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/ 13 April 2008

Piercing the Mbeki shield

On the surface, South Africa’s assumption of the presidency of the United Nations Security Council earlier this month has no relevance for the Zimbabwe electoral crisis. Desperate Zimbabweans could call for help from the UN, but this call comes when South Africa is gatekeeper at the Security Council.

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/ 7 August 2007

Don’t cramp the NGO’s style

A couple of years ago a friend of mine from law school accosted me at a breakfast table in a Harare hotel. I introduced him to my breakfast meeting companion, the director of a Southern African regional NGO. Immediately after the introductions my erstwhile schoolmate charged at the NGO director: "You are going to give me a job in an NGO, aren’t you?" The NGO director recovered just enough to ask why my schoolmate wanted a job with an NGO.

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/ 19 April 2007

Out of sync with the neighbours

The crackdown of March 11 has been dubbed Zimbabwe’s "3/11" — as if to imply that it marks a tipping point in the country’s history. Whether this turns out to be true will depend in large part on the stance adopted by other African states ahead of elections in Zimbabwe next year. It has become clear that Mugabe is increasingly out of step with a critical mass of thinking among African leaders.

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/ 27 July 2005

Everything but quiet diplomacy

Five years into the crisis, it is evident that Pretoria and Africa’s position on Zimbabwe cannot be called quiet diplomacy. And so the question should not be what African leaders should be doing about Zimbabwe, but what the effect is of what Pretoria and other African powers are already doing in relation to Zimbabwe?