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Washington Post
By Peter Baker

The Herald

FIFTEEN ambassadors of the European Union accredited to Zimbabwe and the Head of Delegation of the European Commission are this week visiting EU-funded projects in Manicaland Province.

The visit, which is organised by the delegation of the EC, is taking the ambassadors to Rusape, Nyanga and Mutare, where several EU-funded projects are under implementation.

In a statement this week, the head of the EC in Zimbabwe, Mr Xavier Marchal, said the visit would cover a food distribution operation organised by the World Food Programme with EU funding in Rusape and a tour of an agricultural project funded by ECHO, the humanitarian department of the EC.

The ambassadors will also visit the Sangano Dairy Project. The dairy project, funded by the EU since 2001, involves the establishment of milk processing centre and improvement of the farmers’ dairy herd and on farm production through training. The project is part of the Micro Project Programme (MPP) covering the whole country.

They will also visit the NATPHARM regional storage centre in Mutare. This is part of an EU health support programme, which mainly deals with the procurement of vital and essential medicines, vaccines, hospital equipment and spare parts to be used by public health institutions.

However, eyebrows have been raised after the EC statement revealed that the ambassadors would hold a meeting at the Mutare office of the Legal Resources Foundation (LRF), a project whose objective they say is to encourage a democratic environment in Zimbabwe and the respect of people’s rights. But most Zimbabweans know the LRF as a group of anti-Zimbabwe lawyers formerly headed by MDC secretary for legal affairs Mr David Coltart.

The EU imposed illegal sanctions against Zimbabwe after being drawn into the bilateral dispute between Harare and London.

Daily Telegraph (UK)

Harare - Owners of property next to President Robert Mugabe’s retirement mansion have received written warning that their houses will be confiscated by the state. The move represents the first time Zimbabwe’s elite, both black and white, have suffered at first hand. Millions of Zimbabweans were affected by last year’s “clearances” of urban shantytowns and much of the rural population hit by Mr Mugabe’s war on white farmers. But, until now, many members of the aristocracy have escaped unscathed - and even set up home in close proximity to his putative retirement home. Mr Mugabe, 82 next month, has nearly completed a huge luxury residence which will cost more than £6 million. It is probably the largest private dwelling in Africa. The three floors amount to approximately four acres and include a ballroom, media complex and 24 bedrooms. The Chinese-styled palace overlooks dams and a newly-planted 50-acre garden protected by a 12ft wall. The interior includes a Moroccan-style public room plastered by north African craftsmen. Original Chinese decorations have been used in several other public rooms. The palace is overlooked by scores of luxury residences, some still under construction in a special estate, Borrowdale Brooke, about 18 miles north of Harare. The first 15 homeowners at Borrowdale had warning letters on Wednesday from the valuation department of the Local Government Ministry. “This serves to advise you that your property falls in a designated security area in terms of general notice of 255 of 2004, and we will be in contact with you soon with a view to inspecting your house for valuation purposes.”

Newsweek
By Joshua Hammer

Inside the hidden links between American big-game hunters and Zimbabwe’s Mugabe dictatorship

Jocelyn Chiwenga is not a woman to be taken lightly. The wife of Gen. Constantine Chiwenga, commander-in-chief of Zimbabwe’s armed forces, Mrs. Chiwenga has earned a reputation in her own right as a vicious enforcer for President Robert Mugabe and his ruling Zanu PF. In April 2002 she reportedly showed up at a farm outside Harare, the capital, with an armed gang and ordered the farm’s white owner to turn over his property to her or be killed, according to documents filed in a Zimbabwean court. One year later, Chiwenga accosted Gugulethu Moyo, an attorney for a pro-opposition newspaper, and beat her so severely that she had to seek medical attention. “Your paper wants to encourage anarchy in this country,” Chiwenga reportedly shouted as she punched and slapped the 28-year-old lawyer on a Harare street. “Chiwenga is as close to the center of power as you get,” says David Coltart, a parliamentarian of the Movement for Democratic Change, the country’s main opposition party. She also knows how to use her power. About three years ago, Chiwenga won an auction for a coveted lease on a 220-square-mile tract of bush, owned by Zimbabwe’s Parks and Wildlife Authority, located just outside Hwange National Park in southwest Zimbabwe. Abounding in the Big Five - lion, elephant, Cape buffalo, leopard, and black rhino - Chiwenga’s property has since become a choice destination for professional hunters, particularly well-heeled Americans.

The Zimbabwean

EDITOR - In a development that shocked many Zimbabweans a couple of years ago, the State owned daily newspaper, The Herald carried full page headline story which gave the profile of MDC Secretary-General, Professor Welshman Ncube. It was very rare for the state owned media to give positive coverage to anyone in the opposition. Zimbabweans had gotten used to stories that denigrated the MDC leaders, Morgan Tsvangirai and Professor Welshman Ncube included. In a rare admission, Professor Ncube admitted in that article that he was not a natural politician. A few years down the line, Professor Ncube has proved beyond doubt his own personal assessment of himself in an article carried in the Daily Mirror of 4 January 2006: “Even if Zanu (PF) says there is an election for a toilet caretaker we will participate”, Professor Ncube is reported to have said these words when he addressed over 600 pro-Senate supporters in Mt Pleasant after the restructuring of his faction’s Mashonaland West, Mashonaland Central and Harare provincial executive committees. Like a few other officials in the pro-senate faction, which the professor himself prefers to call the “pro respect for the MDC constitution group”, Professor Ncube had, since the beginning of the crisis that has split the party leaders into two opposing camps, been saying that he was only supporting the idea to participate in Zimbabwe’s senatorial elections because there are others within the party who think it is necessary to participate in these elections. But the statement he made in Mount Pleasant, which in essence means that he thinks that we have to participate in every election Mugabe comes up with, even if it is irrelevant. The MDC opposed the re-introduction of a senate, but in a surprising turn, some officials of the party decided that the party had to participate in the senate elections, even though many prominent Zimbabweans, including the MDC’s Secretary for Legal Affairs, David Coltart, described the senate as an irrelevant institution in Zimbabwe. It would appear from Professor Ncube’s statement that he has been pursuing his own interests under the guise of protecting the democratic rights of those MDC officials who wanted the party to participate in the senate elections. One cannot rule out the possibility that he could be the very person who sold the idea to have the MDC participate in the senate elections, which idea was quickly bought up especially by those who saw the possibility of making easy money as senators. Thank you Professor Ncube for showing your true colours. Having admitted that he is not a natural politician, the best Professor Ncube can do is to quit politics and concentrate on his legal profession or farming. There are unconfirmed reports that Professor Ncube has not been evicted from a farm he owns in the Midlands Province of Zimbabwe because he got it from Mugabe’s Zanu (PF).

Zimonline

HARARE - Too many of Zimbabwe’s judges and magistrates have benefited from the government’s political largesse that the bench could not be deemed independent, local human rights lawyers and activists said yesterday. The lawyers and activists were reacting to a statement by Judge President Paddington Garwe, when he opened Zimbabwe’s legal year yesterday that the bench was independent and not subservient to President Robert Mugabe and his ruling ZANU PF party. Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR) executive director Arnold Tsunga, said the general consensus among the legal fraternity in the country was that the judiciary was compromised both at the personal level of individual judges and at the institutional level. “Let’s look at conditions of employment of the judiciary. The judges and magistrates are mired in poverty, the Judge President mentioned it. The conditions of service are not attractive to the extent that it will be difficult for them to have personal independence when they are economically compromised,” said Tsunga. Tsunga - whose ZHLR has taken Mugabe’s government to the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights (ACHPR) accusing it of violating human rights, undermining the judiciary and the rule of law - said judges had compromised themselves by accepting land controversially seized from whites. Some of Zimbabwe’s judges such as Justices Ben Hlatshwayo and Chinembiri Bhunu allegedly personally invaded farms while several other judicial officers were also allocated land by Mugabe’s government. Tsunga said: “A number (of judicial officers) have accepted farms which are contested. These farms have not come as written perks (in their contracts of
employment) but as discretion perks by politicians.
“When judges and magistrates are being given and accept discretion perks because of poverty, surely their personal independence is compromised as well. Institutionally, they are also compromised because the operating environment is providing them with serious challenges. Judges are given political cases to handle by politicians bent on settling personal scores.” Top human rights lawyer and the faction-riddled opposition Movement for Democratic Change party’s spokesman on legal affairs David Coltart said the bench’s failure to deal expeditiously with political cases had also cast doubt on its independence and professionalism. Coltart said: “The problem with this judiciary is that it is not seen as independent because of what happened in the last five years in terms of failure to deal with certain political cases expeditiously.” He was referring to the courts’ failure to finalise several petitions by MDC candidates against victory by ZANU PF candidates during elections in the past five years including the petition by the opposition party’s leader Morgan Tsvangirai against Mugabe’s re-election in 2002. Although election petitions are dealt with as urgent, the High Court has over the last three years failed to conclude Tsvangirai’s petition forcing the MDC leader to appeal last year to the Supreme Court, the country’s highest court of law. Officially opening the 2006 legal year, Garwe defended Zimbabwe’s judiciary as independent and professional and challenged critics of the bench to come out in the open and point out their specific grievances to judicial authorities. Zimbabwe’s bench - reconstituted over the last five years after Mugabe purged independent judges - has been criticised by both local and international rights groups for failure to defend the rights of ordinary citizens and opposition activists in the face of increasing repression by the government.