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'I work in a heartbroken country'
Peta Thornycroft
October 28, 2007

http://www.miamiherald.com/540/story/285780.html

This is taken from the speech that the writer delivered to the International Women's Media Foundation last week:

Iam most honoured by this award. Thank you.

I work in a heartbroken country.

Zimbabwe has withdrawn from the world. Its life, its energy and resilience is eaten away.

Not for ideology, not because of so called sanctions. Not because its sovereignty is under threat as Robert Mugabe claims.

It is all about money.

Every time Mugabe and his cronies change U.S. dollars on the black market, which is the only market, they make 100,000 percent profit.

And yet the shops are empty, the people are foraging for food in a country abundantly endowed with agricultural jewels, deep red soil and rain.

At the end of apartheid in South Africa, where I have mostly worked, we journalists were elated.

We had made a difference.

When the Truth Commission under Archbishop Desmond Tutu began its investigations into the atrocities of apartheid, they began in the libraries of South African newspapers.

I can truly say that I have made no difference in Zimbabwe.

Three weeks ago I traveled across the vast rural heartland of Mugabe's strongholds up to the Mozambique border.

Mugabe's loyalists are polite, subdued, dependent and obedient. No opposition party can operate there.

I saw a new intake of Mr. Mugabe's personal army, the publicly funded youth militia, also known as green bombers for the colour of their uniforms, and the violence they inflict on anyone who opposes Mugabe.

The small trading stores out there are as empty as the supermarkets in the cities.

Mugabe's voodoo economics dictated that the price of retail goods be cut by 50 percent of production costs. He did this because the outgoing U.S. ambassador Christopher Dell predicted that Zimbabwe would collapse by year end.

Mugabe's generals -- and Zimbabwe is ruled by the military -- decided all businessmen were saboteurs working for the West to effect regime change.

So they slashed prices and arrested thousands.

Zimbabwe's torment is not comparable with the apocalypse in Iraq, or any of the images I have seen of the brief recent Burmese demonstrations. Nor is it Afghanistan, Somalia nor Darfur.

There is no war. There is no one trying for regime change as we have learned to understand what those words imply.

Zimbabweans who oppose Robert Mugabe, or write about what he is doing, day by ghastly day are accused of plotting regime change. Zimbaweans tried to change the regime at the ballot box, but Mugabe and his junta were too strong, too cunning, and most in the rest of Africa chose to ignore him.

Nelson Mandela and the ruling African National Congress know the difference between right and wrong. For seven years they stayed quiet, and endorsed elections which were demonstrably violent and unfair.

Zimbabwe, with the highest literacy rate in the third world is now graduating children who can barely read. We don't even know the numbers dying of treatable disease like HIV/AIDS.

Next year, Mugabe will stand for re-election, seeking five more years to torment his people.

They are too hungry to oppose him.

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