Calls for international community to topple Zimbabwe's Mugabe

Some Zimbabwean refugees who crossed into neighbouring South Africa to escape a cholera outbreak, faced illness and disease instead because they did not have access to clean water, the South African Red Cross.

An increasing number of Zimbabweans refugees are crossing into South Africa hoping to obtain asylum status that would allow them to stay in the country.

Many refugees were filmed on Saturday in Musina, a South African town 12 kilometres (7.4 miles) from the border between South Africa and Zimbabwe.

Kgetsa Nare, a coordinator with the South African Red Cross, said the water and living conditions at the Musina showgrounds were not clean, and that some people were falling ill as a result.

A South African government spokesman said that the country was deploying more military health workers at the border and sending clean water and other aid into Zimbabwe.

South Africa was dispatching a fact-finding team to Zimbabwe on Monday, the spokesman said. Other humanitarian steps would be announced next week, he said, after the team returns and makes its report to the president and Cabinet ministers.

In England, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called for sanctions against members of the Zimbabwean government and pledged "whatever emergency health equipment that is needed, that we can get into the country."

In Zimbabwe, the worst is yet to come as the rainy season sets in.

Rain is lashing the capital, Harare, and other parts of the country, washing raw sewage through the streets and into the drinking system.

Peter Lundberg, a Federation Country representative with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said the call for international assistance reflected "the acknowledgment of the authorities" to the seriousness of the situation.

Cholera is an infectious intestinal disease that is contracted by consuming contaminated food or water. Its symptoms include severe diarrhoea.

Zimbabwe's outbreak is blamed on years of neglect that have water treatment plants collapsing and sewage pipes bursting.

Cholera is easily prevented and cured, but Zimbabwe's medical and water-treatment systems have all but disappeared.

The disaster has led to renewed calls, on Friday from the United States among others, on longtime, increasingly autocratic Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe to step down.

Zimbabwe state media announced on Friday that a national health emergency had been declared.