Harare, Zimbabwe – Canada and Sweden officially handed over up to US$60,000.00 per hospital to four mission hospitals in Manicaland and Masvingo provinces. The donation will enable the mission hospitals, with technical support from Pact ZimAIDS, to carry out competitive community HIV/AIDS support programmes targeted at rural communities.The official handover ceremony was held in Harare on May 20th, 2004. The Ambassador of Canada, John Schram, and the Ambassador of Sweden, Kristina Svensson, officially presented the grants to Musume Mission Hospital (United Lutheran Church), Mutambara Mission Hospital (United Methodist Church), Regina Coeli Mission Hospital (Roman Catholic) and St. Theresa’s Mission Hospital (Roman Catholic).

Africa’s political tragedies are loaded with regular doses of instability forced onto a people by rogue nationalists who block essential freedoms and narrow political activity, writes Movement for Democratic Change leader Morgan Tsvangirai in the Zimbabwe Observer. Tsvangirai asks - and answers - the questions: What are you up to when you shut the door to the sole democratic passage to development? When a regime seals off the country and shrinks the democratic space to the barest minimum, what does it expect the people to do? Do you prepare and participate in an election when you know the result? How do you restore the people’s confidence in a climate of insecurity, fear and, above all, when there is no guarantee that your vote can make a difference? Why waste time?

"The Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) and the Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ) condemn the cynical and unconstitutional banning of The Tribune newspaper by the government-controlled Media and Information Commission (MIC). This latest onslaught against free expression, and particularly the privately owned media, demonstrates precisely why so many of the provisions of the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA) are clearly anti-democratic and grossly repressive. The flimsy regulatory grounds cited as reasons for silencing The Tribune cannot be used to overrule the constitutionally guaranteed right to freedom of expression."

It comes as no surprise that the Zimbabwe government is turning its attention to censoring email and internet communications. Freedom of expression has been under siege in Zimbabwe for the last few years. Increasingly Zimbabweans find their human rights infringed upon in a variety of insidious ways. Just think about it for a second. You have to give notice to the police if you intend to hold a public meeting. You can be harassed by the State if gathered in groups of more than two. Wearing a pro-democracy T-shirt might get you beaten up by intolerant thugs. The Daily News was unceremoniously shut down. Editors from independent newspapers are routinely harassed and intimidated. And, by the way, our television and radio stations parrot the ruling party line. So it’s small wonder that the Zimbabwe government has recognised that email and internet communications remain one of the only avenues through which Zimbabweans can share information.

The International Press Institute (IPI), the global network of editors, leading journalists and media executives in over 120 countries, has condemned the recent decision by the authorities in Zimbabwe to suspend the operating licence of The Tribune newspaper. According to IPI's research, on 10 June, the government-appointed Media and Information Commission (MIC) suspended The Tribune's operations for twelve months for allegedly breaching the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA).

The Zimbabwe Cricket Union has dismissed allegations of racism levelled against them by a group of rebellious contracted players. ZCU chairman Peter Chingoka told a media conference that the allegations came from those who were against the unions integration policy, which they started implementing in 2001.

A new labour survey is set to highlight the situation of working children in Zimbabwe. About 140 enumerators are currently engaged in a three-week National Labour Force Survey being conducted by the Central Statistical Office (CSO), with support from the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF). It is expected to cover more than 10,000 households in Zimbabwe's 10 provinces. The survey will not only deal with the employment situation of adults, but also of children.

Only half of the health clinics in three Zimbabwean provinces have access to safe water and the majority of districts face shortages of essential drugs, according to an NGO monitoring group, the Food Security Network (FOSENET). Based on information drawn from 52 districts, FOSENET noted that clinics spread across central Zimbabwe - in Mashonaland West, the Midlands and Masvingo - had the poorest access to safe water out of the country's eight provinces.

Zimbabwe's controversial land reform programme took a significant turn this week when the government announced its intention to nationalise all productive farmland in the country. "In the end all land shall be state land and there will be no such thing called private land," the official Herald newspaper quoted Lands Minister, John Nkomo, as saying on Tuesday.

The tourists come to Zimbabwe's vast Hwange National Park, view its rich collection of big game from the safety of vehicles with armed guards, and then leave. But communities living on the fringes of the park are forced to share their land with the encroaching wildlife, a proximity that leads to inevitable conflict between humans and animals. The communities in this perennially dry region of northwestern Zimbabwe rely on the Gwayi river, as do thirsty animals who have broken out of the game park. Looking for water, they end up terrorising the villages on the edge of Hwange.

Andrew Meldrum in Pretoria
Monday June 7, 2004
The Guardian

The head of the Zimbabwean central bank is due in Britain later this week to raise funds for the state's depleted coffers, despite a travel ban which prevents Robert Mugabe and other leading politicians entering the country, the Guardian has learned.
Gideon Gono, previously Robert Mugabe's personal banker, is due to address a group of Zimbabweans in Birmingham on Thursday to encourage them to send money home to their families through government channels, according to Zimbabweans invited to the meeting.

The 500 students at Morgenster Teacher's College in Masvingo were on Friday left stranded after the indefinite closure of the institution as a result of intermittent strike action by the students. Heavily armed policemen maintained presence at the Reformed Church in Zimbabwe institution where the students were given 30 minutes to pack their belongings and leave.

A 62 year old widow, Mrs Pat Campbell, was brutally beaten with sticks at her farm, Sutton Estate, in Banket recently, reports the website Sokwanele. Mrs Campbell's "crime" was being on the farm of which she is the lawful owner. In the attack an AK 47 assault rifle was pointed at Mrs Campbell and her son Doug, and they were threatened with instant death if they did not leave the farm at once. To emphasise the point the soldier whose rifle was aimed at their heads, cocked the weapon.

The government’s blitzkrieg on corruption has claimed its biggest corporate scalp to date following the arrest of South African-based Zimbabwean business mogul, Mutumwa Mawere in Johannesburg this week, the Daily Mirror reported. A South African police spokeswoman confirmed that Mawere was picked up by Interpol officers in the plush Johannesburg suburb of Sandton on charges of violating the Zimbabwe Exchange Control Act.

Since the Zimbabwe Government embarked on its fast track land resettlement programme, the food situation, particularly in respect of the staple maize, has been getting worse every year. Initially people were talking of food shortage, but "famine" would now seem a more appropriate term to apply to the situation the country now faces. "Famine" has been used to describe situations of extreme food scarcity and starvation in countries such as Ethiopia and Eritrea. Nobody ever contemplated that Zimbabwe, formerly the bread-basket of southern Africa, would come to be referred to in terms of famine.

The ‘Zimbabwe crisis’ has become the subject of intense debate both inside and outside Zimbabwe, and explanations for its origins, forms and outcomes have been many and varied. What is, however, disappointing is that despite their multiplicity, these explanations have done little to improve our understanding of the complexity of the problems confronting the country. The main problem being that many of these explanations have not only been parochial and partisan but also imagined; seeking to interpret the present problems out of history and context. Moving away from the tradition of narrow and partisan explanations which abound on the topic, this study, bringing together expertise from various scholars, policy analysts, development practitioners and activists who have all researched and written on Zimbabwe for years, analytically examines the crisis through its complexities and contradictions while also trying to suggest solutions to it.

There are no books, no chalk and little hope as children are forced out of class. Deep in the Zimbabwean bush, 65 miles west of Harare, four teachers start each day by washing goat droppings from their primary school’s concrete floor. They have no textbooks, no stationery and no chalk. Five years of economic collapse, political oppression and rampant lawlessness, compounded by the scourge of Aids, are threatening to deprive an entire generation of Zimbabwean children of any meaningful schooling.

The Zimbabwean government has proposed obliging its internet service providers to divulge details of e-mails deemed offensive or dangerous. Zispa, the local ISP association, has asked the government to clarify its proposed addendum to providers' franchise contracts. One ISP told BBC News Online it was not a provider's duty to police the net. President Robert Mugabe has suggested the internet, widely developed in Zimbabwe, is a tool of colonialists.

"Worse than dogs and pigs" is how Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe described homosexuals almost a decade ago, when the gay community attempted to highlight widespread homophobia in the Southern African country. That statement, reported around the world, still reverberates in the country, casting a long shadow over the exercise of sexual freedom. Yet, in subtle ways, things are also changing.

A number of small, medium and large commercial farms given to black farmers under Zimbabwe's fast-track land redistribution programme are lying fallow. Visits by IRIN to several provinces - Mashonaland Central, Mashonaland West and Manicaland - revealed that a significant number of the new A2 (commercial) farmers have not been utilising the land allocated to them. Entire farms appeared neglected, with grass growing in fields that were once filled with crops. Farming infrastructure was derelict, suggesting that it had been vandalised.