Thousands of Zimbabweans who have been refused asylum in Britain are staying on to live hand-to-mouth on food and shelter given by strangers because they are terrified to return to their violent homeland. The Zimbabweans' plight follows a move by the government to appeal against a ruling by the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal that there was a 'real risk' of Zimbabweans being given inhuman treatment if they were sent home. The ruling, following a widespread hunger strike by Zimbabweans held in detention centres and a public furore over their return, led to all removals being halted.

Zimbabwe's ruling party has held its annual conference, backing government moves to clamp down on critics. The resolutions were yet more bad news for the country's political opposition, civil rights groups and other critics. The Zanu-PF meeting called for action against civic groups and NGOs it said were sponsored by Western countries. It urged the government to implement a constitutional amendment allowing the authorities to confiscate the passports of those who it sees as a threat.

Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR) has noted with grave concern that the Zimbabwe Republic Police interrupted the commemoration of World AIDS Day on the 1st of December in Harare. "The commemoration of this day by People Living with HIV and AIDS (PLWHA) after an initiative by the Women and AIDS Support Net- work (WASN), supported by other AIDS activists from Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, Zimbabwe Activists on HIV/AIDS (ZAHA) and the Zimbabwe National Network of People Living With HIV/AIDS (ZNNP+) had initially been authorised by the police after WASN took them to the High Court to compel them to grant such permission."

Two of the six Zimbabwean hunger strikers at Yarls Wood have been taken to Bedford Hospital (in the UK) after refusing meals for a month. Thando Mpofu, 28, and Amanda Sibiya, 21, were admitted on Monday. They are protesting against threatened deportation from the detention centre near Clapham. A doctor's report said that the women were at high risk of suffering from a mild form of brain damage – or Wernicke's encephalopathy – unless re-feeding was carried out at hospital. Four other women refugees are still reported to be refusing meals at Yarls Wood. Miss Mpofu claimed at the beginning of their strike that they faced torture or death at the hands of the Zimbabwean government if they were forced home.

About 150 members of civil society organisations, mainly Sida partners in various fields of human rights and HIV/Aids, converged at the Royal Harare Golf Club to witness the premiere of the Sida-funded feature, Transit on 1st December 2005. The occasion was held to mark World Aids Day. The event also featured entertainment and music provided by another Sida partner in the culture sector, the Zimbabwe College of Music, whose music featured the poem “Let my voice speak” recited by Masimba Biriwasha of the Zimbabwe Aids Network (ZAN).

U.N. humanitarian envoy Jan Egeland tramped through deep mud in squalid camps housing victims of Zimbabwe's shantytown demolitions on Monday (December 5), and said those living there were in tremendous need. President Robert Mugabe's government has bulldozed urban slums and what it called illegal structures in an operation the U.N. says left 700,000 people homeless or without a livelihood and affected 2.4 million others. Egeland, the top U.N. official to visit since the crackdown ended in May, visited people living in makeshift plastic-sheeting shelters in Hatcliffe 20 km (12 miles) outside Harare, a camp often waterlogged by rain.

As a Zimbabwean in the Diaspora, the Commonwealth stance on Zimbabwe is good but not good enough.

The toothlessness of Commonwealth gatherings is occasioned by the presence in the forum of African leadership that never come up with substantive ways to change tyrannical regimes.

Maybe due to the nature of the composition or constitution of this body, we witness the failure of a radical approach to grievances of human rights abuses. In recent years Zimbabwe has remained a matter of both regional and world concern, with strong recommendations coming mainly from the west but however moderated by the sympathizers of Robert Mugabe in personalities like Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and Benjamin Mkapa of Tanzania.

One gets a strong feeling that African leaders fear being criticized and that they would defend each other irrespective of the wrong. Politically the notion of being criticized brings with it the negative connotations of failure. Because many of the leadership in Africa has done something that could cause protracted legal battles, there is a phobia for former African leaders going through trial, hence many have either died in exile or run away.

This could well explain the silence from Africa.

The above should therefore help us to understand the stand taken at the Malta Commonwealth meeting which made Zimbabwe a reference in passing rather than an issue on the agenda.

It is in this context that I find the Commonwealth stand on Zimbabwe misplaced in terms of human sympathy for ordinary Zimbabweans, given the atrocities gone and going on in Zimbabwe under the Zanu PF regime. If Uganda and the Maldives shall be the subject of investigations on human rights abuses, one would have hoped that Zimbabwe should have been given the same treatment.

As the UN investigations have shown, beyond a doubt, that human rights are being breached in Zimbabwe, the Commonwealth must call on higher organizations to intensify the inquiry into the need for a free and fair elections to establish justice, freedom and a democracy.

The Zimbabwean government is refusing to protect and assist hundreds of thousands of people displaced by its campaign of forced evictions, Human Rights Watch said in a report released this week. At the same time, Zimbabwe is deliberately obstructing efforts by international humanitarian agencies to provide assistance and protection to the displaced.

Please follow the link to find a petition to EU leaders to act on the human rights situation in Zimbabwe so that justice prevails.

President Robert Mugabe's party in Zimbabwe has won all but seven seats in a controversial new Senate, crushing the challenge posed by a severely weakened opposition party, final results showed on Monday, November 28. According to final results announced by the official electoral commission, the ruling party secured 43 seats in the 66-seat Upper House, while the main opposition party won seven. With an additional 10 seats in the Senate reserved for traditional chiefs loyal to Mugabe, and six others to be appointed by the president, the results confirm the ruling party's dominance of both Houses of Parliament, reports the Mail and Guardian.

Zimbabwe's embattled leading opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), has suspended its own leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, from his position, according to internal party correspondence. In a letter obtained by Agence France-Presse on Monday, MDC vice-president Gibson Sibanda said a national disciplinary committee met last week and resolved to suspend Tsvangirai from his position as president with "immediate effect". Sibanda said the suspension is for misconduct charges, including violation of the party's constitution, as reported by the Mail and Guardian.

John 'Briggs' Bomba, International Socialist Organisation (ISO), Zimbabwe:

"I was among 120 people who were arrested on the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) led Action Against Poverty demonstration on Tuesday 8 November. Hundreds of people had protested against spiralling levels of poverty. Those arrested included township women with babies on their back (the youngest being only six weeks old), the disabled on crutches, HIV positive people demanding access to antiretroviral drugs (ARVs), workers demanding a living wage, unemployed youth and other activists. We spent a nightmarish four days and three nights behind bars in conditions not fit for wild dogs, for raising banners demanding food and water."

For John’s full account, follow the link.

If anyone thought for a moment that the suffering caused by Operation Murambatsvina ("Sweep away the filth") was over, or had abated, they would be seriously mistaken. Nothing could be farther from the truth, reports Sokwanele, a Zimbabwean civic action support group. Six months on from the initial brutal assault which saw 700,000 people in cities across the country losing either their homes, their sources of income or both and a further 2.4 million affected in varying degrees, the misery of the victims continues. Indeed for many it has only intensified in the ensuing months. And the death toll among the internally displaced persons (IDPs) increases week by week.

Zimbabwe last Friday paid an additional $10-million to the International Monetary Fund as it seeks to move out of the red, with only $25-million now outstanding under the critical General Resources Account, the state-controlled Zimbabwe Herald newspaper reported on Monday. It said Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe Governor Dr Gideon Gono had confirmed the payment at the weekend, adding that a total of $67-million had also been paid towards the procurement of fuel, grain, power imports, seed and other critical requirements. The payment to the Bretton Woods institution brings to $155-million the amount paid by the country this year alone, it added.

Parliamentarians from the African, Caribbean and Pacific nations and the European Union on Saturday saw chilling footage of the devastation caused in Zimbabwe by the brutal clearances of poor urban districts started in May this year. The meeting in Edinburgh was organised by two human rights groups, Zimbabwe Watch and the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum, to draw attention of parliamentarians attending the ACP / EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly to the crisis in Zimbabwe. The Joint Parliamentary Assembly is meeting in Edinburgh November 21 to 24.

Four people have died of dysentery in northern Zimbabwe in what appears to be the first outbreak of the disease outside the capital, say reports on Tuesday. An outbreak of the highly contagious diarrhoeal disease was reported earlier this month in Harare and its satellite town of Chitungwiza. Two hundred people were taken to hospital.

She's a sex worker, but not many passers-by would suspect that the slight figure standing in a narrow street opposite a nightclub in Zimbabwe's gold mining town of Kwekwe is also a university student. Tracy Bunjwali, a second-year business studies scholar and part-time prostitute, says her biggest fear is that she might bump into somebody she knows while out on the streets waiting to be taken to a nearby hotel-cum-brothel.

Sandra Nyaira was on a career high when she left Zimbabwe three years ago. For her work as political editor of the country’s leading independent newspaper the Daily News, she had earned a prestigious Courage in Journalism Award from the Washington-based International Women’s Media Foundation. After traveling to the United States to receive the prize, Nyaira attended the journalism master’s program at City University in London on a scholarship. Nyaira expected to be back at her job in Zimbabwe in a year. She has yet to return.

A Zimbabwean government minister has admitted that farm seizures have led to repeated crop failures and severe food shortages. Zanu-PF President Robert Mugabe has always blamed Zimbabwe's food and economic crisis on years of drought and on a conspiracy by Western countries to bring down his government because of his controversial land reform programme.

Deposits of uranium have been unearthed in Zimbabwe, the country's President Robert Mugabe has said. Mr Mugabe said Zimbabwe would use the uranium to boost its energy supplies, but would not pursue nuclear weapons. Zimbabwe has a chronic energy shortage, blamed on a lack of foreign currency for spare parts, and imports power from several neighbouring countries.