Mark Ellis of the International Bar Association explains to Gugulethu Moyo why leaders who commit crimes against humanity must be prosecuted under international law. Among the world’s lawyers, Ellis stands out for his doggedness in pressing for a criminal investigation of Mugabe.
Reading stories on Zimbabwe or even watching footage on television, one would be forgiven for thinking that it is a country inhabited only by men. Women hardly make the news and the issues that concern them are not deemed newsworthy. The first thing I would expect in a post-Mugabe era is the high visibility of women and women’s rights issues, writes Everjoice Win.
"Events chronicled were far, far worse than I could ever have imagined. It seemed that state armed forces — whether only 5 Brigade or others too — had gone berserk in an orgy of violence against defenceless civilians." We publish an edited extract from the forthcoming book <i>Through the Darkness: A Life in Zimbabwe</i>, by Judith Garfield Todd.
Recent events in Zimbabwe have shown how politics has become militarised and how the military has become politicised. At policy level, the Joint Operational Command, comprising the police, intelligence and military, has found that the internal security situation was unstable and imposed a three-month ban on all political activity.
"One leader is not enough for Zimbabwe’s opposition, after all. The MDC — unable to agree on whether to contest or to boycott elections — has split into two factions." Gugulethu Moyo reports on dealing with the two factions in the Movement for Democratic Change, each with its own president.
Eleven hours a day, seven days a week, Xolani Sinandile (29) of Nyanga, Cape Town, stands on the Main Road intersection near Sea Point, struggling to sell newspapers in order to feed himself and his family. On average, he makes 50 cents per copy, but for Sinandile, and hundreds of thousands of others, this is all that stands between him and abject poverty.
Disproportionate growth of the world’s urban population could result in further loss of many forms of life on Earth, warn experts in the sciences of climate change and biodiversity. Nearly 200 years ago, London was the only city in the world with more than one million people. Today, across the globe, there are more than 400 cities at least that size.
”What sort of woman are you, Grace Kwinjeh? Who do you think you are? What are you trying to prove?” These were the questions fired at me by a group of five baton-wielding riot police officers as they beat me up at Machipisa police station in Harare on March 11.
After participating as a representative of civil society in the Africa Forum on Corruption and the Global Forum on Corruption, both of which were hosted in recent months by the South African government, I was reminded of that moment in English history captured in the book by John Wade first published in 1820 with the title, The Extraordinary Black Book: Corruption Unmasked, writes Charles Yeats.
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