Posted on 04/07/2003 7:11:59 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe - A shiny BMW and two government vans pull up in front of a tangled line of dusty trucks at a Zimbabwe grain depot. Trunks and doors are opened and plump sacks of grain swiftly loaded under the gaze of armed guards.
The transaction, witnessed by journalists, takes place by a row of towering grain silos at one of the distribution sites controlled by the government grain monopoly in this southern African nation.
The centers are at the heart of claims by opposition groups and human rights activists that the government is using food as a political weapon in a country where over half the people are at risk of starvation.
Critics charge that food supplies are being funneled mostly to buy support and pay off cronies as authoritarian President Robert Mugabe fights against a strengthening opposition threatening his decades-long hold on power.
Zimbabwe was once known as the bread basket of southern Africa, but food production has been wrecked by erratic rains and the state's often violent seizure of most white-owned commercial farms. Vast tracts of farmland either lie fallow or have been carved into subsistence plots.
Cornmeal, the staple food, is often distributed only to those with membership cards in the ruling Zanu-PF party. Grain is milled almost exclusively by ruling party members and shipped to stores whose owners are known Mugabe faithful.
"There is an assumption that most governments want to feed their people, (but Mugabe) realized that food is a very effective political weapon," said David Coltart, an opposition lawmaker and a top human rights lawyer.
Government officials dispute the accusation, putting the blame for the food crisis on bad weather.
"(It's) only in the imagination of those who want to politicize and demonize the food distribution system," Social Welfare Minister July Moyo told The Associated Press.
Yet in August, when food first became short in this country of 12 million people, Didymus Mutsata, Zanu-PF's organizing secretary, said food should go only to those within the party's fold.
"We would be better off with only 6 million people, with our own people who support the liberation struggle. We don't want all these extra people," Mutsata said.
Diplomats also accuse the government of obstructing food deliveries to opposition supporters.
At an angry confrontation with Moyo last December, Tony Hall, the special U.S. ambassador to the World Food Program, demanded: "Why do I get the impression, that I have to beg you to feed your people?"
Physicians for Human Rights Denmark issued a report on cases of food being abused for political reasons, including rural opposition strongholds where U.N. food relief was reportedly withheld by the state grain monopoly.
"If it is not possible to increase nonpartisan food supplies into the country, it is our opinion that starvation and eventually death, will occur along party lines in Zimbabwe," the report said.
Ruling party political bosses also have been accused of selling grain on the black market, sometimes from their own living rooms. The official price for a 22-pound (10-kilogram) bag of cornmeal is 500 Zimbabwe dollars - about 50 U.S. cents - but is sold for 10 times that on the illicit market.
Finding cornmeal at government-set prices in public markets has become increasingly difficult, while witnesses report it being sold at cost at ruling party gatherings.
"The suffering is incredible. All the time they interfere, all the time government wants to make it appear that they are the ones feeding the people," said the Rev. Pius Ncube, the outspoken Anglican archbishop of Bulawayo, sitting at his desk under an icon of a black Jesus.
Ncube said every day he hears stories from parishioners who are forced to present ruling party cards to get food, or have been turned away as suspected government opponents.
Out on the street, a bread line stretched down tree-lined blocks of Bulawayo, the country's second biggest city.
"We are very angry," said Cecilia, a 24-year-old who asked to be identified only by her first name.
She slipped away from the line, saying she did not dare speak where patrolling ruling party militants might hear her.
"We don't see food," she said. "We don't know where it is going."
A angry response is always guaranteed from targeted governments, but extra controversy could be generated, with the Bush administration accused of causing civilian deaths in Iraq and criticised for its treatment of detainees from its anti-terror war. But Secretary of State Colin Powell said Washington would not shrink from its commitment to point out human rights abuses wherever they occur. "Our country was founded on the precept that freedom is the birthright of every human being, and America is proud to serve as a force for freedom across the globe," he said, unveiling the congressionally-mandated report which covers 2002.
China is no stranger to US criticism on human rights. This year's report said its record was still "poor" but highlighted several areas where repression had eased slightly, noting the communist government's permission for senior envoys from Tibet's spiritual leader the Dalai Lama to visit Beijing. But "late in the year, these positive developments were undermined by arrests of democracy activists, the imposition of death sentences without due process on two Tibetans, and the trials of labor leaders on 'subversion' charges," the report said. "Authorities were quick to suppress religious, political, and social groups, as well as individuals, that they perceived to be a threat to government power or to national stability.
A new broadside of criticism was aimed at Iraq. "Saddam Hussein's regime is a classic illustration of the fact that such regimes, which ruthlessly violate the rights of their citizens, tend to pose the greatest threats to international peace and stability," said Powell. Israel and the Palestinians both endured a ticking off. The report noted "problems" with Israel's treatment of Israeli Arabs while it accused the Palestinian Authority of having a "poor" human rights record and continuing "to commit numerous, serious abuses." The report said members of the Palestinian security forces and Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) took part in anti-Israel violence and terrorist attacks.
More criticism was heaped on Central Asian states, including Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, all accused of sharpening state control over dissent, more than a decade into the post-Soviet era. Myanmar, a frequent target of US scorn, earned new black marks, as the report lauded the bravery of democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi. "Her tremendous strength of character stands boldly in the face of the military regime's disregard for human rights and democracy, a disregard that extends to abuses such as extrajudicial killings, rapes, disappearances, forced labor and forced relocations."
With the United States locked in a nuclear showdown with North Korea, the report took the opportunity to highlight what it said was the use by Kim Jong-Il's regime of torture, forced abortion and capital punishment as instruments of state power. The human rights record of the third member of President George W. Bush's "axis of evil" Iran, "remained poor and and deteriorated substantially during the year, despite continuing efforts within society to make the Government accountable for its human rights policies," the report said.
"Systematic abuses included summary executions; disappearances; widespread use of torture and other degrading treatment, reportedly including rape; severe punishments such as stoning and flogging; harsh prison conditions; arbitrary arrest and detention; and prolonged and incommunicado detention."
The report also ripped into Zimbabwe's human rights record, accusing President Robert Mugabe's government of conducting an intentional, systematic campaign of abuses. The report accused the government of extrajudicial killings as well as beatings, rapes and torture, restricting freedoms of speech and the press, undermining the judicial system and failing to crack down on blatant rights abuses. [End]
Human rights activists? Where were they when the farmers were being forced off their land or executed where they stood...where was the United Nations, Ah yes, Kofi and Mugabe are of the same kidney so to speak so the UN stood by - as usual and let the Dictator continue in his usual manner...There comes a time, or should, when no aid comes to the aid of Dictators who ruin their countries and starve their people then blame it on the weather...humanitarian aid will not reach the needy anyway as is obvious in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
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