Tsvangirai Returns Home

Tsvangirai arrives home
24th May 2008
all credits: ITN News

Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has returned to Zimbabwe despite his party's fears he might be assassinated by government agents. Mr Tsvangirai arrived at Harare airport aboard a regular South African Airways flight after cancelling his homecoming a week ago after his Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) said it had learnt he was the target of a military intelligence assassination plot.

The government dismissed the plot as a propaganda stunt.

A small party of MDC officials and Western diplomats, including US ambassador James McGee, was at Harare airport to welcome Mr Tsvangirai. At a news conference soon after his return, Mr Tsvangirai said President Robert Mugabe wanted to decimate opposition structures before a presidential run-off election on June 27

Mr Tsvangirai has been travelling abroad since April 8 on a diplomatic drive to pressure Mr Mugabe to surrender power following a March 29 presidential poll, which he says he won outright. But Zimbabwe's electoral commission says he did not get enough votes for a straight victory and must face Mugabe in the run-off.


Related Report:

Zimbabwe in context
19th May 2008
Arguing that Mugabe has been "talking left" while "walking right" Grace Kwinjeh analyses Zimbabwe through regional, African and global capitalism.

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Protestors and Peers

Parliament Protest
A blog worth checking out!

Parliament Protest promotes peaceful resistance to the curtailment of free assembly and free speech, in the SOCPA Designated Area around Parliament Square and beyond.
Visit the blog here >


Related articles:

Peers protest at curbs on protest

26th January 2007

Baroness Williams earlier led a Lib Dem protest outside Parliament calling for the end of restrictions on protests.
A controversial 2005 law created an "exclusion zone" around Parliament, within which police must be given notice before a protest is held.

Lib Dem peer Baroness Miller has brought forward a Bill to abolish the sections which impose the restrictions. During the demo outside the House of Lords the peers read out names of people arrested under the Act.

The protest came as peers prepared to debate repealing parts of the Serious and Organised Crime and Police Act. A Liberal Democrat spokesman confirmed they had registered with police to hold the demonstration. "It comes to something when Parliamentarians can't even protest outside their own House without say so from the police," he said.

Read full article >

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What is happening in Parliament Square?
January 2007

Brian & Co are still in the Square. Since the police's middle of the night raid on 23 May 2006 in which most of Brian's display and possessions were removed, the presence in Parliament Square is smaller but not diminished in spirit.

Brian and others have been in court on charges relating to the restrictions on protest around Parliament under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005.

On 23 November Brian's supporters gathered to mark his 2000th day and night for peace and justice. This is an historic achievement in the face of such opposition by the government but it is also of great sadness that such an action has been necessary at all.

Read full article >

Obama Race Fever

Racist Incidents Make Some Obama Campaigners Pause
First published: 14^th May 2008
All credits: Washington Post

Danielle Ross was alone in an empty room at the Obama campaign headquarters in Kokomo, Ind., a cellphone in one hand, a voter call list in the other. She was stretched out on the carpeted floor wearing laceless sky-blue Converses, stories from the trail on her mind. It was the day before Indiana's primary, and she had just been chased by dogs while canvassing in a Kokomo suburb. But that was not the worst thing to occur since she postponed her sophomore year at Middle Tennessee State University, in part to hopscotch America stumping for Barack Obama.

Here's the worst: In Muncie, a factory town in the east-central part of Indiana, Ross and her cohorts were soliciting support for Obama at malls, on street corners and in a Wal-Mart parking lot, and they ran into "a horrible response," as Ross put it, a level of anti-black sentiment that none of them had anticipated.

"The first person I encountered was like, 'I'll never vote for a black person,' " recalled Ross, who is white and just turned 20. "People just weren't receptive."

For all the hope and excitement Obama's candidacy is generating, some of his field workers, phone-bank volunteers and campaign surrogates are encountering a raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed -- and unreported -- this election season. Doors have been slammed in their faces. They've been called racially derogatory names (including the white volunteers). And they've endured malicious rants and ugly stereotyping from people who can't fathom that the senator from Illinois could become the first African American president.

The contrast between the large, adoring crowds Obama draws at public events and the gritty street-level work to win votes is stark. The candidate is largely insulated from the mean-spiritedness that some of his foot soldiers deal with away from the media spotlight.

Victoria Switzer, a retired social studies teacher, was on phone-bank duty one night during the Pennsylvania primary campaign. One night was all she could take: "It wasn't pretty." She made 60 calls to prospective voters in Susquehanna County, her home county, which is 98 percent white. The responses were dispiriting. One caller, Switzer remembers, said he couldn't possibly vote for Obama and concluded: "Hang that darky from a tree!"

Documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy, the daughter of the late Robert F. Kennedy, said she, too, came across "a lot of racism" when campaigning for Obama in Pennsylvania. One Pittsburgh union organizer told her he would not vote for Obama because he is black, and a white voter, she said, offered this frank reason for not backing Obama: "White people look out for white people, and black people look out for black people."

Obama campaign officials say such incidents are isolated, that the experience of most volunteers and staffers has been overwhelmingly positive.

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The My Lai Sager

Forty years on, and "My Lai" is synonymous with "massacre"
Published 15th March 2008
All credits: BBC News

Forty years on, and “My Lai” is synonymous with “massacre”. The killing of Iraqi civilians at Haditha has often been referred to as a modern-day My Lai. The name is shorthand for slaughter of the defenceless, the benchmark of American wartime atrocity.

The murders of 504 men, women, children and babies happened in a northerly province of South Vietnam on 16 March 1968. It proved to be a turning point for public opinion about the Vietnam War. Yet, most of what we know about the event comes from a single, widely publicised court martial in 1970-71. A young Lieutenant - William Calley - in Charlie Company was tried and convicted of murdering 22 “oriental human beings” in My Lai on that sunny morning in 1968.

Forgotten tapes

Media attention on Lt Calley’s trial was extensive and the glare of publicity so bright it hid the wider, more awful truth. Before that trial got under way, the United States army had, behind closed doors, completed an investigation of its own into the events at My Lai, and specifically into the possibility that those in authority had deliberately covered up a massacre.

Convened on 1st December 1969 in the basement of the Pentagon, The Department of the Army Review of the Preliminary Investigations into The My Lai Incident, known in abbreviated form as The Peers Inquiry, was chaired by Lt Gen William ‘Ray’ Peers. In just 14 weeks, the Peers Inquiry conducted a comprehensive and wide-ranging investigation into the events of 16 March.

Read full article >

The My Lai Tapes (BBC)
Part One >
Part Two >




Other reports:

1968: The My Lai Tapes
Saturday 15th March 2008 (Radio 4 FM)

Survivors reflect 40 years after My Lai
By Ben Stocking Associated Press Writer
16th March 2008

'Blood and fire' of My Lai remembered 30 years later
CNN News
16th March 1998

Marley's Mother Dies

Cedella Booker passes away in Miami
10th April 2008
All credits: Jamaican Gleaner

Cedella Booker, mother of pop icon Bob Marley and matriarch of reggae's most famous family, died at her Miami home on Tuesday evening. She was 81 years old. Jerome Hamilton, a spokesperson for the Marley’s, told The Gleaner that Booker passed away in her sleep. No cause of death has been given.  Booker was a popular figure in the South Florida area she called home for more than 30 years. Since 1993 she was integrally involved in promotion of the annual Bob Marley Movement Festival there, which raised funds to buy food for the indigent.

The live show attracted major stars including Carlos Santana and Wyclef Jean.

Yesterday, Prime Minister Bruce Golding paid tribute to Booker, saying she was a star in her own right. "Her life was one of hardship, struggle and fulfilment and through it all she exuded hope, strength and confidence." Information Minister Olivia Grange described Booker as a 'true heroine'.

Booker, who is survived by two of her four children, last visited Jamaica in February for the annual celebrations marking Bob Marley's birthday. A thanksgiving service for her life will be held in Miami on Sunday, a statement from the Marley family said.

Cedella Malcolm was born in Rhoden Hall, St Ann. At 18, she gave birth to her first child Robert Nesta Marley; his father was Norval Marley, an Englishman 35 years her senior.
Shortly after Norval Marley died in 1955, Cedella moved with Bob to Kingston. She lived in Trench Town, then an expansive slum bursting with musical talent.

Marley achieved relative success with The Wailers group in the early 1960s. During that period, Booker married an American and immigrated to the United States in the early 1960s, settling in Delaware.

After Marley's death from cancer in May 1981, Booker launched her own musical career, recording two albums: Awake Zion and Smilin' Island of Song.

She also wrote two biographies on her famous son.

Visit the Bob Marley website >