Mugabe 'keeps food from hungry'
2005-03-30 17:22
Special Report
Four Chinese men face deportation from Zimbabwe after they were arrested for killing more than 40 tortoises for meat, a report says.
A dusty road leads to the village of Wedza, where veterans of Zimbabwe's liberation war eke out a meagre living on their farm cooperative, which after a promising start now brings only despair.
Harare - Pius Ncube, the outspoken Catholic archbishop for western Zimbabwe, has again condemned Mugabe's policy of using food as a political weapon as both opposition and ruling parties geared up on Wednesday for parliamentary elections.
In a statement, Ncube slammed what he described as the "evil and systematic denial of food to hungry people".
He said villagers in the Insiza district, about 80km east of the western city of Bulawayo, had told him that in one area, ruling party officials held a list of 188 people suspected of supporting the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), who "would never receive food".
Similar incidents were also reported in the districts of Gwanda, Tsholotsho and Binga, all remote, famine-stricken parts of the western provinces of Matabeleland.
"Must parents now choose between belonging to the party of their choice and then having to listen to their children crying from hunger, or join the political party that is prepared to risk the health of the nation's children for political gain," asked Ncube.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday the MDC challenged the state-appointed Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) to bar Zanu-PF polling agents from voting stations in all but one of the 120 constituencies, on the grounds they violated electoral law.
The MDC argued that under electoral law all parties were supposed to have published the names of their polling agents in the local press by Monday. The MDC said it had met the requirement, but Zanu-PF had only complied in one constituency.
The likelihood of clashes outside polling stations during Thursday's election seems increasingly likely after police warned Wednesday that voters should leave polling stations immediately after casting their ballots or risk arrest.
The MDC has been urging its supporters to wait outside the polling stations until counting was over, as a guard against attempts to rig the ballot.
Police assistant commissioner Wayne Bvudzijena was quoted in the state-controlled daily Herald Wednesday as saying that police would "arrest those who were bent on causing mayhem and anarchy at polling stations".
New controversy also emerged late on Tuesday when the head of a leading pro-democracy organisation said electoral authorities had illegally changed the rules for announcing results after the vote count.
Mike Davies, chair of the Combined Harare Residents Association, said polling agents attending a training session on Tuesday were instructed that results in each polling station would have to be forwarded to the administrative centre in each constituency.
This was a contravention of electoral law which stated that the result in each polling stations is to be announced to the public immediately after the count, Davies said. - Sapa-dpa
- SAPA