The Zimbabwe Guardian
By Dyke Sithole
Sunday, 04 May 2008

THE newly elected MDC Senator for Khumalo constituency, David Coltart says there is need for the transformation of both the public and private media into critical and analytical institutions of the government of the day and opposition political parties.

Addressing journalists in Bulawayo during the eve of this year’s world Press Freedom celebration, Coltart said the MDC if elected into power during the forthcoming presidential run–offs will allow the public media to criticize its shortcomings.

“If the MDC forms the next government, we will create enabling conditions for the independence of both the public and private media. Allowing the media to be in the hands of government or the ruling party is an unhealthy situation for democracy,” said Coltart who is a lawyer.

Coltart said in the post Mugabe era there is a need for the private media to critically probe opposition parties and the government unlike the present situation where the private media is seen as a mouthpiece for the opposition.

Coltart said the MDC government will push for the amendments of media laws in the country—in view of creating freedom of the press and more players in the industry— which is presently dominated by state controlled media.

The Senator said he strongly believes that foreigners should not be allowed to control the press, but funding of newspapers and radio stations from foreigners should not be restricted.

If elected, Coltart said, the MDC government will put more resources into the training of journalists as well as promote investigative journalism.

Meanwhile the Minister of Information and Publicity Sihkanyiso Ndlovu is expected today to address the journalists on World Press Freedom day.

The Observer,
Sunday May 4 2008
By Tracy McVeigh and Parker Khesani in Bulawayo

MDC members fail to make a decision as their leader Morgan Tsvangirai remains abroad amid fears for his safety

After a day of top level meetings, Zimbabwe’s main opposition party yesterday failed to make a decision on whether it will take part in presidential run-off elections scheduled for next month.

Observers now fear that there is a fierce dispute within the Movement for Democratic Change – whose leader Morgan Tsvangirai is staying out of the country for his safety – over whether to boycott the second round of voting that was announced on Friday by Zimbabwe’s Electoral Commission.

Tsvangirai claimed an outright majority after the polls and the MDC says the results released this weekend were doctored. Election officials announced on Friday that Tsvangirai had beaten Mugabe in the 29 March presidential poll but failed to win the absolute majority necessary to avoid a second ballot.

The MDC has accused the officials of rigging the results, which showed Tsvangirai won 47.9 per cent of the vote to Mugabe’s 43.2 per cent – falling short of the 50 per cent needed to avoid a runoff. The party says Tsvangirai won the election outright with 50.3 per cent of the vote and that Mugabe’s rule is over.

But the MDC has not signalled how it will handle the run-off. Many believe that participating would legitimise Mugabe’s rigging and worsen a volatile situation in the country where 20 of its supporters have been killed, thousands displaced and hundreds are in hiding from marauding ruling party militias.

Yesterday a senior member of the smaller faction of Zimbabwe’s opposition warned Tsvangirai against a boycott, saying it would effectively hand the presidency with some legitimacy to Mugabe. David Coltart, whose party led by Arthur Mutambara announced last week that it would back Tsvangirai if he took part in the run-off, said that the veteran opposition leader had no option but to contest the run-off.

‘My advice is that he should participate in the run-off under protest,’ said Coltart, who is also the MDC secretary for legal affairs. He said that, despite evidence that Zanu-PF was preparing for a violent fightback, the odds were still stacked against Mugabe winning because of the bad economic situation.

The election stand-off has been accompanied by a wave of political violence in rural areas that human rights groups and aid agencies say has killed several people and forced hundreds to flee their homes. Rights groups and the MDC say the violence is aimed at people who voted for the opposition and is designed to intimidate them into voting for Mugabe in a second round.

‘I have information from credible sources, a group of doctors, which says 600 people have been hospitalised throughout the country because of the ongoing violence,’ said Coltart.

There are also signs of widening divisions within the ruling Zanu-PF. Simba Makoni, a former finance minister in Mugabe’s cabinet, stood against him in the 29 March vote and is thought to be garnering support within his old party for a possible government of national unity, a plan ruled out by Tsvangirai.

Mugabe’s waning popularity among the rank and file in his party could work against the 84-year-old leader’s electoral chances, as will the pressing need for action to tackle the inflation rate – now estimated at 200,000 per cent – unemployment, the health crisis and food and energy shortages within Zimbabwe.

Both the police and the civil service are becoming increasingly disaffected.

The Standard,
4th May 2008

Information and Publicity Minister Sikhanyiso Ndlovu last week disrupted a function for journalists celebrating World Press Freedom Day when he took issue with the organisers after they asked him to respond to a keynote address by Senator David Coltart.

Ndlovu, who arrived shortly before the meeting at the Bulawayo Press Club ended, claimed he had been invited as guest speaker and accused the organisers of “disregarding protocol”.

He dashed to the high table, where the speakers were sitting, drawing boos from journalists who had been given the opportunity to ask questions after Coltart of the Arthur Mutambara-led MDC addressed them on the prospects of press freedom in the new political dispensation.

Coltart is the Senator for Khumalo in the city.

‘You cannot invite the government and expect me to just come here and respond to an address by someone else,” Ndlovu protested. “It now looks like I am gate-crashing… the government does not gate-crash. Others gatecrash into government.”
After about 10 minutes, Ndlovu appeared to calm down but only to protest for another five minutes, when he was asked to address the journalists as the patron of the press club.

He walked out after it was explained to him that he had confused the dates as the journalists had invited him to be the main speaker at a function organised by the Zimbabwe Union of Journalists, scheduled for yesterday evening.

Later in the evening, Ndlovu was involved in more drama when a ZBC news crew from Bulawayo was accused of stealing his cellphone during a press conference he held at a hotel.

The phone was reportedly recovered stashed in the wheel of the news crew’s car and the journalists were still being questioned by the police yesterday morning.

ZBC was hosting a party for its employees at the same hotel which was attended by top management, including chief executive officer, Henry Muradzikwa.

The incident happened in full view of journalists and about five police officers were quickly dispatched to deal with the case. But police were not immediately available for comment.

Meanwhile, Coltart told journalists the outcome of the recent elections gave Zimbabweans a rare “window of opportunity” to push through reforms to guarantee freedom of expression and ensure the public media was not used to advance partisan politics.

He said there was real danger that if checks and balances were not put in place soon after the new government comes into power, the new leaders would fall into the same trap of wanting to control everything.

Chicago Tribune
Apr 30, 2008

Suspiciously delayed poll results, army trucks fanning out through villages, police ransacking opposition party offices, and reports of torched huts and broken-limbed civilians _ such has been the ugly face of democracy for nearly a decade in Zimbabwe, and by now most political experts have given up asking whether millions of Zimbabweans will ever reach a violent breaking point.

Indeed, even as fresh reports of government brutality seep out of Zimbabwe in the wake of the still-unresolved March presidential election, there are virtually no reports of unrest on the streets.

A call for a mass protest two weeks ago by the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, which claims it won the vote, fizzled as usual. Hungry citizens queued obediently for bread in the capital, Harare, last week even as cops rounded up hundreds of opposition activists. And the lone report of a violent backlash _ an alleged attack by opposition members on a rural army barracks on Tuesday _ remains unconfirmed. Human rights activists suspect it may have been planted by the regime of strongman Robert Mugabe to justify further arrests.

This deep well of stoicism _ or, as some critics sneer, passivity _ in Zimbabwe’s victimized population has for years been a source of puzzlement to many Africa analysts, humanitarian workers and foreign journalists, who contrast Zimbabweans’ seemingly inexhaustible acceptance of suffering with deadly explosions of electoral fury elsewhere in Africa, most recently in Kenya.

“This is the single greatest mystery of Zimbabwe,” marveled a Western diplomat in Harare who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue. “In most other countries there would’ve been riots and violence years ago. But not here. These people are just too nice.”

The latest test of Zimbabweans’ restraint came on Wednesday, when the United Nations Security Council announced that it would not dispatch a special envoy to Zimbabwe to help resolve the election standoff. South Africa and China opposed the measure.

Meanwhile, the humanitarian group Human Rights Watch reported that Mugabe’s security forces were intensifying violent attacks on opposition voters in remote areas. In Manicaland province, the Zimbabwean army was equipping Mugabe-allied “war veterans” with trucks and rifles, the group said.

So far, at least 20 people have been killed nationwide, the opposition says.

Such organized brutality is by no means new.

Mugabe launched similar attacks in 2000 against white farmers and their black workers, as part of the government’s disastrous land reform policy. Since then, there have been two more dubious elections, reports of “rape camps” for opposition activists, and an economic meltdown that has seen 150,000 percent inflation – the highest in the world – 80 percent unemployment, near-starvation and such critical fuel shortages that ox wagons have replaced ambulances in some areas.

Through it all, hapless Zimbabweans – who favor sunny first names like Goodwill, Anyhow, Primrose and Everjoy – have managed to behave, if not like Africa’s Tibetans, then at least like the continent’s peaceful and law-abiding Canadians.
Theories for this abound: Some point to the lack of standing armies or a warrior caste in Zimbabwe’s majority Shona culture. Others cite the debilitating effects of malnutrition and a huge HIV/AIDS epidemic. Still others note that millions of frustrated young people, the natural base for an armed opposition, have simply voted with their feet. Between a quarter and a third of Zimbabwe’s 12 million people have fled political intimidation and economic ruin in their country to seek work in South Africa, Botswana or other neighboring states.

Another explanation is death by a thousand cuts. After eight years of watching their world fall apart in slow motion, Zimbabweans are ground down, deeply demoralized. An oft-repeated word in their conversations is a toneless “hopefully.”

“We’re also too proper – more English than the English,” said Foster Dongozi, the Secretary General of the Zimbabwe Union of Journalists, naming Zimbabwe’s former colonial overlord. “Instead of picking up weapons, we go to court.”

Dongozi wasn’t kidding.

“Mugabe has made a specialty of sham legality, lots of useless laws, phony rules that mean nothing,” he said. “He knows how far to push us. He knows how to distract us with a veneer of normalcy. He knows how to beat us way down, but not so far as to embarrass his African neighbors.”

As an example of calibrated repression, Dongozi told how two Zimbabwean journalists were arrested after the elections on spurious charges of arson; an electrical fire had charred a bus in Harare that day. When that charge didn’t stick, police simply switched the crime to attempted murder, and finally settled on public mischief. The reporters remain in jail.

Meanwhile, the city of Harare was hosting an arts festival this week just as pro-government militants armed with guns and machetes were reported to be fanning out to torch the distant homes and granaries of villagers.

“Right now Mugabe may be desperately trying to provoke us into a low-grade civil war,” said David Coltart, an opposition senator from the western Zimbabwe city of Bulawayo.

“We won’t take the bait. That’s where our people’s tradition of rejecting violence pays off,” Coltart said. “It’s taken us longer to go the Martin Luther King route, but I think we’re close to winning.”

Others weren’t so sure.

Reuters reported Wednesday that Zimbabwean election officials would soon announce that opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai had indeed won the election – but without the majority needed to assume power. A runoff would then need to be called, and Mugabe could spool out that process for months.

“This is a regime that won’t ever give up power easily,” said Elinor Sisulu, a Zimbabwean human rights organizer who lives in South Africa. “It’s going to require extraordinary things from us to get it out.”

The Zimbabwean
30th April 2008

Wayne Munroe, a farmer in Nymandlovhu (just outside Bulawayo in Matabeleland South, Zimbabwe), has been under siege since early this morning. His property has been encircled by in excess of 100 “war veterans”.

He phoned the police in Nymandlovhu to inform them of the problem and was on the phone to them when 4 “war veterans” entered his office. He immediately told the member in charge that they were there and that a 303 (gun) was being pointed at his chest. He was forced to hang up.

A tussle ensued: Munroe was injured on the hand with the head of an axe blade and he sprayed the attackers with pepper spray enabling him to escape.

He was fired at 4 times, but they missed, and Munroe managed to get to the farm house where his mother and grandmother live.

The war veterans moved into the compound outside the perimeter fence and are busy right now beating the workers.

Munroe’s wife and his two children, aged 4 and 5, are holed up in their own house some 100m away.

One of the workers managed to escape the beating at the compound (which is outside the perimeter fence of both farm houses) and managed to get to Munroe.

He told Munroe that after they finished beating the workers, they were coming for the farmhouses.

Mrs Munroe (Ursula) managed to phone out that she was going to attempt getting to her husband, but has failed because more armed “war veterans” have moved in.

She is currently there now.

Senator David Coltart has repeatedly called Chief Inspector Munyira at Nymandlovhu to go and assist the Munroes.

Coltart was told by the police they would send a detail out but at 3.10pm one – ONE – police officer arrived at the gate of the farm and then left.

To add to the sinister nature of the situation, this morning the regular member in charge and various other officers were replaced at Nymandlovhu police station. This points to the fact that the police were not trusted to carry out this brutal assault.

Yesterday Munroe was warned that there had been a meeting at stops camp in Bulawayo where the decision to invade had been made.

Institute for War and Peace Reporting
By Nonthando Bhebhe in Harare
24 April 2008

Ruling party insiders say President Mugabe is effectively hostage to his security chiefs’ demands for continuity.

Officials of the ruling ZANU-PF party say President Robert Mugabe is no longer fully in control, with much of the government’s day-to-day affairs being run by military and security chiefs.

Senior ZANU-PF insiders have told IWPR that Mugabe is now out of touch with what is happening on the ground.

Instead, they said, key decisions were being made by the Joint Operations Command, JOC, which consists of the heads of the army, air force, prison services and intelligence. The JOC, which is chaired by the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, General Constantine Chiwenga, coordinates military and security affairs and many observers believe it carries more real clout than the cabinet.

Their ties with Mugabe date back to the liberation struggle of the Seventies.

The party officials, who did not want to be identified, said decision-making was taken over by military and security chiefs after it became clear that Mugabe had lost the March 29 presidential election to Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, MDC.

It was they who made the controversial decision to stop the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, ZEC, from releasing the result of the ballot.

According to these sources, Mugabe was considering stepping down but was forced to carry on when the military threatened to take over if he resigned.

“Mugabe was willing to step down. He had actually indicated that he would retire to his rural home and his Borrowdale mansion and hand over power to Tsvangirai, if people voted for him,” said one official. “He even said he was willing to surrender his fate to Tsvangirai, to do whatever he wanted with him.

“However, the army generals and commanders told him that if he did [resign], it would leave them with no other choice but to take over the country. What a lot of people have missed is that Mugabe agreed to avoid a bloody coup by the military. It was better him than the military taking over.”

Chiwenga and retired Major-General Paradzai Zimondi, head of the penal service, vowed before the election that they would never salute anyone but him as president. Police chief Augustine Chihuri also said he would not accept an opposition victory.

A day after the election, a crisis meeting of army and security chiefs was held to discuss how to prevent the opposition taking over as it became apparent that Mugabe might have lost to Tsvangirai.

Regime figures do not trust Tsvangirai, fearing that if he came to power he would prosecute senior officials for human rights abuses committed over the years.

Although the ZEC has not announced who won the presidential election, it has said that the MDC won a majority in parliament for the first time ever, defeating ZANU-PF. However, this week the commission has been conducting a recount in 23 constituencies, and there are fears this will provide an opportunity to rig the numbers and reverse the position.

The MDC has accused the security forces of embarking on a campaign of violence and intimidation in the weeks since the election.

In an interview with SW Radio Africa on April 11, Tsvangirai said, “He [Mugabe] has lost control – that is why the military is doing what it is doing, going to interfere with the work of ZEC, arresting ZEC officials, relocating the work of the verification of the presidential ballots to a secret place where our representatives are not present. They have literally overthrown the civilian authority.”

David Coltart, a prominent lawyer and a member of the minority MDC faction led by Arthur Mutambara, said, “It’s a coup in the guise of an election.”

Security Minister Didymus Mutasa denied that the military had taken over.

“President Mugabe is still in charge, and that is a fact,” he said. “Those people who are telling you that are wishing for bad things for this country. Wait until the runoff [presidential election]. We will beat them overwhelmingly, and then they will shut up.”

The ZANU-PF officials said security chiefs had called several crisis meetings since the election. At one of them, top military officers gathered two weeks ago at Murombedzi, near Mugabe’s rural home, and told the president they were now in charge.

The military officers, said a ZANU-PF official, laid out a plan by which Mugabe would contest a run-off vote under conditions tipped in his favour by the military taking control of polling stations and counting centres.

The official said Mugabe’s speech on Independence Day on April 18 suggested that he might not be aware of the scale of violence being perpetrated by the army and pro-ZANU-PF militias.

At the independence celebrations, Mugabe paid tribute to Zimbabweans for maintaining peace before, during and after the elections. “Those who are planning violence must stop immediately, otherwise they might be in serious trouble with us,” he said.

According to the MDC, ten of its members have been killed since the election, while dozens of others have been beaten, whipped and threatened by youth militias, war veterans, the military and the security service.

Huts in rural areas have been burnt down, and hundreds of people have been displaced. Victims bearing burns, bruises and serious injuries from some rural areas have been hospitalised in Harare.

The crackdown has come since the JOC took control of the ruling party’s strategy, the electoral system, and internal security measures.

One ZANU-PF member of the Mashonaland Central provincial leadership told IWPR that a meeting held by these local party officials in Bindura agreed unanimously that violence was not the answer. But he added that because the military had taken over, such decisions were not being acted on.

“We have realised in ZANU-PF that things are not good. The problem is that it is now the military that has taken over,” he said.

“It was agreed at that meeting that it was wrong to beat up people. It is not good for the party’s image. But with the army now in charge, all they know is intimidation and violence against opposition supporters. I don’t think that the president really knows what is happening – that people are being tortured and beaten up.”

He said the problem with Mugabe was that he was surrounded by people who did not tell him the truth. The officials said those individuals who could give him honest advice had either died or were no longer in government.

“ZANU-PF is full of new guys or should I say mafikizolos [latecomers] who will not dare say anything. That is why the military can do what it has done,” said the party official. “It is wrong to beat up people, like what is happening in the high-density and rural areas. Violence does not help anyone.”

Nonthando Bhebhe is the pseudonym of a journalist in Zimbabwe.

Cutting Edge
By Priya Abraham
April 21st 2008

To listen to Robert Mugabe’s latest rant on western imperialism, one would think history has not shaken the 84-year-old liberator-turned-dictator of Zimbabwe.

“We need to maintain utmost vigilance in the face of vicious British machinations,” he told a crowd of thousands in Harare’s Gwanzura stadium on April 18, Zimbabwe’s Independence Day. Banners at the stadium further warned against “sell-outs” to Britain.

In reality, Mugabe is facing perhaps the strongest challenge to his power since he took over from white minority rule in 1980. In national elections held March 29—and still under dispute–Zimbabwe’s opposition won control of the nation’s 210-seat parliament, winning 107 seats to the ruling party ZANU-PF’s 97.

Mugabe has now completely lost any remaining legitimacy he held in Zimbabwe and the world. Zimbabwe’s tenacious and beleaguered opposition movement has new hope: “Don’t forget we have won,” wrote Sokwanele, a civil rights coalition, as it urged Zimbabweans to continue pressing for peaceful, democratic renewal. Under this new calculus, the question now is how long Zimbabweans will wait for Mugabe to go.

Mugabe is beyond caring what the world thinks, and that attitude rippled even in Washington circles. Just as an example, His ambassador to the United States agreed to speak at the Institute on Religion and Public Policy, on April 15, then blew off the event as reporters and others waited for his arrival. His staff made little effort to inform anyone that he was “out of town.”
In this election, there is no doubt about the victor: in a slight but profound concession, the country’s 9,000 polling stations were each required to post their results outside. Zimbabweans and civic groups traveled from one polling station to another logging the results for themselves. In previous elections, officials tallied—and tampered with–ballots at a central counting station.

The opposition Movement for Democratic Change, or MDC, also appears to have won the presidency, though Mugabe refuses to release those election results more than three weeks later. Meanwhile, in an effort to recapture the parliamentary seats his party obviously lost, Mugabe has launched a recount in 23 constituencies where the MDC is particularly popular.

With the knowledge of their victory, MDC’s leaders are beginning to sound like leaders of the U.S. civil rights movement. While Mugabe blustered about imperialist threats on Independence Day, MDC President Morgan Tsvangirai told Zimbabweans, “I cannot speak to you on the national media, but I can speak to you from my heart—that freedom comes and your voice and your vote shall be heard.”

Significantly, the election is also uniting the fractured and often weak MDC. Tsvangirai rival Arthur Mutambara, who heads MDC’s splinter faction, has backed Tsvangirai for president and said both camps would act as one body within the parliament. “Under no circumstances will we vote with Robert Mugabe,” he said. “Hell no, never, ever.”

But how long will Zimbabweans hold out for peaceful change? News media continually repeat the grim statistics: Zimbabwe’s inflation is the highest in the world while its life expectancy is the lowest, at 34 for women. One man at an election rally toted a sign with the dry self-description, “Starving billionaire.”

David Coltart is the MDC’s former shadow justice minister and now a leader within the splinter faction, and was elected March 29 as Senator for a southern constituency. On a faint and failing phone connection (lines have been especially faulty since the election), he told me he is skeptical that Zimbabwe will see a popular uprising.

Secondly, “Most of our young activists have gone to Zimbabwe and South Africa and so there’s very few people within the country (for) an uprising,” Coltart said. About a quarter of Zimbabwe’s 12 million people have fled across its borders. Zimbabwe’s brutal and drawn out guerrilla war between the white government and black fighters has also left people with “little stomach” to start another armed struggle.

Even an April 15 national strike the opposition called fizzled as riot police took positions and poor Zimbabweans chose to work, desperate for any meager pay. Mugabe has awarded increasing control of the nation’s day-to-day running to his security forces and the dreaded Central Intelligence Organization. In a familiar tactic, security forces and youth squads are now rounding up and beating opposition supporters in a new crackdown, further feeding tensions.

Despite its obvious and clear victory, the fight still is not over for Zimbabwe’s opposition. Instead of finding relief in this election, the MDC is in its usual position of battling Mugabe’s illegal maneuvers. Tsvangirai would like Africa and the world to intervene in Zimbabwe more strongly, as it did when Kenya’s election last year came under violent dispute. In the meantime, Zimbabweans are back to waiting for deliverance from their old and wily liberator.

Priya Abraham is Communications Director at the Institute on Religion and Public Policy.