- Barely a month before Zimbabwe's presidential election,
Clever Tarindwa, 24, a poor farm worker from Chipinge near the Mozambican
border, voted with his feet to seek a new life in South Africa.
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- Driven into penury by two years of political turmoil
that has brought Zimbabweís once prosperous economy to its knees,
he jumped on a bus heading for the border township of Beitbridge.
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- There he was met by the guma-guma men, a group of
extortionists
who take people across the swirling waters of the Limpopo at night for
the hefty sum of 100 rand (£6.50).
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- Mr Tarindwa, unlike some of his countrymen, who get swept
away or eaten by crocodiles, made it to the other side. Within hours he
was picked up by a South African National Defence Force (SANDF) patrol
and handed to the police in the nearby town of Messina for immediate
deportation.
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- "I left home because there is no work and no
food,"
he said. "I came here in search of a job. Everyone says that life
in South Africa is good. It used to be good in Zimbabwe, but that's all
gone now."
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- Sibongile Moyo, 22, who was picked up after leaving her
village near Bulawayo, told the same story. "Work is hard to get in
Zimbabwe," she said. "There is not enough food. It is expensive
and we donít have enough money to buy. The people are frightened.
They get beaten."
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- Mr Tarindwa and Miss Moyo are two of thousands of black
Zimbabweans fleeing President Mugabe's attempts to cling to power.
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- Every hour a police lorry leaves Messina with 30 to 40
'undocumented migrants' for the ten-mile trip back to the border, where
they are then dumped on the other side. Most are picked up while trying
to hitch a lift on the main road to Johannesburg. Others are caught while
trying to make their way through local game or hunting grounds, or are
turned in by people who fear that migrants will take their jobs and their
women.
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- Hundreds of South African soldiers patrol the three
razor-wire
fences along the border with Zimbabwe that were erected during the
apartheid
era to keep out African National Congress guerrillas.
-
- ìThey wrap themselves in blankets and crawl under
the fence,î Godfrey Mathabatha, a private on one of the border
patrols,
said. "When we catch them, their clothes are torn. They are tired
and thirsty and have gone for a week without something to eat."
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- An old army base at Artonvilla, on the banks of the
Limpopo,
has been earmarked by the Pretoria Government as a reception centre for
migrants, should the situation in Zimbabwe 'reach meltdown'. It can hold
up to 1,000 people, who would be taken back to the border in convoy as
fast as they were caught.
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- Colonel Tol Synman, the officer in charge of the regional
SANDF, said. "We arrest up to 2,500 a month. But we have no idea how
many get through." Some estimates put the figure as high as 500 a
day.
-
- "We are getting more and more undocumented migrants
now because of the shortage of food in Zimbabwe," Colonel Synman
said.
-
- "They cross the river even when the water is chest
high. Our troops have reported some of them being swept away or eaten by
crocodiles."
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- He said that unless the illegal migrants were granted
refugee status, "our job will remain to hold the line."
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