MONDAY, 4.00PM
ZIMBABWEAN war veterans, who stormed the country’s parliament last week to demand pension pay-outs from a government war veterans’ fund, at the weekend mobbed cabinet ministers who were to address them, forcing the ministers to flee for their safety.
President Robert Mugabe’s government called a series of meetings with veterans around the country on Sunday to try to explain the alleged looting of millions of dollars from the veterans’ fund. Allegations that the fund has been plundered by the country’s policitcal elite are at the heart of the veterans’ protest.
At a Sunday rally in Harare, senior government ministers, accustomed to almost fawning respect, were shocked to find themselves confronted by mobs of furious veterans who refused even to listen to them. Three ministers had to abandon their luxury cars waiting out front as riot police escorted them to safety through a back exit of the ruling party headquarters. Veterans had jeered and threatened the ministers, crowding the stage, telling them to “shut up and sit down”, and then moved to lock the front gates to the imposing headquarters building.
The government-supporting Herald newspaper wrote in an editorial on Monday that “the situation [has] deteriorated to alarming levels”, and called on Mugabe to meet the leaders of the war veterans, amid widespread fears that the veterans’ protest could provide the spark for widespread violence as Zimbabweans suffer increasing economic hardship in the face of government corruption. The country has been hit by a recent wave of strikes, some of which have turned violent.
The initial purpose of the War Victims Compensation Fund, which is at the centre of the row, was to give financial help to those disabled in some way in the seven-year war against white-minority rule in this former rebel British colony of Rhodesia. In April, independent newspapers exposed the fact that some senior government officials who spent the war far from the front line had been awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars for problems such as “mental stress”, which seems to have been the last straw for the former guerrillas, many of whom live in abject poverty and with real disabilities.
MONDAY, 5.30PM
WITH furious ex-guerillas chanting “hondo, hondo” (war, war, in Shona) outside his office, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe on Monday appointed an 11-member commission to investigate how persons with influence appropriated Z$41-million from the War Victims Compensation Fund. The commission, tasked with reporting personally to Mugabe, is headed by high court judge Godfrey Chidyausiku, a former minister noted for his loyalty to the ruling party. It will apparently meet behind closed doors, sparing Mugabe the embarrassment of the three-member commission of 1989 headed by Judge Wilson Sandura, which exposed in public court hearings seven cabinet ministers involved in vehicle racketeering.