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calendar   Saturday - December 06, 2008

The thinnest horseman rides out

Famine sweeping Zimbabwe, tens of thousands will die, perhaps millions




And so at last it boils down to this. A murderous tyrant in charge who destroyed the entire economic system. Rampant crime, tribal warfare, the whole long list of endemic African problems. Pestilence spurs his foul steed as Cholera spreads; no government, no money, and no infrastructure means no clean water. Last to join the dark circus is Famine; there is simply no food left. Give Zimbabwe a year and it will be empty land. How terrible the price paid for tyranny, but at this point almost nothing can be done. It is too late.

Families in a once agriculturally rich land are living – and dying – on a diet of nuts and berries as food shortages threaten up to five million Zimbabweans.

A stick-thin woman, barefoot and dressed in rags, approached with her two young children.

“Please. We’re desperate for food,” she told him, and lifted up her children’s filthy T-shirts. Their stomachs and belly buttons were grotesquely distended by kwashiorkor, a condition caused by severe malnutrition that just a few years ago was unheard of in this once bountiful country.

There is nothing exceptional about this family. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of families in this region are surviving on wild berries or nuts that they grind into powder and mix with water, a weed called lude that they boil into a thin soup. They also eat insects such as locusts, if they can find them. Some even eat the moist inner fibres of bark.

Far away in Harare the Mugabe regime, and even Western nongovernment organisations, deny that Zimbabweans are actually dying of hunger, but here, more than 100 miles from any main population centre, they are starving to death.

The root cause was the regime’s seizure and destruction of white-owned farms, compounded by several years of drought. In 2000 Zimbabwe produced 4.5 million tonnes of maize and other cereals. This year’s harvest was barely 800,000 tonnes in a country that needs two million tonnes just to feed its own people.

The bankrupt Government pledged to import 800,000 tonnes, but has only imported 175,000 tonnes. The cash-strapped World Food Programme (WFP), which used to buy Zimbabwe’s surpluses to alleviate famines elsewhere, has to date imported only 260,000 of the 400,000 tonnes it promised.

That leaves a huge shortfall, and the WFP predicts that five million Zimbabweans – half of the population – will need emergency food aid by next month.

“What you have is a very fine line between chronic malnutrition and slipping over that line into something much worse,” one Western diplomat said.

And it is the poorest of the poor, those living far from the towns and cities – and especially in an area like this, which the regime considers an opposition stronghold – who pay the heaviest price.

A year ago we wrote that here, and across Zimbabwe, millions were surviving on a single bowl of sadza – a cornmeal porridge – a day. Today people here have not had sadza for months, and the doctor said they arrived at the clinic having eaten nothing for a week.

People go shoeless. They are dressed in rags. They are emaciated, listless, despairing. What little money they had was long ago rendered worthless by hyperinflation. It is the planting season, but they have no seeds – let alone fertiliser – and few have bothered to plough their tiny fields.

On the other side of the world, the UK’s Gordon Brown has decided that it is time to act. Or at least to talk about acting. He means well, but the time to act was 10 months ago.

Gordon Brown has described the cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe, which has claimed almost 600 lives as an “international emergency”.  The Prime Minister said conditions in the African state had deteriorated to such an extent that the international community must stand together and tell Robery Mugabe “enough is enough”. The disease epidemic has so far killed 575 people and left another 13,000 sick since an outbreak in August. In a statement Mr Brown said there was a duty to give the Zimbabwean people a “better future”.
...
“The entire health system is collapsing, there are no more doctors, no nurses, no specialists,” said spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs. Britain has pledged an emergency aid package to help tackle the spread of the disease, a bacterium infection which leads to dramatic dehydration and can prove fatal within 24 hours if not treated.

Mr Brown said a “command and control structure” needed to be put in place quickly to allow international aid to reach people.

Here on our side of the pond, awareness of the futility may be more apparent.

Condoleezza Rice hit the nail on the head when she said that Robert Mugabe should have gone a long time ago. But having hung on this long, there is little sign that the “old crocodile” is ready to quit. His weary countrymen are resigned to his seeing it out until the end.

The international clamour for him to go may be growing louder, but in Harare, it simply sounds like one of those periodic crescendos that will soon fade away. Dr Rice, Desmond Tutu and the Kenyan President, Raila Odinga, may have increased their rhetoric in calling for his removal, but these are voices that have spoken out against Mr Mugabe many times before. The absence is of any new voices – or any that Harare has not long been deaf to.
...
The prospect of military intervention, even on a humanitarian level, looks more distant than ever. The violence that Mr Mugabe unleashed during the elections has receded. The pain inflicted on Zimbabweans now is the result of the country’s long, slow death and the crumbling of infrastructure and public services. Saving Zimbabwe will take years of rebuilding that can happen only with a cooperative government. Mr Mugabe has made clear he does not want foreign troops, even if there was a friendly country willing to send them. There is not.

The survival of the Mugabe Government defies logic. It provides none of the basic functions of state – security, welfare or representation – and yet limps on. Declaring an endgame for a regime of such tenacity is always risky – the economic implosion that could finish it off has been much predicted but never seen. Another waiting game is under way.

This is all very sad. It’s a terrible tragedy, a horrifying lesson that Africa and the rest of the world refuses to learn. 


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 12/06/2008 at 12:35 PM   
Filed Under: • AfricaTyrants and Dictators •  
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