Friday Zimbabwe Update
Because everyone needs a bit of a comedown before heading into the weekend, here is a bit of a roundup of Zimbabwe-related stories.
South African President Thabo Mbeki has traveled to Zimbabwe for talks on the country’s disputed election. Acting both as South African head of state and as the Southern African Development Community’s (SADC) mediator Mbeki will meet with President Robert Mugabe, but it is unclear whether he will also meet with the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), making one wonder just what sort of mediation he could possibly envision emerging from his trip, especially since the MDC continues to insist that it will not participate in a runoff that it perceives to be a sham.
As violence escalates across the country death tolls are beginning to rise. Farmers and farm workers in rural areas are especially vulnerable to the violence, as are lawyers, journalists, and trade unionists.
As if the actual and impending violence is not ominous enough, the Chinese vessel carrying arms intended for Zimbabwe that was turned away from South African waters weeks ago is still afloat on African waters. The South African Transport and Allied Workers’ Union (SATAWU) reports that the ship, An Yue Jiang, is still in search of a hospitable port and is headed toward Congo-Brazzaville in hopes of being able to offload its deadly cargo there. Somehow that ship, in both its tenacity and its desperation, but also because of the violence that it portends, stands as a pretty grim metaphor for the cynical machinations of Robert Mugabe and ZANU-PF.