Zimbabwe’s opposition movement healed long-standing divisions and declared that it had won control of parliament for the first time in history — and that Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe must concede defeat.
They also asked the UN Security Council to send a special envoy to Zimbabwe and to warn Mugabe that mounting violence against opposition supporters was tantamount to “crimes against humanity.”
Putting months of bickering behind them, Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leaders Morgan Tsvangirai and Arthur Mutambara stood united to order Mugabe to step aside.
PHOTO: AP
“Old man, go and have an honorable exit,” Tsvangirai said in a message on Monday to the 84-year-old autocrat who has ruled since independence from Britain in 1980.
“In a parliamentary democracy, the majority rule,” Tsvangirai said alongside Mutambara at a news conference at a Johannesburg airport. “He should concede that ... he cannot be president.”
More than a month after the elections, results from the presidential race have not been announced. Tsvangirai says he won the presidency outright — although independent observers say he fell just short of the votes needed to avoid a runoff.
Tsvangirai reiterated on Monday that he would not take part in a runoff.
“The question about a runoff doesn’t arise. It doesn’t arise because of the simple fact that the people have spoken, the people have decided,” he said before boarding a plane for Tanzania, whose president takes over the African Union’s (AU) rotating presidency.
Former Malian president Alpha Konare, the outgoing AU chairman, urged the release of poll results.
“The election results must be released to stop the violence,” Konare said.
“We hope that the president of Zimbabwe accepts these results,” he said in a statement.
MDC Secretary-General Tendai Biti was due at UN headquarters in New York yesterday when the Security Council was scheduled to discuss the deteriorating situation in Zimbabwe.
Tsvangirai said Biti was to ask that the Security Council first “stop the violence, and to communicate to the regime in Harare that its actions are tantamount to crimes against humanity.”
The opposition says hundreds of its supporters have been arrested, attacked or driven from their homes, especially in rural areas that used to be Mugabe strongholds but voted against him in the polls. It says that 14 of its supporters have died.
The Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights says more than 63 people were hospitalized in three days last week alone, and provided photos of injuries.
Tsvangirai said his supporters were powerless against the onslaught, which is allegedly perpetrated by ruling party thugs and youth militias, with support from the chief of the armed forces.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the