Nine more people died in Bulawayo last month due to hunger amid reports that an estimated 22 of the 58 districts in Zimbabwe have dwindling food supplies. Bulawayo Executive Mayor, Japhet Ndabeni-Ncube, told The Standard those who died were mostly children under the age of five, some elderly men and women aged above 60 years. He said the deaths resulting from malnutrition were a weekly occurrence.

Senior Zimbabwean officials have inflated the official number of elephants in the country so they can benefit from the ivory trade, a conservationist has said. Johnny Rodrigues of the Zimbabwean Conservation Taskforce said the elephant population had fallen to 60,000 at the most, yet the government put the figure at more than 100,000.

There were 140 violations of the right to freedom of expression, association or movement in Zimbabwe during the month of June. The Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum also recorded 15 cases of torture and 12 of unlawful detention. For the period January-June 2004, the Forum has recorded 417 freedom of expression violations, 389 cases of political discrimination, 232 of assault and 148 of torture. Visit the website provided to access reports from the Forum.

In Harare, Zimbabwe, severe water shortages and water contamination have caused many schools to cut short their hours of class or not reopen at all. Without clean water water supplies in Harare, serious health concerns could arise.

Two years after Zimbabwean troops returned from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Zimbabwe’s public remains largely unaware of the activities of the mission. Government has kept a tight lid on information about the controversial deployment, which was allegedly carried out to prevent Congolese President Laurent Kabila from being ousted by rebels. The United Nations has implicated top generals, ruling party politicians and other members of Zimbabwe’s elite in illegal resource exploitation in the Congo.

Simon Mann, the leader of the failed coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea, has started a seven-year jail sentence in Zimbabwe for trying to buy weapons from Zimbabwe's state arms manufacturer. A court in Harare ruled that the Old Etonian and former SAS officer should stay behind bars until 2011, crushing his hopes that British establishment figures could use their money and influence to secure his freedom.

“It is time to do away with the niceties, to get back to 'rights language' and for women to stop asking men to be nice, as though they are doing them a favour when it comes to women's issues." This is the tough talk from Zimbabwean feminist Everjoice Win, who was in Durban recently to give a lecture at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Win believes that "gender language" does the (women's) cause no good, and cautions that politicians use events like Women's Day as a platform for their own agendas.

Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights and the Legal Resources Foundation are contemplating a class action to compel Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe to publish findings of investigations into military atrocities against civilians in Matabeleland in the 1980s. A spokesperson for the two human rights groups said they were still collecting signatures from victims of an alleged genocidal campaign in Zimbabwe’s Matabeleland and Midlands provinces that claimed the lives of an estimated 20 000 people in five years.

Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe (ANZ), the publishers of the banned “Daily News” and the “Daily News on Sunday” have reportedly defied an order by the Retrenchment Board to pay 153 retrenched workers severance packages totaling ZW$ 2,3 billion (approximately 433 962 US dollars).

Internal displacement in Zimbabwe has been caused by various internal and external factors that have since the late 1990s assured the country’s severe economic and social decline. Population movements have become an increasingly visible and common reality against a backdrop of political violence and a critical humanitarian situation.

On September 3 2004, a new regional newspaper, “The Southern Times”, was launched in the Zimbabwean resort town of Victoria Falls following the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on media cooperation between Zimbabwe and Namibia. The MOU between the two countries was signed in February this year culminating in the joint venture between Zimpapers whose flagship is The Herald, and the New Era of Namibia, which will give birth to the Southern Times project.

Zimbabwe's ruling ZANU-PF party moved a step closer to gaining total control of parliament after it won a new parliamentary seat from the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) at a weekend by-election. ZANU-PF recaptured the Seke parliamentary seat by default after the MDC boycotted the poll, in line with a decision it took last month to suspend its participation in all elections, alleging the lack of transparency and fairness in electoral processes.

When the government launched its much-publicised crackdown on corruption towards the end of 2003, Zimbabweans dismissed the initiative as a stunt designed to win votes ahead of the March 2005 parliamentary election. Cynics suggested the stunt was designed to settle personal scores with business people and bankers who had crossed the paths of the Zanu PF top leadership. Nine months down the line, the scepticism appears to have been vindicated.

Memory Moyo witnessed the horror of her village being burnt and destroyed by President Robert Mugabe's notorious youth militias. She decided to flee Zimbabwe after fighting off several attempts to rape her. In South Africa, she had hoped the income earned from plaiting women's hair would allow her the basics of survival. But now the 19-year-old Moyo says her life in Johannesburg has become "hell on earth" thanks to the South Africa Police Service (SAPS).

The Zimbabwean government should withdraw a proposed law on nongovernmental organizations, Human Rights Watch says. The law would grant a government-appointed body wide power to interfere in the legitimate activities of these civil society groups and sharply curtail local human rights organizations’ access to funding. “The law would unduly restrict the freedoms of association and of expression,” said Georgette Gagnon, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Africa Division. “It would also enable the government to intervene in the reasonable activities of NGOs.” A full copy of the Bill is available by clicking on the link below.

It was none other than Robert Mugabe who once remarked that “absolute power is when a man is starving and you are the only one able to give him food”. Zimbabwe and the world should take note that he and his party are in deadly earnest about demonstrating the truth of this maxim. The suffering which will be inflicted upon millions in the process does not deter him – or them – for one moment. It is a price they are more than willing to pay in pursuit of that hold on absolute power. With the looming 2005 parliamentary poll already casting a deep shadow across the nation, ZANU PF has positioned itself to take total control of the food procurement, storage and distribution process, reports Sokwanele, an online activist website focusing on Zimbabwe.

At least 15 people were reportedly arrested and eight injured when pro-democracy National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) protestors clashed with police during demonstrations against the Zimbabwe government's proposed Non-Governmental Organisations Bill. Under the Public Order and Security Act, the police must approve all gatherings but had turned down an NCA request to hold the demonstration.

"In the ultimate analysis, not only is the Bill in flagrant violation of international and regional human rights standards and norms, it also represents a decisive rejection of the terms of the Constitution of Zimbabwe, which provide for the right to freedom of expression, association and assembly. That attitude can only be described as contemptuous of the rule of law and of regional and international standards of governance and of the protection of human rights." This is according to an analysis of the controversial Zimbabwean Non-Governmental Organisations Bill, 2004, conducted by the International Bar Association.

Zimbabwe's government said this week that the MDC had decided to boycott elections because they were scared of losing. Justice Minister Chinamasa also dismissed charges that the government was not prepared to enforce the SADC election guidelines.

Zimbabwean police last week arrested six white commercial farmers for allegedly refusing to vacate their farms designated for landless blacks. State media sources said that the farmers in the region of Karoi in western Zimbabwe had defied notices to leave their land and that most had more than one farm each. Farming sources have said that none of the farmers had more than one farm and that some were not even farming as their properties had already been taken.