SA cannot do magic in Zimbabwe: Dlamini-Zuma

April 18, 2007, 15:00

South Africa cannot perform magic to solve the problems in Zimbabwe, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, the foreign affairs minister, said today.

Asked if Zimbabweans have reason to celebrate on their Independence Day, Dlamini-Zuma said the day was a time for reflection. "When you celebrate your independence you look at your past but also look at your present and your future. I'm sure they will do that," she said.

She hoped the work that President Thabo Mbeki was doing as a facilitator appointed by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) would have positive results but said it would take time and the outcome was up to the Zimbabweans.

"South Africa cannot do any magic," said Dlamini-Zuma. She said there also had to be a link with the Zimbabweans themselves and their will to accelerate the resolutions of the economic and political problems.

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Rumblings of discontent in Zimbabwe's ruling party

Senior party officials dispute the official story that President Robert Mugabe was formally endorsed as ZANU-PF's candidate for the 2008 election. From IWPR.

By Nonthando Bhebhe in Harare for IWPR (18/04/07)

Senior ZANU-PF politicians have disputed the official announcement that they backed Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe to run as the party's candidate in next year's election, but accept that they failed to challenge the decision when it was foisted on them.

After the 30 March meeting of ZANU-PF's Central Committee, party spokesmen told local media that delegates had endorsed Mugabe as the ruling party's candidate, and had agreed to bring the 2010 parliamentary election forward so that it takes place in 2008, at the same time as the presidential ballot.

Top party members are beginning to talk about what happened at the meeting, and they have told IWPR that Mugabe was simply imposed as the candidate, with no debate or formal endorsement taking place.

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African Anglican Bishops Support Mugabe

Friday April 20, 2007 11:16 PM
By ANGUS SHAW

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) - African Anglican bishops have issued a message to Zimbabweans that was broadly supportive of the government, sharply contrasting with an earlier call from Catholic leaders for President Robert Mugabe to step down.

An Anglican pastoral letter released to coincide with this week's independence celebrations acknowledged Zimbabwe's economic crisis ``rendered the ordinary Zimbabwean unable to make ends meet.''

The 14 Anglican bishops blamed the worsening plight of poor Zimbabweans largely on Western economic sanctions.

``So-called targeted sanctions aimed at the leadership of the country have affected the poor Zimbabweans who have borne the brunt of sanctions,'' the bishops said after a meeting of the central African Episcopal Synod.

Western governments dispute that claim, arguing targeted sanctions on Zimbabwean assets abroad and travel restrictions only affect rulers and policymakers. The sanctions were imposed to protest Mugabe's human rights record.

Investment and foreign loans to Zimbabwe have dried up in six years of political and economic turmoil following the often-violent seizures of thousands of white-owned farms that began in 2000.

Even with the sanctions, the European Union and the United States are still among the nation's top five trading partners.

Zimbabwe's nine Catholic bishops marked Easter with an unprecedented call on Mugabe to end oppression and leave office through democratic reform or face a mass revolt.

Their pastoral letter accused the ruling elite of racism and corruption and fomenting lawlessness and violence to cling to power and wealth, factors they said led to the economic meltdown. The letter decried state-orchestrated intimidation, beatings and torture. Predicting further bloodshed, it said the country had reached a flash point.

The Anglican church has been traditionally muted in its criticism of the government, with its leaders generally toeing the ruling party line.

Prominent among the signatories to Friday's Anglican letter was Harare Bishop Nolbert Kunonga, frequently praised in the state media for his ``progressive sentiment.'' Kunonga has denounced some black clergy as ``Uncle Toms'' and puppets of whites and Britain and the United States for their criticism of Mugabe.

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Now Zimbabwe can see end of the road for its 'brutal old man'

Mugabe's regime is ratcheting up the pressure but the cracks are starting to show and the opposition is gaining confidence.

Tracy McVeigh
Sunday April 22, 2007
The Observer

It is pitch dark across Harare. By 7.30pm the streets are deserted, with only occasional car headlights moving along the unlit wide avenues, and hazard warning lights blinking through junctions where the traffic lights no longer work.

Power cuts have got worse in the past two weeks. There is a shortage of coal and several of the generators at Hwange power station are broken, awaiting new parts to arrive from who knows where. The Electricity Regulatory Commission has announced that bills will rise by 350 per cent within the next six weeks.

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In downtown Harare Gardens a humming generator keeps the spotlight running inside the tiny Theatre In The Park - built like a traditional thatched hut, wooden benches circling a dirt floor stage where an actor in army fatigues is battering a dummy so hard the stuffing is oozing out on the floor. The soldier's instructions come from a loud voice on his mobile phone; the louder the voice gets, the more the audience fidgets.

Political satire is illegal in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe and this is powerful stuff. The Good President tells the story of a 'gogo' - grandmother - who comes to the city for medical treatment and tries to raise the bus fare to return to her village to vote back the ruling President in the coming elections. This is the same President who murdered both her sons in the gukurahundi - the opposition purges by Mugabe in 1983 which left thousands dead. It's a deeply taboo subject.

'The actors are brave to say this dialogue, but anyone who comes here has courage,' says writer Cont Mhlanga. 'Last night, when we opened, the audience was swollen by secret police, about 10 or 12 that we could tell. I wrote this script in two days after the opposition were beaten on 11 March. It's about the cause of our problems not being political, economical or external, but cultural.'

Mhlanga was arrested last year for 'mobilising illegal protests against the government through theatre'. Now he waits for them to come back, to close his play down or worse.

All of Zimbabwe is waiting. 'Waiting for that ageing geriatric bastard to die,' a bus driver told The Observer

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from the April 25, 2007 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0425/p04s01-woaf.html

Zimbabwe Army's deserters underscore country's troubles

President Mugabe has traditionally drawn strong support from the military. But lack of pay and distasteful assignments may be weakening that loyalty.

By Scott Baldauf | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA

They are the missing regiment: 1,500 men deserting from the Zimbabwean Defense Forces across the South African border, sometimes in groups of two or three, and sometimes in whole platoons.

The loss of a regiment, talked about in hushed tones at Army headquarters in the early part of this year, is no small matter in a country as poor as Zimbabwe. But for the regime of President Robert Mugabe, an anticolonial commander who has always found his staunchest supporters among the military, it could be fatal. If he can't rely on his own security forces to maintain control, one year ahead of crucial presidential elections, how much control does he really have?

"This is the breakdown of Mugabe's most trusted sector; he banked on the military and the security forces," says Sikhumbuzo Ndiweni, a retired Zimbabwe Defense Forces lieutenant colonel and now a commentator on Zimbabwean affairs. Mr. Ndiweni himself fled Zimbabwe in November 2003 because of what he called continual harassment by police.

"This spells doom and a painful end, [in the same vein as] Mengistu, Idi Amin, and Charles Taylor," he says, referring to the former dictators of Ethiopia, Uganda, and Liberia, respectively. One of them, Mengistu Haile Mariam, is living in exile in Zimbabwe.

The picture within the Zimbabwe Defense Forces, as told by officers like Ndiweni and a half-dozen deserters interviewed by the Monitor, is a desperate one. President Mugabe has taken strong measures to ensure that the military will remain at his side. As recently as February, the Army chief of staff, General Chedondo, told his soldiers that all future requests for leave would have to be approved by President Mugabe himself. Deserters would be hanged.

Even so, in February, scores of recently recruited officer cadets quit before finishing their courses at the elite Zimbabwe Military Academy in Gweru. In January, it was broadly reported that 10 commandos from a unit fled on the same night. Neither South Africa nor Zimbabwe has released statistics confirming the desertion and arrival of Zimbabwean soldiers, but the anecdotal evidence suggests that the trickle is turning into a flood.

Recruiting loyalists

To fill the gaps, Mugabe has been recruiting people whose loyalty can be trusted, replacing his own Presidential Guard with members of his secret police and filling Army ranks with his party's youth militia and aging veterans of the liberation struggle from the 1970s. Meanwhile, top generals are constructing their own survival strategies, making alliances along tribal and ethnic lines in order to take power – or at least survive – once Mugabe is gone.

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