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Zimbabwe's opposition accused President Robert Mugabe of trying to "fool" the world yesterday when he banned election observers from any western country from covering parliamentary polls due next year. Coming amid food shortages and economic collapse, the contest represents a crucial hurdle for Mr Mugabe. He has already begun a campaign to guarantee victory and hand his African allies enough reason to give the election a clean bill of health. Mr Mugabe, 80, told a summit of developing countries in Mozambique that only observers from "our friends in the Third World" would be allowed to monitor the polls. "We will...

Dreams in fantasy land YOU can, of course, believe anything you like. You can believe that everyone in the troubled central African nation will have full bellies this year. You can believe that patriotic and revolutionary new farmers will have grown the food that fills those bellies. It's entirely up to you whether you believe these things or not. You can even believe the troubled courts in the troubled central African police State will resolve disputed election results from four years ago - and that they'll do so before the next elections. And if you're being really optimistic, you can...

A ROW has erupted among new farmers resettled in Mashonaland East after some farming equipment, which they say was designated for their use, was found stashed at a farm belonging to provincial Governor, David Karimanzira. Karimanzira, however, told The Standard recently that the farm equipment was brought to the farm without his knowledge. Said Karimanzira: "A lot of people leave their property at the farm - and that does not mean its mine. Some have left their scotch carts there. We also have our own irrigation pipes at the farm." The new farmers settled at the AI Saratoga Farm along...

une 17, 2004 "If you listen carefully to the celebrating voices, those of the rich and the powerful in their corporate offices and government buildings, you can pick up a nervous undertone. If you watch the policy-makers closely, you may notice that the smiles are often thin and the hands that hold champagne glasses sometimes twitch, involuntarily. If you listen even more carefully, you can discover why. In the background you can hear another set of voices - those from below - far, far more numerous. These are voices the powerful do not want to hear, but they are having...

On June 8, 2004 Robert Mugabe’s ruling regime in Zimbabwe banned private farmland ownership and nationalized all farmland and privately owned game preserves. Special Affairs Minister for President Mugabe, John Nkomo ordered all private landowners to surrender their land immediately to the government. He added that former landowners could apply for 99-year leases to their land from the government. The legal owners of the land will not be compensated for their losses. This process of stripping legally titled land owners of their property began in 2000. At that time, Nkomo boasted, “in the end all land shall be state land...

Dear Family and Friends, As I sat at my desk on Saturday morning I thought it might be of interest to type, for the record, the headline report on ZBC's 8 am radio news because the war of numbers about Zimbabwe's harvest continues. The headline story was as follows: "The government says internal food assessments indicate that the country will harvest an estimated 2.5 million tonnes of maize. This exceeds the annual national food requirement by six hundred thousand tonnes." This week James Morris, the UN envoy for humanitarian needs in the region, said that if our government's harvest figures...

PRESIDENT Thabo Mbeki has been urged to ratchet up pressure on the government of Zimbabwe to end the continued violation of human rights there. In an open letter delivered to Mbeki yesterday, Amnesty International (AI) South Africa, AI Zimbabwe and other civic organisations from the two countries pleaded with the South African leader to intervene and halt the unrelenting nature of the crisis in Zimbabwe. The signatories highlighted the disparity between the ideals and principles enshrined both in the New Partnership for Africa's Development, the mission of the African Union and the reality of the situation as experienced by millions...

President Robert Mugabe's rosy forecast of a bumper harvest in Zimbabwe was contradicted by his own government yesterday, when an official report said 2.3 million people needed immediate international food aid. The seizure of white-owned farms has combined with drought to cripple agriculture in Zimbabwe. But Mr Mugabe's official message is that his land grab has markedly increased production and made Zimbabwe self-sufficient. Last month, he refused help from the United Nations World Food Programme, saying: "Why foist this food upon us? We don't want to be choked." He brushed aside the fact that Zimbabwe has lived on food aid...

YOU have to admire Robert Mugabe's chutzpah. First he makes life so miserable for Zimbabweans that busloads of them emigrate. Then he asks the fugitives to send money home to prop up the regime that drove them out in the first place. Gideon Gono, the governor of Zimbabwe's central bank, has been on a world tour to persuade expatriate Zimbabweans to wire money home using official channels. Most remittances are currently sent through informal channels. For example, a Zimbabwean nurse in London pays money into a friendly businessman's offshore account, who then asks his cousin in Bulawayo to pay an...

Africa's despots are saber rattling again. Last week Sam Nujoma, the Namibian President, called white people 'snakes', and then Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's disgraceful dictator, called the almost saintly Archbishop Desmond Tutu an 'evil and embittered little bishop'. Zimbabwe under Mugabe has been a lost cause for years, and the Archbishop's complaints about Mugabe's disregard for the law were likely to fall on deaf ears. But that the disease is spreading to Nujoma's Namibia is a rather worrying development. Collapsing or genocidal regimes, including Sudan's, are rife for providing cover for, if not directly encouraging, terrorism. Remember that Osama bin Laden...

Drowning in denial - South Africa is the only country that can effectively put pressure on Mugabe, says Andrew Meldrum, but instead it turns a blind eye to the old monster’s reign of terror Pretoria The unending horror of Robert Mugabe’s misrule reaches well across Zimbabwe’s borders. More than two million Zimbabweans are estimated to be in South Africa now. Desperately hungry and often brutalised, they queue up in their hundreds at border posts. Many more climb through electric fences and brave snapping crocodiles in the ‘grey-green, greasy’ Limpopo river to cross into South Africa. Most are seeking work and...

Mainland China's ambassador to South Africa has denied that his government has sold 12 fighter jets to Zimbabwe. Ambassador Liu Guijin said both China's ambassador to Zimbabwe and his government in Beijing had said the original report in Zimbabwe's Mirror newspaper was "baseless". Liu was speaking at a joint press briefing with Deputy Foreign Minister Aziz Pahad on this week's visit to South Africa by Chinese Vice-President Zeng Qinghong. Asked earlier if South Africa intended to raise the issue of the jets with Zeng, Pahad said he knew nothing about the reported sale, but South Africa would, in any case,...

OFFICIALS in a troubled central African banana republic say they have not snubbed a top United Nations official - they just didn't want to see him. "If he'd come on a different day, things might have been better," said a slightly muddled man from the ruling Zany Party. "As it was, we were a bit busy on the day he wanted to arrive." The UN said the snub was confusing. Senior government officials from all the troubled central African country's neighbours managed to find the time for a meeting with the world body. Meanwhile the UN official, the personal envoy...

Huge wheat deficits feared By our own Staff ZIMBABWE will experience severe shortages of bread next year following late invitations to new farmers to venture into wheat production. The invitations came almost a month after the lapse of the deadline for planting the crop, Standard Business has established. The government last week frantically courted new farmers at the eleventh hour to take up production of the crop after it became clear that there was very little planting activity taking place. Wheat is normally planted up to May 15 and is harvested in September just before the onset of the rains....

CHIKOMBEDZI - Zanu PF Central Committee member, Titus Mukhungulushi Chauke, has described recent claims by President Robert Mugabe and government officials that Zimbabwe had enough food to last until the next harvest as "irresponsible and utter rubbish". The veteran politician from the minority Shangaan tribe said such utterances by Zanu PF chiefs were "illogical" as they chase away international food donor agencies, leaving Zimbabweans suffering. "This is utter rubbish. People, hundreds of thousands of people in Chiredzi, Chivi, Mwenezi and some pockets in Zaka districts are still buying food simply because they did not realise a bumper harvest," said Chauke....

<p>BENONI, South Africa - Daan Duvenage shook his head as he gazed over the wood-and-tin shacks where 40,000 squatters have established homes on a 140-acre swath of his farm.</p> <p>"I can't go in there," he said of the warren of homes, streets and shops where he once grew hay for his cattle. "Too dangerous for me. They know who I am."</p>

A clever and daring under-ground movement has sprung up in Zimbabwe that is stoking public opinion against Robert Mugabe's government. Zvakwana - which means 'enough' in the Shona language - has launched a bold campaign expressed through graffiti, emails and condoms to encourage the Zimbabwean people to rise up. The clandestine campaign is building up steam just as the progress of Zimbabwe's opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, has stalled under the burden of torture of its leaders and state violence against its supporters. A black Z on a bright yellow handprint is appearing mysteriously on the walls of...

AN alleged plot to drive most of Zimbabwe’s 50,000 remaining whites out of the country is being investigated by the Foreign Office. The Sunday Times has obtained a document, apparently drawn up on the orders of a senior official in President Robert Mugabe’s secret police, which calls for the bombing of an economic target in Zimbabwe that could be blamed on “British funded terrorists”. Diplomatic relations with Britain could then be broken off and all British nationals told to leave within 48 hours or risk being interned as suspected terrorists or terrorist sympathisers, says the document. It is dated June...

Paralysed Saturday 19 June 2004 Dear Family and Friends, I have been trying to think of a word that most accurately describes life in the small Zimbabwean town in which I live. Lots of words come to mind, many of which are unrepeatable but I think the most appropriate ones are paralyzed and exhausted. Taking my soon to be 12 year old son shopping for a pair of long trousers for his birthday, we stopped in the middle of the road along with all the other pedestrians and cars and stared at a little parade of school children passing to...

Pretoria/Johannesburg, June 17. (Guardian News Service): The Zimbabwean president, Robert Mugabe, admitted for the first time on Wednesday that members of his family had been affected by HIV/AIDS. Mr Mugabe told a conference on AIDS that unnamed members of his family had become ill from the disease. Describing HIV/AIDS as "one of the greatest challenges facing our nation", he said that most people had been affected "and that includes the extended family of the president himself". The admission came after years of official neglect of a virus that has infected almost a quarter of adults in Zimbabwe, one of the...