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/ 23 February 2005
Iraq took a big step towards appointing its first elected prime minister since the fall of Saddam Hussein on Tuesday when the main Shia alliance chose a self-effacing man, who used to be a family doctor in Britain, as its candidate. Ibrahim al-Jaafari (58) is almost certain to head the new government after winning the unanimous approval of the Shia bloc.
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/ 31 January 2005
Mwanvua Silimu has just told a lie and everyone in the room knows it. She stares at her feet, silent. The 14-year-old is back home after months as the prisoner of vagabond soldiers, relating her ordeal. It is the obvious question, and her family ask it: how many of her 13 kidnappers raped her? In little more than a whisper, Mwanvua replies ”one”.
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/ 22 October 2004
The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) is almost desperate for a chance to dialogue with Zimbabwe’s ruling Zanu-PF and believes the acquittal of its leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, on treason charges ”provides that opportunity”. MDC Secretary General Welshman Ncube said that had Tsvangirai been jailed, it would have created ”numerous obstacles for nation-building”.
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/ 24 September 2004
Some call it South Africa’s Siberia, a dumping ground for the unwanted, but those condemned to live in Pomfret lament that some of them were wanted — as warriors. The families of the Angolan fighters recruited by Simon Mann are counting the cost of their men’s involvement with the Briton.
There was a time when the most Doreen Morris could hope for was filling white people’s bellies and cleaning up their mess. To be black in apartheid South Africa was to be limited in opportunity, if not hope, especially when home was a tin shack in a township gangland. But the emerging black middle class now employ their own domestic help.
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe admitted for the first time this week that members of his family had been affected by HIV/Aids. Mugabe told a conference on Aids that unnamed members of his family had become ill from the disease. Describing HIV/Aids as ”one of the greatest challenges facing our nation”, he said, ”and that includes the extended family of the president himself”.
Headline writers called it his endgame. Robert Mugabe was bunkered in his mansion while opponents shut down the country with a general strike dubbed ”the final push”. Soldiers placed steel barrels outside the presidential gates in case of mobs, but there was nothing they could do to protect Zimbabwe’s leader from a crumbling economy.
His was a classic British military establishment career. Now the old-fashioned adventurer is in prison, charged with plotting to overthrow a West African dictator. Simon Mann is accused of planning to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea by leading a mercenary force into the capital, Malabo, and kidnapping or killing the president.
Simon Mann is accused of planning to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea by leading a mercenary force into the capital, Malabo, and kidnapping or killing the president. His lawyers are fighting a formal extradition request from the West African country, where, it is safe to assume, prison conditions will be no better.
Zim 70 take SA govt to court
An African penguin which vanished four years ago after becoming a wildlife celebrity for surviving an oil spill has been found on Robben Island.
Peter was spotted on rocks on Nelson Mandela’s former island jail off the coast of Cape Town, it emerged on Tuesday.