> There's a long article at This is Zimbabwe floating the hypothesis that Zimbabwe's Central Intelligence Organisation has had an active hand in bringing about the split within the opposition MDC.
> And read this moving piece by Johann Hari on the Zimbabwean refugees in London who run Radio SW Africa, 'the first and only opposition radio station beamed into Robert Mugabe's abattoir-state':
Lance Guama, their 31 year-old lead reporter, tells me how he ended up in London, a city that has housed refugees dreaming of revolution from Marx to Mbeki. "Until 2003, I would file stories for Radio SW Africa in secret from locations around Zimbabwe. I believed somebody had to document what was happening. In a country that once had a better literacy rate than Britain, the schools are shut. Right now, Harare Hospital hasn't performed any operations for two months. There's no medicine. There's no supplies. We are trying to find out what's happening to all the sick people. Where are they going? There's no caesareans. Are mothers just dying in their homes? There's open sewage in Harare – so there's cholera, there's dyssentry. Are people dying of that? There's no-one to see it, there's no-one to report it. It's death below the radar, and I believed that was wrong."Read the rest.But it was impossible to tell the truth under Mugabe. Many people now believe he is suffering from a paranoid form of dementia, making Zimbabwe the world's first Alzheimocracy – and Lance paid for it... three years ago he was approached by four of Mugabe's henchmen just fifteen fifteen minutes after making a secret broadcast about vote-rigging. Before he could speak, his face was smashed with a brick, and he was stabbed repeatedly in the gut with a screwdriver. Lance left Zimbabwe that week, and now fears he will never return. "Will I ever see my mother or father again?" he asks himself, before quickly changing the subject.