IWPR - February 4th, 2005

Mugabe shows little sign of implementing regional leaders’ electoral conduct guidelines aimed at ensure a free and fair ballot.

By Augustine Mutandwa in Harare

The legitimacy and international acceptance - or not - of Zimbabwe's sixth parliamentary elections on March 31 hinge on whether the ruling ZANU PF party respects and applies guidelines on electoral conduct laid down by leaders of countries in the region six months ago.

Heads of state of the Southern African Development Community, SADC, including Zimbabwe's president Robert Mugabe, signed the Mauritius Protocol on the Indian Ocean island of that name last August.

Drawn up specifically as a result of international condemnation of the conduct of the last Zimbabwean parliamentary elections in 2000, the protocol demands that all registered political parties be allowed to campaign freely; have unlimited access to the media; permitted freedom of association; and that all citizens be allowed to exercise their right to vote.

The principles and guidelines also talk of the need for an independent electoral commission to run the ballot and to deploy election observers two weeks before the polls. The heads of state further demanded that there should be an independent judiciary and programmes of voter education run by the government and opposition parties.

With fewer than eight weeks to go before Zimbabweans go to the polls, President Mugabe - who has been in power since his country's independence in 1980 - has done very little as yet to demonstrate that he intends to honour the Mauritius Protocol or that he wants to level the political playing field to allow the free and fair participation of opposition parties.

On February 2, he cocked a snook at his fellow heads of state by expelling a delegation of the Congress of South African Trades Unions, COSATU, who had arrived in Harare to hold routine talks with Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions.

While international attention is closely focused on the SADC rules, Brian Kagoro of the Crisis in Zimbabwe Committee - an umbrella body representing pro-democracy groups - said they would have little effect.

"It's a joke," said Kagoro, a constitutional lawyer and human rights activist. "The reforms cannot be introduced within two months."

He was supported by COSATU general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi, part of the expelled delegation, who said, "Where have you seen a government so desperate, going to the length that they have to refuse entry to trade unionists, unless they have something to hide?

Referring to the leaders of South Africa's apartheid government in the Eighties and Rhodesia before it gained its independence and became Zimbabwe in 1980, he went on, "[The ruling] ZANU PF was once a liberation movement, but it has become a brutal regime which has no respect for basic human rights. Its actions are no different from PW Botha and Ian Smith.

"It is simply a change of complexion of the oppressor. Anyone who disagrees [with Mugabe] is jailed and those who have a different point of view are tortured."

A SADC election observer mission will be deployed two weeks before the voting to pronounce whether the political environment is conducive to holding free, fair and peaceful elections.

But Welshman Ncube, secretary general of the main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, MDC, said that the government is flouting the SADC guidelines daily.

"The police continue to stop us from holding political rallies, while allowing ZANU PF to holds theirs," he said. "Our party activists remain at risk of being abducted, beaten and tortured by ruling party militias and members of the security forces."

The MDC, which decided only on February 3 to take part in an election it expects to be deeply flawed, has said the Mauritius principles can only begin to be honoured if an independent electoral commission is established and if the most draconian laws used by Mugabe against opponents are repealed.

These include the Public Order and Security Act, POSA, which was inherited from the previous white minority regime of Ian Smith. It forbids any gathering of five people or more, and is being used by the government to deny the opposition the ability to hold meetings and rallies.

The MDC also wants the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, AIPPA, repealed before the polls open.

AIPPA is a draconian piece of legislation that requires journalists to be licensed by the government and has led to the closure of several newspapers, including the independent Daily News, the expulsion of all foreign correspondents and the detention of many Zimbabwean journalists.

The MDC also seeks reform of the judiciary, arguing that it is no longer impartial because the bench is packed with ZANU PF loyalists.

One such judge is George Chiweshe, a 51-year-old former ZANU guerrilla and Mugabe lieutenant, who has been appointed chairman of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission. Chiweshe has already erased three important MDC urban constituencies from the electoral map and is expected to use soldiers, policemen and prison officers to staff and supervise 6,000 polling stations instead of trained electoral officers.

The MDC is allowed no time on national radio and TV, while all independent radio stations have been closed down. One station, Voice of the People, was silenced after its building was destroyed in a mystery explosion.

Trevor Ncube, former managing editor of the Zimbabwe Independent and now publisher of South Africa's Mail and Guardian, is deeply sceptical about the possibility of a free and fair Zimbabwe election.

"An election is not a one day event," said Ncube, who is also chairman of the IWPR Africa board.

He said ZANU PF was using the SADC protocol in an attempt to reverse what is seen by most of the world as its illegitimate status, having rigged the last parliamentary election in 2000. March’s ballot is expected to be no different. According to Ncube, this year's election is "already rigged".

The government has refused to publish voter rolls and will not allow independent observers into the country to monitor the election process.

In addition, Zimbabwean traditional chiefs charged with overseeing voting and the distribution of government food aid to their rural subjects have recently had their salaries doubled and been given government cars to ensure they and their village communities stay loyal to ZANU PF.

Augustine Mutandwa is the pseudonym of an IWPR contributor in Zimbabwe.

Millions said to be in need of food aid, largely as a result of chaotic land reform programme.

By Elias Mugwadi in Harare

Zimbabwe is sliding inexorably into famine as crops fail and the ZANU PF government remains unwilling to import grain to cover the production deficit.

“Land preparation by resettled [black] farmers is way behind schedule,” admitted Local Government Minister Ignatius Chombo, who is chairman of a government food supply task force. “We were targeting four million hectares [of tilled cropland], but only 900,000 hectares have been prepared.”

A report just released by the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, FEWS NET, the regional prediction service, said 5.8 million Zimbabweans – half the total population – are in need of food aid.

The problem stems largely from the chaotic organisation of President Robert Mugabe’s land reform programme, in which white commercial farmers have been driven from the land since 2000 to be replaced largely by peasant subsistence farmers and government ministers, army officers, judges and top civil servants with no farming skills.

The majority of the new farmers have no ploughing equipment and they have been sowing maize, the country’s basic food crop, on untilled soils. In addition, because the handful of highly skilled maize seed farmers have been driven from their land into exile, this season’s crop has been planted with untreated, low quality seed. There have also been severe shortages of fertiliser and other critical inputs.

“The biggest drawback over the past four years we have seen here has been the lack of ploughing equipment,” Obediah Mupanganyama, a resettled farmer at Vairona, a previously white-owned farm near Mazowe, 67 kilometres north of Harare, told IWPR.

“Most farmers have been planting on unploughed land which brings us to the problem you are looking at. The weeds have overwhelmed the crops and we have no machinery or chemicals to deal with them.”

Mupanganyama said there were a few private tractors for hire, and the cost of doing so, 350,000 dollars [60 US dollars], was far beyond anything that any “new farmer” could afford.

Black settlers at the previous white-owned Bally Hooly Farm at Glendale, 83 km north of Harare and formerly a rich wheat and cotton area before Mugabe’s land invasion strategy was launched, told IWPR they had been unable to till their soil and had scattered only untreated maize seeds.

Elsewhere hungry Zimbabweans are staving off starvation by selling property or receiving money from relatives among the three million or more of their countrymen who have gone into exile. Many have sold cattle and the tools they need to produce crops. “There aren’t obviously starving people walking the streets, but people are having to resort to things like selling their last cow to buy food,” a senior western diplomat told the Reuters news agency.

The Independent, one of the country’s few remaining private weekly newspapers, reported that many people are now going without food for days, with children fainting in schools and women miscarrying as a result of malnutrition. Around the country, hungry and irritated people have been standing in long queues for hours to buy tiny rations of maize, and police have had to calm unruly crowds.

Eddie Cross, economic spokesman of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, described the situation as frightening. “Food shortages are causing extreme hardship across the board and across the country,” he said. “The political implications are profound. I would hate to run an election campaign amidst a food crisis for which there is no solution.”

By February, the maize crop throughout the country is usually at knee-high level. But IWPR’s enquiries showed that many farmers were still planting – far too late to secure a decent crop because the summer rains are now ending. The coming harvest is likely to be one of the worst ever because of poor planning, erratic rains and absence of low interest loans.

The forecast by international donors and the political opposition that the chaotic land reform programme would be unworkable and a recipe for disaster is turning out to be true. While no accurate figures are available, farm experts estimate that Zimbabwe’s agricultural production has fallen by 70 per cent in the last four years.

Just three years ago, Zimbabwe was still the breadbasket of southern Africa, fully self-sufficient in basic foodstuffs, with surpluses for export. Now it is a net food importer and production of such key crops as maize, wheat, tobacco, horticultural produce, soya and cotton has been slashed.

Last year, the ZANU PF government banned the import of food by international humanitarian organisations. It claimed a record 2.4 million tonnes of maize and wheat had been harvested. But this was shot down when parliament’s farm sub-committee said only 388,000 tonnes were produced, representing only one-sixth of the country’s requirements.

Minister Chombo’s gloomy harvest prediction has been contradicted by Agriculture Minister Joseph Made who boasted that the new settlers would produce a record grain harvest in the next few months of three million tonnes.

Following a harvest of less than one million tonnes last year, such a production total would be “a staggering turnaround, if true”, said James Morris, executive director of the UN’s World Food Programme, WFP. “If the projections are not correct, a great number of people will be very much at risk. I don’t know what the evidence is that things will be any better than last year. The next 90 days are going to be crucial.”

Elias Mugwadi is a pseudonym for an IWPR contributor in Zimbabwe.

Government’s politicisation of healthcare hampers work of malaria control workers at every turn.

By Richard Tren in Harare

The rainy season has begun in Zimbabwe, which is welcome news for gardeners and farmers alike. Over the past few weeks, dramatic thunderstorms and heavy downpours have covered much of the country, sparking vigorous growth in plants and whatever few crops have been planted. But while the rains bring new life, they unfortunately also mark the beginning of the malaria transmission season.

This year, malaria, along with almost every aspect of life in Zimbabwe has a political slant to it. This deadly mix of politics and disease does not augur well for ordinary Zimbabweans now more than ever at peril from mosquitoes and their own government.

I was recently asked by Zimbabwe’s malaria control programme to assist them in communicating their new malaria control policy, which includes the use of DDT. DDT is sprayed in tiny quantities inside houses and is one of the most effective ways of controlling the disease. It is also somewhat controversial because of the bad reputation that DDT has among environmentalists. I agreed to assist as I thought that I may help to save some lives and improve malaria control in that country. This was a mistake.

The Zimbabwean Department of Health had organised two events, a press conference in Harare followed by a public rally near Lake Kariba in the north west of the country. Both events had an overt political agenda that in the current climate in Zimbabwe is both sickening and dangerous.

Not a single journalist from the remains of Zimbabwe’s independent media had been invited to the press conference in Harare. Only writers from the state media, who unquestioningly regurgitate the violent and abusive messages of the Mugabe government, were involved.

Matters deteriorated at the public rally, which was held in an area that is not a stronghold for the ruling ZANU PF party. During the last parliamentary election, a number of awful atrocities were committed in the area against supporters of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, MDC, party. While Kariba is a highly malarial area, the choice to hold a government malaria rally there was probably a carefully thought out strategy.

The audience was divided between the locals from the village, who crowded underneath a large green tent that had seen better days, and supposed VIPs, such as World Health Organisation, WHO, staff and dignitaries who were under a slightly smarter large striped tent. A raised, covered stage, decked in the colours of the Zimbabwean flag and flanked by large photographs of Mugabe, housed the event’s speakers which included the ministers of health for Zimbabwe and Malawi as well as a representative from UNICEF and, interestingly, one from Mugabe’s arch enemy, the British Aid agency, DFID.

Before the speeches and songs about malaria could begin, the master of ceremonies asked local ZANU PF office bearers from the VIP tent to identify themselves and give a rousing message to the crowd. One “comrade” after another stood up and shouted “Forward with Mugabe” and “Down with the MDC” to which the crowd was supposed to respond “Forward” and “Down” in turn. The lack of enthusiasm from the locals was very apparent, but there were many in the VIP tent gleefully raising their fists.

Before the Zimbabwean minister of health gave his speech, he was asked to think up an anti-malaria slogan. The minister duly stood up, raised his fist and shouted “Down with the MDC” and then “Down with Mosquitoes”. As someone who has followed Zimbabwean politics for a while, I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was.

In Zimbabwe, almost everything is politicised. People are denied access to food if they cannot produce a ZANU PF party card. Worse still, they are frequently beaten, tortured and raped for supporting the opposition MDC. Politicising malaria control in such a blatant way marks a new low for Mugabe’s government. Zimbabwe always had an excellent malaria control programme, but in the past few years it has all but disintegrated. Starved of funds due to the economic chaos caused by Mugabe’s disastrous policies, along with the fact that public funds have been diverted to Mugabe’s hated secret police, the Central Intelligence Organisation, most of the anti-malaria personnel have left.

Last year, the malaria control programme only managed to protect 3.4 per cent of households from malaria because they did not even have petrol to drive out to the malaria areas.

Some of the malaria control staff are simply trying to do their job under very trying circumstances, but the politicisation of healthcare by the country’s leadership hampers their work at every turn. More worrying is the fact that various UN bodies as well as aid agencies appear to be endorsing and legitimising this political abuse by standing shoulder to shoulder with the ZANU PF leadership. This should stop immediately. The only way for the long-term health of Zimbabwe’s people to improve is to ensure peace, democracy and economic growth. That will not and cannot happen under Mugabe’s government and the UN should come out and say so.

Richard Tren is a director of the South Africa-based health advocacy group Africa Fighting Malaria.

Early achievements in fields such as education and health are rapidly unravelling.

By Ben Takawira in Harare

Although the government of President Robert Mugabe, in power since Zimbabwe attained independence from Britain in 1980, has been roundly accused of repression, lack of democracy and running down the once booming economy, it initially achieved significant successes.

These were in health and education fields and in economically empowering a small number of the majority black population.

The major success was in the field of education, where Mugabe and his ruling ZANU PF party introduced a policy of education for all in 1980. There were 2,411 primary schools in the country at independence, but within four years the figure rose to 4,161. By last year, the figure had reached 5,007. The number of secondary schools, of which there were fewer than 900 in 1980, rose to 1,548 by 1999 and to 1,680 by the year 2004.

Enrolment in primary schools stood at 800,000 in 1980 and rose to 2.4 million inside four years. Secondary school enrolment rose from 66,000 students in 1980 to 313,000 by 1984 and to 1,502,000 by the year 2004, a major achievement by any standards.

This increase in the number of schools also meant that the number of teacher training colleges had to be increased by a similar margin to provide the necessary teaching strength. There were four teacher training colleges at independence - now there are 15.

Whereas secondary education before independence was reserved for only 12 per cent of primary school leavers, mainly white. By 2004, the former was open to all the latter.

The number of technical colleges rose from two, one each in Harare and Bulawayo, in 1980 with an enrolment of only 2,000 to ten in 2005 with an enrolment of 15,000. The government also paid grants to mission and private schools to make sure these continued operating viably.

University education, which was confined to one University of Zimbabwe campus in Harare in 1980, was spread to twelve others, including three run by various churches. Enrolment has risen from 1,000 in 1980 to more than 54,000 this year.

Mugabe, who began his working life as a school teacher and later became a lecturer at a teacher training college in Ghana, has boasted that Zimbabwe's education is the best within the southern African region.

He supports this by pointing to the fact that university graduates from Zimbabwe are highly sought in neighbouring countries like Zambia, South Africa, Botswana, Malawi and Namibia, where some have been given high posts both in government and the private sector.

However, despite all these early achievements, the past five years of economic collapse, political oppression and rampant lawlessness, compounded by the scourge of AIDS, is rapidly unravelling all the good work.

In 2000, when the upheavals began, primary school enrolment was 93 per cent, the highest in Africa. But the figure has slumped now to less than 60 per cent, according to the United Nations childrens’ agency UNICEF.

Literacy among schoolchildren, once 86 per cent, is plummeting and drop-out rates are soaring.

Additionally, after seven successive years in which the gross national product has been reduced, the government can barely pay its 109,000 teachers and has abandoned the maintenance and development of urban state schools, let alone those in the bush. The impact of AIDS is increasingly felt in the classroom.

UNICEF says that more than 25 per cent of teachers are HIV-positive and predicts that in five years’ time 38,000 will have died. Teachers have been blamed for infecting pupils as young as 11 and 12 with HIV, while heavy drinking and serial absenteeism have become widespread in the profession.

Mugabe and his team initially chalked up considerable successes in the field of health. But it has become a story of two steps forward, three steps backward.

At independence, there were very few hospitals for the black majority. This was quickly addressed as Mugabe sought assistance from the international donor community, mainly the UN, and built health centres right across the country, which made medical services available to the majority of people.

Within ten years of independence, the government had built 246 rural health centres and upgraded 450 while building seventeen entirely new hospitals. Success could be measured by a fall in the infant mortality rate from 83 per 1,000 live births in 1980 to 60 per 1,000 live births in 1990.

Life expectancy rose from 55 years in 1980 to 61 in 1988. However, this has fallen drastically to less than 37 now because of AIDS, the resurgence of malaria and growing hunger. More than a quarter of the adult population is HIV-positive. Gains made in the health sector have also been severely eroded in the past decade by the government's mismanagement of the economy.

Lack of foreign currency has increasingly seen the government dependent on foreign aid handouts to provide a minimum of essential drugs to hospitals and clinics.

Mugabe can claim some success in transferring wealth from the minority whites to the majority blacks – a success more recognised in Africa than the world beyond. The government has extended soft loans from its national budget to black entrepreneurs and some of them have achieved real success in the fields of transport, fuel, mining and chemicals and plastic manufacture.

Mugabe’s controversial land redistribution programme is undoubtedly an area where blacks have benefited, albeit unevenly. However, in recent years the redistribution has been poorly planned. Many people given fertile land do not have the necessary skills to utilise the resource properly. Agricultural production has consequently dropped drastically.

In the early years of independence, white commercial farmers had begun referring to “Good old Bob (Mugabe)” after he urged them to persevere with their profession. “No one doubts that the fortunes of seven and a half million people [the Zimbabwe population size at independence] rest in your hands,” he said.

As the nation gears up for the March 31 ballot, the land issue is a tool that is certain to be used by Mugabe for political purposes again.

Ben Takawira is the pseudonym of an IWPR contributor in Zimbabwe.

Visiting parliamentary delegation say their deportation was “scandalous”.

By Bridget Musa in Harare

A delegation from South Africa’s official parliamentary opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, DA, on a fact finding mission ahead of Zimbabwe’s crucial March parliamentary election, was expelled on arrival at Harare International Airport on Friday, February 18.

The three officials, DA deputy leader Joe Seremane, party spokesman Douglas Gibson and backbench MP Paul Boughey, were labelled prohibited immigrants and put on the same South African Airway plane on which they had arrived. The plane left Harare in the afternoon an hour after landing.

Gibson said they were shocked at the treatment by Zimbabwe’s immigration officials. They had expected to be welcomed as honoured guests from a friendly neighbouring country.

“We are going to appeal regarding us being treated as prohibited immigrants. We didn’t expect this to happen,” Gibson told IWPR in Harare. He said they had written in advance to the Zimbabwe government, through the country’s South African embassy in Harare and Zimbabwe’s ministry of information, requesting a meeting with President Robert Mugabe and other government officials.

The DA officials said they had also wanted to meet other organisations to understand the Zimbabwean situation ahead of the March 31 parliamentary election and assess whether a free and fair poll was possible. “Clearly, we have to suppose that the election will be a farce,” said Gibson. “Our treatment was scandalous, but we can only conclude that the people of Zimbabwe are daily facing even worse treatment than we have received.”

Seremane told IWPR their deportation showed that the Zimbabwean government had something to hide, particularly in the field of human rights abuses and lack of freedom of expression and association. He said the DA was concerned about allegations of violation of human rights and the disregard by Mugabe’s government of principles and guidelines set down by the Southern Africa Development Community, SADC, for the conduct of Zimbabwe’s election.

“We recognise Zimbabwe’s sovereignty,” said Seremane, a veteran of the guerrilla struggle against apartheid in South Africa. “We are going to appeal. I am very sad that this has happened. It seems that something is being hidden. I don’t think it was proper to deport us.

“We are passionate about democracy and democracy in the southern region and in Africa. And where SADC principles are being threatened, we want to know.”

This is the third South African delegation to be deported from Zimbabwe, after representatives of the Congress of South African Trade Unions were expelled first in October last year and then again early this month.

The purpose of Cosatu’s visits was to find out how the current political crisis is affecting Zimbabwe’s workers

The first 13-member Cosatu group was arrested by intelligence officers and driven to Beitbridge border post - on the Limpopo River between Zimbabwe and South Africa - in the middle of the night after being accused of unauthorised meddling in Zimbabwe’s domestic affairs. It had hoped to meet trade unionists, government officials and human rights groups. The second Cosatu group was put back on the plane on which they arrived.

Bridget Musa is the pseudonym of an IWPR contributor in Zimbabwe.

By MICHAEL WINES

JOHANNESBURG, Feb. 21 - Three reporters for major international news organizations have fled Zimbabwe and a fourth is apparently in hiding after police and intelligence agents searched their offices and threatened to arrest them for espionage and slandering the state.

The actions appear to be part of a campaign to suppress international coverage of events in Zimbabwe before crucial national elections, scheduled for March 31, one of the journalists and a Zimbabwe media analyst said Monday.

The journalists who fled, Angus Shaw of The Associated Press, Brian Latham of the Bloomberg financial news service and Jaan Raath of The Times of London, left Zimbabwe separately late last week. Their departures followed a statement a week earlier by the Zimbabwe Central Intelligence Organization that it had begun a manhunt for a fourth journalist, Cornelius Nduna, who does freelance work for several foreign news organizations.

Mr. Nduna has yet to be found. His lawyer, Beatrice Mtetwa, last week told the press advocacy group Reporters Without Borders that the government had accused him of possessing two videotapes shot at a training camp for the so-called Green Bombers, a government-sponsored youth militia.

The government says that the militia is a patriotic youth league and that the videotapes contain information that is potentially damaging to state interests. Critics accuse the militia of terrorizing the government's political opponents, and say 2,000 of the youths have been sent into the political opposition's stronghold province in advance of the March vote.

The three journalists who left the country did so after what Mr. Shaw described as "a constant, systematic campaign against those of us working for the foreign press" dating from last year.

All four journalists are Zimbabwe citizens. Zimbabwe bars foreigners from reporting within its boundaries without accreditation, which is only rarely granted. A newly enacted law says that journalists who work without permission risk prison sentences of up to two years.

In a telephone interview from Harare, Andrew Moyse, the coordinator of Media Monitoring Network Zimbabwe, which promotes press freedom, said the accusations of anti-state activity against the four journalists were "absolute rubbish."

"This was indicative of an attempt to silence the international media and those working for international organizations so that there would be no independent reporting on the events inside Zimbabwe at election time," he said. "It could only have been an attempt to intimidate them. My only regret is that it was successful."

Zimbabwe's approaching election, for Parliament, is especially crucial. The governing ZANU-PF party and its leader, President Robert G. Mugabe, nearly lost elections for Parliament and for president in 2000 and 2002 to a new party, the Movement for Democratic Change, which capitalized on discontent with the nation's collapsing economy. Many international monitors say Mr. Mugabe avoided defeat only by rigging the vote.

He has made it clear that he wants the election to be a mandate for his and his party's continued rule. In August, he agreed with other southern African leaders to abide by a set of guidelines for free and fair elections, including guarantees of independent media coverage and international monitoring of the campaign, but some critics say the government has failed to meet those commitments.

In a telephone interview from Zambia, Mr. Shaw said he had been arrested in October and accused of practicing journalism without government approval - falsely, he said, as he had properly applied for accreditation. He was not prosecuted at that time. On Feb. 14, Mr. Shaw said, about a dozen police and government officials entered the Harare office that he shared with Mr. Latham and Mr. Raath and told the three men and a photographer, Tsvangarai Mukwazhi, that they were suspected of espionage.

During interrogations that day, Mr. Shaw said, he was also told that he was again suspected of practicing journalism without government accreditation and of possessing illegal communications devices.

"They searched the office for two days without a warrant," he said. "When they finally produced a warrant on Wednesday, they accused us of having illegal communications equipment and of transmitting information prejudicial to the state" to Zimbabwe's enemies in the West.

Mr. Shaw said the police were searching for espionage equipment and explosives, but that "they found nothing, of course."

That Wednesday, a senior law enforcement officer told associates of the journalists that the government intended "to throw the book at us," Mr. Shaw said. Separately, officials told their lawyer, Ms. Mtetwa, that the three journalists would be arrested.

Because Zimbabwe prisons have a reputation for unusually sordid conditions - and because several political figures recently arrested on unrelated espionage charges spent long stretches in jail with little legal recourse - "we decided to take a vacation until something was resolved," Mr. Shaw said.

Zimbabwe has increasingly ascribed its legion of woes - from an acute food shortage to the world's highest inflation rate and one of the world's lowest average life expectancies - to a foreign conspiracy to subvert the nation so that it can be returned to white colonial rule.

In Harare, Mr. Mugabe, who has ruled Zimbabwe since its independence in 1980, celebrated his 81st birthday on Monday with a prediction that his government would sweep the March elections.

New home most visible symbol of how Mugabe and his acolytes have prospered, while half the population on point of starvation.

By Chipo Sithole in Harare

Construction has been completed of Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe’s controversial eleven million dollar Chinese-style mansion in Harare’s leafy northern suburbs, IWPR can reveal.

The 25-bedroom private house, built by a Serbian construction company Energoproject to a Chinese architectural design, has two lakes in its 44 acre landscaped grounds and is protected by a multi-million pounds radar system. Approach roads to the mansion, topped by a Chinese-style roof clad in midnight blue tiles from Shanghai, are off limits to the general public.

IWPR understands that some 50 crack police riot response officers guard the Mugabe palace on a 24- hour basis in cooperation with the much-feared Central Intelligence Organisation, CIO.

Sources in the president’s office told IWPR that chemical and biological sensors are strategically positioned on all approaches to the mansion, around 30 kilometres north of the centre of Harare.

“The sensors are supplemented with radiological detection equipment, including radiation pagers on the belts of some of the law enforcement officers,” the presidential source said. “CAAZ (the Civil Aviation Authority of Zimbabwe) is policing the area above the house [by helicopter and spotter plane] to ensure that it is a no-fly zone. In addition, the CIO is providing dogs that can sniff out explosives.”

The project, which took three years to complete, is the most visible symbol of how Mugabe and his acolytes have prospered while more than five million of his 11.5 million people are near starvation and will need food aid this year, according to the World Food Programme.

Some 80 per cent of Mugabe’s fellow countrymen are unemployed and those with factory jobs earn an average wage equivalent to about 11 dollars a month.

The size of the house dwarfs by three times the size of State House, the home of the head of state and earlier British governors. Its interior decoration by South African, Arab and Chinese designers is being supervised by 81-year-old Mugabe’s 40-year-old wife, Grace. Its size and expense raises the question of how Mugabe paid for it, since his annual salary until recently was only the equivalent of 44,000 dollars a year.

Opposition MPs have unsuccessfully asked in parliament where Mugabe got the foreign currency to import materials from Europe, the Middle East and China. Zimbabwe has suffered a foreign exchange crisis as a result of the country’s economic collapse, which has seen gross domestic product drop for each of the past seven successive years.

The president was clearly agitated when, in an interview with Sky News reporter Stuart Ramsey broadcast in Britain last year, he denied that the mansion had been built with Zimbabwean taxpayer’s money.

He said the Serbian company had donated material and labour at cost, supplemented by gifts of fine timber from Malaysian prime minister Makathir Mohammad and roof tiles from China. “You say it is lavish because it is attractive,” Mugabe told Ramsey. “It has Chinese roofing material which makes it very beautiful, but it was donated to us – the Chinese are our good friends, you see.”

The source declined to confirm whether Mugabe and his wife have moved into the house, but added that residents in the area of the palace are being subjected to regular security checks.

No extravagance has been spared on the three-storey palace. Marble has been imported from Italy. The finest European crystal, sunken baths with Jacuzzi fittings and oriental rugs are all part of the décor. The soaring ceilings were decorated by Arab craftsmen.

There is a sprawling entertainment area, a master bedroom suite, apartments for each of the three Mugabe children, servants’ quarters, a helicopter pad, extensive garage systems and swimming pools. Mugabe professes to be a Marxist, and on one website which has followed the construction of his new home, a contributor comments, “Marxism is very profitable indeed for those who run it.”

The justice spokesman for the opposition MDC, David Coltart, said, “Until a few years ago it had been assumed that Mugabe himself had not been corrupt. The size of this house suggests otherwise. He must explain to the nation where he got the money from.”

“The palace is an affront to the suffering people of Zimbabwe,” said John Makumbe, a political science lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe and a member of the anti-corruption group, Transparency International. “It shows that Mugabe will need a further push to convince him that he really must negotiate an end to his reign.”

Chipo Sithole is the pseudonym of an IWPR contributor in Zimbabwe.

ZANU PF youth militias and activists launch campaign of beatings and threats.

By Dzikamayi Chiyausiku in Rusape

Violence and massive intimidation are wreaking havoc in Zimbabwe’s rural areas as the ruling party’s and opposition’s campaigns gather momentum ahead of Zimbabwe’s fifth parliamentary election on March 31.

ZANU PF youth militias, President Robert Mugabe’s much feared stormtroopers, known among the population as the Green Bombers, are currently behaving with such menace in the Makoni West constituency that many villagers have fled their homes.

Makoni West is a marginal constituency on the outskirts of Rusape, 135 kilometres southeast of Harare. The sitting ZANU PF MP has been replaced by Zimbabwe’s highly unpopular Minister of Agriculture Joseph Made, who is opposed by Remus Makuwaza, for the main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, MDC, and Tendai Chekera of the small regional party ZANU-Ndonga.

Villagers also allege they have been threatened with eviction from their recently acquired farms - taken over in Mugabe’s move against white commercial farmer - if they do not vote for ruling party.

Matthew Ngoroma, 38, told IWPR that he fled his home after "some people told me I would pay the price for supporting MDC". He said four men in Zanu PF campaign shirts visited him three weeks ago and threatened to burn down his house. “They said they would torch my house if I continued selling MDC cards,” said Ngoroma, who has moved his family to a place near Rusape town. “I am not alone. There are others who have been beaten, threatened and intimidated. It’s a terror campaign.”

Other villagers perceived to be MDC supporters have been denied food aid, fertiliser and maize seed being distributed by government officials loyal to ZANU PF.

“You have to be a Zanu PF supporter to get fertiliser, seed and food,” said another villager, Susan Rugoyi. “We have to show Zanu PF cards in order to get a pack of maize meal being distributed by Zanu PF officials as food aid.”

The chiefs and village heads have also been roped into Zanu PF campaign teams. Villagers said the chiefs are forcing their subjects to attend Zanu PF rallies. Meanwhile, the chiefs are banning opposition rallies in their areas while threatening to evict opposition supporters.

“We do have several cases of political violence that we are investigating,” said a senior police officer who declined to be named. “But it would be unfair to say categorically say that these violent incidents are being perpetrated by Zanu PF. What if they are just rogue elements abusing Zanu PF regalia?”

The violence is not just isolated incidents. It is on a national scale. Fifty soldiers assaulted three MDC candidates returning from the launch of the party’s election campaign in Masvingo in the southeast on February 20. MDC spokesman Paul Themba Nyathi said, “The soldiers first assaulted Gabriel Chiwara, our candidate for Makoni West, and his election candidate, Josphat Munhumumwe, accusing them of selling the country to the British.

“They were kicked and punched and sustained injuries all over their bodies. They were taken to hospital for treatment and later released. The assault was reported to the police, but no arrests have been made.”

Nyathi said the MDC was particularly concerned about this assault because it repeated a pattern of army violence against the opposition in places many hundreds of kilometres apart. MDC candidate for Mutare West, Gabriel Chiwara, who is trying to topple Transport Minister Christopher Mushohwe in a constituency 250 km southeast of Harare, was assaulted by soldiers together with his campaign manager.

Reports are also coming in of violence by soldiers, Green Bombers and ZANU PF activists against MDC candidates in the south of the country in Gwanda and Beitbridge constituencies.

In Norton, 40 km west of Harare, a stronghold of ZANU PF MP Sabina Mugabe, the president’s sister, ruling party supporters waylaid and severely beat an eleven-strong MDC campaign team who were putting up party posters. The posters and party regalia the MDC activists were wearing were confiscated and burned.

Hilda Mafudze, the MDC candidate for Manyame constituency, neighbouring Norton, said, “This cannot be a free and fair election. How can the whole process be fair when one’s campaign team is beaten up and their regalia burnt by these thugs who belong to a party which claims it supports a free and fair election?”

Wellington Chibebe, secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, said, “We want to state very clearly that as much as the politicians are saying the elections will be violence-free, the reality on the ground is that ordinary men, women and children are going to be subject to untold violence.”

Reginald Matchaba-Hove, chairman of the Zimbabwe Election Support Network, ZESN, a group of 40 civic organisations supporting democratic elections, said, “For many opposition supporters, fear of violence means they would rather not go to vote than vote and face the recriminations.

“The penalty for voting for the opposition can be expulsion from the village, physical violence, withdrawal from the local food aid registers, or all of them combined. Past experience has taught them that such threats are eventually carried out, and they fear a repeat of 2000 and 2002 [legislative and presidential elections marred by widespread violence and intimidation].”

Rural areas in Zimbabwe’s majority ethnic Shona regions have traditionally voted ZANU PF, with the chiefs, who maintain government food registers, beneficiaries and loyal supporters of the ruling party. According to southern Africa’s Famine Early Warning System Network, five million Zimbabweans, nearly half the population, are in need of food aid.

President Mugabe, in an interview on ZANU PF-controlled state television, said he wanted this election campaign to be peaceful. His interior minister, Kembo Mohadi, said organisations alleging violence and human rights abuses were “subversives who are western-funded”.

Responding to the allegations that chiefs are forcing their people to attend ZANU PF rallies and vote for Mugabe’s party, Mohadi said, “Ours is a peaceful party. Our people hold their chiefs in high regard and, naturally, get worried when such accusations are made against them. We cannot deny our people the right to choose their own leaders when we fought so hard [in the 1970s liberation war] to bring them human rights, freedom and social justice.”

Inspector Wayne Bvudzijena, Zimbabwe’s national police spokesman, said the national force had not received any reports of violence or intimidation by political parties. “I am surprised to hear these reports,” he said. “But I can assure you that the campaign remains peaceful.”

Dzikamayi Chiyausiku is the pseudonym of an IWPR contributor in Zimbabwe.

Latest independent newspaper closure seen as attempt to stifle debate in advance of elections.

By Ben Takawira in Harare

The Zimbabwean government has forced the closure of the Weekly Times, an independent publication less than eight weeks old, making it the fourth private newspaper to be pushed off the streets in the past eighteen months under the country’s harsh media laws.

With parliamentary elections less than five weeks way, Tafataona Mahoso, chairman of Zimbabwe’s Media and Information Commission, MIC, said the title, which was closed last week, had violated its operating licence.

Mahoso, a fervent loyalist of President Robert Mugabe and the ruling ZANU PF party, accused the Weekly Times of “misrepresentations” and “partisan political advocacy”.

The weekly, published from Bulawayo, the country’s second city, had built a circulation of 15,000 after publishing just eight editions.

Weekly Times editor Diggs Dube said Mahoso’s action was politically motivated, with the intention of stifling debate in advance of the March 31 poll. “There’s absolutely no freedom of the press in Zimbabwe,” he said.

Owner Godfrey Ncube said, “This is a political move. It’s got nothing to do with the law. There is no legal basis for closing us down.”

Ncube went on to accuse Mahoso of being a tribalist as well as a Mugabe loyalist. “He is a tribalist we should get rid of,” said Ncube. “I hope the new minister of information will get rid of persons such as Mahoso and impotent organisations such as the MIC [Mugabe has just sacked his minister of information, Jonathan Moyo, and a replacement has yet to be appointed].”

Ncube is a member of the Ndebele, Zimbabwe’s minority tribal grouping, and Bulawayo is situated in Matabeleland, the heartland of the Ndebeles. Mahoso, like Mugabe, is a member of the Shona ethnic group, who comprise nearly eighty per cent of Zimbabwe’s population.

Foster Dongozi, secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Union of Journalists, said he was gravely concerned at the closure of yet another independent newspaper. “This just shows how insensitive the authorities are,” he told IWPR. “The closure will see many journalists losing their jobs at a time when unemployment and destitution is on the increase.”

Thomas Deve, the Zimbabwe chairman of the Media Institute of Southern Africa, MISA, a non-governmental organisation dedicated to promoting a free press in eleven southern African countries, said it would intensify its challenge to the draconian Access to Information and Privacy Act, AIPPA, the legislation under which Tafataona Mahoso banned the Weekly News, in an effort to allow the newspaper to begin publishing again.

AIPPA effectively makes the continued publication of newspapers and the practice of journalism contingent on the whim of Mahoso and Mugabe. To secure the legal right to publish or work as a journalist, applications have to be made to Mahoso, well known among Zimbabwe’s media as the president’s hatchet man, unfailingly diligent in instituting repressive state policies. AIPPA states that journalists who work without the approval of the MIC’s Mahoso can be imprisoned for two years.

Media organisations around the world protested against the closure of the Weekly Times. Reporters Without Borders, the Paris-based organisation dedicated to international press freedom and the protection of journalists, said, “As usual, the Zimbabwean authorities find any old pretext for gagging independent media that might spoil things for them at the height of an election campaign.

“The government does not hesitate to step up repression one month before the March 31 parliamentary election, although it ratified the Southern African Development Community’s protocol on principles and rules for democratic elections which ought, in theory, to guarantee press freedom.”

The crackdown on the newspaper followed intimidation two weeks ago of four Zimbabwean journalists, three of them representing foreign news organisations, who were forced to flee the country or face imprisonment.

Mahoso said he was justified in using AIPPA to close the Weekly Times because its “core values, convictions and overall thrust were narrowly political, clearly partisan and even separatist”. He said the newspaper had “hoaxed” his commission in its licence application by saying it would focus on development journalism. The Weekly Times joins The Daily News, The Daily News on Sunday and The Tribune, another weekly, in the stable of independent newspapers closed down by the MIC.

The final issue of the Weekly Times carried a front-page story about the disappearance of valuable timber-processing equipment from a government depot. A full-page advertisement inside the newspaper, placed by the National Constitutional Assembly, grouping many pro-democracy organisations, denounced the approaching election as a “fraudulent exercise that will neither be free nor fair”.

Mugabe’s government owns the country’s three daily newspapers, which have prevented opposition movements placing political advertisements in the titles. The government also controls all radio and television stations.

Ben Takawira is the pseudonym of an IWPR contributor in Zimbabwe.

The military press-gangs youths into Green Bomber militias geared to enforcing ZANU PF rule.

By Elias Mugwade in Mutare

The Zimbabwe army is carrying out widespread sweeps through the spectacular mountain region of eastern Zimbabwe, a stronghold of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, MDC, press-ganging young men and women into the National Youth Militia.

More than one hundred youngsters aged 18 to 22 in the Inyanga Highlands, Vumba Highlands and Chimanimani Mountains have been caught in the dragnet and taken to a camp in the north to begin military and ideological training.

The shanghaied youngsters were set a test to run ten kilometres inside 45 minutes. Those who passed were told they would be paid 600,000 Zimbabwean dollars [less than one US dollar] a day and given the opportunity in due course to join the national army.

Similar scenes are being enacted throughout Zimbabwe as President Robert Mugabe boosts the ranks of the National Youth Militia, the president’s personal storm troopers deployed to enforce ZANU PF rule and to intimidate anyone viewed as an enemy of the ruling party. The Green Bombers, as the militiamen and women have been dubbed because of their bottle green uniforms, are widely feared because of their violent tactics.

ZANU PF officials say the youths are trained in agriculture, carpentry and bricklaying. But those who spoke to IWPR confirmed that military tactics and political indoctrination into ZANU PF ideology are central to their training at the Border Gezi Centre at Mount Darwin, 160 km northeast of Harare.

Border Gezi - named after a former hard-line Mugabe minister who created the youth militia before he died in a 2001 car crash - is one of a number of Green Bomber tented training camps throughout the country.

The youths told IWPR they were divided into groups of about 50 to create psychological bonds once deployed in the field. Their days are spent in fitness training and gun-handling. They attend courses in patriotism, each lesson beginning by a raising of fists in the ZANU PF salute and the chanting of slogans in praise of Mugabe, ending with denunciations of British premier Tony Blair.

Mugabe has said his campaign for Zimbabwe’s March 31 parliamentary elections is an anti-Blair crusade.

The youth militia recruits are also instructed in how the military wing of ZANU PF liberated the country from white rule. Another module includes instruction on Britain’s intention to recolonise Zimbabwe and how it is the duty of every Zimbabwean to defend the nation’s sovereignty.

Surviving white farmers in the mountains told IWPR that army units have been arriving on their properties and ordering black foremen to identify youths in surrounding villages who are fit enough to be taken to youth militia camps.

“They’ve been rounding up forty or more young people at a time,” said one leading farmer. “Zimbabwe is becoming like the Congo and Somalia, where bandits rule. It’s terrifying.”

Critics have compared the Green Bombers to Adolf Hitler’s Brownshirts, who spearheaded the early Nazi attacks on Germany’s Jewish population.

Paul Themba Nyathi, national spokesman for the MDC, alleged that ZANU PF’s aim is to recruit some 2000 youths to the militias in each of Zimbabwe’s 120 parliamentary constituencies - nearly a quarter million young people. The current strength of the National Youth Militia is estimated at 50,000.

“ZANU PF has been recruiting core groups from every province, about ten per district, to go for military training,” Nyathi said. “When they are through, they go home and start new training programmes. The multiplier effect will be enormous, if it works.”

Nyathi said he believed Green Bombers recently promoted into the army were responsible for attacks on February 20 on three MDC parliamentary candidates as they returned home to the eastern town of Mutare after the launch of their party’s national election campaign. The three were hospitalised after being punched and kicked by twenty militia graduates newly attached to a fifty-strong army unit. “Only brainwashed young people would carry out these attacks with such passion,” said Nyathi. “We urge all members of the professional army to encourage unruly elements among them to desist, because they tarnish the name of the professional force.”

A white Zimbabwean woman recently described how she was stopped in her car by a Green Bomber gang in Mutorashanga, 90 km north of Harare. “They had crowbars and they demanded to see a ZANU PF card,” said the woman, who declined to be named for fear of reprisal. “When I said I hadn’t got one, they made me chant: ‘Forward with Osama Bin Laden, forward with Robert Gabriel Mugabe, down with whites.’ It was terrifying. There was a police Land Rover there, but the police just sat and watched.”

The youth militias are expected to have little impact in urban areas, where the opposition enjoys overwhelming support. But in rural parts the impact of the Green Bombers is devastating. Not only are villagers cowed into support for ZANU PF, but opposition candidates are prevented from campaigning.

MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai urged Mugabe to disband the Green Bombers who, he said, had no legal basis for their creation. “They are going from home to home, erecting illegal roadblocks, intimidating people and forcing them to buy ZANU PF cards,” he said. “Youths from Border Gezi and other training camps have embarked on an orgy of violence.”

Elias Mugwade is the pseudonym of an IWPR contributor in Zimbabwe.

TSHOLOTSHO, Zimbabwe (Reuters) - A controversial former minister sacked by President Robert Mugabe after opting to stand as an independent in this month's general election has accused the ruling party of using threats to garner votes.

Former information minister Jonathan Moyo has become the most visible symbol of cracks within Mugabe's ZANU-PF -- which have taken on ethnic overtones. Analysts say these cracks leave the party weaker against the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change at the March 31 poll.

Moyo said late on Friday ZANU-PF officials were intimidating people in his rural constituency of Tsholotsho by suggesting that failing to vote for the party could evoke a reprisal similar to a 1980s government crackdown that rights groups say left 20,000 civilians dead.

That crackdown in the minority Ndebele-speaking Matabeleland region, which includes Tsholotsho, fueled ethnic tensions with Mugabe's majority Shona group which only ended with a 1987 pact which saw the two regions' political parties merge into ZANU-PF.

``What is of concern is what is being said by some of the campaign groups representing ZANU-PF. (They) have been threatening the people, that ... if you don't vote for the party you will not be given drought relief,'' Moyo told reporters during a campaign tour in drought-prone Tsholotsho, 110 km (70 miles) northeast of Bulawayo.

``(The officials are saying) if you don't vote for the party you may even provoke ... Gukurahundi days,'' Moyo added in reference to the 1980s crackdown.

ZANU-PF officials were not immediately available for comment.

Moyo, who as information minister spearheaded ZANU-PF's propaganda campaign in a diplomatic war of words with the West, lost favor with Mugabe after convening a secret meeting the party says plotted to push a favored candidate to the post of ZANU-PF and government co-vice president.

The post, which eventually went to Joyce Mujuru, is seen as a step to succeeding Mugabe, 81, who is widely expected to retire when his present term ends in 2008.

RESENTMENT LINGERS IN MATABELELAND

The succession furor saw Moyo lead several other rebels in registering as independents in the March 31 election, leading to their expulsion from ZANU-PF.

Analysts say the fall-out could cost ZANU-PF votes in Matabeleland, where resentment lingers over the crackdown and a perception that the government has neglected the region.

``Unity is something very good, something that we cherish, but we do not cherish it as just an idea that is there to benefit a few individuals,'' Moyo said on Friday.

``We cherish if it is an agenda for development, if it means by having unity we will see our roads being repaired, tarred so that our people can move ... and in the case of Tsholotsho that the perennial water problem will be addressed.''

The MDC enjoyed a near-clean sweep of Matabeleland both in the last parliamentary election in 2000 and presidential elections in 2002. ZANU-PF won both amid opposition and Western charges of rigging.

Mugabe insists his party won fairly, and says his political opponents are puppets of Western powers who want to end his 25-year grip on power mainly over his controversial seizure of white-owned commercial farms for landless blacks.

Mugabe and Tsvangirai take their election campaigns to an area where tens of thousands of people were killed by the president’s troops.

By Tafi Murinzi in Bulawayo

President Robert Mugabe and his key opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, both take their election battles this weekend into a province where a crack army unit directly answerable to Mugabe slaughtered an estimated 30,000 men, women and children 20 years ago.

Mugabe and his ruling ZANU PF party have only ever been able to control Matabeleland, heartland of the minority Ndebele tribe, by force. It was once the stronghold of the old Zimbabwe African People’s Union, ZAPU, led by the late Joshua Nkomo.

Two decades ago, growing lawlessness in Matabeleland by a group of around 400 disillusioned ZAPU dissidents - who killed six Australian, American and British tourists - gave Mugabe the opportunity to crush Nkomo, ZAPU and the Ndebeles.

Capitalising on his friendship with the then North Korean dictator Kim Il-Sung, Mugabe used around a hundred North Korean military instructors to train a special unit, the Fifth Brigade, made up entirely of the majority Shona ethnic group, to crack down on Matabeleland in a campaign that became known as the “Gukurahundi”, meaning literally “the wind that blows away the chaff before the spring rains”.

From the moment it was deployed in Matabeleland in 1983 under General Perence Shiri, the Fifth Brigade waged a campaign of mass murder, beatings and arson deliberately targeted at the civilian population.

“Villagers were forced to sing songs in the Shona language praising ZANU PF while dancing on the mass graves of their families and fellow villagers who had been killed and buried minutes earlier,” wrote Martin Meredith in “Robert Mugabe”, a biography of the Zimbabwean president. “The scale of violence was far worse than anything that had occurred during the Rhodesian war.”

To this day the Mugabe government has not acknowledged the tens of thousands of murders the Fifth Brigade committed in Matabeleland, nor have those responsible been called to justice. General Shiri, who was known as “Black Jesus”, was promoted to head of the air force and remains one of Mugabe’s closest supporters.

The impact of the Gukurahundi on Matabeleland has proved ineradicable. It has left a huge, raw, unhealed wound among the people of the region who remember the many massacres.

Mugabe subsequently established a one party state, but since the return of Zimbabwe to a multi-party system, it is the MDC that has commanded the loyalty of the people of Matabeleland.

Mugabe’s trip to Matabeleland is a clear attempt to woo reluctant voters. “He would like to win something in Matabeleland in order to legitimise his rule,” said Gordon Moyo, who heads a civic education lobby group called Bulawayo Agenda. “He feels he has been ostracised in Matabeleland and wants his government to be seen as a truly national government.”

Matabeleland returns 21 of the 120 directly elected members of the national parliament. But eyes will be most firmly fixed on the constituency of Tsholotsho, an unremarkable, very dry district around a small town some 120 kilometres northwest of Bulawayo.

It was in Tsholotsho that Mugabe’s aggressive and hyperactive information minister Jonathan Moyo, architect of the country’s repressive media laws, set off a Zimbabwean political earthquake three months ago.

Tsholotsho is Moyo’s home village and at a secret meeting there he plotted with a dozen other senior ZANU PF officials to oust Mugabe’s choice as his new vice president, Joyce Mujuru - a fellow member of the president’s Zezuru sub-clan of the Shona, who in her days as a resistance fighter bore the nom de guerre “Mrs Spillblood”.

But Mugabe discovered the Tsholotsho plot and Moyo was sacked from the government, ending his hopes of being elected as the constituency’s ZANU PF member. The truculent Moyo reacted by deciding to stand as an independent against the sitting MDC member, a woman who was Mugabe’s chosen ZANU PF candidate.

Moyo, who had exercised widespread patronage, courtesy of the huge government funds at his disposal when he was Mugabe’s favourite cabinet minister, believes he can win the seat.

“He is seen as someone who has brought development to the community,” said a local schoolteacher. Moyo has been given credit for constructing a local grain depot, tarring dirt roads and providing electricity to a local business centre and several schools. He has handed out blankets to local hospitals in winter and given computers to schools, in an area from which more people have fled to South Africa to escape economic misery than any other part of Zimbabwe.

Tsvangirai, who will be desperately trying to defend the lacklustre sitting MDC member of parliament, Mtoliki Sibanda, must have Moyo firmly in his sights.

Meanwhile, Mugabe has a number of reasons for wanting to succeed in this area. As well as gaining a foothold in Matabeleland, the president wants to destroy the ultra-powerful minister who masterminded the mass invasions of white farms as well as crafting the draconian Access to Information and Protection of Privacy.

The president is willing to take the risk of venturing into Tsholotsho and the neighbouring constituency of Lupane, where some of the worst Gukurahundi massacres occurred, because Moyo is trying to establish a new network of independents and disillusioned ZANU PF supporters to challenge the power of his former mentor.

If Moyo loses in Tsholotsho he will be cast into the political wilderness and Mugabe, who has now been in power for 25 years, will have crushed yet another potentially dangerous political challenger.

Tafi Murinzi is the pseudonym for an IWPR journalist in Bulawayo.

The collapse of medical services coupled with political and economic instability means Zimbabwe is starting to export its health problems.

By Fred Bridgland in Johannesburg

The collapse of health care services in Zimbabwe poses a serious threat to its neighbours and may worsen the HIV/AIDS crisis in the region, according to a new report by a southern African anti-malaria organisation.

The Johannesburg-based group Africa Fighting Malaria says the country’s serious health problems are spilling across its borders as Zimbabweans flee political violence, economic turmoil and poverty. More than three million Zimbabwean refugees are in neighbouring countries. More than two million of them are in South Africa and another 400,000 have reached Botswana.

With HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis now out of control in Zimbabwe, refugees bring with them these rampant diseases from their home country, said the report, entitled “Despotism and Disease: A report into the health situation of Zimbabwe and its probable impact on the region’s health”.

The report, published last week, says that at independence in 1980, Zimbabwe had an admirable healthcare system. One of the first acts of the new government, of which Robert Mugabe was then prime minister, was to increase spending on health by 80 per cent, spending almost three times as much per capita than other sub-Saharan countries. Zimbabwe had one of the highest rates of immunisation in Africa, and life expectancy rose from 55 years at independence to 65 by 1987.

But as a result of the subsequent collapse in healthcare and good governance, since 1987, life expectancy has fallen by 50 per cent to barely 33 now, said the report’s main author, Richard Tren, the director of Africa Fighting Malaria. “Lives that ordinary Zimbabweans now lead are not only shorter, but more brutish and nasty,” said Tren. “Their lives are also in peril because of inadequate nutrition. For the first time in decades, children with kwashiorkor [protein malnutrition] are streaming into clinics and hospitals.”

Malaria, which had been a minor health problem for decades, has exploded in recent years because of the collapse of health services. The once highly efficient malaria control teams “not only lack insecticides, but also cannot obtain the fuel they require to drive into the malarial areas”, said the report. “The result of this lack of control has been a sharp rise in malaria cases, possibly in excess of two million cases [in a population of 11.5 million] in 2004, five times higher than the low of 400,000 cases in 1992.”

HIV/AIDS infection levels have reached catastrophic levels and because of the collapse of health services, effective treatment – which can prolong the lives of people living with AIDS – is virtually unavailable. The United Nations estimated that by 2003 every fourth adult was HIV-positive, but this is likely to be an underestimate. Some 3,300 people die from AIDS-related diseases every week, and the population of AIDS orphans has probably topped one million.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the scale of the disease is substantially worse than is reported in the country’s increasingly unreliable statistical analyses. Dr Mark Dixon of Mpilo Hospital in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second city, estimates that seven out of every ten patients he sees are HIV-positive.

Incredibly, the International Monetary Fund believes that on current trends, 83 per cent of all teachers alive in 2003 will have died from AIDS-related infections by 2010. Despite the scale of this disaster, the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria last year rejected the Zimbabwean government’s application for funding because it could not be trusted to use the money effectively.

Poor funding and administration is exacerbated by the flight abroad of doctors and nurses. Some 2000 nurses are estimated to leave Zimbabwe each month. Bulawayo surgeon Mike Cotton says he can no longer carry out some of the most basic procedures because of the flight of skilled assistants and the deterioration of equipment. He says that a mere three general surgeons and just one gynaecologist now serve Bulawayo’s one million people. A decade ago there were seven general surgeons, four orthopaedic surgeons, one neurosurgeon and four gynaecologists.

The report says Zimbabwe’s health-care disaster has ceased to be purely a domestic issue.

“The exodus of Zimbabweans means that their poor health status threatens the country’s neighbouring states,” it said, asserting that refugees are transporting HIV at an alarming rate.

The report concludes, “The failure of Zimbabwe’s neighbours to respond adequately to the political crisis and deal with the refugee problem has probably worsened the health status of their own countries.

“It is therefore incumbent on the SADC [Southern African Development Community] states, but particularly South Africa, given its political and economic power, to recognise the crisis in Zimbabwe and exert pressure on the Mugabe regime to reform, restore democracy and reduce political violence. Anything less will destabilise the region and imperil the health status of ordinary citizens in all neighbouring states.”

Fred Bridgland is IWPR’s Zimbabwe project editor based in Johannesburg.

New law allows key Mugabe allies to take prominent role in parliamentary ballot.

By Chipo Sithole in Harare

Three years after the Zimbabwean military covertly ran a presidential poll which enabled Robert Mugabe to retain supreme power in Zimbabwe, the army will again fill all the key positions for this month’s parliamentary elections – legally this time.

A new Electoral Act was signed into law by Mugabe in January that permits military, police and prison officers to staff the Electoral Supervisory Commission, ESC, and to run both the voting and the counting at 8,200 counting stations. In addition, thousands of youth militiamen and women, answerable directly to the president, will be drafted into the military before polling day so that they too can serve in counting stations.

The opposition Movement for Democratic Change, MDC, will be allowed to place only one election agent in each of the polling and counting stations - a number it claims is totally inadequate to monitor the vote and the count properly.

The key appointment is that of recently retired army brigadier Kennedy Zimondi as chief election officer. Sources told IWPR that Zimondi and other military officers seconded to the ESC are working out of the main offices of the Central Intelligence Organisation, CIO, at Hardwicke House in the centre of the capital Harare.

“They have already finished scrutinising the voters’ roll and are now doing an intelligence appreciation of the situation before the election,” said the source.

“There are two men - Major Sibindi, from Sixth Army headquarters, and Major Kampira, from Presidential Guard headquarters - who are also involved. This duo has been working on elections since before the presidential poll in 2002. They were part of a large military network assigned [illegally] to the presidential election.”

The military, theoretically neutral but in fact loyal to Mugabe and ZANU PF, will collaborate closely with the ruling party’s National Command Centre, NCC. An ad hoc body that functions mainly in election periods, the NCC is run by ZANU PF’s national political commissar Elliott Manyika.

A new and supposedly independent Zimbabwe Election Commission, ZEC, was set up to comply with guidelines set down by the 14-state Southern African Development Community, SADC, for the conduct of a “free and fair” election. But the ZEC amounts to virtually powerless window dressing, which is anyway answerable to the real power, Brigadier Zimondi’s ESC.

“The strategy is to get people in key positions who share the hard-line attitudes of the government,” said Lovemore Mdhuku, chairman of the National Constitutional Assembly, an opposition coalition of churches, trade unions and other civil society organisations. “You appoint the military because they follow orders. They will do what is required.”

John Makumbe, a political scientist at the University of Zimbabwe, said, “To shore up his military support, Mugabe recently gave pay rises of up to 1,400 per cent to the troops. He has also given top officers big commercial farms confiscated from white farmers by the government. The army and police services also purged and punished thousands in the junior ranks suspected of supporting Mugabe’s opponents.”

“The big issue remains what happens on polling day,” commented Eddie Cross, an MDC national executive member and economics spokesman.

“Remember what Josef Stalin said, ‘It is not who votes that counts, but who counts the vote.’ He said that a long time ago, but it remains true to this day. And this time in Zimbabwe we know who will do that because the military and the CIO are running the entire elections system.”

Chipo Sithole is the pseudonym of an IWPR journalist in Harare.

Mugabe enraged by court’s decision to allow jailed white MP to contest election.

By Dzikamayi Chiyausiku in Mutare

President Robert Mugabe has reacted with alarm to the most remarkable political comeback story of Zimbabwe’s parliamentary election campaign.

Roy Bennett, a white farmer and the highly popular member of parliament for Chimanimani, who is currently serving a one-year jail sentence with hard labour, has been given the green light to contest his seat from his prison cell.

Bennett, who represents a largely rural and nearly 100 per cent black constituency in the mountains of the same name in eastern Zimbabwe, was jailed after he charged across the floor of parliament last November and shoved Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa to the ground.

Chinamasa had just subjected Bennett to a torrent of racist abuse and called his ancestors thieves and murders. As he fell on top of the justice minister, who emerged unbruised, Anti-Corruption Minister Didymus Mutasa joined the fray and kicked Bennett in the ribs.

The MP for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, MDC – who was born, raised and educated in Zimbabwe - said afterwards, “One’s not proud of it. But I am a person. I have feelings and after the vehement personal [and] racial attack that Chinamasa was making against me, I saw red and reacted. I was insulted on numerous previous occasions when my workers were being killed, raped and beaten.”

In October, parliament voted 53 to 42 to punish the 48-year-old MP by imprisoning him for a year for an offence that would normally have merited a small fine in a normal criminal court.

Since then, he has been sharing a 3.5 by 2.5 metre prison cell with 14 other inmates. His immediate sleeping partner is dying of AIDS and vomits throughout the night. Meanwhile, the speaker of parliament, Emmerson Mnanagagwa, has overruled efforts to have Bennett’s sentence dismissed by an ordinary court of law.

Despite his imprisonment, the people of Chimanimani have asked Bennett to stand again as their candidate. And after a desperate legal battle, this week the country’s new Electoral Court, in its first decision, upheld Bennett’s right to contest the election from his cell.

The move has enraged President Mugabe, who has become accustomed to obedience from the country’s courts. On March 17, he described Judge Tendai Uchena’s decision as “madness” and said his government would appeal against the ruling.

“I don’t understand the court’s decision. We can’t be held to ransom by a man who is in prison. That is absolute nonsense,” he said.

And in an ominous declaration, Mugabe told his supporters to ignore the court ruling. “Proceed as if nothing has happened,” said the head of state, who has a record of ignoring judicial decisions and ruling by decree.

Judge Uchena further angered the president by postponing the Chimanimani poll for a month to give Bennett’s constituency manager, James Mukwaya, and his team a decent period in which to campaign.

Welcoming the court verdict, Mukwaya said, “Roy Bennett is a man of the people. He is white in complexion but there is no difference between [him] and the blacks in Zimbabwe.

“He did not choose himself to stand as the candidate of Chimanimani in 2000. It was the people who went to him and asked him to stand as their MP. And during his tenure in office in the past five years, he showed the people of Chimanimani how an MP should work.”

For the first 20 years of Zimbabwe’s independence, Chimanimani was a stronghold of Mugabe’s ruling ZANU PF party. But as economic conditions deteriorated, Bennett - who had a record of close cooperation with local cultivators and spoke fluent Shona - was approached to stand as the MDC candidate. He was elected in 2000 by 11,410 votes to 8,072, a remarkable victory in a general election that most international observers had declared neither free nor fair.

Bennett’s popularity has been a mixed blessing for him. In the past four years he has suffered a number of attacks with a clear political motivation.

Just before polling day in 2000, ZANU PF activists - operating under the direction of the feared Central Intelligence Organisation, CIO - invaded Bennett’s cattle and coffee farm, Charleswood. They forced Bennett’s 42-year-old wife, Heather, and their 350 employees to attend a ZANU PF political rally where they were made to dance and sing songs in praise of Mugabe.

The pregnant Mrs Bennett was threatened with death, and forced to the ground with a spear held to her throat. “That night the pain began,” she said. “I lost the baby. It was a boy.” Several farm employees were beaten with iron rods and axe handles.

Bennett hurried back more than 300 kilometres from Harare to be told his family would be killed unless he withdrew his MDC candidacy. He refused. He was immediately served with a government notice to vacate his farm, and the Zimbabwe army began occupying it.

The soldiers moved into Bennett’s farmhouse and began hacking cattle and game animals to death. They refused the owner access to his coffee crops which were in a special government-designated Export Processing Zone and earned more than a million US dollars a year in foreign exchange. More than 100 tonnes of coffee were destroyed, together with the painstaking preparations for another three years of planting.

Local people were outraged by the assault on Bennett’s family and his workers. They sent a n’anga - a traditional healer, or witchdoctor - to cleanse and protect the farmhouse, the farm buildings and a tourist lodge that had been built with foreign investment in the nearby mountains.

For Zimbabweans, a blessing or curse from a n’anga is no laughing matter. Of the fifteen ZANU PF activists who were in the first invasion wave on Charleswood, 13 are now dead. And in May 2004, the district administrator - a key political figure who organised the assault - was found dead in his shower.

Bennett, who has not set foot on his farm for nearly five years, has taken the case to court eight times. On each occasion he has won court orders confirming his ownership of Charleswood and his right - and that of his employees - to be left in peace.

But the officials involved have simply ignored these rulings. Two of Bennett’s workers, Stephen Tonera and Shemmy Chimbaraa, have been shot dead by soldiers and others have been beaten and raped.

Heather Bennett, who will now campaign for her husband in Chimanimani, said, “Roy’s enduring popularity is one of the things that infuriates the government. He defies everything they try to portray as happening. He’s a white farmer liked by labour forces.”

And from Mutoko Prison, 145 kilometres north of Harare, Bennett issued a statement vowing never to give up, even if it costs him his life.

“I know my constituency is 100 per cent behind me,” he said. “I was humbly elected by the people of Chimanimani to represent them in parliament. I knew full well the ramifications of taking on a repressive ZANU PF regime, as did the people who voted me in.

“We as a district have been targeted and harassed for our beliefs. I am not seen as a white commercial farmer but as a fellow Zimbabwean, and as long as the people want me to represent them for national change and good governance, I will never give in.

“No amount of intimidation, oppression or threats will work. There are some things in life worth taking a stand for.”

Dzikamayi Chiyausiku is the pseudonym of an IWPR journalist in Mutare.

By MICHAEL WINES and SHARON LaFRANIERE

FILABUSI, Zimbabwe, March 13 - If this is an outpost of tyranny, it was not immediately obvious in this one-road backwater buried in Zimbabwe's hilly southwest flank.

In a clearing amid donkey carts, rafters-high scrub and at least 3,000 peasants, Zimbabwe's sole political opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangarai, delivered a throw-the-bums-out harangue aimed at crucial parliamentary elections later this month.

After 25 years of rule by President Robert G. Mugabe's party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front, "the money you are using presently is as good as old newspapers," he cried. "The grain silos are full of cobwebs. There is no harvest this year."

It was a civics-book image of what Mr. Mugabe, 81, promises for the elections on March 31, possibly his last as president: an honest campaign to rebut accusations that he has devolved into a dictator. When Mr. Tsvangarai last campaigned three years ago, government-run youth gangs routed supporters with clubs and party members lost homes and even lives to midnight arsonists. On this day, the police briefly detained a few slogan-singing supporters, but otherwise stood idly by.

But there is a vast difference between an obviously peaceful election and a fair one. And with two weeks left to a potentially defining moment for Mr. Mugabe, there is mounting evidence that the raucous campaigning masks an expansive effort by his party to rig the outcome.

Both independent analysts and members of Mr. Tsvangarai's party, the Movement for Democratic Change, or M.D.C., cite growing barriers to a fair ballot. They say that polling places are scarce in opposition strongholds; that two in five enrolled voters are suspect; that Zimbabwe's vast, mostly anti-Mugabe diaspora is barred from voting; that the 8,500 election observers are limited to those, like Russians and close African allies, who are likely to rubber-stamp a government victory. Most Westerners are excluded from witnessing the vote.

Foreign journalists are effectively banned from Zimbabwe under threat of arrest (though many enter the country as tourists). Government-run media are heavily biased; broadcast interviews with opposition figures mysteriously drown in static. There is a dearth of independent judges to rule on election complaints. Election oversight is split among a bevy of commissions largely staffed with Mr. Mugabe's cronies.

Most important, perhaps, the government controls the biggest incentive to undecided voters: the distribution of almost all emergency food in a nation where, agricultural experts say, 4 people in 10 are unsure where to find their next meal.

Given such advantages, "they probably believe they have won the election and that creating freer conditions on the immediate eve of the election will not hurt," said Reginald Matchaba-Hove, chairman of the Zimbabwe Election Support Network, a coalition of pro-democracy groups. "The assumption on Mugabe's side is that he will get a two-thirds majority in the parliament anyway."

During a daylong tour of Zimbabwe back-country between Bulawayo and Harare, the capital, candidates for both ZANU-P.F. and the opposition were seen beseeching crowds at groceries and liquor stores. In the mountainous chrome-mining region near Zvishavane, rival candidates were also seen handing out bags, apparently stuffed with corn, from automobiles plastered with their posters.

The police were evident, but none interfered with campaigning.

"Our campaigns are going freely," said Albert Ndlovu, the M.D.C.'s provincial organizer for Mashonaland West, a rural province of 1.2 million in north-central Zimbabwe. "There are pockets of violence here and there. But generally, we would say it is a bit quiet."

Many here see Mr. Mugabe's loosening of the reins as a calculated gamble by someone supremely confident of victory. Of the 150 seats in Parliament, ZANU-P.F. holds 98, including 30 whose occupants are government-appointed and are not being contested. The M.D.C. has a bare 51 seats, down six from the last election. To gain control, the party would have to win an additional 25 seats - an impossibility, most here say.

The voter rolls are crucial - and contentious. A computerized study in January of 100,000 registered voters by the FreeZim Support Group, a pro-democracy organization, concluded that as many as 2 million of Zimbabwe's 5.6 million registered voters are suspect. The group estimates that 800,000 voters are dead, 300,000 are listed more than once and more than 900,000 do not live at their recorded addresses.

Opposition efforts to challenge the lists have proved futile. David Coltart, an M.D.C. legislator from Bulawayo, dispatched supporters house-to-house last month to verify his region's rolls. The police arrested them within hours, saying he needed permission for political gatherings. Armed with a court order, he re-deployed the team - and they were arrested again.

"The M.D.C. is just losing direction," said Margaret, a jobless 28-year-old single mother of two in Bulawayo who once worked for the ZANU-P.F. "ZANU-P.F. will regain three-quarters of the seats they lost" in the 2000 elections, she said.

One reason, she said, is Zimbabweans' reverence for Mr. Mugabe, their liberator from white rule, widespread chaos notwithstanding. "If your father rapes someone, you do not shun him," she said. "He's still your father." She refused to give her last name.

Yet among many Zimbabweans interviewed, the M.D.C. is seen as surging in popularity. Thousands have swarmed to rallies, even in rural areas long seen as government strongholds, and the government's decision to allow open campaigning has emboldened ordinary people.

Burdened with sclerotic leaders and restless younger underlings, ZANU-P.F. also is not the well-oiled political machine it once was.

But if this election hinges on anything, many say, it may be food - or the lack of it. One year ago, Mr. Mugabe ordered the World Food Program to stop distributing most food aid, stating that Zimbabwe was self-sufficient.

In fact, outside experts agree, the opposite was true.

But by forcing the World Food Program to reduce food distribution, the government ensured that the hungry would look to the government for aid, often tied to support of government candidates. The National Constitutional Assembly, a pro-democracy group, reported in February that food was used as a political tool in nearly three out of four districts it surveyed.

But the government has also courted a powerful backlash by failing to fill the vacuum it created by rejecting international food aid. As he stood at in the crowd at the Filabusi rally, Ngwenya, a 52-year-old farmer with seven children who would volunteer only his first name, agreed that this election is first and foremost about food. "A people's government must first see if people are eating," he said.

Michael Wines reported from Filabusi for this article and Sharon LaFraniere from Johannesburg. An employee of The New York Times in Zimbabwe contributed reporting.

Villagers are forced to attend ZANU PF rallies and warned that food aid will be withheld if they vote for the opposition.

By Dzikamayi Chiyausiku in Marondera

People in Zimbabwe’s rural constituencies are living in fear despite President Robert Mugabe’s public assurances - particularly to his most important ally, South Africa’s president Thabo Mbeki - that there will be no violence or intimidation at the March 31 parliamentary election.

Observers say that with fewer than two weeks to go to polling day, intimidation is growing.

Villagers are being frogmarched to rallies of the ruling ZANU PF party and, as famine intensifies, peasants are being warned they will be denied government-controlled food aid unless they support Mugabe’s candidates.

Meanwhile, the main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, MDC, has been warned by Mugabe’s personal stormtroopers - the violent National Youth Militia or Green Bombers - that many parts of the country are “no go” areas for its campaigners.

The situation is well illustrated in Marondera, a small town some 80 kilometres east of the capital, Harare, where Defence Minister Sydney Sekeramayi controversially won by just 63 votes in 2000, despite widespread intimidation and allegations of vote rigging.

Sekeramayi, who runs the feared Central Intelligence Organisation, CIO, and is known as “the cruel one”, has declared Marondera and its surrounding area of decaying farms a no-go area for the MDC.

Nevertheless, there is a spirit of defiance, perhaps inspired by Mugabe’s confident expectation that he will win the two-thirds majority that will enable him to change the country’s constitution.

“We are being warned at ZANU PF rallies that there will be no food aid for us if the MDC wins the election,” Norman Mudekunye, who lives about 20 km outside Marondera, told IWPR.

Mudekunye said a unit of the Green Bombers had established a makeshift election camp near his village called Dirihori. “We hear them singing ZANU PF liberation songs,” he said. “Sometimes they wake us up and force us to attend their night meetings. They have a register of all villagers and those who don’t attend the rallies are in trouble.”

He said that while his neighbours were not being beaten this time - unlike in 2000 – threats were being made. “If you don’t take notice, then you don’t receive food aid,” he said.

People in the Marondera area desperately need food aid. Commercial farms have collapsed, the rains have failed, and the villagers’ sparse crops are wilting in the heat. Some have given up hope of harvesting anything before the short winter months set in – and if they don’t, they will be totally dependent on government food aid for the next twelve months.

At the beginning of this month, ZANU PF supporters burned down Marondera’s United Methodist Church in a warning to people not to vote for the local MDC candidate Iain Kay.

Kay - a farmer who was forced off his land two years ago - helped to build the church, where his wife Kerry carried out much of her full time work with AIDS orphans. Police have made no arrests in connection with the incident.

When Kay began his election campaign, he initially held meetings in caves in nearby hills to avoid harassment by Sekeramayi’s supporters and the police, who were breaking up meetings of more than five opposition supporters.

Kay, one of only five white people contesting seats in the forthcoming election, is a well-known liberal whose late father Jock served as deputy agriculture minister in Mugabe’s government in the late Eighties.

While he is confident he has more support than the defence minister, many believe that this may be irrelevant given the levels of intimidation and advance rigging. Marondera is infamous for election violence. In 2000, Kay’s MDC predecessor was run out of town and his house burned to the ground. MDC supporters were tortured at local ruling party headquarters.

Kay himself was severely assaulted and left for dead when 60 ZANU PF supporters invaded and occupied his 5,000-acre property near Marondera. A young policeman, Constable Tinashe Chikwenya, who tried to help the farmer, was shot dead by the invaders. The 120 people Kay employed and their 380 dependents were driven from their homes on the farm.

Kay refused to leave the country and, when asked why he and his wife stayed, he said, “We’re all Zimbabweans. We’re worth fighting for.”

Unexpectedly, following Mugabe’s slight relaxation of his iron grip, MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai was recently able to hold the first ever opposition rally in the town, which was attended by 600 people. Some men wore MDC t-shirts and a 33-year-old woman who identified herself as Mercy wore an MDC headscarf. Many hundreds more people, including ominous men in suits and wearing dark glasses, gazed at the rally from a distance.

“Those people over there remember the beatings of past years,” said Mercy, gesturing to the bystanders. “But I am not afraid any more. I have been arrested by the police and raped twice and my children have been beaten to the ground in front of me. They have done their worst and I have survived.”

Dzikamayi Chiyausiku is the pseudonym of an IWPR journalist in Zimbabwe.

Opposition claims regime only selling scarce supplies of maize to people who can produce ZANU PF membership cards.

By Elias Mugwade in Harare

Zimbabwe has nearly run out of maize, the country’s staple food, and is now selling low quality grain normally reserved for animal feed in rural areas, the country’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change, MDC, has newly alleged.

The MDC accusation follows reports by international agencies that nearly five million of Zimbabwe’s 11.5 million people will need food aid in order to survive in the coming months. The country’s harvest has failed as a result of a combination of chaotic land reform and drought.

Renson Gasela, the opposition’s party’s agriculture spokesman, told journalists in Harare on March 18 that the government is selling for human consumption D-grade maize meant for stock feed because the 15, 000 tonnes of maize it has found credit to import each month is totally inadequate to meet the country’s needs.

Zimbabwe’s maize consumption in normal times is about 150,000 tonnes. With the autumn [March-May] harvest having largely failed, the country needs to find at least 1.5 million tonnes between now and March next year.

“The country has now virtually run out of maize,” said Gasala. “There will be no food after the elections [on March 31]. If the voters make a mistake and vote ZANU PF into power, there will be starvation of major proportions in the country.

“Half of the maize being sold is not usable. It is bad maize. It is rotten D-grade maize. It is stock-feed maize that they are selling.”

Gasela dismissed claims made by President Robert Mugabe a day earlier at a rally in Bikita in Masvingo province where he said the government would ensure that no one starved, in a desperate ploy to woo voters.

“Government will not let anyone starve. We have put aside some money for grain, which we will be importing from other countries that have the commodity, if the need arises,” said Mugabe.

Gasela said the government, without international donor support, which has been gradually withdrawn, did not have the capability to import adequate maize to feed the people. “In his infamous Sky News interview in May last year, President Mugabe said, ‘Why foist food on us, do you want us to choke?’ Less than a year later, he is now desperately trying to assure the people that no one will starve,” he went on.

“People are starving in the following provinces: Manicaland, Masvingo, Midlands, Matabeleland North and Matabeleland South. At MDC rallies, which are always attended by police details, thousands of people are complaining about starvation. They are starving because of the denial and refusal of food aid.”

Gasela repeated the allegation of many journalists that Mugabe’s ZANU PF government is now using food to buy votes, as scarce maize was only being sold to people who could produce ZANU PF membership cards.

He cited an example in Mberengwa East in Midlands province where names of MDC supporters who attended a rally addressed by the party leader Morgan Tsvangirai were removed from the list of people permitted to buy maize from the government-controlled Grain Marketing Board.

“We have evidence of rampant politicisation of food by the regime,” Gasela alleged. “We know how the regime successfully stopped all food aid so that they are the only ones with food during the elections”. He said village chiefs and headmen were compiling lists of ZANU PF and MDC supporters with the aim of ensuring that only non-ruling party supporters got access to the scarce maize.

Asked what his party offered the people if it wins the election, he said it has maintained lines of communication with the international donor community and these would be ready to step in as soon as they are invited.

Tsvangirai, campaigning in the west of the country, told a rally, “We are against Mugabe because he has brought hunger and famine to the people of Zimbabwe. Hunger is killing people in the countryside, but Mugabe has been saying he does not want people to be fed by the international community. Once the MDC is in power, the [foreign] non-government organisations will come back and operate normally again.”

Elias Mugwade is the pseudonym of an IWPR journalist in Zimbabwe.

South Africa joins some less than democratic states invited to watch the election, as anyone who might be critical is struck off the list.

By Dzikamayi Chidyausiku in Harare

Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe has devised a wide range of measures to rig the country’s sixth parliamentary election and to disguise the extent of the falsification.

Perhaps the most blatant and effective of these measures is the careful cherry-picking of foreign delegations permitted to observe the conduct of the election campaign and the count. Foreign Minister Stan Mudenge has invited observers only from countries that have either openly supported the ruling ZANU PF government or have maintained silence about the country’s prolonged political and human rights crisis.

Crucially, observer teams from the United States, the Commonwealth, Australia, Japan, the European Union, Britain and other European countries who were intensely critical of Zimbabwe’s last parliamentary election in 2000 and the subsequent 2002 presidential election have been denied entry this time round.

“They [Mugabe and ZANU PF] have left out everybody who gave them a negative report,” said John Makumbe, lecturer in political science at the University of Zimbabwe. “In essence it says the regime has something to hide, that it can’t stand close scrutiny.”

The observer teams that have received invitations come from pro-Mugabe African states such as South Africa, Tanzania and Namibia; other friendly countries such as China, Iran, Venezuela and Russia; and from the South African Development Community, SADC, the 14-member regional grouping which pronounced as free and fair the last two internationally criticised Zimbabwean polls.

Even the Atlanta-based Carter Centre, one of the world’s leading election monitoring organisations, which has observed elections on every continent, was told it was unwelcome when its monitors began arriving in Harare.

“Zimbabwe is a disgrace,” said former United States President Jimmy Carter, chairman of the centre. “Mugabe declared that the Carter Centre is a terrorist organisation and asked us to leave.”

A host of African regional civic organisations that have criticised past Zimbabwean polls as neither free nor fair have also been excluded. They include the autonomous SADC parliamentary delegation, made up of ordinary members of southern African parliaments, which issued a report on the 2002 presidential election that was so damning that the SADC and African Union secretariats sat on it for two years before it was released.

South Africa’s powerful trade union movement, the Congress of South African Trade Unions, Cosatu, has been refused permission to send a mission. Cosatu has expressed solidarity with the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, ZCTU, which was one of the leading founding components of the Movement for Democratic Change, MDC, Zimbabwe’s main opposition party.

Justifying the ban on Cosatu, Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa said ZCTU leaders had been “a regular feature at British Labour Party annual conferences and have used the platform to call for international isolation of the country [Zimbabwe] and the illegal removal of the legitimate government.”

The ZCTU itself has been denied permission to place official observers at polling and vote counting stations.

South Africa’s main independent election body, the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa, which has been prominent in organising domestic elections and observing more than twenty overseas votes, was also refused permission for its 40 designated representatives to enter Zimbabwe.

The Harare-based Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, ZLHR, said the cherry-picking process will have a serious impact on the credibility of the ballot result. Other Zimbabwean non-government organisations and opposition parties have also criticised the way the government has hand-picked monitoring teams.

ZLHR executive director Arnold Tsunga said, “There is no diversity in the kind of observer teams invited by the government. The election will consequently lose all credibility because the observer missions are not truly representative of the international community as a whole.”

Zimbabwean human rights organisations and government opponents are particularly incensed with South African President Thabo Mbeki and his labour minister, Membathisi Mdladlana, who is leading the official South African observer mission, who have both endorsed the poll as free and fair before it has even happened.

"I have no reason to think that anybody in Zimbabwe will act in a way that will militate against the [Zimbabwe] elections being free and fair," Mbeki recently told reporters on the steps of the South African parliament.

His early verdict on the election was reinforced by Mdladlana, who said within 30 minutes of arriving in Zimbabwe that everything was “calm and smooth” and that the ballot would be conducted properly.

Mdladlana said too many people had drawn the conclusion that elections in Zimbabwe would not be free and fair. "Those people are a problem and a nuisance," he said. "But nobody attacks them. Some of us are fed up with their lies.”

Welshman Ncube, secretary general of the MDC, accused Mbeki and Mdladlana of adopting a partisan stance that is “an affront to the ideals that guided liberation struggles across Africa”.

Ncube continued, “The South Africans have let us down. History will judge them very harshly indeed. They are trying to sanitise the illegitimate regime of Robert Mugabe and ZANU PF. The South African government continues to go out of its way to act as the servant of ZANU PF repression against the people of Zimbabwe’s struggle for democracy and freedom.”

As a result of Mladlana’s remarks on his arrival in Zimbabwe, the MDC has declined to talk to or cooperate with the South African observer team.

“There are serious legitimacy and credibility issues surrounding the upcoming elections,” said Tsunga. “If the government really believed free and fair elections were about to be held, then it would have freely welcomed anyone interested to observe them. By barring so many observer teams, the government has shown that it has something to hide. The world will have no confidence in the observers that have been selected.”

The world’s two leading human rights organisations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have both issued damning reports saying the situation on the ground makes it impossible to hold a free and fair election. They said there has been massive intimidation and harassment of government opponents by the army, police and Mugabe’s personal youth militia ahead of the polls.

In addition, more than 50 journalists from states pronounced “unfriendly” by President Mugabe have been denied accreditation to report on the election campaign. Mugabe has accused the domestic independent media and foreign correspondents of “printing lies and stirring up unrest in the country”.

Some journalists, including a large team from the government-controlled South Africa Broadcasting Corporation, have been admitted, but they have been charged 600 US dollars per person for the privilege.

Repeated applications for accreditation made by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting have not even received a reply.

Dzikamayi Chidyausiku is a pseudonym used by a journalist in Zimbabwe.

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) -- President Robert Mugabe branded opposition supporters ``traitors'' and warned on Tuesday that an election victory by the top rival party would not be tolerated, raising fears of violence two days before Zimbabweans choose a new parliament.

Mugabe's comments, which were broadcast repeatedly on state radio, followed Roman Catholic Archbishop Pius Ncube's call on Sunday for a ``nonviolent mass popular uprising'' if the ruling party wins Thursday's parliamentary election by fraud.

Similar comments by the president in the past have encouraged the ruling party and its youth militia to take violent action against candidates from the Movement for Democratic Change and its supporters.

``All those who will vote for the MDC are traitors,'' Mugabe said Monday at a rally for the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front in Mutoko, 90 miles northeast of Harare.

In a separate speech on Tuesday, he also rejected the possibility of sharing government with the opposition, saying an MDC win would ``not be tolerated.'' He spoke to about 15,000 party supporters at a rally in Bindura, 55 miles north of Harare.

MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who narrowly lost presidential polls in 2002, did not respond to Mugabe's comments during speeches Tuesday at two rallies in his home region of Bindura, 125 miles south of the capital.

But he blasted Mugabe's policies, which he said had driven Zimbabwe's once thriving economy into the ground.

``Zimbabwe has been destroyed, farms have been destroyed, industry has been destroyed and education has been destroyed. Even relations with other countries have been destroyed,'' Tsvangirai said, calling on all parties to work together to rebuild the country.

Tuesday was expected to be the last day of campaigning, but electoral officials said additional rallies would be permitted Wednesday.

Tsvangirai arrived late at his first appearance Tuesday and police cut his address short, informing him that his party had only requested permission to gather until 12:30 p.m. All political gatherings require police authorization under Zimbabwe's draconian security laws.

Ncube, one of Zimbabwe's most outspoken church leaders, said Mugabe's ``traitor'' comments revived ominous memories of moves against suspected opposition voters after previous elections.

``It may be quiet now, but we are not sure what will happen after these elections,'' Ncube said in a telephone interview from Zimbabwe's second-largest city Bulawayo. ``You are dealing with people who bullied everyone into silence in the past.''

Ncube said he has been followed and all his telephones are tapped.

In 1985, tens of thousands of black families were evicted from their homes into midwinter cold until they could produce ruling party cards. That year, Mugabe told victorious supporters: ``Now take your sticks and beat out the snakes among you.''

Parliamentary elections in 2000, in which the opposition won 57 seats, and presidential elections two years later were marred by widespread state-sanctioned political violence and intimidation, according to Western observers.

The U.S. State Department said it was pleased that Zimbabwe's parliamentary election campaign has been violence-free this year but criticized the government's overall behavior during the process.

Spokesman Adam Ereli said the administration was encouraged that the MDC has been able to hold rallies in most parts of the country and he held out the possibility that the election may be credible. ``Until we see what the results are, I don't want to prejudge the outcomes,'' he said.

Ereli's comments were a departure from the from the normal sustained U.S. criticism of a country that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has called ``an outpost of tyranny.''

Reginald Matshaba-Hove, director of Zimbabwe's independent Electoral Support Network, said he was concerned about Mugabe's comment and had asked foreign observers to stay in the country for at least a week after the polls because of fears of renewed violence.

Zimbabwe was plunged into political and economic chaos when the government began seizing white-owned farms for redistribution to black Zimbabweans in 2000 in an often violent campaign to redress colonial-era imbalances.