{"id":196539,"date":"2008-04-16T16:31:00","date_gmt":"2008-04-16T21:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/04\/16\/zimbabwe-update-28\/"},"modified":"2008-04-16T16:31:00","modified_gmt":"2008-04-16T21:31:00","slug":"zimbabwe-update-28","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/04\/16\/zimbabwe-update-28\/","title":{"rendered":"Zimbabwe Update"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well, the call for a general strike <a href=\"http:\/\/sg.news.yahoo.com\/afp\/20080415\/twl-zimbabwe-vote-4bdc673.html\">went over like a dead balloon<\/a>, though I think that the excuse, that too many people are too near starvation to participate, has some validity.<\/p>\n<p>In terms of a runoff, Morgan Tsvangirai says that he will participate if, &#8220;a tally verified by both parties and the Southern African Development Community shows no candidate won more than 50 percent of the vote&#8221;, as he has no confidence in the electoral commission, which is clearly in Mugabe&#8217;s pocket.<\/p>\n<p>In terms of the brighter side of this whole mess, it appears that Thabo Mbeki is <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">also<\/span> a loser in this affair, as members of the ANC, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.independent.co.uk\/news\/world\/africa\/anc-breaks-with-mbeki-to-condemn-evident-crisis-in-zimbabwe-809621.html\">including ANC leader Jacob Zuma&#8217;s proxy Matthews Phosa are openly criticizing him<\/a>. (also <a href=\"http:\/\/africa.reuters.com\/wire\/news\/usnL16910221.html\">here<\/a>)<\/p>\n<p>This is a good thing.  With his unqualified support of Mugabe, and his quite frankly delusional opposition to the use of anti-virals to fight AIDS, Mbeki is well past any usefulness to either the nation of South Africa, or the southern African region as a whole.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well, the call for a general strike went over like a dead balloon, though I think that the excuse, that too many people are too near starvation to participate, has some validity. In terms of a runoff, Morgan Tsvangirai says that he will participate if, &#8220;a tally verified by both parties and the Southern African &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1095,1000],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-196539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-elections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196539"}],"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=196539"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196539\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}