The New York Review of Books
Monday 7th January 2008

In the Pit of Africa
A Review by Joshua Hammer

At the beginning of Peter Godwin’s enthralling memoir, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, the author, a foreign correspondent living in New York City, returns home to the bush of Zimbabwe, back to the town where he was born and spent his childhood and teenage years. The year is 1997, and the black liberation struggle that ripped apart the country during his youth is a distant memory; the future seems bright for blacks, and Zimbabwe’s roughly sixty thousand white residents, not only farmers but well-to-do business people and professionals, remain in a separate world of prosperity and security. Godwin and his girlfriend, an Englishwoman new to Africa, drive through the countryside, marveling at the tranquillity of a place so recently scarred by war. At one point they encounter “a ragged crocodile of small black children jogging back from school,” he writes. The sight of this threadbare procession prompts contrary reactions from Godwin and his girlfriend (now his wife):

She sees ill-fitting, hand-me-down clothes and scuffed shoes or the bare feet of kids who walk miles to and from school….But what I see are functioning schools: pens and paper and near-universal education producing Africa’s most literate population. She compares up, to the First World, where privileges are treated as rights. I compare down, to the apocalyptic Africa that presses in around us, where rights are only for the privileged. After covering wars in Mozambique, Angola, Uganda, Somalia, and Sudan, Zimbabwe feels to me like Switzerland.

As anyone who has spent time in Africa knows, however, such signs of hope can be ephemeral. And so it was in Zimbabwe, where, two years later, President Robert Mugabe, the former guerrilla leader who had already been in power for two decades, set in motion the forces that would bring his country to ruin. It began, as such downward spirals often do, with a naked grab for more power: in 1999, Mugabe rewrote the country’s constitution to extend his rule for another twelve years and called for a national referendum, as required by law, to ratify the new document. He expected an easy victory; instead, he was soundly defeated. Immediately afterward, he singled out the country’s whites for particular vengeance. As Godwin describes it, for those who had been fooled by him, it revealed Mugabe for who he really was: a megalomaniac dictator, seething with resentment toward a vulnerable minority, and willing to take his country to the brink:

President Mugabe gave a speech after the referendum result saying that he was a democrat and would respect the will of the people. But his face was tight with anger as he said it, and his smile was not a real smile; it was a rictus, a barely suppressed snarl….And you could see that this was a man fueled by thoughts of revenge, that he was boiling with the public humiliation. How could he, who had liberated his people, now be rejected? How could they be so ungrateful? It couldn’t be his own people who had done this (even though 99 percent of the electorate was black); it must have been other people, white people, leading them astray. He would show us….We had broken the unspoken ethnic contract. We had tried to act like citizens, instead of expatriates, here on sufferance.

Weeks later a group calling itself the War Veterans Association, led by Chenjerai “Hitler” Hunzvi, a Polish-educated physician who had, in fact, never served in Zimbabwe’s war for independence, began invading white-owned farms and driving out, and sometimes murdering, the owners. Godwin, who wrote about the mass evictions for a variety of publications, including National Geographic, describes this government-sanctioned campaign of violence in terrifying detail. Here is his description of the last moments of Martin Olds, one of the first white farmers to be killed as he tried to defend his homestead when it was surrounded at dawn on April 18, 2000, by one hundred “wovits,” as these purported war veterans are nicknamed, armed with machetes and Kalashnikovs:

For three desperate hours, the gun battle rages. Olds was once a soldier; he knows how to defend himself. But he is one against a hundred. He is shot in the leg; he ties it with a makeshift splint and fights on. The attackers lob burning Molotov cocktails through the windows. A neighbor flies over the homestead in a little Cessna and sees the house in flames below, sees the gunmen converging on it, but can do nothing to help. And as the house burns, Olds retreats from room to room, finally to the bathroom, where he fills the tub with water, wets his clothes, and prepares to make his final stand. He returns fire until he runs out of bullets, until he is overcome by the smoke and the heat, and then he climbs out the windows, hands raised.

He is barely outside before the gunmen converge on him, beat him with shovels and rifle butts, stones and machetes….Police [later] confirm that no arrests have been made.

Page after page, Godwin chronicles the toll from Mugabe’s brutal campaign. Three days before the assault on Olds, David Stevens was abducted from his farm by a gang of armed men who forced him to drink diesel oil, then blasted him in the back and face with a shotgun. Gloria Olds, Martin’s seventy-year-old mother, was riddled with eighteen bullets a few months after her son was killed. Alan Dunn was beaten to death at his front door by men armed with chains, rocks, and tire irons after defeating a ruling-party candidate for a seat on his local council. (The police and army, who were black, seldom, if ever, offered the besieged farmers protection.) By the end of 2000, Mugabe’s “land reform” program had driven more than half of the country’s six thousand white farmers off of their land; two years later 97 percent would be gone.

Farms were dispersed among destitute “wovits” and their families or, more frequently, handed over to Mugabe’s generals, business cronies, and loyalists within the ruling party. In almost all cases, the new owners lacked the agricultural expertise to manage their holdings, and once-profitable farms turned into wastelands. “Irrigation has been destroyed, wells ruined, electricity cut off for nonpayment of bills,” Godwin reported on a visit to the country in 2002. “Some have reverted to medieval agricultural methods on what were, just the year before, highly sophisticated, productive farms.”

The consequences of Mugabe’s scheme are by now well known. Agricultural production, which once earned 40 percent of the country’s foreign exchange and employed 20 percent of the workforce, collapsed. Hard currency reserves shriveled. Social serv-ices disintegrated. Crime soared. The average life expectancy — thirty-three — now ranks as one of the lowest in the world. Hundreds of thousands of people fled the country. It was, in short, the swiftest, most precipitous economic decline on record of any country not involved in a war. Throughout it all, Mugabe has remained defiant, blaming Great Britain, America, and the country’s whites for Zimbabwe’s economic crisis, and threatening to kill anyone who dares to challenge him. Most of the white farmers who lost their property have left for other African countries, or gone to Europe or Australia. Few, if any, have expressed interest in returning to their former home.

Godwin is one of several nonfiction writers who have tried to describe the difficulties of growing up white in a changing Africa. They write about a continent in turmoil, when colonial privileges were being swept away by civil war and liberation struggles, and there was deep uncertainty about the place of whites in black-led societies. Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight evoked, with a child’s wonder, the savagery and the intoxicating beauty of her life as the daughter of white farmers deep in the bush of wartime Rhodesia, and the disorienting changes after white rule ended. Godwin’s previous memoir, Mukiwa (“white boy” in Shona, the language of Zimbabwe’s majority tribe), described his own Rhodesian upbringing and his unwilling conscription into the army of Ian Smith’s white-minority racist regime. Aidan Hartley, in The Zanzibar Chest, writes of his Kenyan childhood and his early career as a young wire-service reporter in East Africa, observing post-colonial societies as they disintegrated. He describes soaring over the African landscape and seeing “the silhouette of our little aircraft ripple over pulverized cities, refugee camps, the acetylene white flashes of anti-aircraft fire.”

As these writers come of age, they often experience a confusion of identities, caught between their coddled white upbringings and their acute awareness of the human suffering around them. Often they seek means of atoning for the sins committed by their colonial ancestors: in Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart, a scion of South Africa’s white-racist Afrikaners rejects his birthright and immerses himself in the anti-apartheid struggle. Peter Godwin, as a young human rights lawyer, then an investigative reporter in the newly emergent black nation of Zimbabwe, exposes massacres carried out by Mugabe’s army in the early 1980s against the supporters of Joshua Nkomo, his main political rival. Yet these writers cannot shake their white settler identities, or the outsider status that leaves them feeling both guilty and vulnerable to dictators willing to play the race card when they deem it politically expedient.

The burden of growing up white in Rhodesia is perhaps heavier than in most other African countries. Southern Rhodesia was carved out of the bush north of the Limpopo River by Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company. In 1888, Rhodes’s emissaries struck a deal with the paramount chief of Matabeleland, a region in the west and southwest of present-day Zimbabwe, obtaining mineral rights to the territory in perpetuity in return for a monthly lease of one hundred pounds, plus one thousand Martini-Henry breech-loading rifles, one hundred thousand bullets, and a gunboat on the Zambezi River. Soon, however, the company simply confiscated the land, distributed it to thousands of white farmers, and herded the roughly 600,000 “native” Africans onto so-called Tribal Trust Lands. A new wave of immigrants from Europe after World War II, including Godwin’s parents, squeezed the expanding black population further. By the time civil war broke out in the early 1970s against the white-racist government of Ian Smith (who had unilaterally declared Rhodesia independent from Great Britain in 1965), whites made up one percent of Rhodesia’s population — but controlled more than half of the land.

As a leader of the guerrilla forces that defeated Smith, Robert Mugabe acquired a broad popular following, and in 1980, his party won the elections and he became prime minister; a new government was installed in the capital, Salisbury, which was renamed Harare. Whites, fearing that Zimbabwe would follow the pattern of other newly independent black nations — land seizures, nationalization of white property — began fleeing the country. (Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight contains a memorable scene at her elite whites-only boarding school in Harare: the morning after the blacks come to power, she shows up to find the classrooms empty, and white parents hastily packing their children’s belongings in the dormitory to spirit them across the border to apartheid South Africa.) But Mugabe, prodded by President Samora Machel of Mozambique — whose own country had been stripped and left destitute by its fleeing Portuguese population — traveled across Zimbabwe, appealing to the white population to stay and help rebuild the country. Most agreed, and over the next fifteen years, Zimbabwe developed the fastest-growing economy in Africa.

The country’s six thousand white-owned commercial farms were the engines of the new nation’s prosperity. White farmers employed nearly 40 percent of the black population, and, although a de facto system of apartheid remained intact on their farms, more enlightened whites paid their workers good wages and built schools and health centers on their properties. Hard currency poured into Zimbabwe through agricultural exports — mostly tobacco — tourism, and minerals. This newfound wealth allowed the black-majority government (whites still served in the country’s parliament and in the judiciary) to invest in schools, roads, and other infrastructure, bring in Western goods, and otherwise modernize the country.

Godwin doesn’t dispute that a major land-redistribution plan was necessary to correct a century of injustice. But he blames the country’s failure to do so earlier on Mugabe as much as on the country’s white-racist past. A British-funded voluntary redistribution program did turn over 40 percent of white-owned land to blacks before it disbanded in the 1990s — done in, Godwin says, by Mugabe’s lack of interest in the program and by the British government’s disgust over Mugabe’s channeling much of the property to well-heeled loyalists. By that point, land redistribution had become a low priority for most Zimbabweans, thanks to urbanization, widespread literacy, and growing prosperity. A survey by the South Africa–based Helen Suzman Foundation revealed that only 9 percent of Zimbabweans considered such reform a key issue. Moreover, the disparities of wealth could no longer be laid entirely at the doorstep of the previous, white-racist regime: 78 percent of land-holding whites, Godwin writes, had purchased their land after Zimbabwe’s independence.

Mugabe’s real aim, of course, has not been to right colonial injustices, but to keep himself in power, whatever the cost. And white farmers are hardly his only victims. In 2000 Mugabe faced a growing challenge from the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), a broad-based opposition party led by a charismatic former nickel miner and trade unionist, Morgan Tsvangirai. (It received some of its funding from the country’s white commercial farmers, which also helps to explain Mugabe’s anger toward them.) In the runup to the parliamentary elections that year, young brigands from Mugabe’s ruling party, the Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) attacked anyone affiliated with the MDC — gouging out eyes, maiming and murdering the party’s supporters. After it came close to winning a parliamentary majority that year, the harassment of the opposition intensified. Tsvangirai himself was charged with treason, a crime punishable by death. He was acquitted in 2004, but the MDC has never been able to regroup.

The most poignant sections of Godwin’s book are devoted to his parents, elderly and ailing British émigrés who, when the book opens, are living in post-colonial comfort in a leafy Harare suburb. Their 1950s house, with a Dutch-style mansard roof, is surrounded by a “fecund acre of garden” dominated by a Moorish-style swimming pool. Both are representatives of the white liberals who believe in giving something back to Africa. George Godwin is a retired engineering consultant for the Zimbabwean government; his wife commutes to work each day at a government hospital in Harare, where she ministers to victims of a spreading AIDS epidemic — caused, in large part, by Zimbabwean soldiers returning home infected from the war Mugabe was fighting in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, another of his misguided adventures.

Then Zimbabwe’s economy implodes, George Godwin’s pension becomes worthless, the family’s savings shrivel, and the Godwins’ lives unravel. It begins with luxuries: the pool, neglected because chemicals are either unavailable or too expensive, “lies green and still and opaque, its pump quiet, with a slimy watermark around its rim,” Godwin writes. Beef dinners give way to a few slivers of bread with cabbage and minced pork, and meals are reduced from three to two a day. The physical deterioration of the aging couple — Godwin’s mother suffers from sciatica and a disintegrating hip, his father from emphysema and heart disease — sends Godwin on a frantic search for medicine, and then for a decent nursing home, in a country where even basic commodities like gasoline and sugar are becoming harder to come by. (Godwin finds himself collecting the nylon stretch socks from his fellow passengers on a flight to Harare, to hold the dressings of his father’s diseased feet in place, because it’s impossible to find anything suitable in Zimbabwe.) The Godwins’ trusted housekeeper, Mavis, shows up at their house accompanied by two government-backed goons who accuse the Godwins of having cheated her out of her proper salary for years. Realizing that her accomplices are shaking him down, George Godwin furiously hands over “a dozen bricks” of near-worthless Zimbabwean banknotes, and watches as the thugs divide the loot between themselves and the housekeeper. Godwin’s reporter’s eye is particularly effective as he hones in on the details of his parents’ degradation:

I offer to make them lunch, but I find that the refrigerator is nearly empty….It contains half a lemon, hard and dry with age, and little portions of leftovers and scraps: two hard-boiled eggs on a saucer, a few shavings of stiff ham — Dad buys only six thin slices at a time now — and bread crusts and cheese rind saved for the dogs. My mother has also stored a small bag of cornmeal in there, which I toss out as it is mildewed and inedible.

And here he is describing the desperate lengths to which his father goes to hang on to his last valuable possession, an aging car, in the face of daily thefts and depredations:

He parks the car right beneath his bedroom window, as close as possible to the wall. He manages this by hanging a tennis ball from the eaves: when the ball touches the windshield, the bumper is an inch from the wall. After Dad switches off the engine, he turns the radio to full volume, so that even if someone breaks open the gate; neutralizes the car alarm; pries off the gear lock, the accelerator lock, and the crook lock on the steering wheel; bypasses the engine kill and hot-wires the ignition — the radio will immediately burst into life at full blast and, he hopes, wake him up.

Perhaps the least successful part of Godwin’s book is a subplot that he introduces early: the mystery surrounding his father’s identity. When the book opens, Godwin knows little about George Godwin’s early life: he is, Godwin assumes, a born-and-bred Englishman, “this Anglo-African in a safari suit and desert boots.” But during the course of his repeated visits to the family home the younger Godwin learns the truth: George Godwin was born Kazimierz Jerzy Goldfarb, a Polish Jew, who escaped ahead of the Nazi onslaught (most of the Goldfarb family perished at Auschwitz), joined the Polish exile forces, and fought the Nazis in France before emigrating to England. The revelation that this white Zimbabwean is in fact a deracinated Central European Jew adds a layer of irony to the Godwin family saga — decades after escaping the Nazis, George Godwin again finds himself a member of a persecuted minority — and it’s fascinating to watch Godwin try to access his newly discovered heritage. Still, Godwin’s reconstruction of his father’s life before his emigration to Africa lacks the immediacy of his on-the-ground reporting from Zimbabwe.

But this is a quibble. Godwin seems to capture every nuance of life in this beleaguered land: the bundles of near-worthless banknotes carted around in rucksacks and shopping bags, the “threadbare white shirt” and “sad, patient face” of an immigration official at Harare’s increasingly derelict airport, the feces-splattered tombstone that marks the final resting place of his sister, Jain, who was shot dead in 1978, at age twenty-eight, by jittery Rhodesian soldiers — another accidental casualty of war. In one of his most moving passages, Godwin describes the profound discomfort felt by those who can leave from such places at will — something anyone who has ever covered a war has experienced. In Godwin’s case, the distress is intensified because he is running away from his own country, and his own family:

…As we soar away into a crisp, cloudless sky, I feel the profound guilt of those who can escape. I am soaring away from my fragile, breathless father with his tentative hold on life. I’m soaring away from my mother, who still lies in her hospital bed surrounded by wounded demonstrators….The marchers for democracy are being shot at and teargassed, and I am flying away from it all. A nation is bleeding while I sit here cosseted with my baked trout and crispy bacon, my flute of Laurent-Perrier brut champagne, my choice of movies and my hot face towel….

I am abandoning my post. Like my father before me, I am rejecting my own identity. I am committing cultural treason.
Nearly four years after Godwin ends his narrative (with the death and cremation of his father in early 2004), the degradation and the suffering continue in Zimbabwe. Eighty-five percent of the population is jobless. Most schools and hospitals have collapsed. The rate of inflation reached 7,500 percent last June; the same month, the government declared a price freeze and arrested thousands of merchants who defied it. Production came to a standstill. The United Nations now estimates that some four million Zimbabweans — about one third of the population — will face food shortages or famine by the first quarter of 2008.

In September, I telephoned my old friend David Coltart, a white human rights lawyer and an opposition member of parliament, at his home in the southern city of Bulawayo. Coltart had been driving around in his car all morning, searching for something to eat, he told me, but the four supermarkets and two food wholesalers he’d visited had been stripped bare. “There is not a single loaf of bread, not a donut, no rice, nothing [in the city],” he said. Coltart still had his car, hard currency, access to black-market gasoline, and connections that could keep his family supplied with necessities. But most Zimbabweans were subsisting on vegetables they grew themselves on tiny plots, or on handouts sent by relatives who had fled to Botswana and South Africa. “People are hungry, frightened and depressed,” an opposition activist had written to Coltart after a week-long tour of rural areas. “Traders on the roads are selling fruits only, no cooking oil, soap, or maize meal. Bus stops are full of people waiting for the few buses that still ply these roads.”

Yet Mugabe’s hold on power remains secure — at least for the near future. The Movement for Democratic Change is weak and divided along tribal lines, and Mugabe’s control over the security forces remains unchallenged. Top officers are handsomely rewarded with precious hard currency, fat bonuses, and other perks: rank-and-file troops are kept in line through strict discipline and rewards such as gasoline, cooking oil, and food — basic necessities that remain largely unavailable to the general population. As I discovered during my travels through Zimbabwe last year, people are far too frightened to take to the streets in the mass civil action campaign that Morgan Tsvangirai and other opposition leaders have called for. Mugabe has threatened publicly to have Tsvangirai killed if his supporters hold public demonstrations against the regime. Early this year Tsvangirai was badly beaten and had his skull fractured by government goons — a message meant as much for ordinary Zimbabweans as for him. “We know we’ll be killed,” was a refrain I heard everywhere from schoolteachers, trade unionists, political activists, and housewives.
The United States and the European Union have imposed sanctions on Mugabe and his cronies that have frozen their overseas bank accounts and keep them from traveling abroad; but the measures have been largely ineffective. Many African leaders continue to rally around Mugabe, championing him as a living symbol of black liberation. Thabo Mbeki, the president of Zimbabwe’s powerful neighbor, South Africa, has refrained from publicly criticizing him, and has saved Zimbabwe from total paralysis by providing the government with fuel, power, and occasional dollops of cash.

The most courageous voice of opposition to Mugabe’s rule, the Roman Catholic archbishop Pius Ncube, called recently for a British invasion of Zimbabwe to unseat the dictator. That the regime’s principal opponent sees outside intervention as the only hope of deliverance is a measure of how cowed and beaten down its people have become. Ncube himself was the victim earlier this year of an apparent sting operation carried out by Mugabe’s pervasive Central Intelligence Organization. Photos were circulated showing Ncube having sexual relations with the wife of a Zimbabwean military officer, undermining his moral authority and forcing him to resign.

Mugabe recently announced his intention to run again in the 2008 presidential election, putting to rest rumors that he would retire to the $15 million villa that Serbian architects built for him in Harare’s northern suburbs. Last year, Jonathan Moyo, Mugabe’s former minister of information and a confidant for many years, told me that Mugabe “believes the people are still with him, that the only ones who do not support him are those in urban areas who come into contact with Western propaganda — the BBC, CNN. He lives in his own world.”

According to recent reports, international investors have been buying property in Zimbabwe, calculating that the economy has become so poor that it will start to grow again. They may have a long wait. The government controls all food distribution in rural areas, and has a long tradition of ballot-box stuffing, fraud, and intimidation. When I talked to him recently, Coltart, the white human rights attorney, did not rule out that at some point, the army and the police might rise against Mugabe, or that rivals within the ruling party would oust him in a coup d’état. But with the opposition fragmented, the security forces apparently ready to use their guns, average citizens thoroughly cowed, and Mugabe still able to count on the support of his neighbors, Coltart believed that Zimbabwe was nowhere near that point yet. “If an election were held tomorrow,” Coltart told me, “Mugabe would certainly win.”

VOA
By Blessing Zulu and Carole Gombakomba
Washington
21 December 2007

Interview With Glen Mpani
Listen to Interview With Glen Mpani
Discussion With Abel Chikomo and David Coltart
Listen to Discussion With Abel Chikomo and David Coltart

Zimbabwean ruling party and opposition negotiators engaged in crisis resolution talks who were expected to resume their discussions on Friday have pushed off their next round of negotiations until January, sources in Pretoria, South Africa, said.
Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa asked to be excused saying he would be attending a weekend memorial service for his son, who died recently. On the opposition side, Secretary General Tendai Biti of the Movement for Democratic Change faction of Morgan Tsvangirai also indicated that he has family business to attend to.

Pretoria sources said the talks will now resume January 2, adding that when the two sides return, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, mediator in the talks on behalf of the Southern African Development Community, will seek to break the impasse that has arisen in the talks despite apparently significant progress on a number of issues.

The opposition says a new constitution must be adopted before elections are held, but the ZANU-PF team says there is not enough time, given President Robert Mugabe’s recent declaration that elections must be held in March “without fail.”

Opposition officials say ZANU-PF reneged on a promise to adopt a new constitution before the elections in exchange for support by the opposition for a constitutional amendment overhauling the electoral system passed in September.

Ruling party sources say their delegates will offer to prove their commitment to a new constitution by publishing it officially – though not implementing it until after elections.

Cape Town-based political analyst Glen Mpani told reporter Blessing Zulu of VOA’s Studio 7 for Zimbabwe that the latest postponement is discouraging.

Despite reservations expressed by civic groups and some MDC members, ZANU-PF and both factions of the opposition joined forces in parliament to pass amendments to the country’s security, media, broadcasting and electoral laws this past week.
But the amendments have come under fire from civil society activists who say these changes are cosmetic and serve ZANU-PF interests.

Though both MDC factions agreed to these amendments, some members of the rival formations are less than enthusiastic about the amendments, Tsvangirai formation spokesman Nelson Chamisa saying repressive laws should be entirely repealed.

But Legal Affairs Secretary David Coltart of the MDC formation of Arthur Mutambara the amendments represent a step toward democracy even if they fall short.

For a further discussion of the question, reporter Carole Gombakomba spoke with Coltart and Advocacy Coordinator Abel Chikomo of the Media Monitoring Project, who said he believes the opposition may have been snookered by the ruling party.

By Robyn Dixon,
Los Angeles Times
December 18, 2007

POLOKWANE, SOUTH AFRICA — With a presidential election scheduled for March, the Zimbabwean government Monday announced changes to security and media laws that it has used in the past to suppress demonstrations and close independent newspapers.

Analysts quickly countered that the measures would not ensure a free and fair vote unless the election was delayed in order for newspapers to reopen and for the other reforms to have an effect.

Opponents of President Robert Mugabe have long sought changes to the controversial laws, but Mugabe’s insistence on pressing ahead with the scheduled presidential and parliamentary elections would limit the usefulness of the alterations, according to both factions of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, or MDC.

Mugabe, 83, last week was endorsed by the ruling ZANU-PF party for reelection as president, and has repeatedly stated that the elections will take place in March whether the opposition is prepared or not.

The opposition has accused the government of dragging out talks on political reforms, while rushing ahead to redraw electoral boundaries and create a raft of gerrymandered seats.

The changes would theoretically make it easier for opposition groups to hold protest rallies, for independent newspapers to publish and for journalists not accredited by the government to work. But more time is needed for them to have an effect, analysts say.

“The bottom line is postponing the election and operationalizing the new constitution: These are the two key things that are needed for an election,” said Sydney Masamvu, South Africa-based analyst on Zimbabwe with the International Crisis Group. “What Mugabe is trying to do is to push through some cosmetic reforms. Everything will be reading brilliantly on paper, but when you look on the ground, nothing’s changed.”

The reforms emerged from talks between the government and the opposition brokered by the Southern African Development Community, a regional body, in a bid to resolve Zimbabwe’s political crisis and usher in fair elections.

Talks remain deadlocked on whether a new constitution should take effect before or after elections. However, there has been substantial agreement on a new constitution in the talks.

David Coltart, associated with a faction of the MDC, which split into two groups in 2005, said the Mugabe government’s rushing to elections and gerrymandering showed it was not committed to free and fair elections.

“Clearly what Mugabe is seeking to achieve is to create an elaborate facade of a free and fair election because he desperately needs legitimacy amongst his peers and he needs it if he is ever going to get the World Bank and IMF to . . . rescue the Zimbabwean economy.”

Nelson Chamisa, spokesman for the other MDC faction, said the announcement in the main state newspaper of the changes was a ploy designed to deceive Zimbabweans.

“I think they want to mislead the nation and the world that there’s been movement, but obviously it’s on their terms, which is not going to help anyone. Zimbabweans want a new constitution. They want a whole new political environment,” he said. “It’s not possible for us to take part in elections where the result is predetermined.”

robyn.dixon@latimes.com

The Star
December 17, 2007
By Peta Thornycroft

Lusaka – Although Zimbabwe’s repressive media and public assembly laws were set to be profoundly reformed in parliament, a political agreement between Zanu-PF and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change has not been agreed.

It may never be agreed unless President Robert Mugabe delays elections way beyond the due date of March and allows them to be held under a new constitution.

Yesterday, Zanu-PF leaked information via the state-controlled Sunday Mail that an agreement was due to be signed with the MDC following nearly nine months of South African-facilitated talks.

However, MDC executives have agreed that while they will vote for the reformed laws tomorrow, there will be no agreement. “We will support the amendments because there are great improvements to present laws, but we will be asking our negotiators to go and see (President Thabo) Mbeki to say that Mugabe is being too difficult, impossible,” an official said.

David Coltart, the MDC’s founding legal secretary, who is in SA attending a conference, said yesterday: “Unless there is an agreement regarding a new constitution being introduced prior to the election and a reasonable time period between its introduction and holding an election, then any agreement will not be possible.

“I fear this is yet another cynical ploy of Zanu-PF to subvert the good intentions behind the mediation process.” – Independent Foreign Service

The Times
December 3, 2007

By Martin Fletcher

Robert Mugabe is “probably the cleverest politician in the world”, a
European diplomat conceded.

A prominent opponent of the President of Zimbabwe said: “If he was a chess
player he would be a grand-master, if not a world champion.”

The great fear among many of Mr Mugabe’s opponents is that the wily
octogenarian may spring a propaganda coup about his future on the EU-Africa
summit this week. They are concerned that he is close to clinching a deal
enabling him to win reelection next March with a veneer of legitimacy – then
press for an end to the international sanctions against his regime. Indeed,
they believe that he would desperately like to unveil the outline of such a
deal at the Lisbon summit and make Gordon Brown look churlish for boycotting
the event.

Such a deal is being overseen by Thabo Mbeki, the South African President,
who flew to Harare for an unexpected meeting with Mr Mugabe last Thursday.

Mr Mbeki has been mediating talks between Mr Mugabe’s ruling Zanu (PF) party
and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change since the summer, and Zanu
(PF) appears ready to offer concessions. Mr Mugabe’s critics, however, are
deeply divided on whether they will be genuine or merely cunning window
dressing.

For example, the two sides have already agreed a constitutional amendment
that, among other things, abolishes the President’s right to nominate 30 MPs
and increases the number of elected seats from 120 to 210. Most of those new
seats, though, would be in rural constituencies where the ruling Zanu (PF)
is strongest.

Zanu (PF) appears ready to ease media restrictions, but there are few
independent media voices left. It may agree to a new electoral commission,
but has already appointed loyalists as key administrators. It may ease its
repression of opposition leaders, but opponents claim that it is already
cracking down on grassroots activists in remote areas far from the public
eye. It could agree to let the four million Zimbabweans who have fled the
country vote, knowing that many are illegal immigrants and that registering
them would be almost impossible.

David Coltart, a prominent MDC MP, supports the talks because he thinks that
the “Gorbachev factor” will kick in: if Mr Mugabe agrees to even the
slightest liberalisation the process will run away from him. He also
believes the Southern African Development Community, the regional grouping
that instigated the talks, will insist on economic reforms that would
destroy Mr Mugabe’s power of patronage.

Trudy Stevenson, another MDC MP, argues that “the economic crisis in this
country is so bad that [Zanu (PF)] have to find some way forward and have no
alternative but come to some form of compromise”.

Sceptics, including the British Government, counter that Mr Mugabe will
either make promises that he has no intention of honouring or will concede
the bare minimum required to persuade the MDC to fight the elections and to
give the party the appearance of legitimacy. Once re-elected, he may even
appoint a few token members of the MDC as ministers and then demand
international aid and the lifting of sanctions.

One senior diplomat called Mr Mugabe a “wily bastard” who was “pulling the
wool over peoples’ eyes to get through the election . . . Everyone is in
such a wishful-thinking mood”.

Mike Davies, the chairman of the Combined Harare Residents’ Association,
called the talks a huge diversion that was draining the MDC’s energies and
causing a deep rupture with civic society groups such as his own. “Mugabe is
not going to commit political suicide,” he said.

Despite Zimbabwe’s economic meltdown, most experts believe that Mr Mugabe
and his party could win the presidential and parliamentary elections without
rigging them too blatantly.

The MDC is demoralised, depleted and split into two opposing factions.
Leading members admit privately that it is as weak as it has been since it
was founded in 1999.

From The Times
December 1, 2007
By Martin Fletcher

As the people of Zimbabwe are ground down by poverty and brutality, Robert Mugabe is offered a welcome at the international table

We knew Sarudzai Gumbo was still sick, but nothing prepared us for what we found. The seven-year-old was lying alone and neglected in a dirty sideroom in a Harare hospital.

Her head was a mass of septic wounds. Two large cancers were devouring the right side of her face. She had lost the sight of one eye and the other was gummed up. A filthy, blood-stained hat concealed untold horrors on her scalp – she screamed with pain when we tried to remove it. Flies hovered around her lesions. The stench of her putrefying flesh was overpowering. She weighed only 36lb (16.3kg).

The Times highlighted Sarudzai’s plight in March after discovering her in Mbare, a Harare slum. Her family was living on wasteland because its home had been destroyed by President Mugabe’s Operation Murambatsvina (“Clean Up Trash”). Her parents’ livelihoods had been ruined by the regime’s ban on street vendors. They both had Aids, as did Sarudzai, whose face was disfigured by open sores.

Readers sent in £7,500 to try to help her – funds forwarded to the Jesuit mission in Mbare – and Sarudzai was sent to an Aids clinic. But her mother died in April and her father took her away to the ancestral village and – fatally – interrupted her treatment. Sarudzai was transferred to Parirenyatwa Hospital just as Zimbabwe’s healthcare system was imploding.

As with every other hospital, the doctors and nurses who were there have left in droves for better-paid jobs abroad, their salaries at home rendered almost worthless by hyperinflation. There are no anaesthetics, drips, painkillers, antiretroviral drugs, blood for transfusions or even bandages. This is a shell of a hospital – a place where patients are left to die.

Sarudzai, whose father is also close to death, is a lovely, brave, affectionate girl. She never cries. She claps her hands when given something, waves when you leave. We brought two teddy bears that she instantly named Rudzai and Rudo – Shona for “Praise” and “Love”. Her condition was heartbreaking. We had her examined by a private doctor, who said it was the most shocking case he had seen. Within hours she was admitted to a private hospital. She has now been adopted by Kidzcan, a charity that helps Zimbabwean children with cancer, but her chances of survival are slim.

Sarudzai’s is just one of the legion of horror stories that Mr Mugabe seeks to conceal from the world by banning foreign journalists from Zimbabwe. She is one of millions of victims of his pernicious regime who will be largely overlooked when the octogenarian autocrat enjoys the propaganda triumph of being greeted as a legitimate national leader at the EU-Africa summit in Lisbon next week.

Over nine days spent travelling clandestinely around this beautiful, once-bountiful country, The Times found a nation where millions now struggle to survive on barely a bowl of sadza (a mealie-meal porridge) a day, the most basic services have all but collapsed and thousands die every week in a perfect storm of poverty, hunger and disease. Aids, like corruption, is rampant.

We found paupers’ burials, starving children with stunted bodies, orphans left to fend for themselves in the most brutal environments. It is a country regressing from commercial farms to vegetable patches, from the light bulb to the oil lamp, from the tap to the well. Feet – often bare – are replacing the wheel as the most common form of transport. Once Africa’s breadbasket, Zimbabwe can no longer provide its citizens with bread and water.

“This is the world’s worst humanitarian disaster, worse even than Darfur,” said David Coltart, an opposition MP. “We lose more people a week to preventable illnesses than are lost in Iraq, but because there’s no blood on the streets, little attention is paid to what’s going on here.”

Zimbabwe, like Sarudzai, has deteriorated dramatically since March. It is closer than ever to complete collapse, according to the International Crisis Group. Inflation has soared from 1,700 to 15,000 per cent. Draconian price controls have emptied the shops because producers cannot cover their costs. Though millions are starving, farmers are slaughtering dairy herds because they cannot sell milk at a viable price. But those who still have money can buy almost anything on the flourishing black market.

Petrol is virtually unattainable without foreign currency. Power cuts are frequent because Zimbabwe no longer has the foreign exchange to repair its decrepit generating stations or buy electricity from its neighbours. Taps run dry for days on end, and when the water does flow – even in the capital – it is contaminated by sewage.

In Mabvuku, a township east of Harare that has had no proper water supply all year, we found hundreds of women gathered on a patch of wasteland, waiting with their buckets for tiny, muddy pools to form in the bottom of half a dozen 15ft holes. “Some of us get up at 4am because there is more water then and it is cleaner. Some of us wait the whole day,” Joyce Dando, 46, said.

Four of the five reservoirs serving Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second city, have dried up. Some districts have gone weeks without water. Sewers explode for lack of running water to wash away blockages. Mr Coltart, the local MP, accuses the regime of deliberately blocking new water projects for a city that is an opposition stronghold. Japhet Ndabeni-Ncube, the Mayor, agrees. He envisages Bulawayo being abandoned “on the lines of New Orleans”, and accuses the Government of urbicide.

Agriculture, the backbone of economy, was destroyed by land seizures (which continue, with 160 of the 500 remaining white farmers having recently received eviction notices). What remains of industry is being destroyed by inane economic policies. GDP has fallen to the level of 1953, coal production to the level of 1946, and gold production to that of 1907.

Like its health system, Zimbabwe’s once-proud education system has been crippled by a mass exodus of teachers unable to survive on a monthly salary of barely Z$11. An estimated 30,000 have gone abroad since January, many quitting in mid-term. The University of Zimbabwe has lost at least half its 1,200 lecturers.

The mobile phone networks are collapsing; only a skeletal train service survives; bus fares exceed most people’s wages. Even cash is running out because the Government cannot print money fast enough, pay to repair its German presses or buy enough chemicals and ink from abroad. John Robertson, an economist, estimates that it printed Z$372 billion in March, Z$5,648 billion in August.

The human consequences are desperate. A senior NGO official said that nearly half the population now needed food aid. In both rural and urban areas The Times found children with the distended bellies and swollen joints of kwashiorkor – a disease caused by severe malnutrition .

In one rural clinic, a 20-month-old boy lay dying of marasmus, another disease caused by malnutrition. He weighed 11lb. There was no hope, said the doctor in charge. The clinic treats hundreds of villagers who come from far and wide each day on buses, donkey carts or foot. More than 80 per cent are HIV-positive. Half are medically malnourished. That lethal combination has destroyed their immune systems and caused an explosion of other diseases such as TB, malaria, meningitis and pneumonia.

In a Harare cemetery The Times found five funerals taking place simultaneously. An official said the city buried 5,690 adults last year and expected to bury 8,000 this. Those figures exclude paupers’ burials: that morning alone 38 people had been dumped in an unmarked mass grave with no religious service.

A Bulawayo cleric took us to Kilarney, a desperate collection of shacks in the parched bush outside the city that house 500 families displaced by Operation Murambatsvina. There is no school, no clinic. The inhabitants have no jobs, no money, just a few cooking pots. They draw water from the shaft of an abandoned goldmine with a sign reading: “Danger – Cyanide Mining”. They survive on mealie meal provided by the church. Every few months the cleric gets soap which he divides into tiny pieces, one per family.

Nokhuthula, 24, a stick-thin mother of two tiny children, stood outside a shelter of corrugated iron and plastic sheeting held down by stones. A few rags were drying on a thorn bush. Her husband was a carpenter, but his tools were destroyed by Mr Mugabe’s thugs. She used to supplement his income by sewing, but could no longer afford needles and thread. The last time she ate anything but sadza was last Christmas when she had a bowl of rice.

“There’s no hope here. This is a place where people are lucky to reach the age of 40,” the cleric said. He then drove us farther into the bush and showed us rows of mounds in the red earth, each covered with thorny branches to keep animals away. This was where he buried his parishioners, their bodies wrapped in blankets, because their families could not afford proper funerals.

In Mbare, a southern Harare slum, church workers rounded up half a dozen destitute women for The Times to talk to – women like Chipo Holaza, 32, who lost her husband to Aids two years ago. She lives with her four children under plastic sheeting, and sells herself for as little as 20p a time. She is now disfigured by Aids herself. “I’m desperate. The children will have no one to look after them if I pass away. They’ll be street kids,” she said. One headmaster near Bulawayo said that almost all of his 300 female students, aged 14 to 16, were selling their bodies for food. A dental student at the University of Zimbabwe said several classmates were doing the same.

No country on Earth has such a rapidly contracting economy or plummeting life expectancy, but diplomats still believe Mr Mugabe will retain the presidency in elections due next March.

Boosted by Lisbon, he is certain to secure the Zanu (PF) nomination at a special congress on December 14. With the opposition Movement for Democratic Change demoralised, depleted by emigration and split into rival factions, with four million of Zimbabwe’s ablest citizens having fled the country and those that remain debilitated by suffering, Zanu (PF)’s superior political machine should ensure a Mugabe victory.

He is taking no chances though. In remote areas, far from the public eye, his thugs are at work. An activist from Binga in the far northwest said that 200 former members of Zanu (PF)’s youth militia arrived last June. Since then, pumped high on drugs and alcohol, they had systematically terrorised the poorest areas, burning homes, stealing goats and gang-raping as many as 300 women aged between 16 and 51. The activist described Zanu (PF)’s strategy: “If you’re not for us you are against us, and if you’re against us, you’re going to be broken.”

VOA
By Peta Thornycroft
21 November 2007

Former Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith who died in Cape Town late Tuesday brings to an end an era, which haunted citizens of independent Zimbabwe. Peta Thornycroft reports for VOA that Ian Smith, who took his country into war rather than give up white minority rule, died unrepentant.

The Zimbabwe state press has reported Ian Smith’s death at 88, in moderate tones.

Opposition to his rule helped bring to power the present leader of Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe, who lead guerrillas in a punishing civil war for one man one vote. Only black people with a certain education could vote in what was then Rhodesia.
Ian Smith stayed on in Zimbabwe after independence, without security, and continued to farm undisturbed until health problems forced him to move closer to his two surviving children in Cape Town.

He never wanted to leave Zimbabwe and remained profoundly critical of President Mugabe’s rule.

“Many of his political decisions and policies were disastrous for this country,” noted David Coltart, one of Zimbabwe’s longest serving human rights lawyers, who as a teenager was drafted into Ian Smith’s police force during the end of the civil war. “The draconian legislation passed under his tenure as prime minister in the 1960s and 1970s and the unilateral declaration of independence announced by him in November 1965 were the root cause of the civil war that erupted in then Rhodesia in the 1970s. Those policies also radicalized black nationalist movements and directly spawned the violent and fascist rule of Zanu-PF today. I think history will show that his policies contributed to the disastrous state that Zimbabwe is in today.”

Coltart like most Zimbabweans, including President Robert Mugabe, who was jailed for a decade during the civil war, say Mr. Smith led a personally moral life and loved the country.

“During the 14 years of his rule, Rhodesia became a country that produced a wide variety of goods. In the early 1970s and late 1960s the Rhodesian economy grew and of course at the time of independence Ian Smith bequeathed to Robert Mugabe a very strong currency. A currency that was certainly stronger than the U.S. dollar at that time,” he explained. “He also ran a very efficient administration. No Zimbabwean ever starved to death under his tenure. And Robert Mugabe has taken the jewel of Africa in 1980 and destroyed it. So that would be the positive legacy of Ian Smith.”

Zimbabwe’s currency is virtually worthless now, and inflation at about 17,000 percent is the highest in the world. Nevertheless, most Zimbabweans, including those who are now suffering, have demonstrated since independence they would not want to return to minority white rule.

There are now only a few thousand economically active whites left in Zimbabwe.