According to CNN, Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai– Zimbabwe’s President and Prime Minister, respectively– held a rare joint press conference Monday. As ONE Blog readers are probably aware, the two have a complicated political relationship, so this is an interesting development:
“We are different parties; we go at each other at party level. Yes. But let it not be said that we are dysfunctional, (that) we are at war. No,” said Mugabe, 86, defending an attack he made on Tsvangirai at a party conference over the weekend.
“This inclusive government will not collapse. We will make sure that it does not collapse,” said Tsvangirai, adding that there was a “camaraderie” with his former political enemy.
Over the weekend, Mugabe told his supporters that he was tired of working with Tsvangirai and wanted elections next year.
But after meeting with Tsvangirai and Mutambara, Mugabe said that the coalition had given Zimbabweans “a sense of togetherness.”
Both Mugabe and Tsvangirai said Zimbabweans would go to elections once a referendum for a new constitution has been held.
Zimbabwe Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai has fired 4 top Cabinet ministers according to the AP:
All those involved were from Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change party. Tsvangirai has no power over ministers from President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party in a unity government forged last year as a compromise after disputed national elections in 2008.
The Tsvangirai politician who shared the police ministry with a ZANU-PF official was shuffled to the housing ministry and the previous housing minister was dismissed. The ministers of energy, women and youth also were dismissed.
Tsvangirai told reporters the slow pace of restoring law and order, rehabilitating power infrastructure and achieving democratic reforms in general led to “a loss of confidence in the new administration among the electorate.”
“As a result, I have decided on a number of changes needed to strengthen the performance of the MDC in government and outside government,” he said of the first shuffle since he took office in February last year.
Mugabe rarely fires his ministers, most of them longtime ZANU-PF loyalists. Several ZANU-PF politicians have survived corruption allegations over the three decades Mugabe has been in power in Zimbabwe.
New York-based advocacy group Human Rights Watch said on Monday that Zimbabwe has broken its promise to halt physical abuse of diamond miners and should have its international certification frozen.
The call came in a new report issued by the group to coincide with a meeting in Tel Aviv of partners in the Kimberley Process (KP) certification scheme, created to prevent the sale of “blood diamonds”.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Zimbabwe should be suspended from the group as it had reneged on a promise made last year to improve conditions at its Marange diamond fields. Such a move would bar the country’s exports of the gems.
Accreditation of Marange’s production was suspended last November but is likely to be reinstated at the Tel Aviv conference.
Several humanitarian groups oppose such a move, arguing instead that the whole country should be disbarred until conditions at Marange are improved.
“Human Rights Watch has received new reports that soldiers in Marange are engaging in forced labor, torture, beatings, and harassment,” the report said.
The group said its findings were based on more than 30 interviews of people from the Marange district, government officials and staff of other rights groups, some as recently as last month.
In yesterday’s presentation of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award to the women of WOZA, President Obama offered some sharp words for Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, as reported by the New York Times. In his remarks, President Obama said:
In the end, history has a clear direction and it is not the way of those who arrest women and babies for singing in the streets. It is not the way of those who starve and silence their own people, who cling to power by the threat of force.
Mr. Obama’s decision to publicly recognize Women of Zimbabwe Arise, or Woza, whose members have taken to the streets for years to demand democracy, will probably confirm Mr. Mugabe’s belief that the United States and the West are out to topple him, already a recurrent theme in the state-run media he controls.
Though engaged in a power-sharing government since February, Mr. Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party have deployed state security forces to arrest and jail rival politicians and party workers, human rights lawyers and civic leaders.
Regional heads of state, worried that the government led by Mr. Mugabe and his nemesis, Morgan Tsvangirai, will crumble, have insisted the men settle their differences in coming weeks, but so far Mr. Mugabe has shown no inclination to bend.
The United States has limited political leverage in southern Africa, but Mr. Obama has repeatedly spoken out about Mr. Mugabe’s misrule — notably when he welcomed Mr. Tsvangirai to the White House in June, when he addressed the Ghanaian Parliament in July and in his remarks on Monday.
Momentarily Jenni Williams and Magondonga Mahlangu of Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA) will receive the 2009 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award from President Obama. WOZA serves to provide women in Zimbabwe an opportunity and forum to stand up for their rights and freedoms.
Back in April, I and some other ONE staffers got a chance to meet with Jenni and Magondonga to discuss WOZA and the state of human rights in Zimbabwe. It was a remarkable experience. Many congratulations are in order for Jenni, Mogondonga, and all of Women of Zimbabwe Arise.
At the start of the year, Nora Coghlan from our policy team wrote about the education crisis in Zimbabwe. After a heated conflict between school teachers and the Zimbabwean government, it was feared that “2009 will be another lost year for education in Zimbabwe.”
Today, CNN.com has anarticle examining the state of education in Zimbabwe. While they note signs of the education system fighting back to normalcy, the price of education and continued lack of funding still make it incredibly difficult for families to send their children to school.
Watch this corresponding video that CNN ran a few weeks back:
Excerpts below, full piece here:
The country’s education minister in the year-old power-sharing administration believes it could be decade before standards are back up to Zimbabwe’s good past record.
According to the education department, 20,000 teachers have left the country in the past two years and half of Zimbabwe’s children have not progressed beyond primary school.
Many parents today are too poor to send their children to school. Rural schools — where pencils, desks and books are luxuries — are hardest hit.
When CNN visited a Mathabisana primary school in Umguza, in the southwest of Zimbabwe, headmaster Nonkululeko Ndlovu said that at one point teachers used charcoal as a substitute for chalk.
“There are no textbooks to talk about at the moment because I remember the last text books were bought sometime in 2000 or so, when we were still getting government grants but now we don’t have anything.
“Those text books have reached their shelf life. An aid organization donated 32 text books which we really appreciated and we are using those text books right across the grades, trying to impart knowledge to the kids.”
The New York Times and other media outlets are reporting that Zimbabwe Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai is openly boycotting cabinet meetings as a means of protesting President Robert Mugabe’s party. NYT characterizes this as the “biggest breach yet in the new transitional government.”
The catalyst for this step was the jailing Wednesday of Roy Bennett, Mr. Tsvangirai’s deputy agriculture minister-designate, a white farmer who is scheduled to stand trial Monday on three-year-old terrorism charges that his party, the Movement for Democratic Change, says are fabricated. But even after Mr. Bennett was grantedbail Friday after the news conference, officials in his party said their decision to disengage did not change.
“This is the time for us to say enough is enough,” said Thabitha Khumalo, a spokeswoman for the M.D.C.
Mr. Tsvangirai laid out a broad array of grievances. He accused Mr. Mugabe’s party, ZANU-PF, of selectively using the law as a weapon to punish his parliamentarians, putting 16,000 of its youth militia on the government payroll, and remilitarizing the countryside on bases used in last year’s discredited election to organize a campaign of terror against his supporters.
While he stopped short of quitting the government, Mr. Tsvangirai warned that if the crisis were not resolved and a working relationship restored he would call for United Nations-supervised elections.
ONE is campaigning to ensure that the Congressional budget does not cut foreign assistance programs like Feed the Future that help people break the cycle of poverty and hunger.
The Horn of Africa is experiencing its worst drought in 60 years. More than 11 million people, mostly nomadic pastoralists and farmers in south-central Somalia, north-eastern Kenya, and south-eastern Ethiopia, are severely lacking access to food.
2011 marks 30 years since the first cases of AIDS were documented. Take a closer look at the specific, achievable goals we must hit by 2015 to make this year the beginning of the end of AIDS.
As aid agencies warn more than 9 million people could be affected by a food crisis in East Africa, world leaders are failing to keep their 2009 promises to tackle the causes of chronic hunger and support farmers in the world's poorest countries.
