal words of President
Bush in
a recent interview in the Times: 'There's an interesting confluence
now
between dependency upon fossil fuels from a national economic security
perspective, as well as the consequences of burning fossil fuels for
greenhouse gases.'
Part of the background to this summit is the
instability in the world
economy associated with the way the US is spending
way beyond its means,
both in the public and private sectors, and piling up
debts as if there were
no tomorrow. As Sushil Wadhwani, a former member of
the Bank of England's
Monetary Policy Committee, recently told the Society
of Business Economists,
the accumulation of dollars by Asian economies means
that they now account
for about 60 per cent of global foreign currency
reserves, although for only
20 per cent of global gross domestic
product.
The former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker,
recently said:
'At some point, both central banks and private institutions
will have their
fill of dollars.' The Bank for International Settlements -
the Basel-based
central bankers' bank - states in its annual report: 'The
dollar, in real
effective terms, is no lower now than its average of the
last 30 years.
Given how little the US trade deficit seems to have been
affected to date by
dollar depreciation... some further movement seems
almost inevitable...
[yet] a number of important creditor countries,
particularly in Asia, have
taken significant steps to hold down the value of
their currencies against
the dollar, thus impeding the needed downward
adjustment of the dollar.'
China is the big intervener in the exchange
markets and the great
accumulator of dollars. The US may have defeated
Russian communism, but it
lives in fear of China's one-party mixture of
communism and capitalism. It
is fine for US institutions to buy up the
world, but all hell has been let
loose in the US media because of the bid
from the China National Offshore
Oil Corp (70 per cent owned by the Chinese
government) for Unocal, a US
energy company with what is known in the trade
as a 'global reach' for
scarce oil and gas resources.
The US has been
content to finance its huge trade deficit with other
people's money, but
some of the other people have accumulated massive
financial resources. As
the US economist Paul Krugman recently observed:
'Buying a company is a lot
cheaper, in lives and money, than invading an
oil-producing
country.'
One of the concerns raised by the BIS is 'shortsightedness in
policy advice,
which could turn today's solution into tomorrow's problem'.
The BIS says of
the US: 'Given the size of the government deficit, the
obvious first step
will be to cut expenditures and raise taxes.' It adds in
a masterpiece of
understatement: 'While the administration has set a deficit
reduction
objective, the specific policies required to implement this remain
to be put
in place.'
The kind of specific policies Bush has gone in
for are tax cuts for the rich
and an invasion of Iraq that has gone
disastrously wrong. These were both
specific policies in the wrong
direction. As a senior international official
recently observed, one cannot
blame the resulting rise in the US deficit on
the Chinese desire to
save.
New Zealand Herald
Greens draft bill to stop Zimbabwe cricket
tour
03.07.05 UPDATED at 4.25pm
The Green
Party has drafted a bill to make it illegal for the New
Zealand Cricket team
to tour Zimbabwe.
In Wellington today Green Party co-leader Rod
Donald said he was
seeking cross-party support for the law which would make
it an offence for
any New Zealand national sporting organisation to send a
team on tour to
Zimbabwe.
The tour is under fire because of
human rights abuses in President
Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe including the
bulldozing of slums which has left
thousands homeless.
Australia and New Zealand's governments have already joined forces to
oppose
the tour. The two countries' foreign ministers issued a statement
this week
saying they would make joint representations to the International
Cricket
Council urging rule changes to allow teams to cancel tours to
countries
where serious human rights abuses were occurring.
They also want
the Group of Eight - leaders of Britain, Canada,
France, Germany, Italy,
Japan, Russia and the United States - to tackle the
Zimbabwe issue during
their summit at Gleneagles, near Edinburgh next week.
They want the
United Nations to investigate past and present abuses in
Zimbabwe and
proposes that President Mugabe be referred to the International
Criminal
Court.
However, New Zealand Cricket has said the tour must go
ahead because
of the US$2 million fine the ICC would impose if it pulled
out.- NZPA,
HERALD ONLINE STAFF