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ZIMBABWE: Old and hapless
IRIN NEWS (July 10, 2007)

Picture: from Irin website

HARARE, 2 July 2007 (IRIN) - Zimbabwe's seven-year economic crisis has made the elderly, who make up 10 percent of the country's 12 million people, even more vulnerable.

"The situation for older persons, who, by definition, are people over the age of 60, and because of their mental, physical and poor financial status are considered vulnerable, is sad, owing to the hyperinflationary environment that is affecting the country," Priscilla Gavi, director of Help Age, a national voluntary organisation promoting the welfare of the aged, told IRIN.

The decline is evident in institutions for the elderly, which
are mainly funded by independent donors, but whose
contributions were "too little and a token considering
what is required on the ground", Gavi said.

Most homes have been hit hard by an annual inflation rate
of around 4,000 percent, and unable to cope with the steep
increase in the cost of essential services such as health,
water and electricity.

Daily living in Zimbabwe has been characterised by
widespread shortages of basic commodities and foreign
currency. Since the start of the crisis in 2000, donors
have either scaled down operations, citing a harsh
operating environment, or pulled out.
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Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and the "Politics of Naming"
Globalresearch.ca (July 9, 2007)

When Africa scholar Mahmoud Mandani looks at the
slaughter and displacement of civilians in Darfur he notices
something odd. The mass death of civilians in Darfur has
been called a genocide, but slaughters of civilians of similar
magnitude in Iraq and on a larger scale in Congo have not.
According to the World Food Program, about 200,000
civilians have died in Darfur, 80 percent from starvation
and disease, and 20 percent from violence. Close to 700,000
have been displaced(1). This, the US government, calls a
genocide.

But 600,000 Iraqis have died since 2003 as a result of
violence related to the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq (2)
and 3.7 million have either fled to neighboring countries
or are internally displaced (3).
“I read about all sorts of violence against civilians,”
says Mamdani, “and there are two places that I read about –
one is Iraq, and one is Darfur … And I’m struck by the
fact that the largest political movement against mass
violence on US campuses is on Darfur and not on Iraq.” (4)
If Darfur is modest in comparison to Iraq, both are
pipsqueeks compared to Congo. There, some four million
civilians have been slaughtered over several years,
largely as a result of intervention by US proxies,
Uganda and Rwanda.

In Somalia, 460,000 civilians have been displaced by
fighting sparked by a US-backed and assisted invasion
by Ethiopia (5). That invasion was aimed at ousting the
popularly-backed Islamic Courts Union, which had
brought a measure of stability to Somalia. “In the six
months the Islamic courts (governed Somalia), less than
20 people lost their lives through violence. Now, that
many die in 10 minutes,” observes Hussein Adow,
a Mogadishu businessman (6).

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Police Ban Another Play In Bulawayo
The Standard, Zimbabwe (July 9, 2007)

BULAWAYO — Police have banned yet another
theatre production by local artists, claiming
"it threatens national security".

The Bulawayo Arts Forum (BAF) had planned to stage
Everyday Soldiers, which tackles HIV/Aids in the arts
industry and the worsening human rights violations
in the country.

The play was to be staged at the launch of the
association last week.

But riot police descended at the Nhimbe Trust offices,
the venue for the scheduled launch, and ordered the
organisers to drop the play.

The police said the organisers needed clearance
under the Public Order and Security Act (Posa)
before putting it on stage.

Theatre critics observed that the ban came hardly two
weeks after State agents banned the premiere of
Cont Mhlanga’s political satire, The Good President,
in Bulawayo.

They said the latest ban had dealt a major blow to
the thriving arts industry in the city.

Last month theatregoers were left shell-shocked
when riot police stopped the premiere of Amakhosi
Productions and Rooftop Promotions’ political satire,
claiming it was a political gathering.

The Good President focuses on the Gukurahundi
massacres in Matabeleland and Midlands, and the
11 March torture of opposition leaders while in
police custody.

It had successful runs at Theatre in the Park in
Harare early this year.

As with Everyday Soldiers, police wanted to censor
the script of The Good President when it came to
Bulawayo, alleging it violated the draconian
"ugly twins" of repressive laws — Posa and the
Access to Information and Protection of Privacy
Act (Aippa).

Josh Nyampimbi, Nhimbe’s Trust director and
BAF member, said playwrights and actors in the
city were concerned about the clampdown on
"bona fide" theatre productions.

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Mass Zimbabwe Arrests Over Prices
BBC Africa (July 9 2007)

A total of 1,328 Zimbabwean businessmen and women have been arrested and fined for breaking official price controls in the past two weeks, police say.

The government ordered that the prices of many goods be cut in half, in order to tackle the world's highest rate of inflation - more than 3,700%.

But businesses say the new prices are below cost,
so some firms have closed.

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The Rand Might Be The Key Weapon To Bring
Political Change To Zimbabwe
ZWNEWS.COM (July 9, 2007)

He may be about to be neo-colonised from an
unexpected quarter.

It now seems that, while President Robert Mugabe
has been aggressively defending Zimbabwe's
sovereignty against the neo-colonialist designs of
Britain, he may be about to be neo-colonised from
an unexpected quarter - South Africa, his ostensible
ally in his fight against the Brits. Tomaz Salamao,
executive secretary of the Southern African Development
Community (SADC), is reportedly considering a proposal
that the Common Monetary Area (CMA) should include
Zimbabwe. SADC leaders have mandated Salamao to
find an economic solution to the Zimbabwe crisis, and
President Thabo Mbeki a political solution. Mbeki has
persuaded Zimbabwe's ruling Zanu PF party and the
opposition Movement for Democratic Change to start
substantive negotiations today for a just political
dispensation to enable free and fair elections to be held,
probably around March next year.

Meanwhile, Salamao is reportedly close to completing
a report proposing Zimbabwe be brought into the CMA -
or the Rand Monetary Area as it used to be called.
The CMA now has South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho and
Swaziland. Though the smaller countries have their own
currencies and central banks, these seems to be sops to
national pride. In practice, they have a common currency,
the rand. The other currencies are pegged to the rand
at par, and CMA monetary policy essentially emanates
from Pretoria. So it seems that, under Salamao's proposal,
the rand would likewise effectively replace the Zimbabwe
dollar, which is now virtually worthless, with inflation
running at around 5 000% and the real exchange rate
to the US dollar now somewhere in the region of 250 000.
Zimbabwean economist John Robertson told the Sunday
newspapers of this group that he has long advocated the
idea of extending the CMA to cover Zimbabwe as the
only possible cure for the country's terminal economy.

Of course, the idea would not be easy to sell to Mugabe
since it would entail him surrendering real independent
control of his economy, not just monetary policy, and also,
effectively, of political policy.

READ HERE for more.

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Robert Mugabe Critic ‘Raped’
Zwnews.com (July 9, 2007)

The assault came a day after she told the then army
commander that 5 Brigade was massacaring civilians.

In Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe terror is so endemic that not even the daughter of a former prime minister known as a supporter of black rights is immune from rape. Judith Todd's father Sir Garfield Todd was Rhodesia's last liberal leader and she was imprisoned, force-fed and exiled under Ian Smith's rule for her efforts to promote black majority rule. After independence she returned to head a development agency working particularly with the war veterans who had fought for Zimbabwe. But when she criticised Mr Mugabe's regime she was detained and raped by a senior army officer, she revealed yesterday. It was, she said - both for her and her attacker –
an example of the culture of fear used to preserve Mr Mugabe's rule.
The assault came a day after she told the then army commander and another senior officer that the North Korean-trained 5 Brigade was massacring civilians in a campaign of atrocities in Matabeleland.

The next morning another senior officer picked her up
in a car and drove to a house she believed was in the
Chikurubi prison complex. "A servant let us in, not
looking at us," she wrote in a newly-published memoir,
Through the Darkness: A life in Zimbabwe, in which she
names the man. "The [senior officer] led me into a bedroom,
opened a bottle of beer for each of us, unstrapped his
firearm in its holster, laid it on the bedside table next to my
head and proceeded. I did not resist." In her first interview
on the subject, she told The Daily Telegraph: "It was rape.
I was in a state of complete terror. Now and again you
have to face destiny. I had just been reading these
documents which were full of rape, terror, mass murder.
I knew something was going to happen when that car came.
What happened was actually a relief because I thought
I was going to be killed. At least I was alive."

CLICK HERE to read more.

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