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Serenasailor
Veteran Poster
Username: Serenasailor
Post Number: 1440
Registered: 01-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, March 19, 2007 - 05:29 pm: | 
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HARARE, Zimbabwe - Zimbabwe's foreign minister warned a group of Western diplomats Monday that the government would not hesitate to expel them if they gave support to the opposition, and the U.S. ambassador walked out of the meeting, envoys said.
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Foreign Minister Simearashe Mbengegwi told them that Western embassies had gone too far by offering food and water to opposition activists who were jailed last week.
President Robert Mugabe's government is under increasing international criticism for its treatment of the opposition, with activists alleging police have disrupted their gatherings and beaten their leaders. Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai was among those allegedly assaulted when police broke up a March 11 prayer meeting.
Mbengegwi, who had summoned the envoys to a meeting, read a terse statement that said the Vienna Convention governing diplomatic behavior prohibited foreign ambassadors from involvement in the internal affairs of the host nation, and Zimbabwe would not hesitate to use that provision to expel them.
When Mbengegwi refused to respond to questions, U.S. Ambassador Christopher Dell walked out of the meeting, according to diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity because the session was closed.
Pressuring diplomats would make it harder for the international community to keep tabs on a government accused of repressing its people and ruining its economy. Over the weekend, Zimbabwe prevented opponents from leaving the country and has long severely restricted the press.
Earlier, Dell suggested there was a split in Zimbabwe's security forces, with police reluctant to carry out a crackdown on the opposition and Mugabe relying on youth militias and agents from the feared Central Intelligence Organization.
Dell told the British Broadcasting Corp. that Mugabe last week spoke to the youth movement of his party and authorized it to use any means available against the opposition.
"What we believe is that we're witnessing a major split inside the security forces, where the regular police, the real police, the professional police of Zimbabwe, are reluctant to carry out such orders, and therefore the regime is increasingly relying on youth militias and special agents from their Central Intelligence Organization, the CIO of Zimbabwe," Dell said.
"And I'm certain that the people of Zimbabwe, when the time comes, will ultimately hold him accountable for comments like that and his responsibility for the, for unleashing this violence over the last week," he said.
Also on Monday, government opponents said the family of an opposition militant killed by police was forced to bury him at their rural home because the administration feared demonstrations at a planned ceremony in the capital.
The government insisted that demonstrator Gift Tandare — killed as police disbanded the March 11 meeting organized by Zimbabwe's political opposition — was buried in the countryside at the family's request and that the state assisted with the funeral arrangements and expenses.
Opposition spokesman Eliphas Mokunoweshure called the government explanation "nonsense."
Members of the opposition said the Tandare family was coerced by CIO agents into holding the funeral in the Mount Darwin district, 95 miles northeast of Harare.
State television said most of the funeral expenses were paid by the ruling party lawmaker for Mount Darwin, Saviour Kasukuwere, a wealthy businessman. It denied Tandare's body had been seized from a funeral home.
Hundreds of mourners and democracy activists have gathered at Tandare's home in the Harare township of Glen View since his death. On March 13, police tried to quell mourners blocking streets and beating drums around Tandare's home in the township, an opposition stronghold. Two were injured by police gunfire.
Nelson Chamisa, aide to Tsvangirai, was assaulted at Harare International Airport by state agents using iron bars on Sunday as he was leaving to attend a meeting in Brussels, Belgium, members of the Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change said.
The alleged assault followed the re-arrests at the airport Saturday of three opposition activists, who were allegedly assaulted along with Tsvangirai and Chamisa on March 11.
The latest violence has drawn new attention to a deteriorating situation in the southern African country, where the increasingly autocratic Mugabe is blamed by opponents for repression, corruption, acute food shortages and inflation of 1,600 percent — the highest in the world.
Mugabe, 83, has rejected the international condemnation following the arrests and alleged beating. The president accused the opposition party of resorting to violence sponsored by former colonial power Britain and other Western allies to oust his government, a newspaper reported Sunday.
"We have given too much room to mischief-makers and shameless stooges of the West. Let them and their masters know that we shall brook none of their lawless behavior," Mugabe was quoted as saying in the state Sunday Mail.
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Chrishayden
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 3920
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, March 20, 2007 - 11:43 am: |
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The brothers over there are too sloppy. When the white folks want to do you, you "have an accident" or disapear and are never heard from again.
The brothers want to be thuggish and let everybody see what they did to you.
Mugabe wouldn't be having this problem if he wasn't trying to run all the white farmers out.
He was sloppy with that, too. One day they should have all just been gone. |
Steve_s
Regular Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 234
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, March 20, 2007 - 06:37 pm: |
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From Sandra Chait's review of Yvonne Vera's "The Stone Virgins" in Africa Today:
Vera, Yvonne. 2003. The Stone Virgins. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 184 pp., $18.00 (cloth).
The little-known "Gukurahundi Massacres" took place in Zimbabwe between 1980 and 1986, when rivalry between Robert Mugabe's ZANLA and Joshua Nkomo's ZIPRA forces spurred Mugabe to send the North Korean-trained 5 Brigade to Matabeleland, Nkomo's ethnic home, to flush out Ndebele dissidents. In 1987, by the time amnesty was declared, the army had found a mere 100 dissidents living in the bushes. However, twenty-thousand unarmed villagers, many of them women, had lost their lives. Yvonne Vera has chosen to air this shameful period of postindependence Zimbabwe in her novel The Stone Virgins, in which she focuses on the story of two young female victims of the massacre in the Matoba (Kezi) district of South Matabeleland. National amnesia about the atrocities visited on these villagers has been fueled by fear of repercussions from Robert Mugabe's ruling party. Historical documents have been lost, and the perpetrators of the crimes pensioned. Selective forgetting has served to reinforce the silencing of women's voices that female veterans of the Chimurenga, or War of Independence, were already suffering. Mugabe's government, reluctant to tarnish the heroic reputation of the Liberation Army, has consistently ignored female fighters' complaints of rape and abuse, and when British filmmaker Ingrid Sinclair attempted to expose the women's situation in her movie Flame, the government threw endless roadblocks in her path ...
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/africa_today/v050/50.4chait.html
Last year I posted some soulful and lyrical excerpts from The Stone Virgins by the late Yvonne Vera, a beautiful black Zimbabwean author who spent her final years in exile in Canada. Kola knows who she is. It's a feminist novel which breaks the silence about the Mugabe government-initiated atrocities against civilians that took place in the province of Matabeleland in the first decade of independence. And many of these civilians were women including some who had served in the army during the War of Independence.
At that time I did not mention that the "prime minister" in the novel is Robert Mugabe, simply because the author chose not to specifically reveal it and I'm a mostly apolitical person. However, I'm not going to listen to any more of this masculinist crap.
It's a story of two sisters in the town of Kezi in the early 1980s. Mugabe's deranged soldiers, ostensibly seeking members of his rival Joshua Nkomo's army, attack the proprietor of the country store -- an almost exact analog to Joe Starks' country store in Eatonville in TEWWG, which also has a verandah and is the gathering place in the town -- and douse him with gasoline and set him and the store on fire.
While one sister is being raped by one of Mugabe's soldiers, the other sister comes to the door, and the rapist decapitates her. Then when he's through raping the woman, he mutilates her face (and we don't find out until much later that he cut off her lips).
So how is it bearable to read of such horror? Because the author couches it in a poetic language which somehow defers the impact until much later when the character is on the road to healing. And my impression is that at the end when she gets a job at the florist's, the proprietor is a white woman (although I can't say for sure).
2) Anyone who's read GraceLand by Chris Abani, knows that it's a novel about the people's resistance to an unnamed Nigerian dictator's attempt to bulldoze a shanty town built on a swamp in Lagos, Nigeria.
Robert Mugabe is the mother of all bulldozing dictators, who, a few years ago, displaced 100,000 black Zimbabweans by bulldozing their homes, many of which were permanent brick structures, and then he refused the United Nations' offer to provide tents for the 100,000 victims of his wrath.
So spare us the masculinist bullshit. If you want to discuss Mugabe with informed African, Indian, and white Britons, there's usually one blog per week on the subject at the Guardian Unlimited blogs. Just Google on "Comment is Free." |
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