Repression and food queues the daily lot of Zimbabweans

By RICHARD BOOCK

HARARE - An 8-month-old baby is accidentally batoned over the head by police. Valentine's Day peace marchers are locked up without charge. An opposition politician appears in court after days of torture - and, on farms, an estimated 6.7 million are facing starvation.

This is Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, a nation lost in the highly dubious and often-brutal policies of a one-time war hero turned modern-day Stalin.

Life here is not so much in decline as in freefall.

It started with the land-grabs, a blatant ruse to distract attention from last year's "election", and is marked now by an economic depression that makes 1929 look like a boom-time.

Inflation is running at 208 per cent, projected to rise to 522 per cent by the end of the year. Unemployment has sailed past 70 per cent.

Fuel shortages paralyse the country's transport infrastructure, and food queues are common.

If it weren't so grim, there would be some humour in the joke that goes, Zimbabweans have the world's greatest IQ: "I queue for petrol, I queue for bread, I queue for sugar ... "

But there is nothing funny about this. A meat pie costs Z$500 (NZ$16.80), a pair of school shoes Z$8000 (NZ$270), a colour television Z$500,000 (NZ$16,875).

Just down the road from where the Indian World Cup cricket team were staying under presidential-like security, a fridge-freezer stands in a shop-window priced at Z$1.1 million ($37,125). This, in a country where most people earn less than a dollar a day.

Mugabe's regime has closed down all foreign exchange bureaus and is forcing shopkeepers to sell foodstuffs for less than what it costs to make them.

The official exchange rate is about US$10 to the Z$500, but on the street you can get the same for about US30c.

Changing US$500 for local currency on the black market would mean struggling back to the hotel with a sackful of loot a la Ronnie Biggs - and without a hope of being able to squeeze it into the room safe. You'd need a vault.

The Zimbabwean dollar is now being dubbed the "Ferrari", on account of it moving so fast. The only industry experiencing anything like a shot in the arm is the building sector, as anyone who has any money is trying to use it up.

Despite having the monopoly on grain imports, the Government is hard up for foreign currency, so in turn is hard up for food.

The only farmers with the experience and capability to meet the shortfall have been sent into exile or worse. Their replacements are either Mugabe's Zanu PF party cronies, or poor peasants with neither the expertise nor the resources.

As a result, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (Fews Net) says food security prospects for the 2003-04 year are "gloomy due to the low harvest prospects" - a deficit of one million tonnes is expected.

Faced with erratic grain supplies, many rural households were using "last-resort survival options such as prostitution, increased gold-panning, theft and wild food sales to supplement food aid".

Mugabe's attempted solutions have been fantastically naive, and have served only to worsen the situation, fuelling the blackmarket and turning most of his citizens into criminals.

Blanket price-freezes have caused many retailers to shut up shop and move to kerbside stalls. Bakers, ordered to sell their bread for less than production costs, have tried to skirt around the law by including dried fruit and other additives, in a bid to sell an improved product at a higher rate.

This is now an offence, after the Mugabe Government introduced a new law that seeks to prevent people from improving products or manufacturing goods that were not previously available.

According to the Daily News, Zimbabwe's courageously neutral newspaper, close to a million former farm-workers have been reduced to destitution by the policies.

They have not been resettled, as Mugabe supporters like to claim, and neither have they been re-employed.

With that number of displaced workers and about 80 per cent of the country's 12 million population living below the bread-line, the chance of addressing issues such as poverty, hunger and health are not strong. At least, not under the present Government.

Then there is Mugabe's puppets, the Zimbabwean police force, who have been caught on camera dealing out random beatings for little or no reason, including an attack on a black woman who just happened to be strolling too close to the Harare Sports Club's cricket ground a few days ago.

Mugabe also has a youth militia, well-trained in torture techniques that are evidently then used on civilians with complete impunity.

TurnFrom1:


Head1: It's just not cricket


Body1: These kids are known as the "green bombers" for the colour of their military-style uniforms and for their reputation for violence.

Victims of alleged police brutality include MP for St Mary's Job Sikhala, and Douglas Mwonzora, a Masvingo lawyer.

The Daily News reported that Sikhala, the opposition legislator, was arrested and tortured in police custody for allegedly trying to remove the Government unconstitutionally, a charge later thrown out by the court after his alleged torturer failed to appear. He was later admitted to hospital and detained.

Mwonzora was reportedly assaulted by 16 detectives in Bulawayo after his arrest for fraud.

Just as nauseating was the news that Harare was effectively sanitised by the police force before Wednesday's World Cup cricket fixture against India.

Baton-wielding officers dispersed those waiting in line for all manner of commodities, so as to create an impression of calm and order. People were taken from the street.

It didn't seem too far removed from those dark days in Rio de Janeiro, when police "death squads" were accused of exterminating the city's beggars under cover of darkness.

A taxi driver said that in the lead-up to the India match, police had closed petrol stations along Joshua Mqabuko Nkomo Rd joining the airport with the city, apparently to hoodwink arriving journalists and cricketers.

WELLINGTON Chibhebhe, the secretary general of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, said in the period leading up to the World Cup the police had been "chasing people away from fuel, bread and mealie meal queues, which are the order of the day all over the country".

Daily News reporters had also toured overcrowded shopping centres in highly populated suburbs and witnessed police harassing groups of people and dispersing them.

Tinarwo Musosa, who was at one shopping centre, told the newspaper: "We cannot buy bread here because the police said queues are causing disorder at the shopping centre."

Mildred Zimuko said the police, with the help of youths supporting the ruling Zanu-PF party, had beaten people queuing for maize-meal. An employee at one supermarket confirmed police had been violent with customers.

That World Cup organisers could continue to play matches in Zimbabwe under these conditions says something about the calibre of their leadership.

Hiding behind the repressive Public Order and Service Act (POSA), the police last week denied the opposition Movement for Democratic Change party (MDC) permission to hold a rally in Bulawayo, apparently because most of the force was in Harare for the cricket.

The Bulawayo Agenda, a community-based organisation, was barred from holding meetings because police said they feared the gatherings would lead to a breakdown of law and order.

With POSA up their sleeve, police have been running amok, arresting people associated with opposition parties such as the MDC or organisations like the National Constitutional Assembly, ostensibly to suppress views that are critical or different to those of the Government.

Only last week, the same law was used when Tendai Biti, the MP for Harare East, and Paul Madzore, the MP for Glen View (both MDC) and a dozen other party supporters were detained overnight for holding a political rally in Mabvuku. They were later released without charge.

Police also raided a meeting of opposition and reform groups at a church last week, arresting a bishop and four human rights activists.

Equally sickening is the size of the police presence for the World Cup, given there were never enough officers available during the past three years of land confiscations, when farmers and farm-workers were being beaten up and killed.

There were not even enough to prevent some being abducted from a police station, resulting in a cold-blooded murder.

As one letter-writer remarked the other day, if there were enough police available to provide security for a strange colonial game, where on earth were they when the so-called war veterans went on their marauding campaigns, literally throwing entire families out of their homes.

And, while his country writhes, where is Mugabe this week?

He is receiving the royal carpet treatment in Paris, spreading himself out over the entire wing of the luxurious Hotel Plaza-Athenee after being controversially invited to a France-Africa summit by President Chirac.

There are apparently 33 rooms in the East Wing reserved for Mr Mugabe's delegation, ranging in price from NZ$1000 for a single room to NZ$10,300 for the presidential suite.

Reports suggest he has almost run the near-bankrupt Air Zimbabwe into the ground by flying him and his wife around on shopping sprees. And if his impressive motorcade is any guide, he may not have even heard of the fuel shortage.

Around these parts, they call it Bob Mugabe and the Wailers, but not within earshot of Zanu PF sympathisers. It's an offence to make a rude gesture or even express dissatisfaction over the President's regime.

This was shown during Zimbabwe's World Cup match against Namibia a fortnight ago, when a spectator decided to support the actions of local cricketers Andy Flower and Henry Olongo and wear his own black armband as a symbol of the death of democracy.

He was charged under the conveniently phrased Miscellaneous Offences Act, apparently guilty of conduct likely to cause a breach of the peace.

Given a choice of a night in jail or a Z$3000 (NZ$100) fine, the cricket fan paid the fine, but was then confronted by an officer he later discovered to be the deputy commissioner, who harangued him.

The prisoner alleged the officer ranted: "Why do you come and wear it [the armband] at the cricket match? Why don't you people go and leave the country altogether and just leave us to be barbarians?

"Why don't you go outside the country, form an army and fight properly against us, so we can kill you?"

In a nutshell, this is what it's come to. This is Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe.