South African President Kgalema Motlanthe announced yesterday that the region was launching an urgent international campaign to assist Zimbabwe with a humanitarian crisis amid a cholera outbreak.
“The SADC [Southern African Development Community] Troika has decided ... to launch an urgent international campaign to mobilize financial and material resources for the people of Zimbabwe in order to help them overcome the challenges facing their country,” Motlanthe told journalists in Pretoria.
The announcement comes after Motlanthe called a meeting with health and water ministers in the troika of the SADC from South Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia.
“Zimbabwe is facing serious humanitarian challenges characterized by acute food shortages and the recent outbreak of cholera,” he said.
Motlanthe said all countries in the 15-member bloc were expected to contribute to the campaign with their available resources.
He said the campaign was about aid and not Zimbabwe’s political crisis.
“This is not political work, this relief work is not to be politicized. It’s done on a humanitarian basis,” he said.
“So the mandate of this structure is really to ensure that the relief is distributed fairly to all deserving Zimbabweans. It is not to deal with the political challenges — those will be handled by the inclusive government once the inclusive government is in place. They will have the authority to deal with all challenges on the political front.”
The UN estimated this week nearly 1,000 people had died in a cholera epidemic that has affected more than 18,000 in Zimbabwe, compounding the country’s woes, which include inflation of 231 million percent and a political crisis.
Meanwhile, Zimbabwe’s neighbors said they did not believe allegations that opposition militants are training in Botswana to overthrow Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe.
Motlanthe said the main regional bloc opened an investigation into the allegations when Mugabe’s regime first raised them last month.
But “we never believed that,” he said.
The Zimbabwean opposition says the allegations, which were made again this week, are part of a plot to create a pretext for declaring a state of emergency.
Motlanthe would not say why he thought Mugabe’s regime was pressing the allegations, but noted the “mistrust” among Zimbabwe’s politicians.
Motlanthe also said South Africa would not join international calls for Mugabe to step down, saying it was “not for us” to do so.
“It’s really not for us,” he said when asked by reporters how bad conditions had to get in Zimbabwe before South Africa would say it was time for him to step down.
“I mean I don’t know if the British feel qualified to impose that on the people of Zimbabwe but we feel that we should really support and take our cue from what they want.”
Motlanthe said he was hopeful Zimbabwe would have a unity government in place by the end of the week.
But the Brussels-based International Crisis Group described the rivals’ power-sharing talks as “hopelessly deadlocked.”
Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai should both step aside to allow a neutral administration to tackle the country’s crisis and prepare for a new election, it said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver