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Crisis unfolding along our border
Allister Sparks
June 29, 2005

When I interviewed President Thabo Mbeki in late 2002 for my book on the making of the new South Africa, Beyond the Miracle, the conversation turned edgy when I asked about his silence on the gathering crisis in Zimbabwe. The fuss over what was happening there, he said, reflected a racist perspective on the part of white South Africans and the white developed world generally. "The reason Zimbabwe is such a preoccupation here, in the United Kingdom, the United States and Sweden and everywhere is because a handful of white people died and white people were deprived of their property," Mbeki said, adding that the white world didn't care a fig for the millions of black people who died in other African disasters from the Ivory Coast to Rwanda, Mozambique and Angola. "All they want to talk about is Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe," he declared in tones of rising agitation. "Why? It's because 12 white people died!"

There is much truth in Mbeki's charge that many whites are shamefully indifferent to the plight of black people in Africa's many trouble spots, but I pressed the issue that it was not only whites who were suffering in Zimbabwe but blacks as well - and ventured to suggest that there was "a major African tragedy in the making". But Mbeki would have none of it. "No, no, no," he insisted. "I'm saying that Zimbabwe is a big obsession in this country. It isn't anywhere else on the African continent." Alas, two-and-a-half years later my fears are being borne out. A major humanitarian disaster is playing itself out with President Robert Mugabe's latest act of vindictive madness, and it is black people who are doing the suffering and the dying. Yet Mbeki and other African leaders remain silent. Four weeks ago Mugabe's police embarked on what they call Operation Murambatsvina, meaning "get rid of the rubbish". In an exercise astonishing for its speed and scale, they have bulldozed informal townships and trading stalls throughout the country, rendering nearly a million people homeless and depriving hundreds of thousands of their only means of earning a living in a collapsed economy.

Huge numbers of people are seeking shelter in churches and community halls, while others are being packed into holding camps or fleeing into the bush to sleep in gorges and along river banks. It is winter and there is no food, nor are there any sanitary facilities. People are defecating in the bush and drinking polluted water. It is only a matter of time before epidemics of dysentery and cholera break out. Many are already dying, particularly children and those suffering from Aids. In one act epitomising the sadism of the operation, a demolition squad forced nuns to dismantle an Aids clinic in a settlement outside Harare. In another, police burned the boats and fishing nets of a community on the banks of the Zhovi Dam, in south-eastern Zimbabwe, where they had scraped a living catching and selling fish. Other tales of heartlessness are legion. But for me the cherry on the top was a statement by Didymus Mutasa, the minister of State Security and head of the feared Central Intelligence Organisation. "Everyone in Zimbabwe is very happy about this clean-up," Mutasa said in a radio interview. "People are walking around Harare saying, 'We never knew we had such a beautiful city.' " In my book that ranks alongside Jimmy Kruger's immortal statement that the death of Steve Biko "leaves me cold".

Why is this happening? What is the purpose of this extraordinary operation? It appears mindless to the point of madness. But President Mugabe is not mad. He is just coldly ruthless - something his admirers in Africa, of which I was once one, should realise the old liberation hero has become. I think there are three main objectives behind the operation. The first is simply an act of vengeance against the people of Zimbabwe's towns and cities who voted overwhelmingly for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in the parliamentary election last March. They are being punished and driven out of the cities, so that they will not be able to vote against the ruling Zanu PF again in mayoral elections due in August. Secondly, this is a pre-emptive strike to prevent a possible uprising by a desperate and increasingly restive element of the population. With more than 70% unemployment, shortages of food and fuel and sharply rising prices, there are mounting tensions in all the urban areas and there have already been acts of civil disobedience, particularly in the poorer communities which are suffering most acutely. So the regime, realising it can do nothing to ease the plight of these desperate people, has decided to remove them before they erupt into mass action - and in doing so send an intimidating message to the rest of the population.

Two years ago I described Mugabe's political strategy as "Pol Pot in slow motion". Like the Cambodian tyrant, he has embarked on the piecemeal destruction of the middle-class to create a two-tier society with a small and immensely rich elite living off the country's shrinking resources and presiding over a desperately poor and politically passive rural peasantry. We are now witnessing a great leap forward in that process. Thirdly, this is part of a campaign to try to stem Zimbabwe's deepening foreign exchange crisis. In a statement last month the Reserve Bank Governor, Gideon Gono, announced that the government was going to expand its campaign to destroy the parallel market by targeting individuals as well as institutions. "Within days," Gono warned, "the long arm of the law will reach down to these people. They must not cry then. They have been warned." As it turns out, the people he was warning are the poor, the shack dwellers and the informal traders whose economic desperation has forced many to scrape a living as currency dealers.

With the formal economy in a state of collapse, labour has become Zimbabwe's main export industry. The 2-million or so Zimbabwean refugees in South Africa, 1-million in Britain, and 800 000 in Botswana, are sending significant sums of money home to their desperate relatives. This is now Zimbabwe's biggest source of foreign exchange earnings. The families receiving this foreign money have been changing it on the parallel market, where they can get Zim$20 000 to the US dollar rather than the penurious Zim$9 800 which is the special "diaspora" exchange rate set by the Reserve Bank. To stop this, the government has now bulldozed entire townships. Not only is this crassly unfair to the innocent multitudes, it is also futile. When currencies collapse, black market currency dealers will always find ways to operate. What is happening in Zimbabwe today is more than just a humanitarian crisis in the making, as I suggested in that interview with Mbeki two-and-a-half years ago. It is a crime against humanity. Article Seven of the 1998 Treaty of Rome which established the International Criminal Court defines the forcible mass removal of a population as that. The time has come to gather evidence in preparation for the future prosecution of those responsible.

*This article was published in The Star Newspaper in South Africa

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