The diplomatic dispute between the United States and Zimbabwe has escalated after an employee of the US embassy in Harare was beaten by war veterans loyal to President Robert Mugabe.
The Zimbabwean employee was on an aid mission with a group that included another embassy employee — a US citizen — and a United Nations official.
The team was studying how to help former farmworkers displaced by Mugabe’s land seizures who were ”subsisting on a diet of berries and termites”, according to a statement by the US government.
The embassy said the UN official, the American, the Zimbabwean employee and another Zimbabwean citizen travelling with them were forcibly held and interrogated. The Zimbabweans were also beaten, it added.
In an unusually strong statement, the US government said the incident was ”symptomatic of the lawlessness that has affected Zimbabwe” for the past two and a half years.
”It is the same sort of intimidation and violence suffered by thousands of Zimbabweans since the rule of law was effectively suspended,” it added.
The US called for ”swift action to identify and arrest the perpetrators. We call once again on the government of Zimbabwe to restore the rule of law.”
The incident comes a week after Zimbabwean police shot dead an American university lecturer at a roadblock in mysterious circumstances.
The American was questioned about the papers on his rental car. He drove 20km to get his passport and then returned to the roadblock where he was shot and killed.
Zimbabwe’s Information Minister, Jonathan Moyo, said the beating of the embassy worker was the result of ”interventionist behaviour by some US embassy personnel who have been trespassing on some farms under the guise of looking for alleged displaced farmworkers.
”There are no displaced farm workers in Zimbabwe and the embassy knows that,” he said.
Moyo dismissed the charge of lawlessness as ”quite preposterous. Everyone knows that the US is the citadel of Mafia conduct and racist vigilante groups. When will [the US] restore its rule of law by controlling the Mafia and the Ku Klux Klan?” he added.
The official newspaper, The Herald, on Tuesday reported that the two embassy employees were part of a group that staged and filmed a scramble for food among farmworkers.
It said the embassy group was detained after allegedly throwing food from a moving vehicle to farmworkers, who were then filmed as they jostled for the handouts.
Earlier this month a State Department official warned that the US was considering ”intrusive measures” to deliver food aid to people being starved by the Mugabe government.
Aid experts say the US could be considering dropping food aid by air to the southern Matabeleland region, which is not receiving adequate international food aid.
”The US is taking a tougher approach,” said Iden Wetherell, editor of the Zimbabwe Independent.
”They are legitimately concerned that Mugabe is starving his own people. And so they must venture out to all parts of the country, and in doing so they will become targets of Mugabe’s violent militias.”
The US does not consider Mugabe to be the legitimate leader of Zimbabwe because of an alleged rigged election earlier this year. — (c) Guardian Newspapers 2002