Mugabe's "Do or Die" Campaign to Stay in Power

BY A FRONTLINE/World Correspondent

Mrs. Plaxeded Mutariswa Ndira was getting her children ready for school a few weeks ago when she heard a scuffle in the bedroom where her husband was still sleeping.

"Some men ordered him out of bed," she says. "He refused, saying he wanted their IDs. He was grabbed naked and shoved into a vehicle that speeded off. My husband was screaming and wrestling."

Mrs. Ndira heard nothing for weeks. She tried to report her husband's kidnapping to the police, but they turned her away. Two weeks later she received a call that her husband's body had been found.

"His tongue was cut off, his left eye gouged out, his body was severely bruised," she says between sobs. "Who will look after his children?"

Mrs. Ndira's husband, Tonderai, was an activist with the anti-Mugabe opposition party, Movement for Democratic Change, or MDC. He had been organizing party meetings and working as a driver for the national chapter's vice president. Before his abduction, Tonderai had been arrested 35 times for various charges ranging from "disturbing the peace"and "causing hatred to the president" to "organizing meetings without police clearance." He was in and out of jail but had never been convicted.

The Ndiras' story was just the first in a wave of accounts I heard on a recent investigative trip around the country.

Full Article: FRONTLINE/World

Zimbabwe’s Chaos: The Powerful Thrive

By MICHAEL WINES
Published: August 3, 2007

BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, July 28 — Earlier this month, shortly after Zimbabwe’s president, Robert G. Mugabe, proposed legislation mandating a gradual transfer of all businesses to what he called “indigenous” ownership, a Zimbabwean businessman said he received an unexpected telephone call. The caller, a stranger, said that he represented a group of indigenous investors.

The investors, he said, would like to discuss the merchant’s plans for complying with the coming ownership law.

There is a flip side to Zimbabwe’s economic decline, critics and analysts contend, and this is it: As 11 million or more people descend into destitution, a tiny slice of the population is becoming ever more powerful and wealthy at their expense.

No one outside of Mr. Mugabe’s inner circle, of course, can say with certainty why he has pursued policies since 2000 that have produced economic and social bedlam. For his part, Mr. Mugabe says Zimbabwe’s chaos is the product of a Western plot to reassert colonial rule, while he is simply taking steps to fight that off.

Among many outside that circle, however, the growing conviction is that Zimbabwe’s descent is neither the result of paranoia nor the product of Mr. Mugabe’s longstanding belief in Marxist economic theory. Instead, they say, Zimbabwe is fast becoming a kleptocracy, and the government’s seemingly inexplicable policies are in fact preserving and expanding it.

“Their sole interest is in maintaining power by any means,” said David Coltart, a white opposition member of Parliament. “I think their calculation is that the rest of Africa is not going to do anything to stop them, and the West is distracted by Iraq and Afghanistan. The platinum mines can keep the core of the elite living in the manner they’re accustomed to — just in a sea of poverty.”

There surely are other views.

One influential member of the governing ZANU-PF party said Mr. Mugabe, now 83, was rushing to empower long-suffering black Zimbabweans before he died.

This, he said, explains why the government seized thousands of white-owned farms early this decade, and why Mr. Mugabe ordered manufacturers and merchants last month to reduce their prices by 50 percent and more. To him, it also explains why Mr. Mugabe now proposes to require that every Zimbabwean business be controlled by native Zimbabweans.

“The old man wants to leave a legacy,” said the politician. “He’s in the twilight of his life, and he wants it to be remembered that he left something to Zimbabweans.”

Yet in interviews in Zimbabwe, Mr. Coltart’s view was widely shared by blacks and whites alike, many with no political ax to grind. Even the governing party politician allowed that whatever the aims of Mr. Mugabe’s policies, their execution had gone terribly awry.

Zimbabwe’s farm seizures destroyed the nation’s rich agriculture industry, and, as a form of patronage, vast tracts of land were handed over to party elites with little experience or interest in farming. The looming takeover of businesses is expected to produce the same result.

“Some of these people, his cronies, are being greedy,” the ZANU-PF official said. “That’s the tragedy of this country. Those who benefited from land reform are also going to benefit from this takeover.”

The circumstantial evidence that Zimbabwe’s decline has become a zero-sum game, in which one side’s loss inevitably is the other’s gain, is not easy to ignore.

Zimbabwe’s plummeting currency — 200,000 Zimbabwe dollars now buy a single American dollar on the black market — has rendered the salaries of working Zimbabweans all but worthless. Yet the official exchange rate is not 200,000 to 1, but 250 to 1. Those with connections to the government’s reserve bank are widely said to buy American dollars cheap, sell them dear — and reap an 800-fold profit on currency transactions.

Mr. Mugabe’s government declares currency trading illegal, but regularly dumps vast stacks of new bills on the black market, still wrapped in plastic, to raise foreign exchange for its own needs, business leaders and economists say.

NYTimes.com

Battle at Kruger National Park, South Africa - Cape Buffalo fight lions

Battle at Kruger is a viral video posted on YouTube in 2007 which was widely praised for its dramatic depiction of life on the African savannah. It is one of YouTube's most popular videos. It was also the subject of an article in the June 25, 2007 issue of Time Magazine and was featured in the first episode of ABC News' i-Caught, aired on August 7, 2007.

A National Geographic documentary is also planned.

It was originally filmed in September 2004 by videographer David Budzinski and photographer Jason Schlosberg at a watering hole in Kruger National Park, South Africa.

The video depicts an unfolding confrontation between a herd of Cape Buffalo (Syncerus caffer), a small pride of lions (Panthera leo), and a pair of crocodiles. Taken from a vehicle on the opposite side of the watering hole, the video begins with the herd of buffalo approaching the water, unaware of the lions resting nearby. The lions charge and disperse the herd, picking off a young buffalo and unintentionally knocking it into the water while attempting to make a kill. While the lions try to drag the buffalo out of the water, it is grabbed by a pair of crocodiles, who fight for it before giving up and leaving it to the lions. The lions sit down and prepare to eat, but are quickly surrounded by the reorganized buffalo, who move in and begin charging and kicking at the lions.

After a battle which sees one lion being tossed into the air by a buffalo, the baby buffalo (which is miraculously still alive) escapes into the herd. The emboldened buffalo chase the remainder of the lions away.
Source: thought88

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Mogadishu mayor defends Somali media crackdown

Reuters

Wed Nov 14, 2007 5:19am EST

By Aweys Yusuf

MOGADISHU, Nov 14 (Reuters) - Mogadishu's mayor defended on Wednesday a government crackdown on Somali media that has been condemned by rights groups, saying three radio stations were closed this week because they were spreading lies.

In the latest attack on local media, government forces raided Simba Radio and Radio Banadir on Tuesday, a day after shutting down Shabelle Radio for the eighth time this year."

These three radio stations have been closed down because they have no permit. We told them repeatedly to get the official documents, but they ignored the government notification," Mayor Mohamed Dheere told Reuters.

Dheere, a former warlord, also accused the private stations of undermining national security by fabricating reports that the presidential palace had been hit by mortar bombs."

These radios have generated violence by airing exaggerated false reports. So, we have to crack down on them because of national security interests," he said.

"The international community does not have to pressure us over lies told by the media.

"Staff at Simba and Shabelle said both stations had obtained the necessary operating licence and stood by their broadcasts.

"We have been shut down because the government is oppressing us as an independent media not to report the killings and violence happening in Mogadishu," Shabelle Radio News Editor Abdirahman Yusuf Al-Adala told Reuters.

ATTACKS ON JOURNALISTS

Attacks on journalists in the lawless Horn of Africa country have multiplied this year.

Seven reporters have been killed in Somalia since January, when government troops and their Ethiopian allies routed a rival Islamist movement, spawning an insurgency that has been punctuated by roadside bombings and political killings.

The fighting has claimed thousands of lives and forced hundreds of thousands to flee the lawless capital -- prompting a U.N. envoy to call the humanitarian crisis the worst in Africa.

The Committee to Protect Journalists, a media watchdog, called the radio closures "crude and unacceptable censorship".

"Any time the authorities in Mogadishu hear unwelcome news of the fighting in the city they send troops crashing through the door of the radio station responsible," its executive director Joel Simon said in a statement.

The East and Horn of Africa Human Rights Defenders Network urged the interim government -- the 14th attempt at restoring central rule since the 1991 ouster of President Mohamed Siad Barre -- to end its press clampdown if it wanted to establish democratic rule.

In a separate development, a landmine killed six people and wounded 15 others riding a bus on Tuesday in the breakaway northern republic of Somaliland, officials said.

The accident took place in Goroyo Hun, which is laced with mines planted during a 1977-78 war with Ethiopia.

(Additional reporting by Hussein Ali Noor in Hargeisa; Writing by Katie Nguyen; Editing by Daniel Wallis)

Bloggers turn up heat on Zimbabwe

BBC News
Friday, 16 March 2007, 09:19 GMT

Turmoil in Zimbabwe this week refocused the world's attention on the 27-year rule of President Robert Mugabe. The world of blogging was no exception as the BBC News website discovered.

From Harare, Bev Clark writing on kubatanablogs offered an interesting analogy about the country's situation.

"I've been seeing Zimbabwe like a cake lately," she wrote on the day opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, arrested for attending a weekend rally, was taken to hospital after two days in police detention.

"Morgan Tsvangirai, Raymond Majongwe, Mike Davies, and Grace Kwinje (etc) are the candles burning big and bright. The icing is made up of a small section of civic and political activists. While the actual cake itself comprises the Zimbabwean people."

That is not where it ends, the cake, it seems, has just been put in the oven.

"Until we, the Zimbabwean people, come to the party and support civic and political leaders working for change, not much will happen. The cake has got to cook. It's got to get warm, and bake and maybe even burn, but it can't stay like it has been - unmovable.

"Because if it does, no matter how many Highfield rallies we have, and no matter how iconic Tsvangirai becomes, the struggle for freedom in Zimbabwe will remain lop-sided."

The Bearded Man is also not convinced that this is the beginning of the end of Mr Mugabe's rule, as some commentators would have it.

"No doubt the fall-out over this violence will last only a few days before the world neatly sweeps it under the carpet - and the dirty underbelly of African politics..."

He then goes on to echo a plea made by many Western governments to Zimbabwe's immediate neighbours.

"Please would someone out there actually DO something about this Mugabe person?"

'Cowardice'

Who exactly is being asked to do something? Well, South Africa - Zimbabwe's powerful neighbour to the south - for a start.

"South Africa's so called 'quiet diplomacy' has achieved precisely nothing in Zimbabwe," blogged Tony Sharp on The Waendel Journal.

"Its call to Mugabe yesterday to respect the rights of citizens will change nothing. Mugabe, like his ilk elsewhere in the world, recognises cowardice when he sees it and knows that talk is cheap."

In a volatile situation where perceptions of events are so important, The Zimbabwe Pundit - subtitled "the world as seen through the eyes of a Zimbabwean" - seems to be losing patience with the opposition in the country.

"The media in Zimbabwe is owned and operated by the Mugabe regime. So in Sunday's aftermath Zimbabweans are being force fed a diet of MDC thuggery, non-attendance and opposition violence. This makes me wonder when the pro-democracy movement will get its act together in terms of creating its own robust media and information response unit."

Steph's Blog would beg to differ though - and sticks the boot into the BBC while she is at it, comparing a report on violence at an opposition rally on Sunday in state-owned The Herald newspaper with one of ours.

"The Herald is a Zimbabwean government-owned newspaper and the BBC is a British government-owned broadcaster. The Herald's version is pro-Mugabe and pro-police but at least it was there, the BBC wasn't. Its version is MDC propaganda, with a little bit of British imperialism chucked in," she blogged.

"Morgan Tsvangirai is a Western-sponsored 'terrorist', he plotted in London to assassinate Mugabe and overthrow the elected government. There is nothing democratic about the MDC. The only reason the British government is anti-Mugabe is they still consider Zimbabwe to be Rhodesia."

'Breached conditions'

The Radical Soldier of Zimbabwe!, meanwhile, is having none of it and offers what could be a radical solution to challenges facing the country.

"Europe intervened in the Balkans and the 'coalition of the willing' did a job in Iraq, but nobody seems to care about Zimbabwe," he lamented.

"Britain, in my view, has more legal grounds to invade Zimbabwe than it did Iraq. Britain was the former colonial power in Rhodesia and negotiated the Lancaster House Agreement. The agreement is actually worth reading. It sets out the principles under which democratic Zimbabwe should have been governed, and was in fact governed for the first few years.

"Mugabe has clearly violated the agreement. He has breached conditions including white representation in parliament [NB this clause has expired], independence of the judiciary, citizenship and payment of pensions. These should be sufficient grounds for Britain to demand change or otherwise invade. Who knows? Maybe John Howard will even commit a couple of hundred Australian troops."

Laer from Orange County California sees little chance of this happening though - mainly because of another world power.

"The big problem for me is that China doesn't seem to care. It will continue to block UN efforts to protect Zimbabweans from Mugabe, proving once again the powerlessness of the world body," he blogged on Cheat Seeking Missiles.

So is there any hope at all?

"From what I can see, the UN is frozen, the African Union is powerless to do anything, and the world just watches," he said.