Return to Zimbabwe finds a nation in fear

Whitney Manjala has just returned to Whangarei from Zimbabwe, where she found relatives being jailed and beaten in a starving nation.
"I'm really scared for my family. Things were so terrible - I wonder how people can live on if the situation does not change," she said.
When Whitney and her husband Tafadswa "Tafi" Manjala left Zimbabwe five years ago, there was food on supermarket shelves, even if it was expensive, with $1 then worth Zim$250,000.
Tafi - now northern regional manager for DairyNZ - stayed home when Whitney took leave from her job with the Whangarei District Council and returned to their homeland for five weeks with their children, son Rufaro, 6, and daughter Runyararo, 2.
Whitney said, on the day she arrived, the Mugabe regime had arrested her brother, opposition MP Trevor Saruwaka, and held him in prison for 16 days.
Her grandfather, a chief, had been interrogated, an aunt who was detained had disappeared and cousins had been beaten.
She knew of a 78-year-old woman who was so badly beaten a broken leg needed amputation, and of a pregnant woman who had been attacked during Robert Mugabe's terror campaign against supporters of opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai.
Whitney said $1 was now worth Zim$100 million and supermarket shelves were bare.
After returning to New Zealand she had phoned her father back in Zimbabwe and found he had been detained and beaten.
He told her people no longer wanted to vote in elections scheduled to take place on Friday because as Opposition supporters they would be a target for violence. Their votes could not win the rigged poll, he said.
This had made it easier for her to accept, after initial disappointment, Morgan Tsvangirai's withdrawal from the election.
Paulette Scrooby, who came to Whangarei from Zimbabwe six years ago, had the same reaction.
She had been angry when her husband Jas Scrooby woke her on Monday to say Tsvangirai had pulled out of the upcoming poll because of attacks on his supporters.
"At first I felt he had let us down - that all the people killed had died for nothing," she said.
"Then I read what he had said about his participation legitimising an election farce. If he had gone into the poll there would have been full-scale bloodshed."
Jas Scrooby said the Western world had removed pariahs when it saw fit in the past, but had "washed its hands" of a Mugabe regime that had caused thousands of deaths, 80 per cent unemployment and the world's highest inflation rate of at least 165,000 per cent.
"Many Zimbabweans have lost hope. Another cyclone in Asia and we drop off the front page," he said.
The Scroobys and Mrs Manjala were pleased Prime Minister Helen Clark was speaking out against Mugabe. They want more international pressure applied, particularly by other African nations.