{"id":195043,"date":"2008-08-01T17:51:00","date_gmt":"2008-08-01T22:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/08\/01\/zimbabwe-update-22\/"},"modified":"2008-08-01T17:51:00","modified_gmt":"2008-08-01T22:51:00","slug":"zimbabwe-update-22","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/08\/01\/zimbabwe-update-22\/","title":{"rendered":"Zimbabwe Update"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well, we now have a report that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/worldnews\/africaandindianocean\/zimbabwe\/2466450\/Zimbabwe-Robert-Mugabe-offers-Morgan-Tsvangirai-a-paltry-post.html\">Zimbabwe: Robert Mugabe offered Morgan Tsvangirai the vice presidency<\/a>, a position with no powers, in negotiations&#8230;.What I expected.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s no surprise then that there are reports that the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.iht.com\/articles\/reuters\/2008\/07\/29\/africa\/OUKWD-UK-ZIMBABWE-CRISIS.php\">negotiations are deadlocked<\/a>, though talks are supposed <a href=\"http:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/worldNews\/idUSL066278320080731\">Zimbabwe&#8217;s crisis talks to resume Sunday<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>One interesting development is that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.iol.co.za\/index.php?set_id=1&amp;click_id=84&amp;art_id=nw20080801163614918C325094\">Botswana is threatening to boycott of the summit of the next Southern African Development Community (SADC) summit if Mugabe is allowed to attend<\/a>, which indicates, I think, some level of dissatisfaction with Thabo Mbeki&#8217;s mediation efforts.<\/p>\n<p>An unfortunate development is that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thezimbabwean.co.uk\/index.php?option=com_content&amp;view=article&amp;id=14492:junta-plansge-decree-to-nullify-mdc-poll-challenge-&amp;catid=31:top%20zimbabwe%20stories&amp;Itemid=66\">Mugabe is considering stopping a court action on disputed parliamentary seats<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\"><p>Fearing an imminent court defeat that would further increase MDC&#8217;s parliamentary majority Robert Mugabe&#8217;s military junta is considering a law forbidding the courts to invalidate his defeated Zanu (PF) party&#8217;s victories in 60 constituencies facing legal challenges, official sources say.<br \/>The MDC is challenging the results of the March 29 elections in 60 constituencies, where they say electoral fraud, violence and intimidation of voters compromised the returns.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>These are not the actions of a man, or a party, willing to negotiate in good faith.<\/p>\n<p>One final note, they have <a href=\"http:\/\/timesofindia.indiatimes.com\/World\/Zimbabwe_knocks_10_zeros_off_currency\/articleshow\/3307132.cms\">dropped 10 zeros off the currency<\/a>, meaning that a 10 billion Zimbabwean dollar is now 1 <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">new<\/span> Zimbabwean dollar, to deal with inflation, but with inflation running at something like 15,000,000%, it will not help for long.<\/p>\n<p>This may finally be what takes Mugabe and his cronies down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well, we now have a report that Zimbabwe: Robert Mugabe offered Morgan Tsvangirai the vice presidency, a position with no powers, in negotiations&#8230;.What I expected. It&#8217;s no surprise then that there are reports that the negotiations are deadlocked, though talks are supposed Zimbabwe&#8217;s crisis talks to resume Sunday. One interesting development is that Botswana is &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1095,971,1080,1000,972],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-195043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-civil-rights","category-currency","category-elections","category-justice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195043"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=195043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195043\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=195043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=195043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=195043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}