The horde of painfully thin street children milling around you at traffic lights is almost the least of it: in a population now down to 11m or less there are an estimated 1.3m orphans.
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A game ranger friend tells me that hyena attacks on humans, previously unheard of, have become increasingly common. “So many babies, not all of them dead, are being dumped in the bush that hyenas have developed a taste for human flesh,” he explains.
A staggering 42,000 women died in childbirth last year, for example, compared with fewer than 1,000 a decade ago.
A vast human cull is under way in Zimbabwe and the great majority of deaths are a direct result of deliberate government policies. Ignored by the United Nations, it is a genocide perhaps 10 times greater than Darfur’s and more than twice as large as Rwanda’s.Genocide is not a word one should use hastily but the situation is exactly as described in the UN Convention on Genocide, which defines it as “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”.
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When I visited Zimbabwe in 1997 it was still the breadbasket of southern Africa and you could read letters in the local papers from members of the well- educated black middle class complaining, for example, that a floral roundabout was not being properly maintained. Such innocence abruptly vanished after 2000, when President Robert Mugabe launched farm invasions and a political terror campaign to counter a rising tide of opposition. Since Mugabe forbade entry to foreign journalists, getting in at all became increasingly tricky
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Matabeleland, always the centre of opposition to Mugabe, was the first to experience his iron fist in the mid-1980s and has taken more terrible punishment in recent years. Last year, in common with the rest of the country, it was the target of Operation Murambatsvina (Shona for “drive out the filth”) in which the police and army destroyed shanty towns and cracked down on informal traders after Mugabe decreed that they needed to be forcibly “re-ruralised” to regain their peasant roots. All told, some 2m people were affected.
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"we would be better off with only 6m people, with our own who support the liberation struggle. We don’t want all these extra people”.
Mugabe’s henchman (and secret police boss), Didymus Mutasa, in 2002
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“Proper burial has always been important in African society but now many people have a pauper’s burial — no coffins, no service, no relatives present; the bodies are just thrown in a pit like cattle. Our young people cannot think of marriage because they are poverty-stricken. So many are just waiting to die. Some say to me there is no difference between life and death, that life has lost all meaning.
“The women suffer the most. At a certain point the men just walk away but the women are left with their children, watching them starve. We used to have universal schooling but 50% of the children are now out of school because the parents cannot afford even the smallest fees.
“Such children have no future. The only hope lies in the end of Mugabe. Some people pray for him to die but they are very scared. In any meeting of 20 people there will always be two informers.
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Like every black Zimbabwean I met, Makoni would like to leave the country but is in effect trapped by her own poverty and weakness. Despite the horrendous death toll, Archbishop Ncube is right. This is not a genocide like that in Rwanda, where some 900,000 people were butchered in an orgy of tribal hatred. Instead, the regime’s key motive at every stage has simply been its own maintenance of power.
From 2000 on, it destroyed commercial agriculture because it saw the white farmers and their workers as opposition to Mugabe. This led to the first wave of killing, as some 2.25m farm-workers and their families were thrown off the farms, many after being beaten and tortured. An unknown number died. The eviction had the effect of collapsing the economy and cutting the food supply far below subsistence in every subsequent year.
What scarce food there was left, along with seeds, fertiliser, agricultural implements and every other means to life, was made dependent on possession of a Zanu-PF party card. Campaigns of terror followed in 2000 and 2002-03. The population has since been kept in a continuous state of anxiety by a series of military-style “operations”, of which Murambatsvina and Maguta are merely two particularly murderous examples.
[...]World Health Organisation figures show that life expectancy in Zimbabwe, which was 62 in 1990, had by 2004 plummeted to 37 for men and 34 for women. These are by far the worst such figures in the world. Yet Zimbabwe does not even get onto the UN agenda: South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki, who has covered for Mugabe from the beginning, uses his leverage to prevent discussion. How long this can go on is anyone’s guess.
After Rwanda, the UN vowed “never again” but Mugabe — and, to a considerable extent, Mbeki — have already been responsible for far more deaths than Rwanda suffered and the number is fast heading into realms previously explored only by Stalin, Mao and Adolf Eichmann.
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