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Face
to Face with Zimbabwe's Misery
Alex Perry,
Time Magazine
April 12, 2007
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1609808-1,00.html
A bad jail wastes a body
quickly. When I entered Cell 6 at Gwanda police station, I was fit.
After five days in a concrete and iron-bar tank, with no food and
only a few sips of water, my skin was flaking and my clothes were
slipping off. A prison blanket had given me lice. The water I had
palmed from a rusty tap in the shower had given me diarrhea. Under
a 24-hour strip light, I hadn't slept more than a few minutes at
a time. And I stank. So many men had passed through Cell 6 that
they had left their smell on the walls, and while I was making my
own stink, the walls were also passing theirs onto me.
It took 22 hours to get
arrested in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe. On March 28, I flew into Zimbabwe's
second city, Bulawayo, with the intention of reporting on the ruinous
policies that have turned Zimbabwe into one of the poorest and most
repressive countries in the world. Foreign journalists are routinely
refused permission to travel to Zimbabwe, so I entered the country
as a tourist and drove south from Bulawayo to the goldfields of
the Great Dyke. I was following tens of thousands of Zimbabweans
who, as the economy collapsed, headed to the gold-mining region
of Matabeleland, hoping the red hills might give up something to
live on. My goal was to get a firsthand look at the misery facing
ordinary people in Zimbabwe today. But I had little notion of just
how close I would get.
To maintain my presence
as a tourist, I would have been safer staying north, near the game
parks and Victoria Falls. But Matabeleland is a microcosm of Zimbabwe's
implosion. Thousands in the region are dying of malnutrition. Hundreds
of thousands survive by trapping wild animals or bare-handed mining.
When I arrived in the gold-rush town of West Nicholson, I met with
a local miner in his bungalow. Several times during our 10-minute
chat, he would step out for a few moments. It soon became clear
why. When I emerged from his house, two plainclothes officers were
waiting to detain me.
In the 1980s, Zimbabwe
was the second largest economy in southern Africa. Millions of tourists
visited each year to see hippos, lions and the awesome drama of
Victoria Falls. And Zimbabwe--a nation of 11 million to 13 million
people (nobody knows the precise number, partly because so many
have fled) gave black Africans the best education and health care
on the continent. But over the past two decades, Mugabe's single-minded
protection of his power has devastated the economy and turned the
country into a police state. Unemployment is at 80%, living standards
are back to their 1953 levels, and the World Health Organization
says life expectancy is 34 for women and 37 for men--the lowest
in the world. Inflation hit 1,792.9% in February and is predicted
to reach 3,700% by year's end. (A currency free fall of that magnitude
means, for instance, that in nominal terms, a single brick today
costs more than a three-bedroom house with a swimming pool did in
1990.)
Arriving in the country
is like touching down the day after a cataclysm--a place where the
clocks have stopped. There are roads but few cars, and roadside
railings are torn up at the stumps. The shops feature bare shelves
and price boards for imaginary products that are changed three times
a day. Telephones don't work, the power is out, and blackened factory
stacks spew no smoke. People loll in the streets with nothing to
do and nowhere to go, even if there were a way to get there. "What
do people eat?" I asked a lawyer I met. "Good question,"
he replied.
The one thing Zimbabwe
is in no danger of running out of is pictures of "Comrade"
Robert Gabriel Mugabe. He looks down from framed photographs in
every store, gas station and government office, a small man in gold
glasses. When I landed in Zimbabwe, he was front-page news in every
newspaper, railing against the West, which could "go hang"
for plotting "monkey business" against his country, and
members of the opposition, who "will get bashed." A few
weeks earlier, I caught a television interview on his 83rd birthday.
"Some people say I am a dictator," he said at his 25-bedroom
villa in the capital, Harare, complete with Italian-marble bathrooms
and roof tiles from Shanghai. "My own people say I am handsome."
My 10-minute conversation
with the miner in West Nicholson turned out to be my last interview.
The plainclothes officers brought me to the West Nicholson police
station, where I spent the night. The next day I was driven north
to the provincial police headquarters at Gwanda. My escorts accused
me of planning to write "negative" stories about Zimbabwe--as
if arresting me would dispose me to more positive stories--and carried
with them a report from West Nicholson's police chief describing
me as a "dedicated journalist on a clandestine mission."
At Gwanda, I was interrogated
by a series of detectives and was denied a lawyer and a phone call.
Officers crowded in to see me. They were excited. One said he wanted
to "manhandle" me. Two others grinned and bounced before
me, trying to make me flinch. The detective in charge of my case
introduced himself as "Moyo" and disclosed that he approved
of a beating if the crime warranted it. I was driven to the prosecutors'
office and charged with breaching sections 79 and 80, Chapter 10:
27, of the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act,
"working as a journalist without accreditation." The maximum
sentence was two years.
"Do you think I
can just come to your country, start asking questions and write
anything I want?" demanded an officer. Nobody knew I was here,
I replied. Nobody knew what was happening to me. I didn't know what
was happening to me. Could I call someone? Moyo ignored me. His
officers expressed outrage at my nerve.
The only feature in my
cell aside from walls and bars was an iron shackling ring in the
floor. Prisoners at Gwanda are paraded every morning before the
station's officers and, one by one, interrogated and slapped, humiliated.
Some of my fellow prisoners had been arrested for trapping porcupines
in the forest, selling gasoline, stealing--petty offenses committed
in desperate efforts to feed their families. A piece of graffiti
on the wall read, P. MOYO WAS HERE FOR STANDING.
The prisoners weren't
the only ones living in fear. Junior officers barely opened their
mouths. Ranking officers like Moyo would not grant me permission
to visit the toilet or brush my teeth without approval from their
superiors. "I am just a worker," I heard the police-station
chief say. "There are people above me." The jailers' anxiety
about their bosses made them even more determined to demand respect
from their prisoners. Moyo considered my demand for a lawyer insulting.
"I am educated," he said. "And you do not cooperate."
The walls of his office made clear that the regime saw the opposition
less as a threat than an affront. The top crime on a list hanging
above Moyo's desk was "insulting or undermining the authority
of the President."
In truth, Zimbabwe's
opposition remains weak. The main opposition party, the Movement
for Democratic Change (M.D.C.), peaked in 2002, when leader Morgan
Tsvangirai polled 42% to Mugabe's 56% in presidential elections.
Since then the anti-Mugabe movement has foundered because of infighting
and intimidation. Mugabe has unleashed a campaign of beatings, mass
arrests and shootings of his political opponents. On March 11, state
police attacked a joint M.D.C.-Christian march. Tsvangirai was taken
into custody and beaten savagely. Since 2000, Mugabe has also encouraged
mobs to invade farms owned by the country's remaining white residents,
who number in the tens of thousands and mainly back the opposition.
The M.D.C.'s principal base is in the urban slums, so Mugabe destroyed
many of them, forcing millions of shanty dwellers into the streets
or exile. The opposition called a general strike on April 2, but
it's hard for a strike to have much impact when many of its potential
supporters are outside the country.
Mugabe has also targeted
some longstanding foreign adversaries. The West, particularly Britain
and the U.S., is plotting to recolonize Zimbabwe, he says. That
paranoia courses through every level of the country's security apparatus.
A large map in Inspector Moyo's office highlighted in red "areas
of political activity"--which turned out to be every town or
large village. A directive on the wall reminded him his job was
to "investigate all cases of a political nature, suppress all
civil commotion and gather political intelligence." There was
even a detailed procedure in case the station ever came under attack.
Fear and vigilance combined in an obsession with paperwork. Every
remark I made was typed in triplicate. I was fingerprinted five
times.
Moyo seemed to realize
he was working for the bad guys. "The country is ruined,"
he said one day. Shame fueled his need for respect. He was haunted
by the prospect of someday being called to account for the abuses
he has overseen. "You cannot say anything against me,"
he would say. Mugabe's greatest trick is to make sure people fear
him more than they hate him, and hate themselves most of all.
For all of Zimbabwe's
privations, Mugabe's hold on power seems unlikely to slip anytime
soon. On my first day in jail, a heads-of-government Southern African
Development Community summit met in Tanzania. In its ranks were
other veterans of the fight against colonialism, like South African
President Thabo Mbeki, many of whose supporters sympathize with
Mugabe's demonization of the West as racist. Despite worldwide calls
for censure, the conference refused to condemn Mugabe's leadership
and affirmed Zimbabwe's right to noninterference. Mbeki was asked
to act as mediator between the government and the opposition, but
Mbeki told the Financial Times, "Whether we succeed or not
is up to the Zimbabwean leadership. None of us in the region has
any power to force the Zimbabweans to agree." The next day
Zimbabwe's ruling party, the Zanu-PF, endorsed Mugabe as its candidate
for the 2008 presidential election.
I studied the maps on
Moyo's walls for escape routes into South Africa or Botswana.
What encouraged me was that I would hardly be the first to flee
Zimbabwe. There are no reliable estimates of how much of the original
population has left. Some estimates range from 2 million to 4 million;
South Africans reckon they host 1 million to 2 million refugees.
Shantytowns with names like Little Harare and Zimtown have sprung
up outside cities across Africa. The stories their inhabitants tell--of
risking crocodiles in the Limpopo River and lions in South Africa's
Kruger National Park in their bid to escape--speak of desperation.
They also illuminate why any recovery in Zimbabwe will be a long
time coming. "It's a brain drain," says Archbishop Pius
Ncube, a prominent government critic based in Bulawayo. "All
the intelligent people--the doctors, the lawyers, the teachers--have
left." Through the bars of my cell, wardens would quietly ask
if I could help them find jobs in London.
I began to see my captors
as victims as much as persecutors. Many had not been paid. A drive
to Bulawayo, ostensibly to search my hotel room, became a shopping
trip as five officers crammed the car and spent the day hunting
roadside stalls for cheap tomatoes, queuing at gas stations and
ATMs, seeking out a country butcher with a reputation for value.
"I cannot lie to you. The situation is very bad," said
Moyo. "You can see for yourself."
On my fifth day in detention,
I was taken to court. En route, Moyo took me to a café for
my first meal since my arrest. I was amazed to see an English breakfast
on offer: sausages, eggs, toast, coffee. I hungrily ordered and
sat down--only to see Moyo sit at an adjacent table. I beckoned
to him, but, head down, he demurred. A man asked to share my table
and introduced himself as a manager for the Christian relief organization
World Vision. I asked him about this year's harvest. "There's
zero," he said. "No crop. Millions of hungry people, and
just our maize sacks to feed them."
Court took 10 minutes.
I pleaded guilty and was fined 100 Zimbabwean dollars--at present
values, half a U.S. cent. Outside, two men in suits and sunglasses,
possibly secret-service agents, watched as I left court. Though
the local authorities had let me go, there was no guarantee I would
avoid being interrogated again by Mugabe's secret police. I jumped
in my rental car and, calculating that the authorities would expect
me to head south to South Africa or west to Botswana, drove 373
miles north to Zambia. An hour after nightfall, the road became
muddy. It seemed to be raining. A rumbling filled the air. I looked
left, and there, silver in the moonlight, framed between two cliffs,
was Victoria Falls. I was out.
My last night
in jail was a Sunday. I was falling asleep on the floor when I felt
a low harmony echoing up through the concrete of the cell next door.
There was bass, tenor and rhythm. For two hours, prisoners filled
the jail with music. These were songs of suffering and acceptance,
of beauty and soul undiminished.
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