Zimbabwe -- Mugabe is starving his own people

Telegraph (UK) ^ | August 9, 2002 | Tim Butcher

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People are being starved in Zimbabwe by President Robert Mugabe's deliberate and systematic ploy of using food shortages to cling to power.

Millions of people are going hungry not, as Mr Mugabe's government claims, because of poor rains but as a direct result of its policy of denying food to opposition supporters and enriching its loyalists.

Last night, the deadline passed for the mass eviction of 2,900 of Zimbabwe's white commercial farmers, for decades the mainstay of the agricultural sector. Mr Mugabe ordered them to abandon their homes, land and livelihoods by midnight.

An investigation by The Telegraph found that control of the Grain Marketing Board (GMB), Zimbabwe's state-owned monopoly supplier of commercial maize, was passed this year to one of Mr Mugabe's most loyal henchmen, Air Marshal Perence Shiri, an alleged war criminal.

With Zimbabwe's economy in chaos, Shiri's mission was to spend a £17 million loan provided by Libya buying just enough maize to stave off food riots, which would then be supplied through the GMB.

The organisation, which is meant to supply maize at subsidised prices to all Zimbabweans, has instead been selling maize only to supporters of the ruling Zanu-PF party. Backers of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change went hungry.

Worse still was the country's Food For Work programme. Thousands of opposition supporters would provide 15 days' labour only to be told at the end there was no GMB food for them.

The GMB is so corrupt and politicised that aid groups shipping food into Zimbabwe are being forced to set up their own expensive parallel storage and distribution facilities, rather than using those of the GMB - the traditional way of bringing food aid into Zimbabwe.

There is also evidence that the Zimbabwean government is deliberately blocking the work of these international aid groups and keeping the flow of aid down to a trickle.

That trickle is enough to stave off threats of public unrest, but not enough to provide food for all of the country.

"What we are seeing is nothing but humanitarian torture," an aid worker said. "It takes three months to die of starvation and this is a torture every bit as bad as beating someone with barbed wire or hanging them from handcuffs."

One British Government source said: "The irony is that the food shortage is one of the reasons the people in Zimbabwe might be impelled to rise up against the government but we are morally obliged to provide food that removes that impulsion and secures the Mugabe regime."

The British government has promised aid worth £32 million to Zimbabwe.

A warehouse of supplies organised by the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace was blockaded for three months by Zanu-PF militants and an attempt to increase the flow of humanitarian supplies by the World Food Programme (WFP) has also been blocked. The WFP relies on recognised agencies to do the final distribution on the ground and aid sources said the mere presence of a British charity, Save the Children (UK), on a list of possible distributors is hindering expansion.

Aid groups are routinely criticised in the state-owned media in Zimbabwe, accused of being tools of the "imperialist, colonialist West".

The situation is being worsened by logistical problems in neighbouring countries such as South Africa, where management errors in the state-run railways mean there is a drastic shortage of goods wagons to move grain.

And in Mozambique a malfunction in a bagging machine at the port of Beira means six ships carrying grain remain in the approaches to the harbour, unable to offload supplies for Zimbabwe.

In effect, the regime in Zimbabwe is doing just enough to help its own supporters while blocking efforts to help the millions of needy people in the country.

So far, there have been only a handful of deaths connected to food shortages. Without any basic food supplies, families have been forced to live off what they can find in the bush and some children have died from eating poisonous berries.

By early November, however, before the next planting season, aid experts predict widespread malnutrition in Zimbabwe unless significant food supplies can be brought into the country.

The WFP, the world's largest humanitarian aid organisation, currently estimates six million people in Zimbabwe out of a population of 13 million are suffering from food shortages.

There have been intermittent rains in the region this year but observers believe most of the shortages have resulted from Mr Mugabe's policy of land invasions, which have all but destroyed the country's once thriving commercial farming sector.

South of the Limpopo in South Africa the same intermittent rains have not stopped farmers producing a surplus of about 1.8 million tons of maize.

For almost all of the 1990s, Zimbabwe was a net exporter of maize and so good were its supplies that the WFP had an office in Harare, not to distribute maize in Zimbabwe but to procure Zimbabwean maize for distribution elsewhere.

That situation now seems a long way away.

[Clive]

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[gcruse]

Is it time to recycle the Somalia jokes yet?

What do you call a Somali with a dog?
A: A vegetarian.

What do you call a Somali with two dogs?
A: A rancher.