At a landmark solidarity meeting in Harare on 30-31 October, Zimbabwean, African and international human rights organisations pledged to alert Africa and the SADC region to the full extent of the Zimbabwe Government’s continued gross human rights abuses and its relentless persecution of the media.

Most people in Zimbabwe have a desire for a change to the status quo, favouring concurrent presidential and parliamentary elections, according to a survey by the Mass Public Opinion Institute. For the majority of people, the solution to the problems facing the country lies in dialogue, says the survey.

A Zimbabwean magistrate's court on Wednesday placed four directors of the independent newspaper The Daily News on remand, quashing a defence bid to have the charges against them dropped. The four are facing charges of contempt of court and publishing the newspaper, a harsh critic of the government of President Robert Mugabe, without a licence.

The health of President Robert Mugabe is failing and he is positioning his favourite, Emmerson Mnangagwa, to take over, according to sources in Zimbabwe.

The chief executive and three directors of the Daily News, an independent Zimbabwean newspaper critical of the government, turned themselves into the police on Monday and were charged for publishing without a license.

The decline of Zimbabwe's health system, once one of the best in the region, has been underlined by the unravelling of its national immunisation programme. Until 2001, immunisation coverage for most antigens was over 70 percent. But coverage in some districts has now dropped to 44 percent, and the number of children dying before their first birthday has increased from around 56 per 1,000 live births in 1999 to around 65 per live 1,000 births in 2000.
Related Link:
* Zimbabwe deploys army staff in hospitals
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3223617.stm

Doctors at Zimbabwe's government hospitals have gone on an indefinite strike demanding an 8 000 percent pay increase, their union leader Phibion Manyanga said on Friday. Manyanga, who heads the Hospital Doctors Association, told AFP that the strike, which started last Thursday, would go on until their demands were addressed.

Zimbabwe's Plunge is a rare and unique book about Zimbabwe's geo-political and economic situation. The book, with consistent objectivity and the precision of a butcher's cleaver, analyses the link between finance and politics and the way these have contributed to the economic predicament in Zimbabwe. The simple and dynamic style appeals to a wide readership including politicians, economists, historians, academics, secondary school students and ordinary people who want to have knowledge about Zimbabwe's current socio economic problems and their possible solutions.

Zimbabwe's Plunge is a rare and unique book about Zimbabwe's geo-political and economic situation. The book, with consistent objectivity and the precision of a butcher's cleaver, analyses the link between finance and politics and the way these have contributed to the economic predicament in Zimbabwe. The simple and dynamic style appeals to a wide readership including politicians, economists, historians, academics, secondary school students and ordinary people who want to have knowledge about Zimbabwe's current socio economic problems and their possible solutions.

Participants at the Zimbabwe Social Forum which was held in Harare from 9-11 October have called on the working class communities the world over to enhance global solidarity and roll back the advance of neo-liberalism by working for and marching towards Socialism. The forum adopted a charter of principles that basically said "Say no to capitalism, no to Globalisation, No to any form of domination!"

The government-controlled media’s monopoly of daily news output following the banning of The Daily News and as a result of delays in issuing licences to private broadcasters continues to expose their partisan coverage of topical issues. If these media are not slavishly praising government’s policies, they are churning out selective, distorted and contradictory reports that mislead their audiences into believing the government is in control of the myriad problems bedevilling the country, says the Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe.

The Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum has condemned the pervasive levels of inter-party political violence that continue to be recorded in Zimbabwe. "Inter-party violence, sustained by lack of political tolerance and at times encouraged by statements made by party officials, has been prevalent in Zimbabwe since early 2000," said the Forum in its latest political violence report for the month of September. The report records 18 assaults, 16 cases of political discrimination and two cases of torture for the month of September.

Zimbabwean authorities discriminate against perceived political opponents by denying them access to food programs, Human Rights Watch says in a new report. The report documents how food is denied to suspected supporters of Zimbabwe’s main opposition party and to residents of former commercial farms resettled under the country’s “fast-track” land reform program.

A High Court judge in Zimbabwe Wednesday approved a petition by two top government officials that allows them to remove themselves from a case brought by the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. The opposition is questioning the judge's decision, saying the two officials played a key role in the presidential election last year that the opposition is challenging in the courts.
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* Election Petition - Full Heads of Argument
http://www.zwnews.com/issuefull.cfm?ArticleID=7794

Some 100 activists were arrested in Zimbabwe on Wednesday after protesting near the parliament in Harare. The National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) organised the protest in support of political reforms.

Zimbabwe plans to use the banned chemical DDT in its anti-malaria spraying programme. DDT has been shown to cause cancer, infant deaths, to poison animals, and to be very hard to eradicate from groundwater and the food chain. Environmentalists in Zimbabwe say the government has been forced to resort to the chemical because it can't afford better alternatives. But government spokespeople counter that the chemical is still used in South Africa and Swaziland.

Ex-farm workers make up the bulk of Zimbabwe's estimated 100,000 displaced persons and are in need of assistance, the NGO, Refugees International (RI), has warned.

The health delivery system in Zimbabwe is declining as medical personnel leave the country in search of better working conditions and more money. The exodus of nurses and doctors and other professionals from Zimbabwe for economic reasons is accelerating, with most of those leaving going to Britain, the country's former colonial master.

Don’t take the assault on the freedom of the press lying down. Not only has the only independent daily newspaper been shut down but postage has increased to an extent that many Zimbabweans can no longer afford to correspond with each other. The cost of transport is excessive. The public media including radio and television is state-controlled. All these factors have increased the isolation and the information vacuum in which Zimbabweans live. The information that used to pass between urban and rural dwellers has become almost non-existent. Click on the URL below to find out what you can do.

Inflation has hit 456 percent, grain prices soar and food staples become ever more unavailable for the poor majority of Zimbabweans. There are now reports of "an increasing number of negative coping mechanisms such as child labour and prostitution," WFP, the UN food agency, reports.