The objective reality in Zimbabwe does not meet the minimum conditions for any election to be considered free and fair. For elections to be said to be free and fair, the pre-election, election, and post election periods must be characterized by the opening up of democratic space, respect of human rights, and the protection of fundamental civil and political rights of all citizens. There can be no free and fair elections where people are forced to vote, denied voting or are systematically denied the vital information to enable them to make an informed political decision, concludes this article on the website of the Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in its fourth round of grants has rejected Zimbabwe's application for $218 million in funding for its HIV/AIDS program, Zimbabwe's Standard reports. The denial of funding puts plans to scale up the country's antiretroviral drug program in "disarray," according to the Standard.

In Zimbabwe economic disruption and political intimidation and harassment have caused 150,000 former farm workers to become internally displaced. As conditions for the former farm workers deteriorate, the Government of Zimbabwe is imposing restrictions and preventing humanitarian agencies from providing them assistance, resulting in a hidden crisis of internal displacement in the country.

Zimbabwean journalists have teamed up to publish a new daily online newspaper: "Zim Online - An independent news service from Zimbabwe", according to a media release. The service will be distributed via the internet (www.zimonline.co.za) and start operating from 7 July 2004. Zim Online aims to help fill the vast information vacuum left by the banning of independent newspapers and the expulsion of all foreign correspondents from Zimbabwe.

Amnesty International has expressed grave concerns at reports that the Zimbabwe government plans to ban international human rights groups as well as the foreign funding of local organisations promoting rights in the country. "These reports indicate that as with other legislation introduced in the past two years, the government will use this new bill to silence critical voices and further restrict the right to freedom of expression. It is a clear attempt by the government to suppress dissenting views as parliamentary elections scheduled for March 2005 draw closer," Amnesty International said.

Civil society groups and the opposition in Zimbabwe are calling for a fresh voter registration process to create a new and reliable voters' roll. The move follows last week's announcement by the Chairman of the Zimbabwe Election Support Network (ZESN), Reginald Matchaba-Hove, that it 'was impossible, even under new electoral laws, to hold a truly free and fair election next year because of the serious defects in the present voters' register'.

Child rights campaigners are looking to amend current Zimbabwean legislation to make birth registration easier, as nearly a third of all children do not possess a birth certificate, restricting their access to public services. Zimbabwe has ratified the Convention of the African Child, which emphases a child's right to a name and nationality, and makes registration immediately after birth compulsory. But neither the Zimbabwean constitution nor the Births and Deaths Registration (BDR) Act expressly state that a child has the right to be registered.

"The danger with race as a definitive prism is that one becomes primarily and even wholly fixated on remnants of racism to the exclusion of all else. In the case of Zimbabwe, it is to the exclusion of the indignity visited upon fellow blacks which, were it being done by whites, we should certainly be up in arms over. We have internalised race and racism, something that Fanon predicted, just as he predicted that the consolidation of urban middle-class interest could see black leaders become as abusive of their citizens as the colonialists were."

Participants in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Seminar on “Promoting an Independent and Pluralistic African Press”, held in Windhoek, Namibia, from 29 April to 3 May 1991, declared: “Consistent with article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the establishment, maintenance and fostering of an independent, pluralistic and free press is essential to the development and maintenance of democracy in a nation and for economic development.”

This “Windhoek Declaration” marked a highlight in the so-called second wave (of democratisation) on the continent. Ironically, it was also at Windhoek - almost thirteen years later (end of February 2004) - when Zimbabwe's Minister of State for Information and Publicity signed a co-operation agreement with his Namibian counterpart on closer collaboration, including a planned joint weekly newspaper on regional issues.

In an in-depth interview offered to the local state-funded newspaper “New Era” (5 March 2004), he praised the Presidents of both countries “as two leaders that have remained steadfast, committed, not only as nationalists but also as Pan-Africanists, and as global leaders”. He urged both countries to pursue the common task of “doing justice to the kind of solidarity that was born during the liberation struggle, and which must be upheld today and in future”.

He further identified the following common challenges: “We are here to cement these historic bonds and ties, and look at the new challenges that we are facing, as we in particular begin to consolidate the economic objectives of our liberation struggle, and identifying the critical role of information, information not only in terms of the press, the print media, but also the electronic media and other multimedia platforms that are new, that are being used and that are accessible to these generations that may be prone to losing the bigger picture of the essential story.”

The Honourable Minister was not always using such language. As a Zimbabwean scholar still abroad he stated at a Conference on Robben Island as late as February 1999 that “it would be a mistake to justify the struggles for national liberation purely on the basis of the need to remove the white minority regimes from power and to replace them with black majority regimes that did not respect or subscribe to fundamental principles of democracy and human rights (…) ruling personalities have hijacked the movement and are doing totally unacceptable things in the name of national liberation. Being here at Robben Island for the first time, I am immensely pained by the fact that some people who suffered here left this place only to turn their whole countries into Robben Islands.”

Only three years later, in March 2002, he - now in a ministerial rank - praised the results of the Presidential elections in his country as an impressive sign “that Zimbabweans have come of age that they do not believe in change from something to nothing. They do not believe in moving from independence and sovereignty to new colonialism, they do not believe in the discourse of human rights to deepen inequality.”

Rhetoric of such calibre has earned Jonathan Moyo the label 'Goebbels of Africa'. This is certainly too demagogic itself, given the historically unique dimensions of German holocaust to which the Nazi propaganda minister relates and associates with. But name calling of this kind documents the degree of polarisation and level of dissent in the Zimbabwean society today. The current clamp down on the independent media in Zimbabwe is certainly neither exclusively nor decisively the result of a personal vendetta by a previously progressive scholar.

Jonathan Moyo is just one - though admittedly due to his track record notably exotic - example of relatively high profile calibre representatives of a post-colonial establishment seeking own gains by populist rhetoric covering up their selfish motives. They have become part and parcel of a set of deep-rooted anachronistic values within a system of liberation movements in power. After seizing legitimate political control over the state, these turned their liberation politics under the disguise of pseudo-revolutionary slogans into oppressive tools. Their “talk left, act right” seeks to cover the true motive to consolidate the occupied political commanding heights of society against all odds preferably forever - at the expense of the public interest they claim to represent in the light of deteriorating socio-economic conditions of living for the once colonised and now hardly liberated (and even less emancipated) majority.

Sadly enough, it was the same Jonathan Moyo, who at an early stage of the sobering post-colonial realities in Zimbabwe offered courageous and sensible analytical insights into these processes. While being a Lecturer at the Department of Political and Administrative Studies of the University of Zimbabwe, he presented thought provoking and painful reflections on the liberation war (chimurenga) with all its dubious ambiguity.

Read this from a paper in late 1992: “There can hardly be any doubt that the armed struggle in Zimbabwe was a pivotal means to the goal of defeating oppressive and intransigent elements of colonialism and racism. However, as it often is the case with protracted social processes of a conflict with two sides, the armed struggle in this country had a deep socio-psychological impact on its targets as well as on its perpetrators. (…) For the most part, the armed struggle in this country lacked a guiding moral ethic beyond the savagery of primitive war and was thus amenable to manipulation by the violence of unscrupulous nationalist politicians and military commanders who personalized the liberation war for their own selfish ends. (…) This resulted in a culture of fear driven by values of violence perpetrated in the name of nationalism and socialism.”

Nowadays, the erstwhile critical scholar represents the same mindset he had questioned. According to a news report by the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA), he used a press conference on 30 April 2004 in Bulawayo to threaten, “there was enough space in Zimbabwe's prisons for journalists caught dealing with foreign media houses”. As “terrorists of the pen” they would be targeted next. The report quotes the Minister as saying: “President Mugabe has said our main enemy is the financial sector but the enemy is media who use the pen to lie about this country. Such reporters are terrorists and the position on how to deal with terrorists is to subject them to the laws of Zimbabwe.” This is tantamount to paranoia and indicative for the recent efforts to censor even private communication.

As the mere distribution of and access to information can be damaging to the security interest of those represented by the Minister, the next onslaught is directed against the private ISPs (Internet Service Providers). The state owned telephone-company announced early June 2004 that ISPs had to enter new contracts stipulating that they as service providers prevent or report to the authorities anti-national activities and malicious correspondence via their telephone lines. If they fail to do so, they will be liable, i.e. penalised.

This follows earlier appalling interferences resulting in the closing of independent newspapers and the imprisonment or expelling of journalists on a systematic scale. The government and its executive branches are eager to emphasise that this repression is in compliance with the existing (and for such purposes enacted) laws and hence fully within “legality” (which, of course, is a far cry from legitimacy). This simply shows that the “rule of law” can apply in the absence of any justice. It is the strategy of the ban that constitutes the rule of law. It does not even spare government friendly media productions and displays the intolerant, all-controlling nature of the system.

One prominent example is the banning of the live broadcasted television production “Talk to the Nation” in mid-2001, which was sponsored by the National Development Association (NDA). The explanatory statement by an official of the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) is a remarkable example for the “innocence” of a totalitarian mindset: “Live productions can be tricky and dangerous. The setting of the NDA productions was professionally done but maybe the production should not have been broadcast live. You do not know what someone will come and say and there is no way of controlling it.”

Along such an understanding, media operating independently or beyond direct control of government were increasingly hampered and closed down, as the prominent example of the Daily News showed. On an alleged breach of a legal clause under the notorious Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA), the Media and Information Commission (MIC) has now in June 2004 closed The Tribune for at least one year. Its publisher, himself a former ZANU-PF MP, was reportedly suspended earlier on by the ruling party for “disrespecting” ZANU-PF top structures as he had denounced AIPPA in his maiden address to parliament.

It therefore does not come as a surprise that the latest annual overview on the state of media freedom in the Southern African region by the Media Institute of Southern Africa - issued on the World Press Freedom Day (26 April) - records more than half of all 188 media freedom and freedom of expression violations in 2003 among the ten monitored countries in Zimbabwe alone.

International agencies committed to the freedom of press and the professional ethics of independent journalism are in agreement that the situation in Zimbabwe is intolerable. It prompted the Annual General Assembly of the International Press Institute (IPI) on 18 May 2004 in Warsaw to adopt the unanimous decision “to retain Zimbabwe's name on the 'watchlist' of nations that are seriously eroding media freedom”. And the Board of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) condemned at its 57th World Newspaper Congress in Istanbul early June 2004 the “attempts to silence independent media”. At a meeting in Windhoek during early June 2004 a total of 24 newspaper editors from eight countries in Southern Africa organised in The Council of the Southern African Editors' Forum (SAEF) suspended its Zimbabwean wing.

The narrowing down of the post-colonial discourse to a mystification of the liberation movement in power as the exclusive home to national identity and belonging finds a corresponding expression in the increased monopolisation of the public sphere and expressed opinion.

Amanda Hammer and Brian Raftopoulos, co-editors of a recent volume on “Zimbabwe's Unfinished Business” summarised this in their introduction as “efforts to control or destroy the independent media and to silence all alternative versions of history and the present, whether expressed in schools, in churches, on sports fields, in food and fuel queues, at trade union or rate payers' meetings, in opposition party offices or at foreign embassies.”

Such desperate initiatives to enhance control signal at the same time a lack of true support among the population, who otherwise could be allowed to speak out freely. The repression of public opinion beyond the official government propaganda is therefore an indication of the ruthless last fight for survival of a regime, which has lost its original credibility and legitimacy to an extent that it has to be afraid of allowing a basic and fundamental principle of human rights - the freedom of expression.

* Dr Henning Melber is Research Director at The Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala/Sweden and has been Director of The Namibian Economic Policy Research Unit (NEPRU) between 1992 and 2000. Before studying Political Science and Sociology he was trained as journalist (1971/72) and sacked from the local German newspaper in Windhoek (1972) for disputes over political and professional-ethical reasons. He joined SWAPO of Namibia in 1974. This is the shortened introduction to the forthcoming “Media, Public Discourse and Political Contestation in Zimbabwe”, published in the “Current African Issues” series with The Nordic Africa Institute.

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Zimbabwean President, Robert Mugabe, warned his country this week to expect expanded state security powers affecting the internet and telephones. In his opening of parliament address he announced that his government would introduce a Security of Communications Bill to control the Internet and telephones, claiming that it would 'bolster the security of our nation.'

In contrast to President Mugabe's declaration of a revival in the Zimbabwean economy as he opened Parliament this week, an opposition movement, Sokwanele, has published its latest article, 'The Politics of Land', in which it attacks the process and effect of the Government's land distribution programme.

Following reports that the Ministry of Land Reform and Resettlement had written to several ministers inquiring about their alleged ownership of more than one farm, the Zimbabwe Government has now announced that none of them were found to. Instead, the Government claims that the Ministry mistakenly assumed that the ministers owned farms which were in fact owned by their close relatives.

The health delivery capacity of public health institutions has been adversely affected by the poor economic environment and some clinics and hospitals are now operating without essential drugs and medical supplies. Zimbabwe's public health sector - once the best in sub-Saharan Africa - is now reeling as a result of neglect and inadequate funding by the government.

The government media’s timidity in demanding accountability from the ruling party leadership when they publicly make potentially harmful pronouncements was exposed by the manner in which they handled President Robert Mugabe’s closing address at the Fourth ZANU PF National Youth Congress, according to the latest edition of the Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe's newsletter. "These media merely carried President Mugabe’s speech without analysing it. For instance, The Sunday Mail quoted President Mugabe telling his party youths that they should 'mount a vigorous campaign across the country to push Tony Blair’s midgets out' as ZANU PF 'wanted to teach them a lesson across the whole country that Zimbabwe will never be a colony again'. No attempt was made to disentangle the embedded meaning of such statements."

South Africa's Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs has disclosed that SADC is to assist Zimbabwe in creating a climate for free and fair elections, ahead of its polls in March next year. The comments came whilst the minister was holding talks with the South African Council of Churches on the Zimbabwean issue.

Further evidence of urban vulnerability in Zimbabwe has emerged with the release of a report indicating that the capital, Harare, has seen an increase in the number of kwashiorkor cases. In his health report for 2003, the city's director of health services, Dr Lovemore Mbengeranwa, noted that instances of diagnosed kwashiorkor had risen by 11.1 percent. A total of 621 cases were treated at council-run clinics, of which 97 percent were children under the age of five.

Civil rights groups in Zimbabwe on Monday slammed moves to introduce a new bill that will give the government greater control over the operations of NGOs and churches. The Non-Governmental Organisations (NGO) and Churches Bill is expected to be tabled in the coming parliamentary session.

Brian Chikwava, from Zimbabwe, has won the fifth Caine Prize for African Writing for ‘Seventh Street Alchemy’ from Writing Still, Weaver Press, Harare 2003. The result was announced by the Chair of the judges, Alvaro Ribeiro, at a dinner held this evening (Monday, 19 July) in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Brian is the first winner of the Prize from Zimbabwe.

The African Union has lambasted President Robert Mugabe's government for flagrant human rights abuses. It is Africa's most damning condemnation of Zimbabwe yet, says Zvakwana in its latest bulletin. A report adopted by the AU executive council on Saturday slams the government for the arrests and torture of opposition members of parliament and human rights lawyers, the arrests of journalists, the stifling of freedom of expression and clampdowns on other civil liberties. This is the harshest criticism Mugabe has had to bear from his continental peers. The report was adopted by the AU's executive council, which comprises foreign ministers of the 53 member states, despite strong opposition from Zimbabwe. Email your support and ask for a copy of the report to [email protected] or [email protected].

In April of this year yet another Zimbabwean joined the staggering statistic of Aids related deaths. But Abel Phiri (real name withheld for the safety of his family) was not just a statistic, he was a man born with the same hopes and desires common to all humanity. The story of his sad end, as told by a concerned and compassionate friend, brings home the tragedy of life and death in this ravaged country. In the last year of his life, Abel Phiri’s meagre savings kept his family of six barely fed in a time of staggering inflation and dire food shortages. The year of untold misery was made even more agonizing by the poor health of his two youngest children.