‘The Black Boots [police] burnt my house,’ said 47-year-old George, an MDC campaigner forced to flee Buhera two weeks ago. ‘We don’t own much but they smashed all we had in front of my children then urinated in the small amounts of sugar and flour we had left.’
The villagers’ greatest fear is being taken to one of the camps. Set up before the elections to train the youth militia to harass the MDC and funded from the Food for Work programme, under which youths are supposed to receive food aid for work such as road building, they form the centres for Mugabe’s terror campaign.
One of the most notorious is at Bazeley River in Manicaland. There was a police roadblock on the main road outside, clearly designed to stop anyone getting near. With the Corrs blaring from our car stereo, however, they believed our story of being tourists lost in search of a particular mountain and, incredibly, let us through.
We reached the camp by crossing a narrow bridge and driving up a dirt track. The series of tents around a trestle table at which young men were helping themselves to breakfast looked unnervingly like a scout camp apart from the ‘Do Not Enter’ sign painted angrily on the gate, the surly red-eyed men hanging around wearing T-shirts bearing the legend ‘The Third Chimurenga’, after the liberation war, and pictures of Osama bin Laden.
It was here that 15-year-old Priscilla, whom I had interviewed in a safe house in Harare, was raped repeatedly for three days then had her genitals burnt with a poker. It was here, too, that Benjamin, a 32-year-old teacher, was badly beaten after having his house burnt down. ‘They accused me of repeating the word chinja [change – the opposition MDC election slogan] in lessons.
‘They took me into one of the tents and forced me to lie on my stomach and said they would keep beating me until I defecated. I told them I had already defecated in my pants but they said: “No, you must defecate your whole intestines.” Finally they stopped and made me crawl in the mud. When they let me go, they said this is only a taste of what will happen to you.’
A former member of the youth militia, who fled because he was so appalled at what he was being ordered to do and is now in hiding, agreed to talk about what went on in the camp. ‘I was desperate,’ he said. ‘I had lost my job in a fried-chicken takeaway last November and have a wife and 13-month-old baby girl to support. So when Zanu-PF people came around our houses I joined. They said we would get Z$50,000 [about £600] but we didn’t get any money, just food and beer.
‘There were about 200 of us in the camp and we called ourselves “the Taliban”. We were told if we saw anyone with an MDC T-shirt we must assault them with whips, catapults, steel bars. The idea was to instil fear in people so they would be frightened to vote and to take revenge against those who had.
‘Then a couple of months ago they said it is the women who are behind this campaign to bring back white rule. They told us to take them to the bush, that they are daughters of dogs and coconuts [blacks with white centres], and to bring young ones back to the camp to service us. When I said we can’t do this, that these are our sisters, they accused me of being a “sell-out” and beat me.’
Zimbabwe is the most heartbreaking story I have ever covered. I first went there in 1994 when I was living in neighbouring South Africa. I was so taken with its friendly people and landscape of green hills and strange balancing rocks that a few months later I went back on holiday with Paulo. In those days, it was one of the most prosperous countries in Africa. We got giggling-drenched in the spray from Victoria Falls, sipped gin and tonics as the sun set over the Zambezi, laughed at road signs warning ‘Elephants Crossing’. We sat awed by the silent grandeur of the Matopo Hills, burial place of Cecil Rhodes, the empire builder after whom the country was originally named.
We also marvelled at an African nation with traffic lights that worked (even if they did call them robots), pothole-free roads, neat brick schools everywhere, and book cafés. The roads on which we travelled passed through a patchwork of lush green fields of tobacco, cotton and maize. They looked like model farms with combine harvesters gathering up neat bundles, long greenhouses full of neatly spaced roses, and rainbows playing through the water sprinkling from sophisticated irrigation systems.
Ten years on, Mugabe’s campaign of violent land invasions had left Zimbabwe looking as if a terrible scourge had swept through. Some of the most advanced farms in the world had been reduced to slash and burn. The fields were charred and spiked with dead maize stalks or overgrown with weeds and elephant grass; the equipment plundered and stripped; and what little ploughing was still going on was by oxen or donkey.
The war vets had been used and moved on. Just as in the Shepherds’ case, most farms ended up in the hands of Mugabe’s cronies, used as patronage to keep his allies onside, whether party officials, army and police commanders, High Court judges, even the Anglican Bishop of Harare, Nolbert Kunonga.
By 2004, production of maize, the staple crop, had fallen by 74 per cent and the national cow herd shrunk by 90 per cent. On his farm Mr Shepherd had grown 80 hectares of high-grade tobacco and 200 hectares of maize. Its new ‘owner’, Mr Nhema, managed three hectares of tobacco and ten hectares of maize.
Zimbabwe has gone from a country which used to export large amounts of food to one dependent on food aid, with half of its 12 million population on the edge of starvation. By August 2007, its inflation was around 10,000 per cent, by far the highest in the world, with money so worthless that the country was returning to a barter economy. Average per capita income had plummeted to 1953 levels. No country has ever experienced such a decline in its economy in peacetime.
A few years ago, I spent an afternoon with James Chikerema, Mugabe’s one-time ally in the freedom struggle, who grew up with him at Kutama mission. He insisted that the Zimbabwean President would stay in power until he brought the whole country tumbling down around him. ‘Mugabe’s behaving like a captain who wants to go down with his ship,’ he said. ‘He forgets that Zimbabwe is not a ship but a country.’
As a reporter it has been incredibly frustrating going back again and again reporting on more and more unthinkable things – the beatings of the opposition; the series of rigged parliamentary and presidential elections; the households headed by 7-year-olds because their parents had died of Aids; the pensioners living on the equivalent of just 13p a month, not even enough for one toilet roll. All the time it seemed the rest of the world sat by, attention distracted by 9/11, then the war in Iraq. And so cleverly had Mugabe presented what he was doing as a stand against colonialism that other African leaders gave him standing ovations at international forums.
Those Zimbabweans who could leave, left. These tended to be the middle classes – doctors, nurses, accountants, teachers and professors. Each time I go back I find a population weaker and sicker –and thus less likely to rise up.
It has also become an increasingly risky story to cover. Only once did I feel physically threatened – at Lake Kariba during the 2000 elections when I was surrounded by a crowd of Mugabe’s thugs late one night and taken into the Zambezi Valley Motel where earlier that week they had tortured, raped and killed opposition activists. That evening Mugabe had been on television railing against his favourite bogeyman, the Blair government. ‘Why are the British stealing the fish from the lake?’ my captors demanded, ranting for four hours before finally releasing me.
Then the regime banned foreign journalists altogether, or rather made it illegal for them to operate without a licence, which was impossible to get if you were British and had ever written anything remotely critical of Mugabe. In January 2005 they introduced a penalty of a two-year prison sentence for any foreign correspondent caught illegally in the country.
So-called snooping laws were passed enabling the government to monitor emails and phone calls; one in five people are thought to be informers for the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO). To criticise the government has been made a crime and passengers on buses have been arrested for complaining about the price of tomatoes. Anyone I interview I
am putting at risk. One day in Bulawayo, I spent a morning in Emganwini township in which every shack seemed to have someone fading away from Aids on a mattress in the corner. That evening I got a call from the local councillor telling me that everyone I had interviewed had subsequently been visited by CIO agents.
In April 2005 I was at Johannesburg airport boarding a plane to Zimbabwe when a friend called to warn me that Mugabe’s spokesman George Charamba had declared me an enemy of the state. Somewhat quaintly, Charamba had added that I had a ‘penchant for writing about corpses on golf courses’, a subject on which I had never written.
I decided to get on the flight. But I did not sleep easy on that trip. One evening in Harare I was driving out of the house where I was staying. The power was off so the road was dark and, as the gate opened, I was surrounded by blue flashing lights. I froze, thinking Mugabe’s men had found me. Then I realised that they were fire engines.
A month later, in late May 2005, I was in neighbouring Botswana researching an article and decided to try crossing the border. I arrived in Bulawayo and drove to my usual money changers. There was an uneasy atmosphere in town, not many people around, and, passing the street of the old Fifth Avenue market, I caught sight of a whole lot of twisted wire and smashed wood. When I asked the money changer what had happened, he looked terrified and whispered that police had broken up the market.
Early the next morning I flew north to Harare. As my taxi neared the city we passed thousands of people streaming along the road with a few possessions tied in bundles on their heads or in wheelbarrows. They looked like refugees fleeing a war.
Mugabe had switched his attention to the cities, targeting the urban population who had dared vote against him in successive elections. That day I watched in horror as police bulldozers demolished thousands of homes, market stalls and small businesses. Worst hit was Mbare, a district on the outskirts of Harare that had housed Zimbabwe’s largest market. Street after street had been turned into a battleground of twisted wreckage, torn wood and piles of broken bricks. Sirens wailed and plumes of smoke rose from smouldering ground, in the midst of which stood the occasional wardrobe or iron bed frame – all that remained of family homes. A few figures were picking among the smoking debris like vultures while others huddled in small dazed groups at the sides. Every so often one of Zimbabwe’s new Chinese warplanes roared across the sky.
Operation Murambatsvina or ‘Drive Out the Filth’ had begun with no warning when trucks of police and youth militia clad in riot-protection gear arrived at Hatcliff, a shantytown alongside a large orphanage. From there they swept through the city, smashing dwellings and ordering people to go back to the rural areas. One man showed me a swamp of rotting vegetables stamped and trodden by laughing militia. From Mutare to Victoria Falls, no one was safe – even the colourful women flower-sellers who had operated in Harare’s Africa Unity Square for decades. Flowers and carved wooden animals were thrown on to bonfires as their owners watched in disbelief.
‘This is Pol Pot-style depopulation of cities,’ said David Coltart, legal affairs spokesman for the MDC. ‘It’s a sinister pre-emptive strike designed to remove the maximum possible number of people from urban areas to rural areas where they are easier to control.’
Back in London I kept waking in the night seeing those blank faces as everything they had ever worked for was destroyed in front of them. The UN estimated that 700,000 people had lost their homes yet only one had protested. I had even watched people meekly burn their own belongings at the behest of the police.
In our garden is a curious giraffe made of scrap metal that I had bought at Harare’s Enterprise Road market. Mugabe’s 22-vehicle motorcade had passed as I was about to pay, causing everyone to freeze (it’s illegal to move the upper body when it goes by). It was a terrifying sight with wailing sirens, ambulances, blacked-out saloon cars and army trucks bearing men with orange-painted faces and Kalashnikovs trained on the roadside. The young man who made the giraffe was shaking. Afterwards, we chatted for a while and, as he laid the animal on my back seat, he asked me to name it Elvis after him ‘so you won’t forget me’. When I returned during Operation Murambatsvina, Elvis’s entire iron menagerie lay crushed and twisted among the rubble. I wondered what had happened to him.
All the time it is getting harder and harder for people to survive. Harare has had a cholera outbreak; doctors tell of a dramatic increase in child malnutrition; hospitals have nothing left but aspirins – not even saline solution for drips. In June 2007 the Minister for Economic Development told me that he thought half the population would be dead were it not for remittances from Zimbabweans who have left the country.
Saddest of all is seeing mothers no longer able to send their children to school. Zimbabwe once had the best-educated population in Africa. I remember on my first visit being impressed by all those neat buildings and lines of children with freshly washed uniforms and rucksacks of books.
And who could forget the television pictures of Robert Mugabe and a young Prince Charles removing the British flag on 18 April 1980 and raising that of the new Zimbabwe – the last colony in Africa to become independent.
How could today’s monster be the same man who so impressed the world that day with his talk of reconciliation. ‘I urge you, whether you are black or white, to join me in a new pledge to forget our grim past, forgive others and join hands in a new amity,’ he said.
But under the lectern while he spoke his fist was clenched.
Zimbabwe’s silent genocide
Sunday Times, 8 July 2007
GRANDMOTHER NDLOLO DUBE sits on the dusty ground outside her mud-and-pole hut and looks out on a land that has never seemed so dry and unforgiving. The field that was supposed to feed her and her four orphaned grandchildren is littered with dead, broken maize stalks.
‘No rain,’ she says, as she shows the half-full fifty-kilo bag of maize that is all the family has harvested this year. It is the third year running that the harvest has failed, but this time is by far the worst. ‘It’s just enough to last two or three weeks then I don’t know what we’ll do.’
At every hut, every village, it is the same story. Plumtree and Figtree sound as if they should be verdant places but severe drought has left the area, like much of southern Zimbabwe, with 95 per cent crop failure. People sit with dazed expressions, fuddled with hunger. The United Nations World Food Programme estimates that 4 million people will need food aid.
Shortages are no longer new in this country where President Robert Mugabe’s violent land seizures have seen the destruction of commercial farms that once provided work for millions and food for the whole region. But this year they come amid inflation estimated to have reached 10,000–15,000 per cent.
By the end of June prices were doubling daily. Last week the government sent in police and militia youths to force shopkeepers to lower prices. Many responded by locking their doors and suspending business. The police responded by arresting them.
Dube has no idea how she and her family will survive for the rest of the year. ‘I have no cow, no goats, nothing,’ she says.
When I ask how often they eat, she replies: ‘Morning and evening.’ Surprised, I ask what they ate that morning. ‘Nothing,’ she says. And the previous evening? ‘Nothing.’ It turns out that they often go for days without eating.
Sometimes the children get so hungry they chew green fruits from a tree known as African chewing gum, even though they know they will end up with stomach ache.
Two of Dube’s grandchildren – 10-year-old twins Kwenza Kele and Flatter – take me with them to collect water. They are smaller than my 7-year-old back home. The water hole has a fence of twisted logs to prevent cows defecating but it is green and putrid water, topped with scum.
This year’s maize harvest is expected to be 500,000 tonnes, compared with the 1.4 million tonnes needed. But Pius Ncube, the outspoken Catholic Archbishop of Bulawayo, believes the shortages will help Mugabe in the run-up to elections next March. ‘The go
vernment is very happy about the food situation as they know they can use food to make people vote for them again,’ he says. ‘They use every advantage.’
At the next village, grandmother Dedi Ndlovu is complaining about pain in her legs. She harvested just twenty kilos of maize for her nine grandchildren, eight of whom are orphans. ‘Not even half a bag,’ she says. ‘In the past we would get six or seven bags. Sometimes I think, what if I get sick and die? What will happen to these children?’
It is a while before I notice something even more eerie than the impending famine. These are villages of grandparents and grandchildren. There is nobody of my age. In a whole day we meet only one person between the ages of 20 and 50. ‘All the young people have either died or gone,’ explains Pastor Raymond, the local clergyman.
Many have fallen victim to the lethal combination of Aids and hunger. Others are part of an exodus of 4 million Zimbabweans forced for economic and political reasons to leave their country.
In the towns I have noticed fewer people on the streets, but it is only in these villages that the figures are brought home. This is a country that has lost an entire generation.
Amid the breakdown of society – twenty-hour power cuts, water shortages, collapse of the phone system – nobody I ask, whether government official, diplomat or aid worker, has any idea what the population of Zimbabwe is any more. ‘That’s the $25 million question,’ says a US diplomat, suggesting the figure may be as low as 8 million, instead of the 12 million usually cited.
In fifteen years, life expectancy has fallen from 62 to 34 years for women and 37 for men, by far the lowest in the world. What some call a silent genocide has left Zimbabwe with more orphans than anywhere else in the world – 1.4 million according to Unicef.
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