The rains have come to the undulating pastures of northern Matabeleland. In the bread basket of Zimbabwe, the seed should be in the ground by now. But instead the rural poor are bracing themselves for a catastrophe on a scale not seen since the Matabeleland massacres a generation ago.
Death is stalking the people of Matabeleland again. Only this time it is a slow death by starvation — orchestrated in large part by Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party as a weapon against his opponents in the Movement for Democratic Change.
Amid warnings that more than 6,7-million Zimbabweans are facing starvation, the Matabele have found themselves attacked by Mugabe’s thugs, who are refusing food to anyone suspected of supporting the MDC. They have been abandoned by donor countries in the international aid community, who have judged Zimbabwe a bad bet; and threatened by forecasts of a strong El Nino effect on the country’s weather set to bring a season of heavy rains followed by drought.
The combination is bad enough for Zimbabwe’s hungry rural communities — where one in three adults is infected with HIV — but there is more bad news. Thanks to drought and the Government’s ‘fast-track’ land reform policy, cereal production is down 57% from last year and maize output by 67%. The international community has raised barely half the money needed to bridge that gap.
With inflation rampant and foreign exchange rates in dramatic decline, shortages of bread, maize, milk and sugar are worsening. To complicate the picture further, Western officials accuse senior Zanu officials of profiteering from a black market in food that most cannot afford.
‘Zimbabwe is facing an utter catastrophe,’ said one British official last week involved in organising the aid effort for Zimbabwe. ‘Countries that usually give in crises like this don’t want to know because of Mugabe’s reputation. At present funding for food aid is running at only 40% of what is needed. If we can’t persuade people to give more, then we are looking at a disaster.
‘Mugabe is playing politics with aid, but the international community must not be drawn into doing the same, no matter how repellent Mugabe’s behaviour. It is the people of Zimbabwe themselves that matter, and we have got to help them.’
Britain’s International Development Secretary, Clare Short, has called on fellow members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Develpoment to pledge more. Despite deteriorating relations between Britain and the Mugabe regime that saw Zimbabwe last week ban scores of British and European politicians and impose visa requirements on Britons travelling to the country, Britain remains the second largest donor behind the United States — providing 36-million pounds since September 2001.
‘It is not that nothing is happening on the ground,’ said one British source. ‘The World Food Programme and other agencies are doing good work; it is just that no one is grasping the scale and urgency of the crisis. Unless the international community steps up a gear — and now — there is going to be a disaster.’
The most recent assessments suggest that the ‘coping strategies’ of those most badly affected will run out early in the new year. And then people will start to die.
But it is a message likely to be unpopular with governments from Scandinavia to Japan — usually big donors — which sources say have been reticent about giving aid to Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
It is a position that was outlined last week by Denmark’s European Affairs Minister, Bertel Haarder, speaking at a meeting of European and southern African Ministers meeting in Maputo. His comments are unlikely to encourage already cautious governments to rush to Zimbabwe’s aid while Mugabe is still in power.
‘We would like to strongly react against the fact that the Zimbabwe government is using our aid and our food to put political and economic pressure on its own people,’ said Haarder last week. ‘They use our aid as a tool in the domestic fight against the opposition to survive, and that is not acceptable.’
Haarder’s remarks followed comments by a senior US official earlier in the week who also accused Mugabe of politicising famine relief and said Washington was considering ‘interventionist’ measures that could challenge Zimbabwe’s sovereignty.
The elections may be over but, according to one human rights observer returned from Zimbabwe, the use of starvation as a political weapon is continuing in some of the most hard-hit areas. The human rights worker — who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals against witnesses — described widespread use of starvation against opposition communities.
‘In Nkayi in Matabeleland North, I interviewed one witness who had been planning to stand for the MDC in the district elections in September but was intimidated into pulling out,’ said the worker. ‘He was threatened into leaving his home. He told me that 20 families in his community had been denied the right to buy food from the government’s Grain Marketing Board warehouses because of their support of the opposition. They have also been denied the right to work. So they cannot eat and they cannot earn money.’
It is a story being repeated across the country. ‘In one area I actually witnessed Zanu youth militia running rural food sales with the instructions to sell only to Zanu supporters. With the government having a monopoly on the warehouses, it can control completely who is fed and who is not.’
At Murambinda District Hospital, according to the World Food Programme, doctors report increasing cases of malnutrition and pellagra, associated with starvation. Informal interviews with those queuing for food aid in Mutasa district suggest many families are going for more than two days at a time without a proper meal. As always, it is the children who are suffering the worst.
A Unicef survey last May showed acute malnutrition prevalence in under-fives at 6,4%. But when broken down further, the data show prevalence of acute malnutrition up to 18,2% in some areas and alarming levels of wasting in those aged three to five at 41,6% nationally.
In Silobela, in Midlands province, the local chief, Malisa, warned last month that thousands of schoolchildren in his area were on the verge of starvation. ‘There is no family in the area that harvested even a bucket of grain,’ he said.
Clare Short told The Observer: ‘This is a very serious crisis. We can’t let the people of Zimbabwe be punished twice by Mugabe and then by food shortages. They mustn’t be abandoned. The donor community must step up their efforts.’ – Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001