- A deluxe funeral package in Harare these days comes with
a guard who sits on the grave overnight. If you can't afford that (and
most people can't), the funeral company will supply concrete slabs to lay
on the freshly dug grave. And if that is beyond of your budget, then you
must spend the first few nights of your bereavement guarding the grave
yourself.
-
- After dark, in Harare's cemeteries, the gravediggers
come to dig up the newly dead. They steal their coffins for resale, once
unthinkable in a culture with a mingled respect and fear of the dead, but
now just one of dozens of ways people are struggling to survive as Zimbabwe
implodes.
-
- Once one of Africa's fastest-growing economies, this
is now the fastest-shrinking. The annual inflation rate has reached 560
per cent. In the supermarkets, clerks do not bother putting stickers on
the groceries any more because the prices change so often. But its catastrophe
is much more than economic: More than 3,000 Zimbabweans a week die of AIDS,
while hospitals lack even Tylenol to treat them.
-
- The government of President Robert Mugabe, once one of
Africa's heroes, is shunned internationally and lashes out each day at
the "enemies of the state" he says seek to undermine it. Union
activists, members of the political opposition and journalists from the
besieged independent media are routinely detained, beaten at police stations
and then dumped back out without charges.
-
- When trade unions planned a march to protest the economic
catastrophe last week, the government responded by putting armoured personnel
carriers on the streets of the capital and posting soldiers, slapping metre-long
truncheons against their legs, on every corner.
-
- Zimbabwe's crisis is likely to dominate the agenda of
the Commonwealth meeting in Abuja, Nigeria, next weekend, where Prime Minister
Jean ChrÈtien will spend some of his last days in office. But Zimbabweans
know there is no easy answer to their problems: Nothing will change while
Mr. Mugabe rules, as he has since independence in 1980, and he won't go
easily. Yesterday, the country replaced its retiring armed forces chief
with a staunch ally of the President who was involved in rallying soldiers
behind Mr. Mugabe's re-election last year.
-
- "I sometimes think the world won't pay attention
until there is bloodshed here," says a young member of the opposition
Movement for Democratic Change.
-
- Mr. Mugabe has been ostracized by much of the world,
including the Commonwealth, which has imposed a travel ban on his regime.
Most of Africa's democratic leaders have also shunned him, including Nigerian
President Olusegun Obasanjo, who refused to invite him to next week's summit.
-
- But despite the many pressures, he continues to show
the sort of defiance that ordinary Zimbabweans have come to know, and dread.
-
- "These days you could be led to the guillotine,
and your friends would watch you walk by," the head of a Zimbabwean
human-rights group said recently in a clandestine interview. Like virtually
everyone else who speaks in hushed tones about politics in Zimbabwe today,
he was afraid to be identified by name. "People are very afraid. Exhausted
and afraid."
-
- Although the country's economy has been in trouble for
more than a decade, its rapid decline began in 2000, when disgruntled farmers,
industrialists and the labour movement combined to form the first real
opposition to Mr. Mugabe's ruling ZANU-PF party. The government and its
security forces set out to seize many of the large commercial farms, which
were owned by opposition supporters.
-
- Today, few dispute that land reform was badly needed
in a country where 4,000 white farmers owned 70 per cent of the nation's
land while the vast majority of impoverished blacks farmed tiny plots.
But after a violent campaign to seize prime agricultural land, largely
for government supporters, the commercial farming sector collapsed.
-
- More than a million people, commercial farm workers and
their children, were driven from their jobs but not given land, while senior
government figures collected farms like toys; the minister of justice is
said to have 15. With no revenue from traditional cash crops such as cotton
and tobacco, the government has no foreign exchange. Most foreign donors
have suspended their programs, except for the World Food Program, which
says that as of this month it will be helping to feed 5.5 million Zimbabweans,
half the population.
-
- The government itself is more than $1.5-billion (U.S.)
in arrears to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and has
another $4-billion of foreign debt. The economy shrank 20 per cent last
year. There is a huge fuel shortage, with blocks-long lines at the few
stations that are open in Harare and almost no gas to be had in rural areas.
-
- With their salaries declining by 90 per cent in real
terms since 2001, teachers, nurses and doctors have left in droves, to
seek work in neighbouring South Africa or overseas.
-
- At Mudzi District Hospital in the country's northwest,
nurse Eugenia Chinaka supervises a crumbling program of community care.
Her vaccination coverage rates are disintegrating: where six months ago
her beleaguered team (19 nurses and the occasional visiting doctor for
135,000 people) had 94 per cent of children vaccinated for key diseases
such as diphtheria and polio, that coverage rate has dropped to 74 per
cent and is falling fast.
-
- Ms. Chinaka's district hospital has two vehicles at her
disposal to take the Unicef-supplied vaccines (which must be kept refrigerated)
out to rural areas, but it has been three months since she had gas for
them. Life expectancy here was 61 a decade ago; today it is 37.
-
- Although the situation has deteriorated steadily for
the past three years, there has been no revolution in Zimbabwe, no mass
taking-to-the-streets, only the most muted opposition. Frustrated activists
puzzle why. The memory of the bloody cost of the war of independence in
the late 1970s, in which 30,000 people died, is one reason given; another
is the traditional "peaceful nature" of the majority Shona peoples.
-
- But the best explanation is probably the stranglehold
that Mr. Mugabe maintains on the country. Dissent is quickly and brutally
crushed. Amnesty International reported more than 70,000 incidents of torture
and abuse in 2002.
-
- Zimbabweans have had to learn not to wave, because the
open palm is the symbol of the MDC. Now, on pain of arrest, mothers teach
their children to say "bye-bye" waving a closed fist.
-
- In Hatfield, a slum on the edge of Harare that is home
to 25,000 people, people sit listlessly outside their wooden shacks. The
few who had jobs don't go any more, because the price of transport in the
shared trucks or taxis has risen past their day wages. "Mealie [the
staple maize] costs two times as much this week as last," one mother
said.
-
- "Last week we sold the bed mats to buy it,"
said another. Who do they blame? The women turned away.
-
- "We can't say," the first said.
-
- "Really, we don't know," said the second, her
face like stone. "Please don't ask us that."
-
- The young MDC activist, who was badly beaten when she
was detained earlier this year, said she will not protest publicly any
more and discourages her compatriots. "We can't do it, so there has
to be international pressure."
-
- There is no question that quiet international diplomacy
has failed, but the Commonwealth has not, so far, shown itself willing
to intervene more than symbolically. When South African President Thabo
Mbeki came to Canada last month, he assured Mr. Chretien that there was
ongoing dialogue between the Zimbabwe government and the MDC.
-
- Outraged, the MDC denied it. The party is in court, attempting
to overturn the results of the 2002 presidential election, which the opposition
and many international observers said were rigged. The case is being heard
by a judge, Mr. Justice Ben Hlatshwayo, who was given a huge farm by the
government.
-
- "There is no dialogue going on," said a Commonwealth
diplomat who has repeatedly attempted to facilitate talks on behalf of
his government. "None. None at all. And there won't be until [Mr.]
Mugabe has a successor; no one else dares to speak or act."
-
- Mr. Mugabe has declined to name an heir, and the internal
wrangling in Zanu-PF is said to be at fever pitch.
-
- In a bold, front-page editorial on Zimbabwe last month,
the Nigerian-owned Johannesburg daily This Day proclaimed, "Mugabe
should be freed of the burden of rule. Only the people of Zimbabwe can
show him the door. But we can help. Removing Mugabe is a first step. The
international community should press for free and fair elections, monitored
without hindrance. It should agitate for a neutral international body to
oversee the elections.
-
- And it should do so loudly, consistently, resolutely."
-
- "We keep thinking we can't go on like this,"
said the human-rights activist, who did not want to be named. "We've
said it for three years now. But the nightmare doesn't end. We can't wake
up."
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