Southern African leaders on Sunday pressured Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe to make democratic reforms ahead of new elections, hoping to set a new timetable for polls. Leaders of the 15-nation Southern African Development Community had discussed Zimbabwe late on Saturday on the eve of a free trade summit. After failing to reach a decision, they resumed talks after Sunday's trade meeting.
The full summit is expected to sign off on a roadmap that will lay out a new timetable for the constitution and later elections.

'The Lesbian and Gay Equality Project (LGEP) joins the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition in calling on this weekend’s Extra-Ordinary Summit of the Southern African Development Community focusing on Zimbabwe can lead to a peaceful, free, fair and legitimate democratic transition in that country. We fully endorse and support the Coalition’s call on the summit to put on public record minimum pre-conditions that Zimbabwe must meet in order to create an environment conducive to holding free and fair elections where violence and intimidation play no part and to inspire confidence in the people of Zimbabwe, in SADC and the wider international community.'

I question the wisdom of the African Union (AU) sending South African President Jacob Zuma, who is also the SADC mediator and facilitator on the Zimbabwean crisis, to Libya in an attempt to revive the AU ‘roadmap’ (another AU loaded word) for ending the conflict between Muammar Gaddafi and the anti-Gaddafi uprising. Zuma’s visit to Tripoli occurred amid concerns over Mugabe’s refusal to abide by the SADC roadmap for free and fair elections in Zimbabwe.

Between 20 September and 31 December 2010, the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) carried out the Zimbabwe Documentation Process (ZDP). Intended as a model for similar documentation projects that the DHA plans to extend to other categories of Southern Africans, the process provided a path for regularising the status of undocumented migrants. It also provided an alternative to the asylum system, which Zimbabweans have turned to in large numbers. The African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS) - formerly the Forced Migration Studies Programme - began sending researchers to observe the situation at several DHA offices. The findings from this monitoring provide a picture of how the process worked and highlight important problem areas.

For Zimbabweans who cross into South Africa in search of work, the risk of robbery, rape and extortion at the border is just the beginning of their problems. Khadija Sharife meets a ‘rightless’ underclass who are both exploited and scapegoated, simply for wanting to feed their children.

The credibility of the African Union (AU) is being questioned, after news that Zimbabwe will assume the chairmanship of the bloc’s Peace and Security Council. The rotational chairmanship passes from South Africa to Zimbabwe in June. The Peace and Security Council, in theory, is meant to promote peace, security and stability across Africa, while promoting democracy, good governance and the rule of the law. It is also meant to uphold the protection of human rights.

ZANU PF has demanded that recent strong resolutions on Zimbabwe, adopted by the regional security organ the Troika, be overturned, calling on the Summit of Southern African Development Community (SADC) leaders to reverse the position. Dewa Mavhinga from the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition, which is attending the summit, told SW Radio Africa that SADC leaders were set to discuss recent resolutions adopted by the SADC Troika in March. That summit in Livingstone, Zambia, had condemned the lack of progress in the unity government, in the first meaningful criticism of ZANU PF the region has ever issued. The Troika called for an end to violence and intimidation, and called for the drafting of an election roadmap towards a credible and violence free poll in Zimbabwe.

A recent report on Zimbabwe’s progress toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals, complied by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the World Health Organisation (WHO), said about 80 per cent of the posts for midwives were vacant in the public sector. 'The shortage of skilled and competent midwives can avert 80 to 90 per cent of maternal deaths. The shortage of skilled and competent midwives can result in women and their newborns dying from the complications that could be prevented by a health worker with the right skills, the right equipment and the right support,' the report pointed out.

Over 100 Somali refugees stranded at Zimbabwe’s border with South Africa have been hit by a malaria outbreak, authorities have said. They have warned of a worse disease outbreak if the situation was not addressed urgently. The Somalis were denied entry into South Africa where they wanted to apply for asylum and were now stranded at Zimbabwe’s border town of Beitbridge.

Baton-wielding riot police waged a brutal crackdown recently on peaceful Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA) demonstrators in Bulawayo, with witnesses saying dozens of people were injured. WOZA said thousands of protesters gathered in central Bulawayo to express their frustration at the persistent daily ‘18 hour power cuts,’ when riot police arrived and began to indiscriminately beat the peaceful activists. The protest was aimed at the Zimbabwe Electricity Transmission and Distribution Company (ZETDC) for what WOZA termed was daylight robbery by the utility company.

The Zimbabwe Coalition of Debt and Development (ZIMCODD), Poverty Reduction Forum (PRF) and Women's Action Group (WAG) with the support of Reality of Aid (RoA) convened a CSO Consultative Meeting on the Implementation of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (PD) and the Accra Agenda for Action (AAA) in Zimbabwe on 23 February 2011. The objective of the meeting was to identify Zimbabwean CSOs which are interested in Aid Effectiveness (hereafter AE) and the AAA and provide a platform for information sharing among them. Visit the Kubatana website for a report of the meeting.

Beatings, assaults, torture, manipulation of the party structures, tribalism, nepotism, cooked up voters’ rolls, intolerance, vote buying, elections taking place under the cover of darkness, the use of long incumbency to remain in power and the imposition of candidates by the party’s top leadership. The above describes how the leadership of the MDC led by Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai (MDC-T) is managing its provincial congresses ahead of the party’s national congress in Bulawayo at the end of April, says the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition.

Zimbabwe has adopted a two-pronged approach to tackling the country’s foreign debt that will see the African country use its rich natural resources while also embracing the HIPC debt relief initiative to pay back the more than US$7 billion owed to foreigners. The move to adopt a hybrid solution to the debt crisis comes after more than a year of strong disagreements within the Harare unity government over how to handle a burgeoning debt that Finance Minister Tendai Biti has said is the biggest obstacle to efforts to resuscitate the country’s economy ravaged by a decade-long recession.

Media rights group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has said Robert Mugabe is among the seven worst ‘press freedom predators’ on the African continent. In a statement released to mark World Press Freedom Day the group also named leaders Yahya Jammeh (Gambia), Issaias Afeworki (Eritrea), Teodoro Obiang Nguema (Equatorial Guinea), Paul Kagamé (Rwanda), King Mswati III (Swaziland) and Somalia’s Islamist militias, Al-Shabaab and Hizb-Al-Islam. Despite the formation of a coalition government in Zimbabwe, Reporters Without Borders, said because of Mugabe, 'Zimbabwe’s privately-owned print media are constantly harassed and that the state-owned Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) has a monopoly of radio and TV broadcasting'.

Some 21 villagers from Nyambeya in Cashel Valley have been forced to flee their village after ZANU PF militia carried out an early morning raid on Sunday (01 May) and burned down seven houses owned by MDC-T officials. Homes belonging to MDC ward chairman Moses Chemwanyisa, ward youth chairman Admire Chizikani and his mother Naomi were torched.

An independent daily newspaper critical of Zimbabwe's president says thieves raided its offices and stole computer hard drives and the editor's laptop. No other items were stolen. In front page headlines last week, the paper called on President Robert Mugabe, 87, to step down.

Several senior advisors to US President Barack Obama recently met a high powered delegation from the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) in Washington, to discuss mounting violence and arrests in Zimbabwe. Although the focus of the meeting for the US seemed to be the mounting violence and arrests in Zimbabwe, the SADC delegates focused on the removal of targeted sanctions placed on companies and individuals aligned to the Mugabe regime.

Mugabe has vowed that he would force elections to be held by June, without the consent of his partners in the country's shaky coalition government, stirring widespread fears that the vote would bring another wave of violent mayhem against his pro-democracy opponents. However, the latest development shows that Mugabe has been pushed further into a corner, Western diplomats say, after his Southern African neighbours, led by South Africa's president Jacob Zuma, last month ordered Mugabe to end the repeated cycles of violence and to carry out the democratic reforms he agreed to at the inception of the coalition government in February 2009.

Zimbabwe’s current Inclusive Government, more commonly referred to as a Government of National Unity (GNU), was established pursuant to an Interparty Political Agreement, itself more commonly referred to as the Global Political Agreement (GPA), states this legal analysis from the Research and Advocacy Unit Zimbabwe. 'Rather than simply containing clauses which are subject to legal interpretation and enforcement, the larger part of the agreement comprises rhetoric and ideological bombast designed to facilitate political posturing and little else,' the authors state.

Western calls for an international ban on trading in Zimbabwe’s controversial Chiadzwa diamonds appear to have been silenced, after a reported agreement on the country’s trade future was met in Dubai last week. It’s understood that officials in China and India have managed to persuade the European Union (EU) and the United States to soften their stance on the export of the diamonds. The Western states had been resisting growing pressure to allow Zimbabwean exports to resume, amid ongoing human rights concerns at Chiadzwa, where its feared that at least 20 people are killed a month.