A senior British politician visiting Zimbabwe Monday made clear Britain would not buckle to pressure to lift sanctions on the cash-strapped country in the run-up to the first anniversary of Zimbabwe's power-sharing government. 'The British Government has already made clear that the key to having the EU's restrictive measures lifted is for those blocking progress in Zimbabwe to implement the commitments they signed up to ... and to stop using sanctions as an excuse,' Malcolm Bruce, the chairman of the House of Commons International Development Committee said in a statement on arrival in Zimbabwe. Bruce is in Zimbabwe, together with seven other British parliamentarians on a four-day visit to review the effectiveness of Britain's aid programme.

 

Police in Zimbabwe are warning they do not have enough money to feed people in holding cells around the country. The whole justice system in Zimbabwe is threatened by lack of adequate resources. Although fewer people are being arrested now than in previous years, the police say they do not have enough money to feed those held in custody at police stations. Senior Assistant Commissioner Wayne Bvudzijena said if arrested people are not given food by relatives or from sympathetic policemen paying for food out of their own pockets, detainees are going hungry. He said policemen, like many other civil servants, are only earning about $150 a month. Bvudzijena said the worst affected among those people arrested and held in rural police districts. He said some charitable organizations helped feed suspects in urban areas like Harare, but it is never enough.

 

Members of an Anglican church in Zimbabwe’s capital Harare are facing persecution reminiscent to that of Christian churches under communist rule, said the bishop of the diocese of Harare. According to reports, armed police blocked congregants from entering their cathedral in central Harare on May 4. Ecumenical News International reported Tuesday that congregants were trying to hold a church service that would also have included a baptism ceremony when they were forced to cancel the service. "We wanted to hold our church service as usual in the shed, but we were not allowed even to use that,” one parishioner recalled. Police spokesperson Wayne Bvudzijena confirmed the deployment of police at the Harare cathedral, saying they were sent to prevent clashes between Bishop Sebastian Bakare of the Diocese of Harare and the supporters of former Anglican Bishop Nolbert Kunonga, a renowned supporter of Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe.

 

Farmers' organizations in Zimbabwe said this year’s corn crop is likely to fail because prolonged dry spells withered plants beyond recovery. The country may have to import as much as 1 million metric tons of corn, according to estimates from the Commercial Farmers’ Union and the Zimbabwe Commercial Farmers Union, two of the country’s three main agriculture organizations. “This season is going to be a disaster,” Deon Theron, president of the CFU, said in a telephone interview from Harare today. “Zimbabwe will reap about 500,000 tons against an annual requirement of 1.8 million tons.”

The CFU represents between 300 and 500 white large-scale farmers remaining in Zimbabwe after a decade of farm seizures by President Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union- Patriotic Front party that exacerbated food shortages in the southern African country. White large-scale farmers planted less corn than planned because of continued harassment, Theron said. “Producing sufficient food for the country is going to be a continuing problem until we can resolve the disputes on commercial farms.”