The South African government is considering "managing" the influx of Zimbabweans, said a government spokesman after its border area with Zimbabwe was declared a cholera disaster area. "We are looking into the issue," Themba Maseko responded to a question on whether the country would control the number of possibly infected Zimbabweans entering South Africa.

Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe said Thursday a cholera epidemic has ended, even as the United Nations said more people have died and South Africa declared a disaster on its border because of the disease. "I am happy to say our doctors have been assisted by others, and WHO (the World Health Organization) and they have now arrested cholera," he said in a nationally broadcast speech.

The Zimbabwe Election Support Network (ZESN), learnt with deep shock and dismay the violent abduction and secret detention of the ZPP Executive Director and ZESN Board member Ms Jestina Mukoko. ZESN joins the long list of organisations and concerned individuals who have expressed their grave concern and condemnation of the abduction of Ms Mukoko.

We, the undersigned African scholars, are greatly concerned about threats of military intervention in Zimbabwe, ostensibly in the name of human rights and for humanitarian purposes. We fully recognize the political impasse in Zimbabwe and the resultant prolonged suffering of its people. For that very reason, we appreciate the regional initiative taken by SADC to resolve this impasse politically. We are of the view that the political process must be given the space and the opportunity to be resolved in a peaceful and democratic way. The political process is the only way to allow the people of Zimbabwe to arrive at a sustainable solution. We condemn the use of violence to short cut the political process. We call upon the political actors in Zimbabwe to seek a solution that does not subject its people to suffer the consequences of violence. The duty of Africans and states is to facilitate this process in the spirit of Pan-Africanism as an act of solidarity with the Zimbabwean people.
Experience shows that the inevitable consequence of military intervention to resolve social and political conflicts has been endless wars, as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia clearly demonstrate. In all these military interventions millions of people have suffered. Women and children are the most affected. Military interventions exacerbate political and socio-economic crises and internal differences with profoundly detrimental and destructive regional implications. We recognize that threats of military intervention come from imperialist powers, and also through their African proxies. Its consequence will be continued domination of the African continent while dehumanizing its peoples.

Military intervention in Zimbabwe will militarise the whole of Southern Africa. In protesting against threats of military intervention in Africa we confirm the right of African peoples to a peaceful life and to social justice, and to self-determination, including the right to solve our own problems through peaceful means.

Signed by Professor Issa Shivji, Professor Samir Amin, and 200 other scholars attending the 12th Congress of CODESRIA.

Yaounde, Cameroon
10TH DECEMBER 2008

As desperate Zimbabweans continue to fight a daily battle to survive, a group of young refugee women have taken their struggle against the Robert Mugabe regime to the streets of South Africa. The group of up to fifty women at a time has been picketing outside South Africa’s Union Buildings in Pretoria since last week, in protest against the ongoing violence and abuse of women by Zimbabwe’s state agents.

Power-sharing in Zimbabwe is dead and it is time for African governments to oust President Robert Mugabe, Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga has said. After talks with Zimbabwe opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai in Nairobi, Mr Odinga told the BBC that Mr Mugabe had no interest in sharing power.

The Botswana President Ian Tseretse Khama has unveiled his government is ready to fund the whole election re-run in Zimbabwe. Speaking on national television, he said Botswana is not part of the quiet diplomacy employed by other leaders saying its time for such tactics fast expired long time ago.

A Zimbabwean human rights activist was abducted from her home at dawn on Wednesday by a group of armed plain-clothes men who identified themselves as policemen. Jestina Mukoko is the director of the Zimbabwe Peace Project (ZPP), a local human rights organisation that is involved in monitoring and documenting human rights violations in Zimbabwe.

Suspected cumulative cholera cases continue to rise in the nine out of ten Provinces of Zimbabwe. The increase of the outbreak is attributed inter–alia to poor water and sanitation supply, collapsed health system and limited government capacity to respond to the emergency. Trans–border outbreaks are also reported and mainly at the Beitbridge border post in the Matabeleland South of Zimbabwe and Plumtree in Botswana border post.

The outbreak of cholera in epidemic proportions has brought Zimbabwe back to the attention of the region and the world. Zimbabwe’s complex emergency, which is now causing so much suffering, taking lives and breaking the society apart at its seams, has been several years in the making. A key factor in creating a perfect environment for the breeding and spread of the cholera bacterium has been the neglect of essential services by the ZANU PF government over the years.

As Zimbabwe’s ministry of home affairs has become the centre of political attention in the tug of war between Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC and Mugabe’s ZANU PF, what has become of the countries health and education? Silence Chihuri reflects on why the police today matter more than doctors in a country grappling with a cholera epidemic and massive economic meltdown and why home affairs remain the gate keepers of Zimbabwe.

Godwin Muti was one of the first people to descend on Chiadzwa when word spread that diamonds had been discovered in the arid and impoverished part of eastern Zimbabwe. Mr Muti, 31, an unemployed father-of-two, was wallowing in poverty. He could hardly pay rent for a one-room house where he lodged in the old township of Sakubva in Mutare city.

Authorities in Zimbabwe have declared a cholera outbreak that has killed more than 550 people to be a national emergency, state media reports. Health Minister David Parirenyatwa said hospitals were in urgent need of medicine, food and equipment and were suffering a critical staff shortage.

Botswana's government said Wednesday it would give 370,000 dollars to neighbouring Zimbabwe for cholera and food relief, but that the money was not intended for President Robert Mugabe's regime. "We have no quarrel with the people of Zimbabwe. They are in this because their leadership has failed to form a government. The money is intended for the people and not authorities," said Clifford Maribe, a foreign affairs official.

The situation in Zimbabwe has reached unprecedented levels of crisis. As we have been saying for the last few years, such crisis was climaxing and with a number of possibilities arising. Firstly and most likely was the likelihood of the bourgeois elite politicians in Zanu PF and the opposition MDC uniting together in an elitist government of national unity in which Zanu PF would be the senior partner and MDC the junior around a western and capitalist supported neoliberal economic agenda.

Jenni Williams and Magodonga Mahlangu, leaders of Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA), appeared in Bulawayo Magistrate's Court this morning before a packed courtroom. They were on trial for charges relating to the combined cases of the 16 October 2008 case and a 19 June 2004 arrest. The state, represented by Mr. Shawarira, was not ready for trial however and so Magistrate Msipa postponed the trial until 22 January 2009.

A top-ranking official of President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF has publicly admitted that Mugabe is merely the “de facto” and not legally the Zimbabwean Head of State. Zimbabwe’s former ambassador to China and a senior Mugabe aide Chris Mutsvangwa conceded Friday that Mugabe can only become Zimbabwe’s legitimate President when the pending Constitutional Amendment 19 Bill is passed into law.

"It is hard to think of a figure more reviled in the West than Robert Mugabe. Liberal and conservative commentators alike portray him as a brutal dictator, and blame him for Zimbabwe’s descent into hyperinflation and poverty," writes Mahmood Mamdani. " ... There is no denying Mugabe’s authoritarianism, or his willingness to tolerate and even encourage the violent behaviour of his supporters. His policies have helped lay waste the country’s economy, though sanctions have played no small part, while his refusal to share power with the country’s growing opposition movement, much of it based in the trade unions, has led to a bitter impasse. ... Many have compared Mugabe to Idi Amin and the land expropriation in Zimbabwe to the Asian expulsion in Uganda. The comparison isn’t entirely off the mark. I was one of the 70,000 people of South Asian descent booted out by Idi Amin in 1972; I returned to Uganda in 1979. My abiding recollection of my first few months back is that no one I met opposed Amin’s expulsion of ‘Asians’. Most merely said: ‘It was bad the way he did it.’ The same is likely to be said of the land transfers in Zimbabwe. What distinguishes Mugabe and Amin from other authoritarian rulers is not their demagoguery but the fact that they projected themselves as champions of mass justice and successfully rallied those to whom justice had been denied by the colonial system. Not surprisingly, the justice dispensed by these demagogues mirrored the racialised injustice of the colonial system. In 1979 I began to realise that whatever they made of Amin’s brutality, the Ugandan people experienced the Asian expulsion of 1972 – and not the formal handover in 1962 – as the dawn of true independence. The people of Zimbabwe are likely to remember 2000-3 as the end of the settler colonial era. Any assessment of contemporary Zimbabwe needs to begin with this sobering fact."

Thousands of people with HIV and AIDS are being forced further into misery in Zimbabwe, as drastic food shortages and spiralling prices make it difficult to follow antiretroviral (ARV) treatment regimes, the potent medications essential to manage HIV infection. Five local organisations partnered by international development agency Progressio report that “scores” are having to quit or skip medication due, in part, to side effects associated with lack of nutrition and the soaring devaluation of the country’s currency, which is making poor people poorer.

cc. States in Transition Observatory look at the Zimbabwe’s botched election and the subsequent violence, and how this has specifically affected women. They underscore the fact that in times of crisis and conflict, such as those still being witnessed in Zimbabwe, it is always the women and children who are most victimized. The case of Zimbabwe shows how women suffer, both for perceived direct participation in the political process, but also by proxy, for their husbands’ or family members’ involvement. In Zimbabwe, as in other conflict areas, sexual violence continues to be a tool of war.