Sunday, September 25, 2005
Tennis / Israel goes up 2-1 against Zimbabwe
From www.haaretz.com
Tennis / Israel goes up 2-1 against Zimbabwe
By Rami Hipsh
Yoni Erlich and Andy Ram defeated Zimbabwe's Wayne Black and Genius Chidzikwe 6-2, 6-3, 6-3 in the doubles event of their Davis Cup Europe/Africa Zone I relegation tie in Harare yesterday, to put Israel up 2-1 going into today's final matches.
Israel needs to win one match out of two today to avoid relegation from Europe/Africa Zone I, the competition's second level.
Ram and Erlich, the No. 10 doubles team in the world, have been a strong point for Israel in recent years. "This match was very important for us," Erlich said. "We wanted to take the point and come into [Sunday] with more confidence for the final day. We started out strong in the first set, with lots of presence and control. We broke them early and it gave us confidence and control for the entire match. After that, we were already loose, we played very well, we were better than them."
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On Friday, Dudi Sela, Israel's top male tennis player at the moment at No. 160, lost to Wayne Black 6-1, 7-6, 6-7, 6-3. In the second match, Noam Okun picked up Israel's first point by defeating Chidzikwe 6-2, 7-6, 6-3.
Okun is already used to winning Davis Cup matches, especially against an opponent like Chidzikwe, No. 734 in the world.
"I began well," Okun said after his match Friday. "I didn't make a lot of mistakes. I played consistently, and from the start I showed him I intended to win the match."
Sela will try to seal the victory against Chidzikwe in the reverse singles at 1 P.M. Israel time today. If he loses, Okun will need to defeat Black in the final match of the competition for Israel t">Haaretz - Israel News - Tennis / Israel goes up 2-1 against Zimbabwe: "Tennis / Davis Cup
Tennis / Israel goes up 2-1 against Zimbabwe
By Rami Hipsh
Yoni Erlich and Andy Ram defeated Zimbabwe's Wayne Black and Genius Chidzikwe 6-2, 6-3, 6-3 in the doubles event of their Davis Cup Europe/Africa Zone I relegation tie in Harare yesterday, to put Israel up 2-1 going into today's final matches.
Israel needs to win one match out of two today to avoid relegation from Europe/Africa Zone I, the competition's second level.
Ram and Erlich, the No. 10 doubles team in the world, have been a strong point for Israel in recent years. 'This match was very important for us,' Erlich said. 'We wanted to take the point and come into [Sunday] with more confidence for the final day. We started out strong in the first set, with lots of presence and control. We broke them early and it gave us confidence and control for the entire match. After that, we were already loose, we played very well, we were better than them.'
On Friday, Dudi Sela, Israel's top male tennis player at the moment at No. 160, lost to Wayne Black 6-1, 7-6, 6-7, 6-3. In the second match, Noam Okun picked up Israel's first point by defeating Chidzikwe 6-2, 7-6, 6-3.
Okun is already used to winning Davis Cup matches, especially against an opponent like Chidzikwe, No. 734 in the world.
'I began well,' Okun said after his match Friday. 'I didn't make a lot of mistakes. I played consistently, and from the start I showed him I intended to win the match.'
Sela will try to seal the victory against Chidzikwe in the reverse singles at 1 P.M. Israel time today. If he loses, Okun will need to defeat Black in the final match of the competition for Israel to avoid relegation.
Sunday, September 18, 2005
New Zimbabwe law scraps 4,000 land challenges
New Zimbabwe law scraps 4,000 land challenges
Sun Sep 18, 2005 12:07 PM GMT
HARARE (Reuters) - Zimbabwe has nullified more than 4,000 court cases brought by white farmers challenging the forced acquisition of their land, the official Sunday Mail said.
President Robert Mugabe this month signed into law controversial constitutional changes he said would finally settle any dispute over the legality of his government's drive to seize white-owned farms, which started in 2000.
Under the amendments, all such land now becomes state-owned and court challenges are barred.
The Sunday Mail quoted the chief law officer in the attorney general's office, Nelson Mutsonziwa, as saying the department would make court submissions on Monday to formally end the farmers' litigation.
"Around 4,000 cases were pending before the Administrative Court and the passing of the Constitutional Amendment Bill into law means they are all being nullified. All the challenges are now useless," Mutsonziwa told the paper. He was not available for comment.
The Sunday Mail quoted Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa as saying the nationalisation would not affect private residential properties or companies.
The changes to the constitution also provide for the creation of a Senate as the second chamber of parliament, seen likely packed with Mugabe's allies, and allow the government to deny passports to people deemed "traitors".
Critics believe the changes are yet another tool to suppress opposition to Mugabe's 25-year rule as the country groans under an economic crisis widely blamed on his mismanagement.
Zimbabwe is suffering from record unemployment, triple digit inflation, a six-year-old fuel crunch and food shortages, which critics blame on disruptions to agriculture linked to the land seizures. Mugabe's government solely blames drought.
Mugabe denies misruling the country since assuming power from Britain in 1980, and argues that London has conspired with other western countries and his domestic opponents to sabotage Zimbabwe's economy over the land seizures, which he says redress ownership imbalances left by British colonialism.
Sun Sep 18, 2005 12:07 PM GMT
HARARE (Reuters) - Zimbabwe has nullified more than 4,000 court cases brought by white farmers challenging the forced acquisition of their land, the official Sunday Mail said.
President Robert Mugabe this month signed into law controversial constitutional changes he said would finally settle any dispute over the legality of his government's drive to seize white-owned farms, which started in 2000.
Under the amendments, all such land now becomes state-owned and court challenges are barred.
The Sunday Mail quoted the chief law officer in the attorney general's office, Nelson Mutsonziwa, as saying the department would make court submissions on Monday to formally end the farmers' litigation.
"Around 4,000 cases were pending before the Administrative Court and the passing of the Constitutional Amendment Bill into law means they are all being nullified. All the challenges are now useless," Mutsonziwa told the paper. He was not available for comment.
The Sunday Mail quoted Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa as saying the nationalisation would not affect private residential properties or companies.
The changes to the constitution also provide for the creation of a Senate as the second chamber of parliament, seen likely packed with Mugabe's allies, and allow the government to deny passports to people deemed "traitors".
Critics believe the changes are yet another tool to suppress opposition to Mugabe's 25-year rule as the country groans under an economic crisis widely blamed on his mismanagement.
Zimbabwe is suffering from record unemployment, triple digit inflation, a six-year-old fuel crunch and food shortages, which critics blame on disruptions to agriculture linked to the land seizures. Mugabe's government solely blames drought.
Mugabe denies misruling the country since assuming power from Britain in 1980, and argues that London has conspired with other western countries and his domestic opponents to sabotage Zimbabwe's economy over the land seizures, which he says redress ownership imbalances left by British colonialism.
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Israeli in S. Africa sues neighbor over Nazi graffiti
Israeli in S. Africa sues neighbor over Nazi graffiti
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
EDWIN NAIDU, THE JERUSALEM POST Aug. 24, 2005
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
An Israeli-born textile businessman is challenging his South African neighbor in the country's recently-established Equality Court over paintings of a swastika, a German war decoration and writings he said were anti-Semitic and offensive.
Yaron Fishman, a Jew who moved to South Africa 17 years ago, said his neighbor, Gerald Barkhuizen, painted the graffiti on the fence outside his property in White River, in Mpumalanga. The incident took place last month, following a petty dispute over a dog kennel.
Fishman, who moved to Mpumalanga a year ago after living in Cape Town, has filed a notice to take the matter before the Equality Court in what would be the first "hate speech" case to come before the body, which is empowered to rule on any form of discrimination in South Africa. The papers are being finalized and are expected to be served to Barkhuizen within a week.
South Africa's Equality Law (also known as the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act), which prohibits hate speech, came into effect in 2000 and was amended two years later.
Jody Kollapen, the chairperson of the South African Human Rights Commission, confirmed that the commission would represent Fishman in the case. "Barkhuizen said the paintings are art, but Fishman believes they were directed at him because of his identity. Therefore, we believe the court should hear the matter and consider it within the context of the Equality Laws."
Fishman said the graffiti was drawn on the fence surrounding Barkhuizen's property, facing the public, and was an insult that exceeded Barkhuizen's right to freely express himself. The anti-Semitic images included a swastika and an iron cross (a German war decoration) and also included the phrase "offensive bastard" in Hebrew and Greek.
Fishman said the incident took place after he asked Barkhuizen to move a dog kennel that was on the border of his property. "The slogan appeared the next morning after we had begun cutting bushes to start building a wall," he said.
"Seeing those signs came as quite a shock because they were so extreme and full of malice," Fishman said, noting that he had previously enjoyed good relations with his neighbor.
Fishman said he wanted the matter resolved soon, before his father, a Holocaust survivor, arrived from Europe to stay with him. "Knowing what he experienced during the Holocaust, I would hate for him to be humiliated again," he said.
"My hope is that this case will become popular and contribute to a better South Africa," Fishman said.
His neighbor, however, believes he is being wrongly persecuted for his works of art.
Barkhuizen, who has moved out of his house reportedly because of death threats, said he had no ill feelings toward Fishman. "I am an artist. It is my house and I have every right to draw murals of freedom struggles and wars," he said. He has received numerous threats since the case surfaced.
"I am an anti-war person," he said. "I would like all governments on Earth to be peaceful." However, he added, he was not happy with his neighbor for helping spread a number of "untruths," including that he was racist.
"I am no liar. I paint murals, and I am not anti-Jewish. I am just enjoying my right to be free to paint," he said.
Barkhuizen said the paintings were a demonstration of his view of the world. "I don't go to public walls or government building walls. I paint on my own property's walls," he said.
"If I write that Osama bin Laden is a spiteful bastard, is that wrong? After all, he was responsible for 9/11," said Barkhuizen.
"He [Fishman] can do what he likes on his walls. As a South African I can do what I like on my walls, and he can take me to court should he wish," he said.
Kollapen said freedom of expression was not an unqualified right. "In the South African context, the right to dignity and equality is worthy of equal treatment and protection, if not more," he said.
David Saks, associate director of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, said Fishman was quite justified in believing that the graffiti was aimed at offending him.
"Not only Jews suffered at the hands of the Nazis during World War II, but Jews were certainly Nazism's most high-profile victims and were the only people singled out for systematic destruction simply because of who they were. It is for this reason that people wishing to give offense to Jews the world over commonly resort to using Nazi imagery," he said.
Saks added that, during eight years at the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, he found Nazi references to be the most common form of anti-Jewish harassment.
"It strains credibility to claim that the placing of Nazi symbols, accompanied by insulting slogans – in part in Hebrew, in full view of Fishman – have nothing to do with his Jewish background," Saks added.
An Israeli-born textile businessman is challenging his South African neighbor in the country's recently-established Equality Court over paintings of a swastika, a German war decoration and writings he said were anti-Semitic and offensive.
Yaron Fishman, a Jew who moved to South Africa 17 years ago, said his neighbor, Gerald Barkhuizen, painted the graffiti on the fence outside his property in White River, in Mpumalanga. The incident took place last month, following a petty dispute over a dog kennel.
Fishman, who moved to Mpumalanga a year ago after living in Cape Town, has filed a notice to take the matter before the Equality Court in what would be the first 'hate speech' case to come before the body, which is empowered to rule on any form of discrimination in South Africa. The papers are being finalized and are expected to be served to Barkhuizen within a week.
South Africa's Equality Law (also known as the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act), which prohibits hate speech, came into effect in 2000 and was amended two years later.
Jody Kollapen, the chairperson of the South African Human Rights Commission, confirmed that the commission would represent Fishman in the case. 'Barkhuizen said the paintings are art, but Fishman believes they were directed at him because of his identity. Therefore, we believe the court should hear the matter and consider it within the context of the Equality Laws.'
Fishman said the graffiti was drawn on the fence surrounding Barkhuizen's property, facing the public, a"
Mugabe: Outstaying His Welcome
: "27 March 2005
Mugabe: Outstaying His Welcome
By Gwynne Dyer
Like the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Cuba's Fidel
Castro, President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe is a revolutionary who would
have served his people best by dying a long time ago. Instead, at the age
of 81, he is now deliberately starving people who refuse to vote for his
Zanu-PF party in the parliamentary elections on 31 March. Perhaps no one
individual can claim the credit for ruining a whole country, but Mugabe
would certainly lead the contenders."
Mugabe: Outstaying His Welcome
By Gwynne Dyer
Like the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Cuba's Fidel
Castro, President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe is a revolutionary who would
have served his people best by dying a long time ago. Instead, at the age
of 81, he is now deliberately starving people who refuse to vote for his
Zanu-PF party in the parliamentary elections on 31 March. Perhaps no one
individual can claim the credit for ruining a whole country, but Mugabe
would certainly lead the contenders."
Sunday, August 14, 2005
Counting Mugabe’s troubles
Comment from The Mail & Guardian (SA), 12 August
Counting Mugabe’s troubles
Eric W Bloch
Zimbabwe’s government has for years pronounced that "Zimbabwe can go it alone!", and, if necessary, would do so, and would be as successful as Malaysia had been in the late 1990s. But, to quote trite but relevant clichés, eventually chickens come home to roost and, as a result, the Zimbabwean leadership has had to swallow the bitter pill of crawling on hands and knees to solicit assistance from others to enable Zimbabwe to extract itself from the economic quagmire to which it has been reduced. The economy has been devastated, contracting by more than a third in the past five years. Almost three-quarters of the employable population are unemployed, an estimated 78% of the populace barely survives at levels below the poverty line, while almost half the population is suffering malnutrition, their incomes being below the food line. Zimbabwe’s balance of payments has been so negative that available foreign currency exchange does not even meet half of its import and other current foreign exchange outgoings, let alone service external debt. More than three million Zimbabweans have left the country to seek employment or other income-generating activities in neighbouring countries and further afield, including the United Kingdom, US and Australia. The immense "brain drain" has further hindered any endeavours to restore the economy to even the lowest levels of economic growth. All these ills were severely compounded by the extent to which government has brought about the decimation of the agricultural sector, which had, for over a century, been the economy’s foundation. Consequently, Zimbabwe is faced with a need to import two-thirds of the nation’s requirements of maize, which is the staple diet of most of the populace, and to import more than half the national need for flour. Then the ills afflicting Zimbabwe were exacerbated by the grossly ill-conceived "Operation Murambatsvina". In the process more than 700 000 were rendered homeless, at the height of winter, and deprived of any income-producing opportunities they had. So parlous has Zimbabwean circumstance become that the government has been forced to swallow its pride. It appealed to South Africa for a loan of $1-billion. All indications are that South Africa was sympathetic to the appeal but, not unreasonably, applied certain conditions, as is normal with any loan. That there should be conditions was too great a blow to the Zimbabwe government’s pride, so, instead of accepting the loan, Robert Mugabe and a large entourage set off to visit Zimbabwe’s special friend, China. To their reportedly great dismay, China was not forthcoming with the $1-billion loan. Instead, it entered into some investment agreements, sold Zimbabwe 60 buses, advanced $6-million for food imports and bestowed an honorary professorship upon Mugabe. Zimbabwe was reduced to only one possibility: to appeal to South Africa again. Although a loan agreement has yet to be signed, and its details made public, informed sources suggest that the loan is only half of that Zimbabwe sought. A loan of $500-million has apparently been agreed to. With diplomatic "double-speak", it is claimed to be unconditional, but it appears that the funding is to become available on a phased basis, aligned to appropriate Zimbabwean actions targeted towards achieving political and economic stability. The first payment will be between $150-million and $160-million, to be applied to reducing Zimbabwe’s arrears with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which amounts to approximately $300-million. It is expected that such a reduction of the arrears will motivate the IMF board of directors, when it meets on September 9, not to recommend the termination of Zimbabwe’s IMF membership, but to allow the present suspension of membership to continue. The remaining $340-million to $350-million will then be applied to importation of critically needed fuel to an estimated value of about $150-million, and the balance on agricultural inputs for the 2005/06 season, including fertilisers, chemicals, insecticides and seeds (to the extent that present stocks do not suffice). With the Zimbabwean dollars raised from the purchase of fuel and other imports, approximately Z$6,5-trillion will then partially fund "Operation Garikai" (Operation Rebuilding). Although the $500-million loan will give Zimbabwe a substantial interim booost, and the allegedly non-existent loan conditions may bring about a slow-down of further economic decline, or even some limited economic recovery, it is not enough for Zimbabwe’s crucial needs. At least $200-million is needed for food inputs, unless Zimbabwe accepts support from the World Food Programme (which has been offered subject to food distribution being effected wholly by independent non-governmental organisations which would not use the food distribution as a political tool). Yet another $100-million is needed for essential healthcare requisites, including anti-retrovirals, and $200-million more to fund critical and immediate import needs of commerce and industry, mining and other economic sectors.Although the act of lending Zimbabwe $500-million is one of neighbourly generosity, it is also one which recognises humanitarian need and indirectly conveys significant benefits to South Africa. Without political and economic stability in Zimbabwe, South Africa faces potential upheaval and unrest on its borders and a further massive influx of illegal "economic refugees".
Counting Mugabe’s troubles
Eric W Bloch
Zimbabwe’s government has for years pronounced that "Zimbabwe can go it alone!", and, if necessary, would do so, and would be as successful as Malaysia had been in the late 1990s. But, to quote trite but relevant clichés, eventually chickens come home to roost and, as a result, the Zimbabwean leadership has had to swallow the bitter pill of crawling on hands and knees to solicit assistance from others to enable Zimbabwe to extract itself from the economic quagmire to which it has been reduced. The economy has been devastated, contracting by more than a third in the past five years. Almost three-quarters of the employable population are unemployed, an estimated 78% of the populace barely survives at levels below the poverty line, while almost half the population is suffering malnutrition, their incomes being below the food line. Zimbabwe’s balance of payments has been so negative that available foreign currency exchange does not even meet half of its import and other current foreign exchange outgoings, let alone service external debt. More than three million Zimbabweans have left the country to seek employment or other income-generating activities in neighbouring countries and further afield, including the United Kingdom, US and Australia. The immense "brain drain" has further hindered any endeavours to restore the economy to even the lowest levels of economic growth. All these ills were severely compounded by the extent to which government has brought about the decimation of the agricultural sector, which had, for over a century, been the economy’s foundation. Consequently, Zimbabwe is faced with a need to import two-thirds of the nation’s requirements of maize, which is the staple diet of most of the populace, and to import more than half the national need for flour. Then the ills afflicting Zimbabwe were exacerbated by the grossly ill-conceived "Operation Murambatsvina". In the process more than 700 000 were rendered homeless, at the height of winter, and deprived of any income-producing opportunities they had. So parlous has Zimbabwean circumstance become that the government has been forced to swallow its pride. It appealed to South Africa for a loan of $1-billion. All indications are that South Africa was sympathetic to the appeal but, not unreasonably, applied certain conditions, as is normal with any loan. That there should be conditions was too great a blow to the Zimbabwe government’s pride, so, instead of accepting the loan, Robert Mugabe and a large entourage set off to visit Zimbabwe’s special friend, China. To their reportedly great dismay, China was not forthcoming with the $1-billion loan. Instead, it entered into some investment agreements, sold Zimbabwe 60 buses, advanced $6-million for food imports and bestowed an honorary professorship upon Mugabe. Zimbabwe was reduced to only one possibility: to appeal to South Africa again. Although a loan agreement has yet to be signed, and its details made public, informed sources suggest that the loan is only half of that Zimbabwe sought. A loan of $500-million has apparently been agreed to. With diplomatic "double-speak", it is claimed to be unconditional, but it appears that the funding is to become available on a phased basis, aligned to appropriate Zimbabwean actions targeted towards achieving political and economic stability. The first payment will be between $150-million and $160-million, to be applied to reducing Zimbabwe’s arrears with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which amounts to approximately $300-million. It is expected that such a reduction of the arrears will motivate the IMF board of directors, when it meets on September 9, not to recommend the termination of Zimbabwe’s IMF membership, but to allow the present suspension of membership to continue. The remaining $340-million to $350-million will then be applied to importation of critically needed fuel to an estimated value of about $150-million, and the balance on agricultural inputs for the 2005/06 season, including fertilisers, chemicals, insecticides and seeds (to the extent that present stocks do not suffice). With the Zimbabwean dollars raised from the purchase of fuel and other imports, approximately Z$6,5-trillion will then partially fund "Operation Garikai" (Operation Rebuilding). Although the $500-million loan will give Zimbabwe a substantial interim booost, and the allegedly non-existent loan conditions may bring about a slow-down of further economic decline, or even some limited economic recovery, it is not enough for Zimbabwe’s crucial needs. At least $200-million is needed for food inputs, unless Zimbabwe accepts support from the World Food Programme (which has been offered subject to food distribution being effected wholly by independent non-governmental organisations which would not use the food distribution as a political tool). Yet another $100-million is needed for essential healthcare requisites, including anti-retrovirals, and $200-million more to fund critical and immediate import needs of commerce and industry, mining and other economic sectors.Although the act of lending Zimbabwe $500-million is one of neighbourly generosity, it is also one which recognises humanitarian need and indirectly conveys significant benefits to South Africa. Without political and economic stability in Zimbabwe, South Africa faces potential upheaval and unrest on its borders and a further massive influx of illegal "economic refugees".
Saturday, August 06, 2005
Eyewitness in Zimbabwe
EYEWITNESS IN ZIMBABWE
July 31 August 4, 2005 by Lucy Y. Steinitz*
Flying into Harare s spanking-new airport, you can see vast stretches
of broken rubble where entire neighborhoods once stood. I visited Zimbabwe
last week for work (on behalf of the World Council of Churches, for
their Regional Reference Group on the Ecumenical HIV/AIDS Initiative
for Africa, which I chair). This was my first trip back to Harare
(Zimbabwes capital) since our family lived there in 1994. But
tragically, in many ways this is a different Zimbabwe than we knew and
loved eleven years ago.
THE DIRTY CLEAN-UP
The UN estimates that Robert Mugabes recent Project Murambatsvina
(Shona for clean up trash campaign) cost 700,000 people their homes
and forced 300,000 children out of school. Deaths have not been
accurately counted, but must surely include people who died from the
resultant loss in food, medicine, or shelter during Zimbabwe’s cold
winter-weather. By way of example, one home-based care volunteer I met
told me of a woman she knew who had been forced out of the room she had
been renting and told to go back where she came from. Some days later
the woman reached the rural area where she had been born, only to have
the local chief chase her away again, saying that there was no food to
eat and that the land was already crowded with others who had gotten
there first. Eventually, the woman made her way back to the Harare,
where she pleaded with her former landlord to let her have her old room
back. Im not allowed, cried the landlord, fearful of what would
happen to him if the police found out. Weak with hunger, the woman
simply laid down on the street, a few feet from her former residence.
Two days later, with just the clothes she wore to protect her from the
nighttime cold, she died of pneumonia.
A representative from the International Organization for Migration, Dr
Islene Araujo, reminded our group that since 2000, Zimbabwes land
reform policies have already displaced 800,000 people. The current
campaign comes on top of that upheaval. Since we came to this country
to address AIDS-related issues, however, we focused on this aspect more
than others. It is overwhelming: according to the UN, at least 80,000
of the people who have recently been forced from their homes are
estimated to be HIV+. Moreover, this government-induced tsunami (as
some local people now refer to the disaster) has disrupted virtually
every conceivable network of social support that was developed by or
for people living with HIV: medication-distribution systems,
condom-distribution networks, organizations doing volunteer home-based
care, income-generating groups, and so on.
The end-effect is mass-murder. Lacking a place to live and regular
nutrition, literally thousands of HIV+ Zimbabweans have been forced to
stop treatment for their HIV. As a result, many will die. Even if calm
is restored and people are able to start their anti-retroviral
treatments once again, they will now be required to use a different and
far more expensive drug regimen which is far less sustainable. These
are also the conditions that foster drug-resistant forms of the HIV
virus, which pose a great threat to the entire Southern African region.
And with an estimated 30% of all Zimbabweans now living outside the
country (often as illegal refugees, mostly in surrounding countries),
this can happen a lot faster than I had previously thought.
EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT
We heard about this first-hand. When we visited one of the worst
affected areas, two women told us that their local Catholic-run clinic
had been bulldozed, leaving them without any anti-retroviral drugs
and to obtain drugs elsewhere they will now have to travel a long distance
and start the process all over again. Similarly, Dominican Sister
Sipiwe Mugadza told us of a couple she had been counseling some months
ago to help them prepare for an HIV-test, accept their illness, and
then start treatment. Finally, they were ready but then the demolition
started. Sister Sipiwei has been looking for the couple ever since,
but they disappeared without a trace. Others also told us of health workers
who have been trying to locate their AIDS-patients in order to continue
their medical treatment, but they cannot find them anymore.
Our group drove out to a field at the edge of town, which had once been
the residential neighborhood of Hatcliff-Extension, housing over 6000
people plus shops, a clinic, and so on. From a distance, all we could
see of the former township were some homemade tents of cardboard and
discarded metal, looking like oversized anthills fit for animals rather
than for human habitat. And yet, the people were moving back to the
area, in most cases because they had nowhere else to go.
In order to enter the area ourselves, we first had to seek permission;
this is because our hosts (Christian Care, an arm of the Zimbabwean
Council of Churches) must tread carefully with the government
authorities in order to retain their own role as an approved
organization that has permission to distribute food, blankets, and
otherassistance. Still, we approached this former neighborhood from the
back, as we had been warned that there might be trouble from some
government supporters who would not appreciate our visit.
Significantly, the government-authorities we did find were guarding a distribution
point where sheets of asbestos roofing had been delivered and were now
being allocated, three and four to a family. What was this all about?
we wondered. Reverend Forbes Matonga, executive director of Christian
Care, explained that most of the residents had been living in this
neighborhood for fifteen years, before the government declared the
settlement illegal and forced everyone out. Some residents moved-in
with relatives in the rural areas, while others got hoarded onto trucks like
cattle and dropped off at a transit camp (Caledonia Farm) which was, in
fact, nothing but an open field.
HOW MUCH MORE CAN THE PEOPLE TAKE?
With the arrival of the special UN envoy Anna Tibauijuka some weeks ago
to investigate the governments clean up campaign, Caledonia Farm has
became an embarrassment to the government and has now been closed off
to
all visitors. At the same time, those former residents who wanted to
return to Hatcliff Extension (which we visited) were suddenly declared
legal and given documents to prove their status. But the residents told
us that they had always had documents to prove their legal status
even
BEFORE their homes were bulldozed to the ground. So what good is a new
piece of paper?” they asked. To call this an exercise in futility
obscures the deeper, insidious impact of Mugabes strategy. It breaks
the spirit of people, obliterates political opposition and the freedom
of speech, makes them dependent on government handouts, and generates a
constant fear of worse things to come.
The end effect is that this is a war not against poverty but against
the poor. Hatcliff Extension, the neighborhood we visited, has always
been badly-off. But now the conditions here have gone from bad to
worse
there is literally NOTHING here. The infrastructure is completely
gone no more streets, nor sewage, nor water-pipes, nor electricity. At
night, it is horrific: dark and cold, with temperatures dropping to
near-freezing (this being winter in Zimbabwe). To obtain wood for a
cooking fire, people have to walk miles away, into a distant forest.
For food, they must beg. As one woman said, the worst part is that they
have taken our dignity. The only certainty that the people have is
that there is no certainty at all.
We also drove to the high-density township of Mbare in the heart of
Harare. I remember this neighborhood from 1994, when our family came to
the Mbare Market in order to buy fresh fruits and vegetables, and even
furniture for our rented apartment. But this would no longer be
possible. Street vendors are now forbidden to operate; the government
claims this clogs the streets and creates a bad impression. (The real
reason, others argue, is that the government wants to make way for
cheap
Chinese imports in exchange for Chinese assistance and government
pay-offs.) Visiting here last week, we were struck by the irony of the
government calling their campaign [clean up trash]. In fact, we
witnessed huge piles of trash and rubble everywhere, largely left over
from the housing extensions that the government forced the local people
to dismantle, brick by brick, under the guise of their being illegal
structures. Yes, you got this right: under the threat of death, local
residents had to physically tear down their own homes that they had
painstakingly built of the past ten and twenty years. They might as
well have been digging their own graves. Now people are huddled ten
and
twenty to a room, the perfect conditions for tuberculosis, pneumonia,
and other contagious diseases to spread.
Everyone is affected. This country is so cash-strapped that it can
take days on a queue to buy petrol for your car, and power outages have
become a regular part of daily life. By the end of the year, the
inflation level may well reach 1000%. Prices have so many zeros
attached to them (a coke costs 17,000 Zimbabwean dollars), that I stopped
keeping track. According to Sister Patricia Walsh (one of Mugabe s most
courageous detractors), Zimbabwe s crisis should become a warning bell
to other countries in Southern Africa and beyond. Just as new
drug-resistant forms of HIV are likely to spread across Zimbabwe’s
borders as a result of this disaster, she said, so too are the
effects of Zimbabwes economic meltdown.The rest of us must be prepared to
act.
One industry that is booming is gallows-humor. As I shared a
candlelight dinner with a friend at her home, my friend popped the
question: What did Zimbabweans use before they had candles? Answer:
Electricity.
Here is another. Queen Elizabeth, George Bush, and Robert Mugabe meet
in Hell. Queen Elizabeth asks the Devil if she can phone England to
see how things are getting on without her. The Devil agrees and afterwards
charges her a million dollars for the call. Then George Bush asks to
phone the USA, and he is also charged a million dollars. After Robert
Mugabe asks for the same privilege and is given permission to phone
Zimbabwe, he is only charged one dollar. Why does Comrade Mugabe only
have to pay one dollar? asks Queen Elizabeth and George Bush. The
Devil smiles. Calling Zimbabwe is cheap because it is a local call,
he answers.
FINDING HOPE
Where is the hope, you ask? Against enormous odds, I found great acts
of courage amongst the Zimbabwean people I met, especially amongst those
who had already lost practically everything. By way of example, let me
introduce you to Florence Ndlovu, a widow, who has been HIV-positive
for the past 18 years. She showed me the photograph of the house she had
been building, bit by bit, whenever her savings allowed. It was a
large structure, with at least six rooms. But Florence had the misfortune of
building her house in a neighborhood that the government had decided
was full of illegal shacks and should be torn down. So hers was
bulldozed
to the ground, too. What now? Eventually, Florence said, she found
alternate housing but it is just a single room in which 13 people now
sleep, huddled together like sardines on mats on the floor. Well,
she
added, we started out as eleven, but then I ran across one of my
former
counseling clients, who is also HIV-positive, who was living on the
street with her daughter. So I said they could join us. But our
situation is really terrible. One of the children I took in has a skin
rash. At night, she shares a single blanket with another one of the
children, and yesterday I noticed that the second child has now gotten
the same skin rash. In all the years since I found out Im
HIV-positive,
I have never felt so hopeless. But you keep on going, because
otherwise
there is no future.
I also came away inspired by my visits to the Mashambanzou Care Trust,
a Catholic-run hospice and outreach project that serves 4000 HIV-infected
patients and their orphaned children weekly, and to The Centre, a
holistic nutrition-and-support organization by and for people living
with HIV and AIDS. Remarkably, I even found hope (or, at the very
least, commitment) within Zimbabwe s dwindling white community
(although I am leaving out their names here, not to put anyone at risk). Church
worker John Anderson probably summed it up most succinctly: Im proud
to be a Zimbabwean, he explained. This is where I was born and this
is where I will die. If I left, what could I do to help my fellow
human
being? I wouldnt be any good anywhere else, anyway.
Finally, I asked the people we met what they wanted us as visitors
to do. All had basically the same message: We want our voices heard,
Sister Sipiwe said prophetically. Tell others what you have seen and
learned. Ultimately the truth will set us free
Please feel free to pass this on to others. Some names have been
changed to protect the identity of the individuals involved.
* Lucy Y Steinitz, PhD. Tel: 264-81-270-6528. Home email:
Steinitz@mweb.com.na
July 31 August 4, 2005 by Lucy Y. Steinitz*
Flying into Harare s spanking-new airport, you can see vast stretches
of broken rubble where entire neighborhoods once stood. I visited Zimbabwe
last week for work (on behalf of the World Council of Churches, for
their Regional Reference Group on the Ecumenical HIV/AIDS Initiative
for Africa, which I chair). This was my first trip back to Harare
(Zimbabwes capital) since our family lived there in 1994. But
tragically, in many ways this is a different Zimbabwe than we knew and
loved eleven years ago.
THE DIRTY CLEAN-UP
The UN estimates that Robert Mugabes recent Project Murambatsvina
(Shona for clean up trash campaign) cost 700,000 people their homes
and forced 300,000 children out of school. Deaths have not been
accurately counted, but must surely include people who died from the
resultant loss in food, medicine, or shelter during Zimbabwe’s cold
winter-weather. By way of example, one home-based care volunteer I met
told me of a woman she knew who had been forced out of the room she had
been renting and told to go back where she came from. Some days later
the woman reached the rural area where she had been born, only to have
the local chief chase her away again, saying that there was no food to
eat and that the land was already crowded with others who had gotten
there first. Eventually, the woman made her way back to the Harare,
where she pleaded with her former landlord to let her have her old room
back. Im not allowed, cried the landlord, fearful of what would
happen to him if the police found out. Weak with hunger, the woman
simply laid down on the street, a few feet from her former residence.
Two days later, with just the clothes she wore to protect her from the
nighttime cold, she died of pneumonia.
A representative from the International Organization for Migration, Dr
Islene Araujo, reminded our group that since 2000, Zimbabwes land
reform policies have already displaced 800,000 people. The current
campaign comes on top of that upheaval. Since we came to this country
to address AIDS-related issues, however, we focused on this aspect more
than others. It is overwhelming: according to the UN, at least 80,000
of the people who have recently been forced from their homes are
estimated to be HIV+. Moreover, this government-induced tsunami (as
some local people now refer to the disaster) has disrupted virtually
every conceivable network of social support that was developed by or
for people living with HIV: medication-distribution systems,
condom-distribution networks, organizations doing volunteer home-based
care, income-generating groups, and so on.
The end-effect is mass-murder. Lacking a place to live and regular
nutrition, literally thousands of HIV+ Zimbabweans have been forced to
stop treatment for their HIV. As a result, many will die. Even if calm
is restored and people are able to start their anti-retroviral
treatments once again, they will now be required to use a different and
far more expensive drug regimen which is far less sustainable. These
are also the conditions that foster drug-resistant forms of the HIV
virus, which pose a great threat to the entire Southern African region.
And with an estimated 30% of all Zimbabweans now living outside the
country (often as illegal refugees, mostly in surrounding countries),
this can happen a lot faster than I had previously thought.
EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT
We heard about this first-hand. When we visited one of the worst
affected areas, two women told us that their local Catholic-run clinic
had been bulldozed, leaving them without any anti-retroviral drugs
and to obtain drugs elsewhere they will now have to travel a long distance
and start the process all over again. Similarly, Dominican Sister
Sipiwe Mugadza told us of a couple she had been counseling some months
ago to help them prepare for an HIV-test, accept their illness, and
then start treatment. Finally, they were ready but then the demolition
started. Sister Sipiwei has been looking for the couple ever since,
but they disappeared without a trace. Others also told us of health workers
who have been trying to locate their AIDS-patients in order to continue
their medical treatment, but they cannot find them anymore.
Our group drove out to a field at the edge of town, which had once been
the residential neighborhood of Hatcliff-Extension, housing over 6000
people plus shops, a clinic, and so on. From a distance, all we could
see of the former township were some homemade tents of cardboard and
discarded metal, looking like oversized anthills fit for animals rather
than for human habitat. And yet, the people were moving back to the
area, in most cases because they had nowhere else to go.
In order to enter the area ourselves, we first had to seek permission;
this is because our hosts (Christian Care, an arm of the Zimbabwean
Council of Churches) must tread carefully with the government
authorities in order to retain their own role as an approved
organization that has permission to distribute food, blankets, and
otherassistance. Still, we approached this former neighborhood from the
back, as we had been warned that there might be trouble from some
government supporters who would not appreciate our visit.
Significantly, the government-authorities we did find were guarding a distribution
point where sheets of asbestos roofing had been delivered and were now
being allocated, three and four to a family. What was this all about?
we wondered. Reverend Forbes Matonga, executive director of Christian
Care, explained that most of the residents had been living in this
neighborhood for fifteen years, before the government declared the
settlement illegal and forced everyone out. Some residents moved-in
with relatives in the rural areas, while others got hoarded onto trucks like
cattle and dropped off at a transit camp (Caledonia Farm) which was, in
fact, nothing but an open field.
HOW MUCH MORE CAN THE PEOPLE TAKE?
With the arrival of the special UN envoy Anna Tibauijuka some weeks ago
to investigate the governments clean up campaign, Caledonia Farm has
became an embarrassment to the government and has now been closed off
to
all visitors. At the same time, those former residents who wanted to
return to Hatcliff Extension (which we visited) were suddenly declared
legal and given documents to prove their status. But the residents told
us that they had always had documents to prove their legal status
even
BEFORE their homes were bulldozed to the ground. So what good is a new
piece of paper?” they asked. To call this an exercise in futility
obscures the deeper, insidious impact of Mugabes strategy. It breaks
the spirit of people, obliterates political opposition and the freedom
of speech, makes them dependent on government handouts, and generates a
constant fear of worse things to come.
The end effect is that this is a war not against poverty but against
the poor. Hatcliff Extension, the neighborhood we visited, has always
been badly-off. But now the conditions here have gone from bad to
worse
there is literally NOTHING here. The infrastructure is completely
gone no more streets, nor sewage, nor water-pipes, nor electricity. At
night, it is horrific: dark and cold, with temperatures dropping to
near-freezing (this being winter in Zimbabwe). To obtain wood for a
cooking fire, people have to walk miles away, into a distant forest.
For food, they must beg. As one woman said, the worst part is that they
have taken our dignity. The only certainty that the people have is
that there is no certainty at all.
We also drove to the high-density township of Mbare in the heart of
Harare. I remember this neighborhood from 1994, when our family came to
the Mbare Market in order to buy fresh fruits and vegetables, and even
furniture for our rented apartment. But this would no longer be
possible. Street vendors are now forbidden to operate; the government
claims this clogs the streets and creates a bad impression. (The real
reason, others argue, is that the government wants to make way for
cheap
Chinese imports in exchange for Chinese assistance and government
pay-offs.) Visiting here last week, we were struck by the irony of the
government calling their campaign [clean up trash]. In fact, we
witnessed huge piles of trash and rubble everywhere, largely left over
from the housing extensions that the government forced the local people
to dismantle, brick by brick, under the guise of their being illegal
structures. Yes, you got this right: under the threat of death, local
residents had to physically tear down their own homes that they had
painstakingly built of the past ten and twenty years. They might as
well have been digging their own graves. Now people are huddled ten
and
twenty to a room, the perfect conditions for tuberculosis, pneumonia,
and other contagious diseases to spread.
Everyone is affected. This country is so cash-strapped that it can
take days on a queue to buy petrol for your car, and power outages have
become a regular part of daily life. By the end of the year, the
inflation level may well reach 1000%. Prices have so many zeros
attached to them (a coke costs 17,000 Zimbabwean dollars), that I stopped
keeping track. According to Sister Patricia Walsh (one of Mugabe s most
courageous detractors), Zimbabwe s crisis should become a warning bell
to other countries in Southern Africa and beyond. Just as new
drug-resistant forms of HIV are likely to spread across Zimbabwe’s
borders as a result of this disaster, she said, so too are the
effects of Zimbabwes economic meltdown.The rest of us must be prepared to
act.
One industry that is booming is gallows-humor. As I shared a
candlelight dinner with a friend at her home, my friend popped the
question: What did Zimbabweans use before they had candles? Answer:
Electricity.
Here is another. Queen Elizabeth, George Bush, and Robert Mugabe meet
in Hell. Queen Elizabeth asks the Devil if she can phone England to
see how things are getting on without her. The Devil agrees and afterwards
charges her a million dollars for the call. Then George Bush asks to
phone the USA, and he is also charged a million dollars. After Robert
Mugabe asks for the same privilege and is given permission to phone
Zimbabwe, he is only charged one dollar. Why does Comrade Mugabe only
have to pay one dollar? asks Queen Elizabeth and George Bush. The
Devil smiles. Calling Zimbabwe is cheap because it is a local call,
he answers.
FINDING HOPE
Where is the hope, you ask? Against enormous odds, I found great acts
of courage amongst the Zimbabwean people I met, especially amongst those
who had already lost practically everything. By way of example, let me
introduce you to Florence Ndlovu, a widow, who has been HIV-positive
for the past 18 years. She showed me the photograph of the house she had
been building, bit by bit, whenever her savings allowed. It was a
large structure, with at least six rooms. But Florence had the misfortune of
building her house in a neighborhood that the government had decided
was full of illegal shacks and should be torn down. So hers was
bulldozed
to the ground, too. What now? Eventually, Florence said, she found
alternate housing but it is just a single room in which 13 people now
sleep, huddled together like sardines on mats on the floor. Well,
she
added, we started out as eleven, but then I ran across one of my
former
counseling clients, who is also HIV-positive, who was living on the
street with her daughter. So I said they could join us. But our
situation is really terrible. One of the children I took in has a skin
rash. At night, she shares a single blanket with another one of the
children, and yesterday I noticed that the second child has now gotten
the same skin rash. In all the years since I found out Im
HIV-positive,
I have never felt so hopeless. But you keep on going, because
otherwise
there is no future.
I also came away inspired by my visits to the Mashambanzou Care Trust,
a Catholic-run hospice and outreach project that serves 4000 HIV-infected
patients and their orphaned children weekly, and to The Centre, a
holistic nutrition-and-support organization by and for people living
with HIV and AIDS. Remarkably, I even found hope (or, at the very
least, commitment) within Zimbabwe s dwindling white community
(although I am leaving out their names here, not to put anyone at risk). Church
worker John Anderson probably summed it up most succinctly: Im proud
to be a Zimbabwean, he explained. This is where I was born and this
is where I will die. If I left, what could I do to help my fellow
human
being? I wouldnt be any good anywhere else, anyway.
Finally, I asked the people we met what they wanted us as visitors
to do. All had basically the same message: We want our voices heard,
Sister Sipiwe said prophetically. Tell others what you have seen and
learned. Ultimately the truth will set us free
Please feel free to pass this on to others. Some names have been
changed to protect the identity of the individuals involved.
* Lucy Y Steinitz, PhD. Tel: 264-81-270-6528. Home email:
Steinitz@mweb.com.na
Friday, August 05, 2005
VOA News - South Africa Encouraging as to Zimbabwe Loan
VOA News - South Africa Encouraging as to Zimbabwe Loan: "South Africa Encouraging as to Zimbabwe Loan By Blessing Zulu
Washington
03 August 2005
Interview with Percy Makombe
Listen to Interview with Percy Makombe
The South African government has confirmed that it is willing in principle to financially assist Zimbabwe, including through the provision of a loan facility to help it address its overdue obligations to the International Monetary Fund.
Spokesman Joel Netshitenzhe said Pretoria is basing the commitment on the premise that assistance should benefit the people of Zimbabwe as a whole �within the context of their program of economic recovery and political normalization,� alluding to ongoing efforts to promote discussions between Zimbawe's government and its opposition."
Washington
03 August 2005
Interview with Percy Makombe
Listen to Interview with Percy Makombe
The South African government has confirmed that it is willing in principle to financially assist Zimbabwe, including through the provision of a loan facility to help it address its overdue obligations to the International Monetary Fund.
Spokesman Joel Netshitenzhe said Pretoria is basing the commitment on the premise that assistance should benefit the people of Zimbabwe as a whole �within the context of their program of economic recovery and political normalization,� alluding to ongoing efforts to promote discussions between Zimbawe's government and its opposition."
Sunday, July 31, 2005
Zimbabwe rules out returning land to white farmers
Top News | Reuters.co.za: "HARARE (Reuters) - Zimbabwe will not invite back white farmers whose land was seized by President Robert Mugabe's government despite calls by the central bank chief to allow them to help the struggling agriculture sector, state media reported.
'The land here is for the black people and we are not going to give it back to anybody. We are not inviting any white farmers back,' Security Minister Didymus Mutasa, also in charge of Lands, Land Reform and Resettlement, told the state-owned Sunday Mail.
Since 2000 Mugabe's government has seized thousands of white-owned farms after often violent invasions by government-backed veterans of the country's 1970s struggle against white rule."
'The land here is for the black people and we are not going to give it back to anybody. We are not inviting any white farmers back,' Security Minister Didymus Mutasa, also in charge of Lands, Land Reform and Resettlement, told the state-owned Sunday Mail.
Since 2000 Mugabe's government has seized thousands of white-owned farms after often violent invasions by government-backed veterans of the country's 1970s struggle against white rule."
Friday, July 29, 2005
Tiny Jewish Community in Zimbabwe Perseveres Despite Economic Woes
Tiny Jewish Community in Zimbabwe Perseveres Despite Economic Woes: "Tiny Jewish Community in Zimbabwe Perseveres Despite Economic Woes
By Moira Schneider
CAPE TOWN, July 27 (JTA) -- Hylton Solomon, a Zimbabwean Jewish leader, says that he has never felt threatened by the turbulent goings-on in the country, though he did admit to feeling ?a little bit uneasy? during the government?s recent Operation Restore Order, which saw hundreds of thousands of street vendors and others being driven out of urban areas and rendered homeless in midwinter.
?It was like Kristallnacht. You can?t describe it in any other way,? says Solomon, the president of the Bulawayo Hebrew Congregation.
Zimbabwe?s mostly elderly Jewish community has dwindled through emigration to around 300 individuals from a high of 7,500 in the early 1970s. Despite its much diminished size and the rapidly deteriorating political and economic situation in the country, Jewish life, though curtailed, carries on."
By Moira Schneider
CAPE TOWN, July 27 (JTA) -- Hylton Solomon, a Zimbabwean Jewish leader, says that he has never felt threatened by the turbulent goings-on in the country, though he did admit to feeling ?a little bit uneasy? during the government?s recent Operation Restore Order, which saw hundreds of thousands of street vendors and others being driven out of urban areas and rendered homeless in midwinter.
?It was like Kristallnacht. You can?t describe it in any other way,? says Solomon, the president of the Bulawayo Hebrew Congregation.
Zimbabwe?s mostly elderly Jewish community has dwindled through emigration to around 300 individuals from a high of 7,500 in the early 1970s. Despite its much diminished size and the rapidly deteriorating political and economic situation in the country, Jewish life, though curtailed, carries on."
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
Zimbawe in financial crisis
SABCnews.com - africa/southern_africa: "Zimbabwe slump unprecedented : World Bank
Zimbawe in financial crisis
July 27, 2005, 05:00
Zimbabwe's rapid economic decline over the past six years is likely unprecedented for a country not at war, says the World Bank's director for the country. In an interview with Reuters yesterday, Hartwig Schafer said reversing the decline would require major economic restructuring, similar to policies that helped rebuild former Soviet states also endowed with infrastructure and human resources."
Zimbawe in financial crisis
July 27, 2005, 05:00
Zimbabwe's rapid economic decline over the past six years is likely unprecedented for a country not at war, says the World Bank's director for the country. In an interview with Reuters yesterday, Hartwig Schafer said reversing the decline would require major economic restructuring, similar to policies that helped rebuild former Soviet states also endowed with infrastructure and human resources."
Saturday, May 21, 2005
Interactive museum marred by hesitation to confront apartheid
Haaretz - Israel News: "Interactive museum marred by hesitation to confront apartheid
By Shoshana Kordova
CAPE TOWN - A hesitation to confront organized Jewry's complicity with apartheid, a pandering political correctness wall and a bizarre exhibit extolling South African Jews' desire to leave the country are some of the more jarring flaws that mar the otherwise informative, attractive and interactive Jewish museum in this city.
The South African Jewish Museum uses short films on the lives of three influential Jewish businessmen to help tell the tale of Jewish immigration from Lithuania - to which most South African Jews can trace their ancestry - and describe the roles that ostrich farming in Oudtshoorn (at one time known as 'the Jerusalem of Africa') and the 1860s discovery of diamonds in Kimberly played in the establishment of Jewish communities in different parts of the country. The discovery of gold in the 1880s spurred Jewish immigration to the area around Johannesburg, which is today the South African city with the largest Jewish population. "
Interactive features include a touch screen that lets the museumgoer select various "dorps" (Afrikaans for small towns) to find out about the small Jewish communities that at one point were scattered throughout the country, and another screen that lets visitors view famous South African Jews by name or profession. Downstairs is a "discovery center" that provides information on the European background of South African Jews and on Jewish life in Cape Town.
While these media generally add to the quality of the museum, which opened in 2000, in one egregious instance the way in which the technology is used ends up obscuring important information and can mislead visitors.
The section on the relationship between apartheid and the organized Jewish community, as represented by the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, does not live up to its title, "Facing Reality." By relying too heavily on the expectation that visitors will stand under the "sound dome" to hear a recorded narrative, and stay there from beginning to end, the museum ends up failing to address adequately the reality of the Board's de facto tolerance of apartheid.
The recording notes that the Board of Deputies did not take an official stance against apartheid until 1985, opting not to take responsibility for the actions of individual Jews who fought apartheid (the subjects of the neighboring exhibit). But the recording can be heard well by only one person at a time, and the visitor must stand directly under what looks like a small plastic umbrella attached to the ceiling, which can be hard to spot if you're not looking for it.
Indeed, the most obvious element of this exhibit is the visual one, the text on the wall that can be observed with a casual glance, and the visual element makes no mention of the Board's official stance - even going so far as to imply its opposite.
The biblical injunction "Tzedek tzedek tirdof" ("Justice, justice shalt thou pursue") is printed in large letters next to excerpts from speeches, including one that called for the creation of a consensus that "race relations are not exclusively a matter of politics but concern human values." The quotes are attributed to speeches made between 1963 and 1965 by Arthur Suzman, chairman of the Board's public relations committee. There is no indication, however, that the Board as an organization spent 20 more years responding in the negative to what the museum calls "the apartheid dilemma: to 'speak out' or not to 'speak out.'"
Perhaps in an effort to show how Jews are part of the "new South Africa," a term used to refer to the post-1994 era, the museum dedicates nine video screens to the cause of multiculturalism, showing constantly shifting images that include a Jewish wedding, an African tribal ritual, a traditional Indian wedding, a modern black wedding, a brit milah (circumcision) and a baptism. According to the museum, this demonstrates that South African cultures "all celebrate a common cycle of life, as part of the vast human family." This paean to political correctness would appear to indicate a tension between the museum's focus on a single ethnicity and its desire not to be labeled as ethnocentric, but it is ultimately out of place, if not devoid of meaning.
In addition, there is a lack of correlation between the museum's stated theme and its displays. The museum purports to structure its exhibits around the theme of reality ("life in South Africa"), memory ("roots in Baltic Europe") and dreams ("visions of the future"). But this theme is not wholly evident in the exhibits or in their layout, seeming to be more of an afterthought than a blueprint.
The museum does look at immigration from Lithuania, and has even built a mock wooden shtetl meant to evoke the "memory" of how Jews typically lived in the 1800s (a project the museum workers seem particularly keen to make sure their visitors see). The history of South African Jewish "reality" as it used to exist in cities and dorps throughout the country is also presented well. But while the museum shows that about 40,000 Jews immigrated to South Africa between 1881 and 1910, it shies away from the present reality, whereby 50,000 Jews have emigrated from South Africa since 1970, according to the World Jewish Congress. The WJC puts the number of Jews in South Africa today at 92,000.
Instead of discussing emigration head-on, the museum displays several video interviews with South Africans who have left the country, in a section that, inexplicably, is meant to represent the "dreams" introduced in the theme. One of the interviewees says he moved to the United States because he likes adventure and has "always wanted to live in the center." Unless the museum organizers dream of a future South Africa without Jews, it is difficult to understand the purpose of this exhibit or the reason for its name.
One final point may seem incidental, but touches on the museum's intended audience. If it is meant to be accessible to the local Jewish community as well as to visitors from abroad, the museum would do well to consider lowering its 50 rand (NIS 34) entrance fee.
In all, the South African Jewish Museum does a good job of involving its visitors in the history of the country's Jewry. But in only partially addressing modern reality, the museum does not ultimately fulfill the promise of its theme or the potential of the media it utilizes.
By Shoshana Kordova
CAPE TOWN - A hesitation to confront organized Jewry's complicity with apartheid, a pandering political correctness wall and a bizarre exhibit extolling South African Jews' desire to leave the country are some of the more jarring flaws that mar the otherwise informative, attractive and interactive Jewish museum in this city.
The South African Jewish Museum uses short films on the lives of three influential Jewish businessmen to help tell the tale of Jewish immigration from Lithuania - to which most South African Jews can trace their ancestry - and describe the roles that ostrich farming in Oudtshoorn (at one time known as 'the Jerusalem of Africa') and the 1860s discovery of diamonds in Kimberly played in the establishment of Jewish communities in different parts of the country. The discovery of gold in the 1880s spurred Jewish immigration to the area around Johannesburg, which is today the South African city with the largest Jewish population. "
Interactive features include a touch screen that lets the museumgoer select various "dorps" (Afrikaans for small towns) to find out about the small Jewish communities that at one point were scattered throughout the country, and another screen that lets visitors view famous South African Jews by name or profession. Downstairs is a "discovery center" that provides information on the European background of South African Jews and on Jewish life in Cape Town.
While these media generally add to the quality of the museum, which opened in 2000, in one egregious instance the way in which the technology is used ends up obscuring important information and can mislead visitors.
The section on the relationship between apartheid and the organized Jewish community, as represented by the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, does not live up to its title, "Facing Reality." By relying too heavily on the expectation that visitors will stand under the "sound dome" to hear a recorded narrative, and stay there from beginning to end, the museum ends up failing to address adequately the reality of the Board's de facto tolerance of apartheid.
The recording notes that the Board of Deputies did not take an official stance against apartheid until 1985, opting not to take responsibility for the actions of individual Jews who fought apartheid (the subjects of the neighboring exhibit). But the recording can be heard well by only one person at a time, and the visitor must stand directly under what looks like a small plastic umbrella attached to the ceiling, which can be hard to spot if you're not looking for it.
Indeed, the most obvious element of this exhibit is the visual one, the text on the wall that can be observed with a casual glance, and the visual element makes no mention of the Board's official stance - even going so far as to imply its opposite.
The biblical injunction "Tzedek tzedek tirdof" ("Justice, justice shalt thou pursue") is printed in large letters next to excerpts from speeches, including one that called for the creation of a consensus that "race relations are not exclusively a matter of politics but concern human values." The quotes are attributed to speeches made between 1963 and 1965 by Arthur Suzman, chairman of the Board's public relations committee. There is no indication, however, that the Board as an organization spent 20 more years responding in the negative to what the museum calls "the apartheid dilemma: to 'speak out' or not to 'speak out.'"
Perhaps in an effort to show how Jews are part of the "new South Africa," a term used to refer to the post-1994 era, the museum dedicates nine video screens to the cause of multiculturalism, showing constantly shifting images that include a Jewish wedding, an African tribal ritual, a traditional Indian wedding, a modern black wedding, a brit milah (circumcision) and a baptism. According to the museum, this demonstrates that South African cultures "all celebrate a common cycle of life, as part of the vast human family." This paean to political correctness would appear to indicate a tension between the museum's focus on a single ethnicity and its desire not to be labeled as ethnocentric, but it is ultimately out of place, if not devoid of meaning.
In addition, there is a lack of correlation between the museum's stated theme and its displays. The museum purports to structure its exhibits around the theme of reality ("life in South Africa"), memory ("roots in Baltic Europe") and dreams ("visions of the future"). But this theme is not wholly evident in the exhibits or in their layout, seeming to be more of an afterthought than a blueprint.
The museum does look at immigration from Lithuania, and has even built a mock wooden shtetl meant to evoke the "memory" of how Jews typically lived in the 1800s (a project the museum workers seem particularly keen to make sure their visitors see). The history of South African Jewish "reality" as it used to exist in cities and dorps throughout the country is also presented well. But while the museum shows that about 40,000 Jews immigrated to South Africa between 1881 and 1910, it shies away from the present reality, whereby 50,000 Jews have emigrated from South Africa since 1970, according to the World Jewish Congress. The WJC puts the number of Jews in South Africa today at 92,000.
Instead of discussing emigration head-on, the museum displays several video interviews with South Africans who have left the country, in a section that, inexplicably, is meant to represent the "dreams" introduced in the theme. One of the interviewees says he moved to the United States because he likes adventure and has "always wanted to live in the center." Unless the museum organizers dream of a future South Africa without Jews, it is difficult to understand the purpose of this exhibit or the reason for its name.
One final point may seem incidental, but touches on the museum's intended audience. If it is meant to be accessible to the local Jewish community as well as to visitors from abroad, the museum would do well to consider lowering its 50 rand (NIS 34) entrance fee.
In all, the South African Jewish Museum does a good job of involving its visitors in the history of the country's Jewry. But in only partially addressing modern reality, the museum does not ultimately fulfill the promise of its theme or the potential of the media it utilizes.
Zimbabwe's central bank chief wants white farmers back
Zimbabwe's central bank chief wants white farmers back: "Zimbabwe's central bank chief wants white farmers back
GONO
Central back chief admits failure
Gono revises inflation target 100 percent upwards
Gono's 'sleepless nights' over inflation
Gono fighting a losing battle
Gono, the Zimbabwean Napoleon
The small minds in charge of our economy
Overcoming the 'Messiah Complex'
By Staff Reporter
Last updated: 05/20/2005 17:33:34
ZIMBABWE'S central bank chief has called on President Robert Mugabe's government to allow some white farmers back on to land seized for redistribution to blacks to help revive an economy on the brink of collapse."
GONO
Central back chief admits failure
Gono revises inflation target 100 percent upwards
Gono's 'sleepless nights' over inflation
Gono fighting a losing battle
Gono, the Zimbabwean Napoleon
The small minds in charge of our economy
Overcoming the 'Messiah Complex'
By Staff Reporter
Last updated: 05/20/2005 17:33:34
ZIMBABWE'S central bank chief has called on President Robert Mugabe's government to allow some white farmers back on to land seized for redistribution to blacks to help revive an economy on the brink of collapse."
Friday, May 20, 2005
Southern Africa Habonim plans `biggest ever' anniversary bash
Haaretz - Israel News: "Southern Africa Habonim plans `biggest ever' anniversary bash
By Charlotte Halle
Mass preparations are underway for the 75th anniversary celebrations of Southern African Habonim, the socialist Zionist youth movement which inspired hundreds of Southern Africans to immigrate to Israel. "
By Charlotte Halle
Mass preparations are underway for the 75th anniversary celebrations of Southern African Habonim, the socialist Zionist youth movement which inspired hundreds of Southern Africans to immigrate to Israel. "
Sunday, May 15, 2005
57 more reasons I love Israel
Jerusalem Post | Breaking News from Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World
The Human Spirit: 57 more reasons I love Israel
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Barbara Sofer, THE JERUSALEM POST May. 11, 2005
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Last Independence Day, I suggested 56 reasons why I love Israel. With the trepidation of embarking on a sequel, I venture forth with 57 additional reasons - in no particular order.
1. At Jerusalem's Biblical Zoo the loudspeaker announces "Afternoon prayers (minha) are now being held near the lions."
2. The Biblical Zoo is kosher for Pessah. The primates eat matza, but the parrots get rice.
3. The nation mourns when a distinguished songwriter dies.
4. The prime minister invites not only survivors, but their soldier grandchildren to the March of the Living at Auschwitz
5. Thousands of free loan societies flourish. You can borrow wedding dresses and pacifiers.
6. Fourteen years after Operation Solomon, the first plane's pilot still volunteers to teach Ethiopian youth.
7. When the tsunami struck, we sent medical assistance the same day.
8. We also added flights to bring home our backpacking children.
9. The president of the US touts the book of Israel's former minister of Diaspora Affairs.
10. The president of Israel spends Shabbat in a development town, and the first lady does the cooking.
11. A week before Yom Kippur, forecasters speculate on the weather for the fast.
12. Strangers still invite you for a home-cooked Shabbat meal.
13. We entertain at home, but so many Israelis travel abroad that duty free shops advertise on municipal billboards.
14. Before Shabbat a siren marks our country hitting the brakes.
15. Municipal decorating contests feature succot, not trees.
16. Jewish soccer players for Bnei Sakhnin compete against Arab players for Maccabi Tel Aviv.
17. Volunteers pass out sandwiches at the hospitals, not for the patients, but for their families.
18. Childbirth and burial are free. Even the homeless have health insurance.
19. We have a Museum of Psalms, but at every bus stop someone is reading them, keeping the tradition alive.
20. Mrs. World is a Jewish Mother from Tel Aviv.
21. Stem cell research isn't controversial here
22. Fifty years after draining the swamps, we invented a one-pound aerial surveillance vehicle called the Mosquito.
23. Fifty years after we drained the swamps, we're considering bringing them back.
24. Desalinization is finally happening.
25. Per capita, Israel has the highest number of publications in science and Talmud.
26. Sufferers from Jerusalem Syndrome think they're King David or John the Baptist. Could be worse.
27. Disputes with Europeans notwithstanding, we've invented a urine test for mad cows.
28. You can hold an outdoor wedding all summer.
29. Designers create European fashions in real women's sizes.
30. Corner grocers know what type of hallah every family in their neighborhood eats on Shabbat.
31. At the corner grocery, you can often hear a discussion of the Torah portion.
32. We charge our food at the corner grocery, but Israelis invented the check-out technology for America's largest supermarkets
33. Everyone feels compelled to tell a parent to put a hat on the baby in a country where we wear scarves, snoods, spodiks and streimels; wimples, fedoras, berets, tarbushes, homburgs, mods, kippot and keffiyot.
34. Israeli teens like to party, but they won all the top prizes in the international robotic firefighting contest.
35. Our first Nobel Prize laureate chemists are both really doctors.
36. We invented both the chat room and the silent prayer.
37. Israelis take kids everywhere. "Please wait for the strollers to be unloaded" is a standard announcement on El Al.
38. Even the fanciest cars fly blue and white flags.
39. Fabulous boutique kosher wineries are arising on the sites of ancient wine presses.
40. Globalization means a Russian-born Israeli nurse coming in first for her age group in the "run up" the Empire State building.
41. A Beduin kiosk in the middle of the desert stocks kosher-for-Pessah snacks.
42. Our ATM machines speak many languages.
43. Everyone knows where the secret intelligence offices are.
44. Combat soldiers aren't embarrassed to phone their moms.
45. Kindergarteners stand for memorial sirens, and know what they mean.
46. You can find someone to fix small appliances and alter clothing.
47. People mark their birthdays by the Jewish holidays they're closest to.
48. We're still egalitarian: When you go for a blood test, a Knesset member or Supreme Court justice might be in line with you.
49. In Jerusalem, the person offering tefillin shares space with the person selling red strings.
50. Take-out food is called "take-away" in Hebrew, and you can get kosher kubeh, sushi and tiramisu.
51. On Saturday night the radio summarizes news for all those who don't listen on Shabbat.
52. A popular TV contest this year sought someone to explain the case for Israel. A popular movie was Ushpizin, the ancient Aramaic for "sukka visitors."
53. A municipal pool in Tel Aviv is crowded at 4:30 am.
54. Throughout four years of war, we refused to give up essentials like outdoor book fairs.
55. After four years of war, we still feel safest here.
56. "Shalom" means hello or goodbye, and it can be a first name or a last name, but it's primarily our elusive dream.
57. In this ancient land, there's always something new to love.
The Human Spirit: 57 more reasons I love Israel
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Barbara Sofer, THE JERUSALEM POST May. 11, 2005
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Last Independence Day, I suggested 56 reasons why I love Israel. With the trepidation of embarking on a sequel, I venture forth with 57 additional reasons - in no particular order.
1. At Jerusalem's Biblical Zoo the loudspeaker announces "Afternoon prayers (minha) are now being held near the lions."
2. The Biblical Zoo is kosher for Pessah. The primates eat matza, but the parrots get rice.
3. The nation mourns when a distinguished songwriter dies.
4. The prime minister invites not only survivors, but their soldier grandchildren to the March of the Living at Auschwitz
5. Thousands of free loan societies flourish. You can borrow wedding dresses and pacifiers.
6. Fourteen years after Operation Solomon, the first plane's pilot still volunteers to teach Ethiopian youth.
7. When the tsunami struck, we sent medical assistance the same day.
8. We also added flights to bring home our backpacking children.
9. The president of the US touts the book of Israel's former minister of Diaspora Affairs.
10. The president of Israel spends Shabbat in a development town, and the first lady does the cooking.
11. A week before Yom Kippur, forecasters speculate on the weather for the fast.
12. Strangers still invite you for a home-cooked Shabbat meal.
13. We entertain at home, but so many Israelis travel abroad that duty free shops advertise on municipal billboards.
14. Before Shabbat a siren marks our country hitting the brakes.
15. Municipal decorating contests feature succot, not trees.
16. Jewish soccer players for Bnei Sakhnin compete against Arab players for Maccabi Tel Aviv.
17. Volunteers pass out sandwiches at the hospitals, not for the patients, but for their families.
18. Childbirth and burial are free. Even the homeless have health insurance.
19. We have a Museum of Psalms, but at every bus stop someone is reading them, keeping the tradition alive.
20. Mrs. World is a Jewish Mother from Tel Aviv.
21. Stem cell research isn't controversial here
22. Fifty years after draining the swamps, we invented a one-pound aerial surveillance vehicle called the Mosquito.
23. Fifty years after we drained the swamps, we're considering bringing them back.
24. Desalinization is finally happening.
25. Per capita, Israel has the highest number of publications in science and Talmud.
26. Sufferers from Jerusalem Syndrome think they're King David or John the Baptist. Could be worse.
27. Disputes with Europeans notwithstanding, we've invented a urine test for mad cows.
28. You can hold an outdoor wedding all summer.
29. Designers create European fashions in real women's sizes.
30. Corner grocers know what type of hallah every family in their neighborhood eats on Shabbat.
31. At the corner grocery, you can often hear a discussion of the Torah portion.
32. We charge our food at the corner grocery, but Israelis invented the check-out technology for America's largest supermarkets
33. Everyone feels compelled to tell a parent to put a hat on the baby in a country where we wear scarves, snoods, spodiks and streimels; wimples, fedoras, berets, tarbushes, homburgs, mods, kippot and keffiyot.
34. Israeli teens like to party, but they won all the top prizes in the international robotic firefighting contest.
35. Our first Nobel Prize laureate chemists are both really doctors.
36. We invented both the chat room and the silent prayer.
37. Israelis take kids everywhere. "Please wait for the strollers to be unloaded" is a standard announcement on El Al.
38. Even the fanciest cars fly blue and white flags.
39. Fabulous boutique kosher wineries are arising on the sites of ancient wine presses.
40. Globalization means a Russian-born Israeli nurse coming in first for her age group in the "run up" the Empire State building.
41. A Beduin kiosk in the middle of the desert stocks kosher-for-Pessah snacks.
42. Our ATM machines speak many languages.
43. Everyone knows where the secret intelligence offices are.
44. Combat soldiers aren't embarrassed to phone their moms.
45. Kindergarteners stand for memorial sirens, and know what they mean.
46. You can find someone to fix small appliances and alter clothing.
47. People mark their birthdays by the Jewish holidays they're closest to.
48. We're still egalitarian: When you go for a blood test, a Knesset member or Supreme Court justice might be in line with you.
49. In Jerusalem, the person offering tefillin shares space with the person selling red strings.
50. Take-out food is called "take-away" in Hebrew, and you can get kosher kubeh, sushi and tiramisu.
51. On Saturday night the radio summarizes news for all those who don't listen on Shabbat.
52. A popular TV contest this year sought someone to explain the case for Israel. A popular movie was Ushpizin, the ancient Aramaic for "sukka visitors."
53. A municipal pool in Tel Aviv is crowded at 4:30 am.
54. Throughout four years of war, we refused to give up essentials like outdoor book fairs.
55. After four years of war, we still feel safest here.
56. "Shalom" means hello or goodbye, and it can be a first name or a last name, but it's primarily our elusive dream.
57. In this ancient land, there's always something new to love.
Jerusalem Post | Breaking News from Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World
Jerusalem Post | Breaking News from Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World
The Human Spirit: 57 more reasons I love Israel
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Barbara Sofer, THE JERUSALEM POST May. 11, 2005
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Last Independence Day, I suggested 56 reasons why I love Israel. With the trepidation of embarking on a sequel, I venture forth with 57 additional reasons - in no particular order.
1. At Jerusalem's Biblical Zoo the loudspeaker announces "Afternoon prayers (minha) are now being held near the lions."
2. The Biblical Zoo is kosher for Pessah. The primates eat matza, but the parrots get rice.
3. The nation mourns when a distinguished songwriter dies.
4. The prime minister invites not only survivors, but their soldier grandchildren to the March of the Living at Auschwitz
5. Thousands of free loan societies flourish. You can borrow wedding dresses and pacifiers.
6. Fourteen years after Operation Solomon, the first plane's pilot still volunteers to teach Ethiopian youth.
7. When the tsunami struck, we sent medical assistance the same day.
8. We also added flights to bring home our backpacking children.
9. The president of the US touts the book of Israel's former minister of Diaspora Affairs.
10. The president of Israel spends Shabbat in a development town, and the first lady does the cooking.
11. A week before Yom Kippur, forecasters speculate on the weather for the fast.
12. Strangers still invite you for a home-cooked Shabbat meal.
13. We entertain at home, but so many Israelis travel abroad that duty free shops advertise on municipal billboards.
14. Before Shabbat a siren marks our country hitting the brakes.
15. Municipal decorating contests feature succot, not trees.
16. Jewish soccer players for Bnei Sakhnin compete against Arab players for Maccabi Tel Aviv.
17. Volunteers pass out sandwiches at the hospitals, not for the patients, but for their families.
18. Childbirth and burial are free. Even the homeless have health insurance.
19. We have a Museum of Psalms, but at every bus stop someone is reading them, keeping the tradition alive.
20. Mrs. World is a Jewish Mother from Tel Aviv.
21. Stem cell research isn't controversial here
22. Fifty years after draining the swamps, we invented a one-pound aerial surveillance vehicle called the Mosquito.
23. Fifty years after we drained the swamps, we're considering bringing them back.
24. Desalinization is finally happening.
25. Per capita, Israel has the highest number of publications in science and Talmud.
26. Sufferers from Jerusalem Syndrome think they're King David or John the Baptist. Could be worse.
27. Disputes with Europeans notwithstanding, we've invented a urine test for mad cows.
28. You can hold an outdoor wedding all summer.
29. Designers create European fashions in real women's sizes.
30. Corner grocers know what type of hallah every family in their neighborhood eats on Shabbat.
31. At the corner grocery, you can often hear a discussion of the Torah portion.
32. We charge our food at the corner grocery, but Israelis invented the check-out technology for America's largest supermarkets
33. Everyone feels compelled to tell a parent to put a hat on the baby in a country where we wear scarves, snoods, spodiks and streimels; wimples, fedoras, berets, tarbushes, homburgs, mods, kippot and keffiyot.
34. Israeli teens like to party, but they won all the top prizes in the international robotic firefighting contest.
35. Our first Nobel Prize laureate chemists are both really doctors.
36. We invented both the chat room and the silent prayer.
37. Israelis take kids everywhere. "Please wait for the strollers to be unloaded" is a standard announcement on El Al.
38. Even the fanciest cars fly blue and white flags.
39. Fabulous boutique kosher wineries are arising on the sites of ancient wine presses.
40. Globalization means a Russian-born Israeli nurse coming in first for her age group in the "run up" the Empire State building.
41. A Beduin kiosk in the middle of the desert stocks kosher-for-Pessah snacks.
42. Our ATM machines speak many languages.
43. Everyone knows where the secret intelligence offices are.
44. Combat soldiers aren't embarrassed to phone their moms.
45. Kindergarteners stand for memorial sirens, and know what they mean.
46. You can find someone to fix small appliances and alter clothing.
47. People mark their birthdays by the Jewish holidays they're closest to.
48. We're still egalitarian: When you go for a blood test, a Knesset member or Supreme Court justice might be in line with you.
49. In Jerusalem, the person offering tefillin shares space with the person selling red strings.
50. Take-out food is called "take-away" in Hebrew, and you can get kosher kubeh, sushi and tiramisu.
51. On Saturday night the radio summarizes news for all those who don't listen on Shabbat.
52. A popular TV contest this year sought someone to explain the case for Israel. A popular movie was Ushpizin, the ancient Aramaic for "sukka visitors."
53. A municipal pool in Tel Aviv is crowded at 4:30 am.
54. Throughout four years of war, we refused to give up essentials like outdoor book fairs.
55. After four years of war, we still feel safest here.
56. "Shalom" means hello or goodbye, and it can be a first name or a last name, but it's primarily our elusive dream.
57. In this ancient land, there's always something new to love.
The Human Spirit: 57 more reasons I love Israel
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Barbara Sofer, THE JERUSALEM POST May. 11, 2005
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Last Independence Day, I suggested 56 reasons why I love Israel. With the trepidation of embarking on a sequel, I venture forth with 57 additional reasons - in no particular order.
1. At Jerusalem's Biblical Zoo the loudspeaker announces "Afternoon prayers (minha) are now being held near the lions."
2. The Biblical Zoo is kosher for Pessah. The primates eat matza, but the parrots get rice.
3. The nation mourns when a distinguished songwriter dies.
4. The prime minister invites not only survivors, but their soldier grandchildren to the March of the Living at Auschwitz
5. Thousands of free loan societies flourish. You can borrow wedding dresses and pacifiers.
6. Fourteen years after Operation Solomon, the first plane's pilot still volunteers to teach Ethiopian youth.
7. When the tsunami struck, we sent medical assistance the same day.
8. We also added flights to bring home our backpacking children.
9. The president of the US touts the book of Israel's former minister of Diaspora Affairs.
10. The president of Israel spends Shabbat in a development town, and the first lady does the cooking.
11. A week before Yom Kippur, forecasters speculate on the weather for the fast.
12. Strangers still invite you for a home-cooked Shabbat meal.
13. We entertain at home, but so many Israelis travel abroad that duty free shops advertise on municipal billboards.
14. Before Shabbat a siren marks our country hitting the brakes.
15. Municipal decorating contests feature succot, not trees.
16. Jewish soccer players for Bnei Sakhnin compete against Arab players for Maccabi Tel Aviv.
17. Volunteers pass out sandwiches at the hospitals, not for the patients, but for their families.
18. Childbirth and burial are free. Even the homeless have health insurance.
19. We have a Museum of Psalms, but at every bus stop someone is reading them, keeping the tradition alive.
20. Mrs. World is a Jewish Mother from Tel Aviv.
21. Stem cell research isn't controversial here
22. Fifty years after draining the swamps, we invented a one-pound aerial surveillance vehicle called the Mosquito.
23. Fifty years after we drained the swamps, we're considering bringing them back.
24. Desalinization is finally happening.
25. Per capita, Israel has the highest number of publications in science and Talmud.
26. Sufferers from Jerusalem Syndrome think they're King David or John the Baptist. Could be worse.
27. Disputes with Europeans notwithstanding, we've invented a urine test for mad cows.
28. You can hold an outdoor wedding all summer.
29. Designers create European fashions in real women's sizes.
30. Corner grocers know what type of hallah every family in their neighborhood eats on Shabbat.
31. At the corner grocery, you can often hear a discussion of the Torah portion.
32. We charge our food at the corner grocery, but Israelis invented the check-out technology for America's largest supermarkets
33. Everyone feels compelled to tell a parent to put a hat on the baby in a country where we wear scarves, snoods, spodiks and streimels; wimples, fedoras, berets, tarbushes, homburgs, mods, kippot and keffiyot.
34. Israeli teens like to party, but they won all the top prizes in the international robotic firefighting contest.
35. Our first Nobel Prize laureate chemists are both really doctors.
36. We invented both the chat room and the silent prayer.
37. Israelis take kids everywhere. "Please wait for the strollers to be unloaded" is a standard announcement on El Al.
38. Even the fanciest cars fly blue and white flags.
39. Fabulous boutique kosher wineries are arising on the sites of ancient wine presses.
40. Globalization means a Russian-born Israeli nurse coming in first for her age group in the "run up" the Empire State building.
41. A Beduin kiosk in the middle of the desert stocks kosher-for-Pessah snacks.
42. Our ATM machines speak many languages.
43. Everyone knows where the secret intelligence offices are.
44. Combat soldiers aren't embarrassed to phone their moms.
45. Kindergarteners stand for memorial sirens, and know what they mean.
46. You can find someone to fix small appliances and alter clothing.
47. People mark their birthdays by the Jewish holidays they're closest to.
48. We're still egalitarian: When you go for a blood test, a Knesset member or Supreme Court justice might be in line with you.
49. In Jerusalem, the person offering tefillin shares space with the person selling red strings.
50. Take-out food is called "take-away" in Hebrew, and you can get kosher kubeh, sushi and tiramisu.
51. On Saturday night the radio summarizes news for all those who don't listen on Shabbat.
52. A popular TV contest this year sought someone to explain the case for Israel. A popular movie was Ushpizin, the ancient Aramaic for "sukka visitors."
53. A municipal pool in Tel Aviv is crowded at 4:30 am.
54. Throughout four years of war, we refused to give up essentials like outdoor book fairs.
55. After four years of war, we still feel safest here.
56. "Shalom" means hello or goodbye, and it can be a first name or a last name, but it's primarily our elusive dream.
57. In this ancient land, there's always something new to love.
Saturday, May 14, 2005
The Human Spiritm 57 more reasons I love Israel
Jerusalem Post | Breaking News from Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World: "The Human Spirit: 57 more reasons I love Israel
By BARBARA SOFER
Last Independence Day, I suggested 56 reasons why I love Israel. With the trepidation of embarking on a sequel, I venture forth with 57 additional reasons - in no particular order.
1. At Jerusalem's Biblical Zoo the loudspeaker announces 'Afternoon prayers (minha) are now being held near the lions.'
2. The Biblical Zoo is kosher for Pessah. The primates eat matza, but the parrots get rice.
3. The nation mourns when a distinguished songwriter dies.
4. The prime minister invites not only survivors, but their soldier grandchildren to the March of the Living at Auschwitz "
By BARBARA SOFER
Last Independence Day, I suggested 56 reasons why I love Israel. With the trepidation of embarking on a sequel, I venture forth with 57 additional reasons - in no particular order.
1. At Jerusalem's Biblical Zoo the loudspeaker announces 'Afternoon prayers (minha) are now being held near the lions.'
2. The Biblical Zoo is kosher for Pessah. The primates eat matza, but the parrots get rice.
3. The nation mourns when a distinguished songwriter dies.
4. The prime minister invites not only survivors, but their soldier grandchildren to the March of the Living at Auschwitz "
Sunday, May 08, 2005
Zimbabwe Fuel crisis
ZWNEWS.com - linking the world to Zimbabwe: "Zimbabwe in fuel crisisprint friendly version
author/source:People's Daily (China)
published:Sun 8-May-2005
posted on this site:Sun 8-May-2005
Article Type : News
'Depressed price has made forecourt business unviable'
The past week has seen tablets of 'no fuel' at most petrol filling stations in Zimbabwean capital Harare, and there was virtually no petrol at service stations outside the capital. Zimbabwe is now facing a serious fuel crisis due to shortage of foreign currency and low prices of petrol. On Friday afternoon it was said that there was fuel at a petrol filling station at Fourth Street, where cars were immediately seen queuing for this precious liquid, which has increasingly become scarce. In a few minutes, a fuel delivery tanker arrived. It off-loaded about 20,000 liters of fuel and vehicles began to assemble in a single line and the police were soon called in to calm the possibly explosive environment. Two hours later, the service station management announced that the fuel has run out and grumbling drivers began to disperse. Was it true that 20,000 liters of fuel have been sold already? There comes the answer of some drivers. The fuel was still available, but would be sold to dealers who will in turn sell it on the thriving 'black market' at inflated prices, although selling fuel on the black market and demanding bribes from desperate motorists is a criminal offence in Zimbabwe."
author/source:People's Daily (China)
published:Sun 8-May-2005
posted on this site:Sun 8-May-2005
Article Type : News
'Depressed price has made forecourt business unviable'
The past week has seen tablets of 'no fuel' at most petrol filling stations in Zimbabwean capital Harare, and there was virtually no petrol at service stations outside the capital. Zimbabwe is now facing a serious fuel crisis due to shortage of foreign currency and low prices of petrol. On Friday afternoon it was said that there was fuel at a petrol filling station at Fourth Street, where cars were immediately seen queuing for this precious liquid, which has increasingly become scarce. In a few minutes, a fuel delivery tanker arrived. It off-loaded about 20,000 liters of fuel and vehicles began to assemble in a single line and the police were soon called in to calm the possibly explosive environment. Two hours later, the service station management announced that the fuel has run out and grumbling drivers began to disperse. Was it true that 20,000 liters of fuel have been sold already? There comes the answer of some drivers. The fuel was still available, but would be sold to dealers who will in turn sell it on the thriving 'black market' at inflated prices, although selling fuel on the black market and demanding bribes from desperate motorists is a criminal offence in Zimbabwe."
Haaretz - Israel News - Israel seeks PR help for image makeover
Haaretz - Israel News - Israel seeks PR help for image makeover: "Israel seeks PR help for image makeover
By Akiva Eldar
Israeli missions abroad and the Foreign Ministry are hoping to 'rebrand' Israel by focusing less on the regional conflict and more on Israel's achievements in science, culture and other areas.
In cooperation with the Advertisers Association, the foreign and finance ministries and the Prime Minister's Office have started drafting PR firms, associations and businesspeople in efforts to find a new image for Israel in keeping with commercial PR and marketing models."
By Akiva Eldar
Israeli missions abroad and the Foreign Ministry are hoping to 'rebrand' Israel by focusing less on the regional conflict and more on Israel's achievements in science, culture and other areas.
In cooperation with the Advertisers Association, the foreign and finance ministries and the Prime Minister's Office have started drafting PR firms, associations and businesspeople in efforts to find a new image for Israel in keeping with commercial PR and marketing models."
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
Zimbabwe: Less press, little freedom : Mail & Guardian Online
Zimbabwe: Less press, little freedom : Mail & Guardian Online: "Zimbabwe: Less press, little freedom
Sekai Ngara | Harare
03 May 2005 07:17
advertisementLittle has changed one year after Zimbabwe earned itself a place on
a list of the world's worst places to be a journalist, published by the New York-based
Committee to Protect Journalists."
Sekai Ngara | Harare
03 May 2005 07:17
advertisementLittle has changed one year after Zimbabwe earned itself a place on
a list of the world's worst places to be a journalist, published by the New York-based
Committee to Protect Journalists."
Sunday, May 01, 2005
The following text is from a Yahoo Group known (rather embarrasingly) as rhodesiawassuper
Nothing to loose.
I have just been into the largest wholesaler in Bulawayo. We are quite large buyers and the staff greeted me cheerfully. Then I collected a trolley and started to walk through the company premises - I came out in a state of shock. Whole rows of shelving were absolutely empty - to the roof. There was no soap powder, no bath soaps, no cooking oil, no fats, no sugar and no maize meal, no flour and no rice, no milk products of any kind and no children's foods.
We walked out empty handed and I said to the floor manager that I was shocked - he simply nodded his head and said, "what can we do?" Frankly, I find this situation very scary.
We need 36 000 tonnes of basic food imports a week, these will cost about
US$20 million. One of my friends sat in a fuel queue yesterday for 13 hours to get a tank of petrol. Most garages have queues outside their premises - even if they have no fuel. It has never been so bad as now. To top this serious situation we have started to experience load shedding by the State controlled electricity utility.
When we had an economy to speak of, we used about 5,5 million liters of
petroleum fuels a day - I would guess that today we use about 3 million
liters. Even that will cost about US$700 000 a day - or nearly US$5 million
a week - so just for the basics we need US$25 million a week. In fact we
earn about that from our exports each week but that leaves no margin for
anything else.
Yesterday I saw the new Chinese fighter jets fly over - we have just spent
US$400 million on these plus some Mig 23's, attack helicopters and military vehicles. Most of it from China. We have also just purchased two Chinese passenger jets for regional routes to augment the three remaining aircraft still flying for Air Zimbuggered.
These ill-advised purchases have flattened our foreign exchange resources, in fact I hear that we have sold 25 tonnes of gold forward (US$500 million) and we have also sold our tobacco production forward. The main problem with these transactions is that we no longer can produce 25 tonnes of gold in a year and we have produced a very small and inferior tobacco crop.
Last year Gideon Gono was the local hero when he succeeded in herding all local foreign exchange resources into the coffers of the Reserve Bank but in doing so he has effectively spelled the death of the export industries that fed the system. His hope of harnessing the US$75 million a month that comes back to local families from Zimbabweans working abroad has flopped totally - after handling a mere US$45 million in the past year, receipts are now virtually zero.
The election results and the aftermath have not helped - we remain
completely isolated, people have no faith in the future, capital flight is
accelerating and the parallel market has taken off into the stratosphere.
The fact that the Reserve Bank was going to devalue by nearly 100 per cent was leaked last week and there is a sudden frosty silence in that quarter.
The first month of sales on the tobacco floors - always an important period
in Zimbuggered, has yielded prices in Zimbuggered dollars below last years. This simply puts paid to any hopes of a tobacco led recovery this year, or next.
The reaction of President Mugape to these shocking facts was to hold a
"Silver Jubilee" celebration, which costs billions. Undertake a spending
spree for the air force in a country where we have no external or internal
threats and a vague promise by a muted Gono that a "recovery plan" is being prepared. Oh yes - they fired the poor GM of the Grain Marketing Board and kept that idiot Made (Minister of Agriculture) in an enlarged Cabinet.
We have had confirmation from official sources that the maize crop now being reaped is a disaster - our estimate of about 400 000 tonnes seems about right. There is a flurry of activity going on to try and get a wheat crop into the ground before the 15th of May but it is unlikely they will get more than the 50 000 tonnes or so they grew last year. So we are now faced with a severe famine and no foreign resources with which to buy the food and other products we need. In fact, if we had the resources we could hardly move this volume given the parlous state of our infrastructure.
Official UN sources estimate that we have nearly 6 million people who need food aid - donors are feeding about 1 million people at present - mainly children. This leaves 5 million people at risk of starvation out of a
population of 11 million. The rest of us will simply have to fend for
ourselves - faced with rising prices, shortages and other problems. It seems to me that South Africa will have to step in and pick up the pieces, as it is very largely responsible for this sorry state of affairs.
The big question is what do we do about this situation. The one thing that
sticks out a mile is that Zanu has no solutions and we simply cannot let
things stand as they are. The MDC has put its own plans into action and at
this stage they are saying: -
1. The MDC does not accept the results of the election.
2. The MDC now accepts that neither democracy nor the legal system here offer any way forward at present.
3. The MDC demands the resignation of the new government and the negotiation of an interim administration to begin to resolve the immediate crisis situation we are in.
4. The MDC demands the convening of a constitutional conference involving all civic groups to draft a new constitution for the country with fresh elections to be held under the new constitution and under the supervision of the international community.
To back up these demands a broad coalition of civic groups is being formed and will be charged with taking mass action against the new government. The MDC will employ all forms of political action required to support the efforts by civil society to rescue the country from the grip of a small, self-seeking elite that simply refuses to allow the people to select the government of their choice. It will call on the armed forces to support this initiative in the broader interests of the country and its people.
The Ministry of Defense has stated that it will "crush" any mass action
launched by the opposition or civic society. On Monday last week thousands took to the streets in Bulawayo after a football match on Independence Day - it took the Police and the Army 7 hours to stop the rioting. To local observers the policemen involved had little heart for the activity they were involved in - next time it will be worse.
Eddie Cross
Bulawayo, 26th April 2005
Will we ever get a chance to show what we can really do?
Zimbuggered is a fantastic country - with wonderful people living in it. It has
a diversity of climate, some areas are quite high and temperate with good
rainfall and there are the bits down below 500 m above sea level that are
hot and dry. They all have their own charm.
April and May are my favorite months - the wet season is over but the veldt is still green and lush, the days are warm and the nights cool and it is
mostly bone dry. Blue skies and fresh mornings complete the picture.
We are also a rich country - we produce 32 minerals, of which 4 have global significance. We used to have an advanced and progressive agriculture supported by a sophisticated supply chain and marketing agencies and supported by world renown research and extension services. Until 2000 we were largely self sufficient in basic goods and over 90 per cent of what we bought in an average store will come out of our own farms and factories.
Our people were the best educated in the region and were accepted as
motivated and hard working. We played hard and produced many individuals with world-class skills. Migrants from this country were highly regarded wherever they went and were quickly absorbed into the economic structures of the countries they went to. There was no real class system and race relations were by and large, very good.
So why are we now so far down in the scheme of things? We are cited as a
frightening example of just how quickly a country can be destroyed by bad
governance - I guess that has some value as a warning to others not take
such things for granted. We are now the subject of global concern as a
country that is unable to feed itself, support its own health and education
systems and where the quality of human life is at best, short, nasty and
blighted.
But then we need to remember that this country has never had it easy. My
father who spent his life here said to me once that he could hardly remember a time when we were not dealing with a crisis of one kind or another. The Shona and Ndebele rebellions at the end of the 19th century, the Boer War, the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War, the aftermath and then a brief 10 years of stability and growth during the Federation followed by the crisis in 1962 then UDI and that was followed by 15 years of sanctions and the civil war from 1972 to 1980.
When finally the country obtained democracy in 1980, we should have seen better days - it was not to be. In 1983 the struggle between Zanu and Zapu came to a head and was only settled when Zapu was absorbed into Zanu in 1988 under the "Unity Accord". Even then there was little real peace and progress. The new government ran up a huge public debt and experimented with all sorts of economic policies - none of which really worked.
Faced with a faltering economy and growing unrest in the labor unions and in civil society, the ruling elite - growing older but reluctant to allow any sort of succession or real democracy simply clamped down on the peoples freedoms and rights until eventually the MDC was formed and successfully challenged the ruling elite for power in the year 2000. That experience triggered an outburst of violence and repression that continues today and which has led to the country being increasingly isolated internationally and it put the economy into a steep decline.
So today we look back on 25 years of independence under a government which has held onto power by the skin of its teeth in the past 5 years and in the process become ever more unpopular and myopic. It is a tragedy of enormous proportions that the great promise of 1980 has not been realized and to appreciate that our failure as a country is due entirely to our own bad governance.
The country is still great - the people terrific but we just do not seem to
get it right. A business leader I once worked with said to me that in real
life you need a bit of luck. We seem to have been unable to find that
singular ingredient in our search for a better life and prosperity for our
people.
I have no doubt that our leaders are entirely to blame for this state of
affairs - we cannot blame the country as it has all that we need to succeed.
The question is how do we change them and get ourselves a new set of
leadership that will allow Zimbuggered - the real Zimbuggered, to stand proud
again.
We - the democrats - have given democratic principle our very best in the
past five years with little or no help from anyone outside and certainly not
from the region. We have won all the democratic contests in the past 5 years
starting with the referendum which we won by a 5 per cent margin - I estimate
that the real margin was closed to 20 per cent. We won the 200
election - we actually got 52 per cent of the vote but if you factor out the
rigging element, we actually won handsomely. Then in the 2002 presidential
election we won again - I estimate that Tsvangirai was actually elected by a
margin of 65 per cent to 35 per cent. Now in the 2005 election there is growing
evidence that we took close to 75 per cent of the real vote.
But none of this makes any difference - Mugape still took the elections by
rigging the final counts and there is absolutely nothing we democrats can do
about it except suffer the consequences.
We are all agreed that there will be no chance of the legal route yielding
any sort of justice to the efforts of the MDC and its supporters to elect a
new and more accountable administration. So what do we do? More of the
same is not enough this time, there is simply no way we can accept another
5 years of Zanu PF misrule and corruption. Perhaps the economy and the
deepening food and foreign exchange crisis will do it for us, but in the end
I suspect we are going to have to do something more to put our beloved
country back where it belongs.
Eddie Cross Bulawayo, 18th April 2005
Elephants eaten at Zimbuggered independence celebrations!
JANE FIELDS
IN HARARE
Faced with worsening food shortages, president Robert Mugape's
officials have resorted to killing elephants to pacify hungry
Zimbabweans, it was claimed yesterday.
Game rangers near the western resort town of Kariba were told to
kill at least four elephants ahead of celebrations to mark
Zimbuggered's 25th anniversary of independence this week, said Johnny
Rodrigues, the chairman of the Zimbuggered Conservation Task Force
(ZCTF).
Elephant meat is not traditionally eaten by Zimbabweans but other
kinds of meat are increasingly scarce in this once prosperous
farming nation.
Mr Mugape used Monday's independence celebrations to boast about
Zimbuggered's "enormous" achievements since independence in 1980. The
southern African country is now entering its fourth year of food
shortages.
The Zimbabwean president says the crisis has nothing to do with his
chaotic programme of white farm seizures but is simply a result of
drought.
Dear Family and Friends,
Things have deteriorating noticeably in Zimbuggered in the three weeks since
the ruling party declared they had won the elections. Prices have shot up,
basic foodstuffs are becoming harder and harder to find and the fuel
supply is sporadic. Water from taps has become a luxury and the state
owned television this week gave us a long story to explain that as winter
approaches electricity cuts are going to be regular occurrences.
This week the MDC finally gave up their prolonged diplomatic game and
openly declared that the South Africans were not honest brokers in mediating
in the Zimbabwean crisis. They said that it was now apparent
that the South African stance of "Quiet Diplomacy" was in a reality just a
"package of lies and pretence." The statement of this sad fact and an end
to the nonsensical diplomatic pretence, comes as a relief to Zimbabweans.
We had watched with shock and disgust the line taken by the SABC TV news
presenter reporting from Zimbuggered during the election period and few people
believed they had remained impartial.
Zimbabweans feel so utterly betrayed by our African neighbours and at
least now the talk has become straightforward and to the point. By all
accounts there are probably less than 20 or 30 000 white people left in
Zimbuggered and it is matter of continental shame that our regional
neighbours cannot and will not see the suffering of 11 million ordinary
people but choose to keep on and on hiding behind the now 25 year old
"colonialist" scapegoat.
It is very hard to be optimistic about anything at the moment but there is
a joke doing the rounds which is particularly appropriate as we hurtle
backwards into the dark ages. Using a stick, an old shoelace and a bent
paper clip a hungry man crafts a crude fishing rod and goes down to try
his luck at the river. Against all the odds he manages to catch a small
fish and he hurries home to his wife with the first meat they've seen for
weeks. He asks his wife to grill the fish immediately but she says she
can't because they are having an extended power cut. Then he suggests
that she uses the paraffin stove instead and poaches the fish but she
can't do that either because there is no paraffin in the country for the stove.
The man goes off to collect firewood and says now they can fry the fish but
that is also impossible because there is neither margarine nor cooking oil
in the country. In despair, the hungry man suggests they simply boil the
fish but that too is impossible as there is no water in the taps. Resigned
to just smoking the fish on an open fire, the hungry man bends to light
the sticks but cannot even do that as the country even ran out of matches
this week. In disgust he gets up, grabs the fish and takes it back to the
river. The fish slides into the water and turns back to wave a fin at the
hungry man and says: "Well, you voted for them."
Until next week, with love, cathy. Copyright cathy buckle 23 April 2005
I have just been into the largest wholesaler in Bulawayo. We are quite large buyers and the staff greeted me cheerfully. Then I collected a trolley and started to walk through the company premises - I came out in a state of shock. Whole rows of shelving were absolutely empty - to the roof. There was no soap powder, no bath soaps, no cooking oil, no fats, no sugar and no maize meal, no flour and no rice, no milk products of any kind and no children's foods.
We walked out empty handed and I said to the floor manager that I was shocked - he simply nodded his head and said, "what can we do?" Frankly, I find this situation very scary.
We need 36 000 tonnes of basic food imports a week, these will cost about
US$20 million. One of my friends sat in a fuel queue yesterday for 13 hours to get a tank of petrol. Most garages have queues outside their premises - even if they have no fuel. It has never been so bad as now. To top this serious situation we have started to experience load shedding by the State controlled electricity utility.
When we had an economy to speak of, we used about 5,5 million liters of
petroleum fuels a day - I would guess that today we use about 3 million
liters. Even that will cost about US$700 000 a day - or nearly US$5 million
a week - so just for the basics we need US$25 million a week. In fact we
earn about that from our exports each week but that leaves no margin for
anything else.
Yesterday I saw the new Chinese fighter jets fly over - we have just spent
US$400 million on these plus some Mig 23's, attack helicopters and military vehicles. Most of it from China. We have also just purchased two Chinese passenger jets for regional routes to augment the three remaining aircraft still flying for Air Zimbuggered.
These ill-advised purchases have flattened our foreign exchange resources, in fact I hear that we have sold 25 tonnes of gold forward (US$500 million) and we have also sold our tobacco production forward. The main problem with these transactions is that we no longer can produce 25 tonnes of gold in a year and we have produced a very small and inferior tobacco crop.
Last year Gideon Gono was the local hero when he succeeded in herding all local foreign exchange resources into the coffers of the Reserve Bank but in doing so he has effectively spelled the death of the export industries that fed the system. His hope of harnessing the US$75 million a month that comes back to local families from Zimbabweans working abroad has flopped totally - after handling a mere US$45 million in the past year, receipts are now virtually zero.
The election results and the aftermath have not helped - we remain
completely isolated, people have no faith in the future, capital flight is
accelerating and the parallel market has taken off into the stratosphere.
The fact that the Reserve Bank was going to devalue by nearly 100 per cent was leaked last week and there is a sudden frosty silence in that quarter.
The first month of sales on the tobacco floors - always an important period
in Zimbuggered, has yielded prices in Zimbuggered dollars below last years. This simply puts paid to any hopes of a tobacco led recovery this year, or next.
The reaction of President Mugape to these shocking facts was to hold a
"Silver Jubilee" celebration, which costs billions. Undertake a spending
spree for the air force in a country where we have no external or internal
threats and a vague promise by a muted Gono that a "recovery plan" is being prepared. Oh yes - they fired the poor GM of the Grain Marketing Board and kept that idiot Made (Minister of Agriculture) in an enlarged Cabinet.
We have had confirmation from official sources that the maize crop now being reaped is a disaster - our estimate of about 400 000 tonnes seems about right. There is a flurry of activity going on to try and get a wheat crop into the ground before the 15th of May but it is unlikely they will get more than the 50 000 tonnes or so they grew last year. So we are now faced with a severe famine and no foreign resources with which to buy the food and other products we need. In fact, if we had the resources we could hardly move this volume given the parlous state of our infrastructure.
Official UN sources estimate that we have nearly 6 million people who need food aid - donors are feeding about 1 million people at present - mainly children. This leaves 5 million people at risk of starvation out of a
population of 11 million. The rest of us will simply have to fend for
ourselves - faced with rising prices, shortages and other problems. It seems to me that South Africa will have to step in and pick up the pieces, as it is very largely responsible for this sorry state of affairs.
The big question is what do we do about this situation. The one thing that
sticks out a mile is that Zanu has no solutions and we simply cannot let
things stand as they are. The MDC has put its own plans into action and at
this stage they are saying: -
1. The MDC does not accept the results of the election.
2. The MDC now accepts that neither democracy nor the legal system here offer any way forward at present.
3. The MDC demands the resignation of the new government and the negotiation of an interim administration to begin to resolve the immediate crisis situation we are in.
4. The MDC demands the convening of a constitutional conference involving all civic groups to draft a new constitution for the country with fresh elections to be held under the new constitution and under the supervision of the international community.
To back up these demands a broad coalition of civic groups is being formed and will be charged with taking mass action against the new government. The MDC will employ all forms of political action required to support the efforts by civil society to rescue the country from the grip of a small, self-seeking elite that simply refuses to allow the people to select the government of their choice. It will call on the armed forces to support this initiative in the broader interests of the country and its people.
The Ministry of Defense has stated that it will "crush" any mass action
launched by the opposition or civic society. On Monday last week thousands took to the streets in Bulawayo after a football match on Independence Day - it took the Police and the Army 7 hours to stop the rioting. To local observers the policemen involved had little heart for the activity they were involved in - next time it will be worse.
Eddie Cross
Bulawayo, 26th April 2005
Will we ever get a chance to show what we can really do?
Zimbuggered is a fantastic country - with wonderful people living in it. It has
a diversity of climate, some areas are quite high and temperate with good
rainfall and there are the bits down below 500 m above sea level that are
hot and dry. They all have their own charm.
April and May are my favorite months - the wet season is over but the veldt is still green and lush, the days are warm and the nights cool and it is
mostly bone dry. Blue skies and fresh mornings complete the picture.
We are also a rich country - we produce 32 minerals, of which 4 have global significance. We used to have an advanced and progressive agriculture supported by a sophisticated supply chain and marketing agencies and supported by world renown research and extension services. Until 2000 we were largely self sufficient in basic goods and over 90 per cent of what we bought in an average store will come out of our own farms and factories.
Our people were the best educated in the region and were accepted as
motivated and hard working. We played hard and produced many individuals with world-class skills. Migrants from this country were highly regarded wherever they went and were quickly absorbed into the economic structures of the countries they went to. There was no real class system and race relations were by and large, very good.
So why are we now so far down in the scheme of things? We are cited as a
frightening example of just how quickly a country can be destroyed by bad
governance - I guess that has some value as a warning to others not take
such things for granted. We are now the subject of global concern as a
country that is unable to feed itself, support its own health and education
systems and where the quality of human life is at best, short, nasty and
blighted.
But then we need to remember that this country has never had it easy. My
father who spent his life here said to me once that he could hardly remember a time when we were not dealing with a crisis of one kind or another. The Shona and Ndebele rebellions at the end of the 19th century, the Boer War, the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War, the aftermath and then a brief 10 years of stability and growth during the Federation followed by the crisis in 1962 then UDI and that was followed by 15 years of sanctions and the civil war from 1972 to 1980.
When finally the country obtained democracy in 1980, we should have seen better days - it was not to be. In 1983 the struggle between Zanu and Zapu came to a head and was only settled when Zapu was absorbed into Zanu in 1988 under the "Unity Accord". Even then there was little real peace and progress. The new government ran up a huge public debt and experimented with all sorts of economic policies - none of which really worked.
Faced with a faltering economy and growing unrest in the labor unions and in civil society, the ruling elite - growing older but reluctant to allow any sort of succession or real democracy simply clamped down on the peoples freedoms and rights until eventually the MDC was formed and successfully challenged the ruling elite for power in the year 2000. That experience triggered an outburst of violence and repression that continues today and which has led to the country being increasingly isolated internationally and it put the economy into a steep decline.
So today we look back on 25 years of independence under a government which has held onto power by the skin of its teeth in the past 5 years and in the process become ever more unpopular and myopic. It is a tragedy of enormous proportions that the great promise of 1980 has not been realized and to appreciate that our failure as a country is due entirely to our own bad governance.
The country is still great - the people terrific but we just do not seem to
get it right. A business leader I once worked with said to me that in real
life you need a bit of luck. We seem to have been unable to find that
singular ingredient in our search for a better life and prosperity for our
people.
I have no doubt that our leaders are entirely to blame for this state of
affairs - we cannot blame the country as it has all that we need to succeed.
The question is how do we change them and get ourselves a new set of
leadership that will allow Zimbuggered - the real Zimbuggered, to stand proud
again.
We - the democrats - have given democratic principle our very best in the
past five years with little or no help from anyone outside and certainly not
from the region. We have won all the democratic contests in the past 5 years
starting with the referendum which we won by a 5 per cent margin - I estimate
that the real margin was closed to 20 per cent. We won the 200
election - we actually got 52 per cent of the vote but if you factor out the
rigging element, we actually won handsomely. Then in the 2002 presidential
election we won again - I estimate that Tsvangirai was actually elected by a
margin of 65 per cent to 35 per cent. Now in the 2005 election there is growing
evidence that we took close to 75 per cent of the real vote.
But none of this makes any difference - Mugape still took the elections by
rigging the final counts and there is absolutely nothing we democrats can do
about it except suffer the consequences.
We are all agreed that there will be no chance of the legal route yielding
any sort of justice to the efforts of the MDC and its supporters to elect a
new and more accountable administration. So what do we do? More of the
same is not enough this time, there is simply no way we can accept another
5 years of Zanu PF misrule and corruption. Perhaps the economy and the
deepening food and foreign exchange crisis will do it for us, but in the end
I suspect we are going to have to do something more to put our beloved
country back where it belongs.
Eddie Cross Bulawayo, 18th April 2005
Elephants eaten at Zimbuggered independence celebrations!
JANE FIELDS
IN HARARE
Faced with worsening food shortages, president Robert Mugape's
officials have resorted to killing elephants to pacify hungry
Zimbabweans, it was claimed yesterday.
Game rangers near the western resort town of Kariba were told to
kill at least four elephants ahead of celebrations to mark
Zimbuggered's 25th anniversary of independence this week, said Johnny
Rodrigues, the chairman of the Zimbuggered Conservation Task Force
(ZCTF).
Elephant meat is not traditionally eaten by Zimbabweans but other
kinds of meat are increasingly scarce in this once prosperous
farming nation.
Mr Mugape used Monday's independence celebrations to boast about
Zimbuggered's "enormous" achievements since independence in 1980. The
southern African country is now entering its fourth year of food
shortages.
The Zimbabwean president says the crisis has nothing to do with his
chaotic programme of white farm seizures but is simply a result of
drought.
Dear Family and Friends,
Things have deteriorating noticeably in Zimbuggered in the three weeks since
the ruling party declared they had won the elections. Prices have shot up,
basic foodstuffs are becoming harder and harder to find and the fuel
supply is sporadic. Water from taps has become a luxury and the state
owned television this week gave us a long story to explain that as winter
approaches electricity cuts are going to be regular occurrences.
This week the MDC finally gave up their prolonged diplomatic game and
openly declared that the South Africans were not honest brokers in mediating
in the Zimbabwean crisis. They said that it was now apparent
that the South African stance of "Quiet Diplomacy" was in a reality just a
"package of lies and pretence." The statement of this sad fact and an end
to the nonsensical diplomatic pretence, comes as a relief to Zimbabweans.
We had watched with shock and disgust the line taken by the SABC TV news
presenter reporting from Zimbuggered during the election period and few people
believed they had remained impartial.
Zimbabweans feel so utterly betrayed by our African neighbours and at
least now the talk has become straightforward and to the point. By all
accounts there are probably less than 20 or 30 000 white people left in
Zimbuggered and it is matter of continental shame that our regional
neighbours cannot and will not see the suffering of 11 million ordinary
people but choose to keep on and on hiding behind the now 25 year old
"colonialist" scapegoat.
It is very hard to be optimistic about anything at the moment but there is
a joke doing the rounds which is particularly appropriate as we hurtle
backwards into the dark ages. Using a stick, an old shoelace and a bent
paper clip a hungry man crafts a crude fishing rod and goes down to try
his luck at the river. Against all the odds he manages to catch a small
fish and he hurries home to his wife with the first meat they've seen for
weeks. He asks his wife to grill the fish immediately but she says she
can't because they are having an extended power cut. Then he suggests
that she uses the paraffin stove instead and poaches the fish but she
can't do that either because there is no paraffin in the country for the stove.
The man goes off to collect firewood and says now they can fry the fish but
that is also impossible because there is neither margarine nor cooking oil
in the country. In despair, the hungry man suggests they simply boil the
fish but that too is impossible as there is no water in the taps. Resigned
to just smoking the fish on an open fire, the hungry man bends to light
the sticks but cannot even do that as the country even ran out of matches
this week. In disgust he gets up, grabs the fish and takes it back to the
river. The fish slides into the water and turns back to wave a fin at the
hungry man and says: "Well, you voted for them."
Until next week, with love, cathy. Copyright cathy buckle 23 April 2005
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