“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.

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 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.

Excerpts below, full New York Times account here

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.

You can read details of the event here.

Today, CNN.com has an article 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.”

More details below, read the full report here:

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.

Check out this update on what’s happening in Zimbabwe from our friends at Amnesty International USA.

-Margaret McDonnell

Zimbabwe is locked in an increasingly downward spiral of diminishing civil rights, decaying infrastructure, violent farm seizures, food insecurity and mass displacement of persons through government destruction of property and those escaping violence and poverty. The situation came to a head last year following Presidential and Parliamentary elections when a run-off election instigated mass violence perpetrated against members of the opposition candidate party Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and human rights defenders in an attempt to sway the election results.

A power sharing agreement was negotiated in September 2008 between President Mugabe of the ZANU-PF party, Morgan Tsvangirai of the MDC-T and Arthur Mutambara of the MDC-M, calling for a return to the rule of law, an end to harassment of political parties, respect for human rights, a new constitution and prosecutions of perpetrators of the election violence.

Since the new government was sworn in February of this year, there have been some small changes in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe now uses a monetary system based on the US dollar or South Africa rand which has curbed inflation but it means many people can’t access hospital care because they have no foreign currency. Additionally, Zimbabwe’s healthcare system cannot provide the services necessary to sustain the population due to serious shortages of basic clinical equipment and medications.

Zimbabwe also faces a continuing cholera epidemic that has seen 100,000 cases and claimed more than 4000 lives since initials outbreaks in August 2008. The epidemic’s severity is traced to lack of functioning hospitals, abject poverty due to the collapse of the nation’s economy and infrastructure and the rainy season that caused raw sewage to seep into wells used for drinking water. Crisis levels of the outbreak will resume when the rainy season returns in October 2009 if the water treatment plants and sewer systems are not repaired.

Zimbabwe’s education system, once a model in southern Africa, is in a state of near collapse. Compulsory school fees are not affordable by most of the population. Educational supplies are not sufficient to promote a conducive learning environment, with children required to bring chalk, paper and other materials to the classroom. The current Education Minister David Coltart reports an average of 30 pupils share one text book in rural areas while in urban areas it is mostly 15-1 or 20-1. An assessment by UNICEF in February 2009 reported “eighty-six percent of schools reportedly open were not fully functional; 54% of the opened schools were conducting no classes at all. Ninety-two schools visited were completely closed: of the total 94 schools reportedly “open,” only 14% of schools reported teaching at full capacity.”

Amnesty International’s Secretary General visited Zimbabwe last month and noted that repression of human rights defenders, political activists, lawyers and journalists continues. In fact, while she was there, members of civil society group Women of Zimbabwe Arise held a protest near the building Ms. Khan was simultaneously conducting a press conference. Police converged on the protest, arresting and beating many people severely, including a grandmother and a mother with her 9 month old baby.

Zimbabwe is approaching new elections in less than a year’s time. The new constitution process requires it to be ratified by the Zimbabwe people in a vote which should occur around July 2010. Further, if the new constitution alters the current structure of the power sharing agreement, such as eliminating the new Prime Minister position or calls for new Presidential elections, there is potentially a second election in Zimbabwe as well. Considering that the violence never ceased in Zimbabwe, the chances of a dramatic increase during the next year are high.

You can help. Amnesty International USA and Physicians for Human Rights are calling for the United Nations and African Union to deploy human rights monitors on the ground in Zimbabwe NOW. These monitors will assist in compiling investigation reports of the violence that occurred during the elections last year, assure that humanitarian aid flowing into Zimbabwe is distributed equitably, monitor and report on-going incidences of human rights violations and hopefully remain on the ground throughout 2010 to assist with monitoring human rights conditions during the coming elections.

-Sarah Hager, Amnesty International USA

Sign the petition here calling for human rights monitors to be deployed to Zimbabwe.
Listen to Amnesty International’s Secretary General Irene Kahn discuss her visit to Zimbabwe.

“This year’s improved harvest comes after two consecutive years of poor production,” said the World Food Programme’s Jan Delbaere, who worked on the report, reports AP news agency. “Having depleted their food stocks and sold livestock and other assets to cope with the effects of the recent crises, many rural households are still struggling to survive.”

If you’re curious about the report, you can find it here.

-Beth Adler

Thanks to Amnesty International USA, last week I and some other ONE staff got the chance to meet with two extraordinary women from the organization Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA). Formed in 2003 by Jenni Williams, WOZA now has a membership of over 70,000 women (and men) and has truly become a grassroots force to be reckoned with.

The idea behind WOZA, as Jenni Williams and Magodonga Mahlangu stressed, is to give ordinary women in Zimbabwe the power to mobilize and take nonviolent action against injustices. Unfortunately, the right to mobilize—something we as ONE members often take for granted—is regularly stifled in Zimbabwe by a police force who, according to Ms. Williams, have become agents of the ruling party rather than an independent and non-partisan organization. Both Ms. Williams and Ms. Mahlangu have spent time in custody for exercising WOZA’s ability to organize and peacefully protest.

Both women spoke at length about some of the crushing social and systemic crises currently afflicting Zimbabwe, including a collapsing economy, healthcare system and a disintegrating—nearly nonexistent now—educational system. The children that are fortunate enough to live near an open and staffed school have to bring their own chair and chalk to school and basic medicines, including pain killers, are no longer available in many hospitals. As these problems mount, the Zimbabwe government continues to subvert the will of the people, making a stark divide between wealthy politicians and impoverished citizens.

It was fascinating and enlightening to hear Ms. Williams and Ms. Maglangu speak not only about their on-the-ground, personal experiences living in Zimbabwe, but also their efforts to mount a massive coalition of ordinary Zimbabwe citizens to speak out against the Zimbabwe government. They are truly living up to the mission of WOZA, which means “come forward” in Ndebele.

To learn more about WOZA and their ongoing campaigns, check out: www.amnestyusa.org/woza and http://www.amnesty.org.uk/actions_details.asp?ActionID=364.

-Chris Scott, ONE