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Zimbabwe undone
Stephanie Nolen, Globe & Mail (Canada)
April 01, 2006

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/

Despite myriad wrenching crises, STEPHANIE NOLEN reports, the winds of change are calm

HARARE - The young men sat in the shadow of the huge stone walls of the Great Zimbabwe Ruins and reminisced about the glory days: not the 11th century, when the ancient stone city ruled much of southern Africa, but that period just five or six years ago, when foreign visitors used to flock here, leaving behind tips in all manner of brightly printed currencies. At the Great Zimbabwe these days, they are lucky to see two tourists a month.

The young tour guides said they have not been paid in months. They sit in the shade, play checkers with bottle caps and try to make tea on a small wood fire; the gas and electric stoves in the employee kitchen were cut off a year ago. Albert, though, clings to the belief that things cannot get worse.

"To be Zimbabwean is to endure," he said, poking at embers with a stick. "And the only thing greater than the Zimbabwean ability to tolerate pain is our capacity to believe that somehow tomorrow will be better."

These are hard days for even the most determined optimist. Zimbabwe's riches-to-rags story grows only worse, the once-lustrous economy in free fall, the repressive government of Robert Mugabe dug in deep.

Everyone has a story, but this may the worst: A young woman, Doris (not her real name), working for an AIDS organization in Harare, recounted how she and colleagues had to bury a 21-year-old woman who couldn't afford ARV treatment, one of 3,000 deaths from AIDS in Zimbabwe each week.

"While we were there at the morgue to get her body, a family came in with a body and there were so many flies and such a terrible smell - it had taken them two weeks to raise the money for a burial," she said.

It costs at least $20-million in Zimbabwe's collapsing currency, or $200 (U.S.) at the official exchange rate, to bury the dead in Zimbabwe these days, money Doris and her colleagues had pooled together to pay for a funeral for their friend. But for most people, it's a sum that's beyond reach.

Lowering her voice to a whisper, though no one was around, she described something else that's happening in Harare now: The government has posted police to guard the cemeteries at night, she said, because people were sneaking in to bury their dead relations in unmarked plots under cover of dark.

"And you know, in our culture that's a terrible thing," she said. "You must have a funeral. You must have last respects. The family must come, you must gather. You can't just put someone in the ground - whomp! -without even a stone to say they are there. Can you imagine, this is how we must live now?"

Two weeks ago, Zimbabwe's bakers rebelled and defied a government price cap on bread. Over the course of that week, the price of a loaf went from $55,000 - that's Zimbabwe dollars, of course - on Monday to $75,000 by Friday. That assumes a store even has bread; many lack staples such as soap, toilet paper or cooking oil.

To pay for a basic lunch of cheese sandwiches and a Coke requires a stack of money thicker than a hockey puck - and don't get your heart set on that Coke. The bottler has packed up shop, after running out of foreign currency to buy the precious secret syrup, and stores that still carry Coke will sell only one to a customer. Inflation, even by the government's low-ball estimate, was 782 per cent more than last year, by far the highest rate in the world.

Gas stations will sell only to people who manage to buy a rare state-issued coupon in U.S. dollars for fuel, but most stations have empty pumps in any case. There is fuel to be had on the black market, at $250,000 a litre, if you have connections and a jerry can to take to a dark alley to make the transaction.

Over the past few years, one of the sole saving graces of life in Zimbabwe was sitting down at the end of the day with some friends and a cold, locally brewed Zambezi beer to complain about how things were going to hell in a hand basket. Now the breweries can't get the foreign exchange to buy ingredients, so they've put out warnings about imminent production stoppages. Could this be the thing that finally drives Zimbabweans into the streets?

In fact, there is little sign of rebellion. The opposition Movement for Democratic Change is in total disarray, split by infighting that supporters blame darkly on infiltration activities by government agents. It takes most of people's energy just to negotiate the fuel shortages, the transport crisis, the food scarcities and the illness (an estimated one in four Zimbabwean adults has HIV-AIDS), leaving few to contemplate organized rebellion.

"We know things won't change here until people go into the streets," a group of unemployed and hungry young men in Harare explained.

"But everyone remembers the [Rhodesian] war. Our parents tell us so many people died, and even some of us saw our parents killed. Mugabe knows he will only go with a war, and he knows that in Zimbabwe, we do not want another war."

Mr. Mugabe has ruled Zimbabwe since independence in 1980. Under his tenure, the country became an economic powerhouse and achieved rates of literacy and health-care access that were the envy of most of the rest of Africa.

But in the late 1990s, as Mr. Mugabe felt his popularity begin to wane, he dealt the economy a first harsh blow, making a massive, unbudgeted payment to "war veterans" of the fight for independence, a move that silenced one sector of fomenting dissent.

Then he undertook a huge land-reform campaign, expropriating commercial farms and turning them over to new owners, ostensibly landless black people.

There is no question that land ownership in Zimbabwe was terribly skewed: As much as 70 per cent of arable land was then in the hands of a small, white minority, and a willing buyer/willing seller transfer envisioned at independence had not occurred. But the white farmers who were driven off their land, in often violent and brutal evictions, had been growing the maize that fed the country (and many of Zimbabwe's neighbours) and the tobacco and other cash crops that formed as much as two-thirds of import earnings.

Mr. Mugabe's government turned over the farms to some war veterans, and to many cabinet ministers and members of the ruling Zanu-PF party. The economy collapsed, contracting by as much as 75 per cent since 2000, while a huge food shortage emerged, exacerbated by drought.

ZANU-PF has since blatantly used food aid plus other more routine tactics of intimidation to manipulate voters in order to take both parliamentary and presidential elections.

The polls were endorsed by observers from his African neighbours and condemned by both domestic and other international monitors as patently unfair. After the last election a year ago, opposition supporters became the target of a revenge campaign as vicious as it was gratuitous.

Mr. Mugabe turned 82 in February, and told supporters at lavish birthday celebrations that he felt instead like a man of 28. The state-owned Herald newspaper (the government has choked out all but the last flickers of independent media here) ran a special 16-page supplement, which described the President as "the greatest hero ever to grace Zimbabwe and Africa."

He has given no indication he intends to leave office any time soon, and ZANU-PF is riven by squabbling over a successor in any case. Just this past week, at a state dinner for a fellow visiting despot, Equatorial Guineau's President, Teodoro Obiang Mbasogo, Mr. Mugabe reiterated his theory that meddling Western states, enraged by his government's independent streak, are to blame for the country's crisis, imposing sanctions that they disguise in the rhetoric of human rights.

"Those opposed to our principles have enlisted the services of like-minded countries and their leaders, and deceitfully and dishonestly used the media . . . vilifying us as undemocratic because we have dared to put the interests of the poor and downtrodden first," he said to thunderous applause. "The born-again democrats in London and Washington would like to hoodwink the world on the situation in Zimbabwe in the very same manner they have done on Iraq."

The meddling foreign states were at it again two weeks ago when U.S. Ambassador Christopher Dell gave an interview to the local news media in which he said Zimbabwe's political and economic crisis had "passed the point of no return" for recovery without huge internal reforms and substantial international help.

"It is our hope that in the face of the massive crisis that it has brought on itself, the government here will recognize that it needs to do more than talk about bridge building," Mr. Dell was quoted as saying.

Yet there is no sign of that change. In the neighbourhood of Mabvuku, on the edge of the city - known, in the Zimbabwean euphemism for slum, as a high-density suburb - there is higher density than ever before, after the government's Operation Murambatsvina begun nine months ago.

Police with bulldozers levelled tens of thousands of houses and market stalls across the city in an ostensible urban-renewal program that was a thinly veiled retaliatory attack on supporters of the Movement for Democratic Change. People were forcibly relocated out to empty fields in rural areas, left without food or possessions. Some 700,000 people lost their homes or jobs or both.

Many have crept back to the city. Families are crammed together in tiny houses. But the police still patrol Mabvuku and smash any little stalls that desperate women set up in their yards to sell soap or sweets.

One family of 17, who cannot safely be identified by name, is living in two rooms. Parents and small children sleep in the beds, older ones sleep below them; possessions that they salvaged from the wreckage of their homes are piled almost to the ceiling, and thin curtains carve up the already tiny space in a vain nod to privacy.

One brother worked at the Coke bottling plant; he's been laid off. Another was a mechanic; the small shop where he worked was bulldozed. Two of the women used to sell in the market. Now nobody has any income at all. Two family members have advanced AIDS, but cannot afford to buy treatment (at $5-million a month) or even to pay the $150,000 bus fare in to the clinic. It's a struggle to figure out where to get food each day, although in a bit of grim practicality, they've taken the two little plots where the other houses used to stand and turned them into vegetable gardens.

"We want something better, it's awful how we live now - truly, we are suffering," one of the women said. "We don't know why they would do this to us. We're just poor people, and now we're poorer, while we see so many rich people getting richer."

There are still those who live well in Zimbabwe: At one of the city's best restaurants, for example, there was not a free table to be had last week for a prix-fixe four-course dinner at $3-million a head. Lunch time in a popular café draws an all-white crowd of matrons in designer sunglasses who sip South African sauvignon blanc and compare notes on what they can't find any longer at the illegal-import supermarket they frequent.

In one of the rare pieces of good news, there was plenty of rain this year, but driving across Zimbabwe, one passes only hectare after hectare of unplanted land. Many "new farmers" don't have the basic skills to grow crops, or have not been provided with seeds and fertilizer, which they now cannot afford to buy.

Yet one farm on the edge of Harare stands out for its huge fields of crops - it is now owned by Mr. Mugabe's wife, Grace. She is expecting a bumper harvest.

LOST JEWEL
President Robert Mugabe's desperate measures to remain in power have devastated Zimbabwe, once considered the brightest jewel in Africa with a balanced and flourishing economy.

1992: President Robert Mugabe announces plan to redistribute some of the land owned by whites to black farmers.

1998: Economic crisis marked by high interest rates and inflation, weak currency and rising unemployment provokes riots.

2000: Squatters seize hundreds of white-owned farms with impunity to reclaim what they say was stolen by settlers.

2001: Finance Minister publicly acknowledges economic crisis, saying foreign reserves have run out and warns of serious food shortages.

2002: Mr. Mugabe re-elected in elections condemned as seriously flawed by the opposition and foreign observers. State of disaster declared as worsening food shortages threaten famine. Government blames drought, the UN says disruption to agriculture is a contributing factor.

2003: Widely observed general strike is followed by the arrest -- and reported beatings -- of hundreds of people.

2005: Tens of thousands of shanty dwellings and illegal street stalls are destroyed as part of a "cleanup" program, leaving an estimated 700,000 homeless.

*Africa correspondent Stephanie Nolen slipped into Zimbabwe in early March, travelling through the country for a week to document the devastating legacy of President Robert Mugabe's 26-year rule. Forced to travel as a tourist because the government is refusing entry to most journalists, Ms. Nolen paints a picture in the first of a series of articles of a once-thriving nation that has all but collapsed. Out of fear of retribution, first names or pseudonyms are used for many of the people quoted.

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