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Desperate mothers throw away 20 babies a week as Zimbabwe starves
Christina Lamb and Flora Bagenal, Sunday Times (UK)
April 02, 2006

http://www.zwnews.com/issuefull.cfm?ArticleID=14135

People are dying of Aids before they can starve

Harare - The first time Knowledge Mbanda found a dead baby in the drains of Harare, he was horrified.

"It is completely against our culture to abandon children," he said. "I thought it must be of a woman who had been raped or a prostitute." But now he and fellow council workers find at least 20 corpses of newborn babies each week, thrown away or even flushed down the lavatories of Zimbabwe's capital. The dumping of babies, along with what doctors describe as a "dramatic" increase in malnourished children in city hospitals, is the most shocking illustration of the economic collapse of a country that was once the breadbasket of southern Africa. Some of the corpses are the result of unwanted pregnancies in a country experiencing a rise in sexual abuse and prostitution. But others are newborns dumped by desperate mothers unable to support another child. Inflation has reached 1,000% and the government's seizure of 95% of commercial farms has seen food production plummet. The dead gutter babies are the most pitiful victims of a government that believes it can starve its people into compliance, or death, turning Zimbabwe into the only country in the region with a shrinking population.

So grave is the situation that even the government media have begun reporting it. "Some of the things that are happening now are shocking," complained Nomutsa Chideya, Harare's town clerk, to the state-owned Herald newspaper. "Apart from upsetting the normal flow of waste, it [baby dumping] is not right from a moral standpoint." Paediatricians contacted by The Sunday Times in the two main cities of Harare and Bulawayo said severe child malnutrition had doubled over the past year and hospital morgues were piled high with bodies people could not afford to bury. "Children are dying off like flies," said one surgeon in Bulawayo who, like most of those interviewed for this article, asked to remain anonymous for fear of repercussions by President Robert Mugabe's police state. Nobody knows the exact figures for malnutrition because the majority of victims cannot afford to reach hospitals. Moreover, according to the surgeon, the extent of the famine is being masked by the scale of the Aids epidemic, with more than a quarter of the population HIV-positive. "Put simply, people are dying of Aids before they can starve to death," he said.

A study at Harare hospital in 2003-4 showed that 55% of children admitted were suffering from malnutrition. The problem is believed to have intensified since last year because of the effects of Operation Murambatsvina - or Drive Out the Filth - the government campaign to demolish supposedly illegal structures. The three-month operation, which began last May, left more than 700,000 people without homes or livelihoods and scrabbling in rubbish dumps to survive. On top of that, the government's printing of money to appease the wealthy few has driven inflation higher than anywhere else in the world, making food harder and harder to afford for the poor. "All we know is what we see and that is a dramatic increase in malnourished children," said Greg Powell, a paediatrician from Doctors for Human Rights and author of a paper entitled Severe Child Malnutrition: An Unnecessary and Avoidable Crisis. This paper linked the rise in malnourished children to shortages caused by the land-grab programme that were compounded by the loss of livelihoods resulting from Operation Murambatsvina. "Most of the severe malnutrition is urban-based, which is highly unusual," said Powell.

At a church feeding centre in Bulawayo I met crowds of desperate people who had spent their last dollars to catch a bus 100 miles into town in search of food for their children. Most said they had not had a meal of sadza, the staple maize porridge, for three weeks - some for two months. "There is no food where we are," said one mother as she looked in disappointment at the 22lb bag of maize that was all she was given. "Now we will have to beg the Z$400,000 (£1.14) bus fare back." "The hunger is like a plague," said Pastor Edwin (not his real name), a brave priest whose own church was demolished in Operation Murambatsvina and who has tried to keep track of - and feed - more than 2,000 people who were dumped in remote areas. Despite being arrested several times he has persuaded colleagues from other denominations to form an alliance of 150 pastors, called Churches of Bulawayo, which helps the victims.

He sneaks me into Killarney, an old squatter settlement that was demolished last June but to which some families have returned, driven out of rural areas by the lack of food. The conditions are shocking, with people clustered in shelters of branches and scrap metal.

Their only protection from the rains are a few plastic sheets that Pastor Edwin managed to obtain.

Children in ragged clothes clamour for food while women sit around with dulled expressions, chewing seeds. Many have been affected mentally, according to the priest. "Whenever I try to sleep, I see my wardrobe being smashed and my house going up in flames," said one woman. Every few days police come and chase them out again, but they have nowhere else to go. "We're losing an average of two people a week here to starvation," said Pastor Edwin, showing some abandoned shelters where the inhabitants have died. "Several times I've been called to places urgently, only to find they have already died of starvation. I see the signs everywhere - the hands and feet grey like bark. "The government doesn't care about these people and it has become my problem because I do," he added. "But it's never ending."

The hunger is so widespread in Zimbabwe that the World Food Programme (WFP) has increased the numbers on food aid in the country from 1m last July to 4m, more than a third of the population. Michael Huggins, a spokesman for the WFP in southern Africa, said: "If this was Niger or Ethiopia you would see dead bodies everywhere. For some reason Zimbabwe stays afloat and one of those reasons is remittances." An estimated 3.4m Zimbabweans have fled the country, most to South Africa but also to the UK and Botswana. And with £1 now equivalent to more than Z$300,000, the small amounts of hard currency they manage to send back can sustain their families. World Vision, one of the agencies that distributes WFP food, has taken to defining the needy as those who do not have a relation overseas. "It's grim," added Huggins. "Even if children are not wasting away in front of your eyes they are chronically hungry." A mission doctor working in rural Matabeleland agrees. "What we're seeing throughout Zimbabwe is chronic under-nutrition," he explained. "Children are much smaller than they should be for their age. A child that you think is a healthy two-year-old is probably a very underfed four-year old."

Malnutrition is causing carriers of the HIV virus to develop full-blown Aids far faster, he said. "With proper nutrition and medical care, HIV sufferers in the West typically take up to 10 years to develop full-blown Aids. For the starving Zimbabweans, their immune systems are so weakened by malnutrition that the transition is now a matter of months." The near collapse of public services means that even those who manage to get to hospitals receive little help. Of 1.5m Zimbabweans registered as HIV-positive, only 6,000 are thought to be receiving drugs. At Mpilo hospital in Bulawayo, nurses told me they had shortages of dressings and drips, no gloves or hand-wash solution, no drugs to treat tuberculosis and no antibiotics. "The situation is bloody awful," said a surgeon from Bulawayo United Hospitals. "There are shortages of everything. We have no insulin so cannot treat diabetic patients. You get to theatre and are told there are no clean sheets because the government has not paid the laundry bill. For months we could not do x-rays. There's no saline for drips, because it was used for washing as there was no sterile hand wash. It's desperate. Quite a number of us are thinking about giving up. Yet when I came here 20 years ago, this health service was one of the best on the continent." So many doctors have gone overseas that the surgeon is working with one house officer instead of eight and the hospital almost had to close down casualty altogether because it had no staff. Yet an aid agency in Harare recently had to incinerate hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of American drugs, including expensive antibiotics, because they were not registered in Zimbabwe.

Bodies are piling up in hospital morgues because burial in city cemeteries is becoming a preserve of the rich. A grave plot at the downmarket Granville cemetery in Harare costs Z$8.5m (£24) during weekdays and Z$15m (£42) at weekends - more than three times the monthly income. With frequent power cuts leading to rapid decomposition, Harare hospitals have begun employing a company called Sunrise to take bodies away twice a week for a pauper's burial, in which as many as 15 at a time are consigned to a ditch. The government refuses to admit that its people are suffering. For months it even refused to let the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) start the Back to School feeding programme it runs throughout the world. In the end Unicef had to rename it Be in School as the government would not admit that any children were ever taken out of school. Spiralling school fees have forced many parents to withdraw their children from education.

In Mbare, the Harare suburb that was left largely in rubble by Operation Murambatsvina, a single mother called Irene tearfully told me she had been arrested twice in the past month for selling sadza on the streets to earn money so that her two sons could go to school. "The police took my pot, fined me and held me three days," she said as she showed me the waist-high dwelling she has fashioned from scraps of iron. "They've turned us into beggars." Irene, like many others, survives on food handed out by Tracy, a plucky church volunteer, and two other brightly dressed women. She calls them her "tsunami team" - many Zimbabweans refer to Operation Murambatsvina as the African tsunami. Everywhere Tracy and her tsunami team go, people call: "We're hungry, hungry, help us!" In one shack, Tracy shows me a family of 38 crammed into three tiny rooms after five others they had built were all bulldozed. The tin bowl of watery porridge the children were sharing was the only meal they would get. After a damning UN report on Operation Murambatsvina - which Mugabe described as "an urban beautification programme" - the government announced Operation Garakai to build new houses. But not one person contacted by The Sunday Times, from aid agencies to diplomats, knew of a single victim who has been rehoused by the government. The few houses that have been built have gone to officials of the ruling party, Zanu PF. "It was criminal and murderous, what they did to the people," said Pius Ncube, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Bulawayo. "I can never forgive them. If that man [Mugabe] dies tomorrow, I don't see myself going to his funeral."

Although good rains have raised expectations that next month's harvest will be better than last year's, officials say it will still be way below the country's needs. According to Africa's food security early warning system, Zimbabwe will harvest only 600,000 tons of maize this season. The country consumes an annual average of 1.8m tons, leaving it the highest cereal deficit in southern Africa. Zimbabwe will also have to import 200,000 tons of wheat, 40,000 tons of sorghum and 6,000 tons of rice to avert widespread deaths related to starvation. The government has no money to pay for this and Mugabe has consistently refused to appeal for food aid. To do so would mean admitting the failure of his land distribution programme.

Some believe the WFP should stop plugging the gap as this has the side effect of sustaining the regime. "The world must differentiate between the politics and the people of Zimbabwe," responds James Elder, Unicef's spokesman in Zimbabwe. "During any given hour today, three Zimbabweans under the age of 15 will become infected with HIV-Aids; another three children will die of Aids-related deaths. Same again an hour later. Meanwhile, too many children remain severely malnourished. "It doesn't need to be this way. The people of Zimbabwe need more than the world's outrage; they need the world's support."

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