Regards, Ivan
Posted on 08/16/2004 2:47:00 AM PDT by MadIvan
“THERE is an operation on Wednesday,” said Tawanda, a Zimbabwean border-jumper, raising his voice above the din around the minibus rank next to the railway station.
“When it comes, you run and run. You have to be like a soldier in enemy country. You may be captured at any time.”
Sure enough, at dawn hundreds of armed soldiers and police descended on Francistown. They set up roadblocks all over and banged on doors, mostly in the poorer quarters of Botswana’s second-largest town on the edge of the Kalahari Desert.
For the next three days they demanded identification and listened for tongues other than the Setswana language. On the first day, police superintendent Mosalagae Moseki said, 1,051 illegal Zimbabwean immigrants were caught. Men who could not pay the fine were given three lashes on their buttocks and in the afternoon the whole lot were driven, singing, over the border and dumped on the Zimbabwe side at Plumtree border post.
Tawanda, who may have been among them, had insisted: “I will keep on coming back and coming back. I am running away from home to another man’s home because of hunger.” This city of run-down townships and vast shopping malls in a country booming with diamond wealth is a magnet for tens of thousands of Zimbabweans, who walk all night through the bush, climb over the 2m barbed wire fence — soon to be electrified — and dodge Botswana Defence Force patrols, so that they can earn the stable Botswana pula by menial work and crime.
“The Batswana hate us,” said Pamela, 20, an illegal from Harare with a frizz of orange hair, who earns a living by housework, plaiting hair and prostitution. “It is hard here. Sometimes they don’t pay us. We sleep ten in a room. But I have a chance here to earn money.”
She came three months ago as soon as she got her O-level results. “All my classmates, they are looking for passports, then they will leave Zimbabwe,” she said.
They will join 3.4 million others in the Zimbabwean diaspora, about a quarter of the total population, according to Zimbabwe’s central bank.
Nearly five years ago President Mugabe set off the collapse of the economy with a violent offensive to destroy his opponents. It opened a rush of migration that shows no sign of diminishing.
The state statistical office says that it does not keep figures of racial groups, but there is wide consensus among academics and business groups that the white population has fallen to 30,000 to 40,000, from a peak of 270,000 in the early 1970s.
There are more than four times the number of black Zimbabweans in Britain now — making up the bulk of the 1.1 million on British soil — than there were whites in Zimbabwe when it was the British colony of Southern Rhodesia.
“Anybody who can get a job overseas has left,” said John Mufakare, the director of the Employers’ Confederation of Zimbabwe. “The only graduates who are left are those who are making frantic efforts to go. Those still here are the parents, the elderly and the plodders. The spark that distinguished Zimbabwe from the rest of Africa has gone.”
The catalogue of loss is staggering. Two thirds of recently qualified accountants have left in the past couple of years. Volkswagen’s franchise-holder is in danger of closing because its mechanics fail to return from training courses abroad. Lifts are becoming dangerous because most mechanics have left.
In 2002, when statistics were last made public, 21,000 nurses left. “They were tutors, theatre sisters, intensive-care sisters,” said Timothy Stamps, health adviser to Mr Mugabe’s office. “It’s even worse now.” Attempts by Britain to restrict the flow by introducing visas has had no effect. Queues start lining up outside the embassy often 15 hours before it opens.
“The numbers are growing every day,” an official said. “If they are rejected, they will be back the next day with another 690,000 Zimbabwe dollars (£36, a month’s pay for a teacher) for the visa fee. They don’t give up.”
Some who want to go cannot. “Every now and then we get rocks through the window,” said an English-born salesman, who asked for anonymity.
“In the small hours the other night, my wife was crying. She said: ‘I want to leave this country.’ We can’t go anywhere. I’m 65 and we don’t have the money.”
FAR AND WIDE
Regards, Ivan
Ping!
BUMP
Actually, anything short of an full-scale invasion would be fine with me. Even a partial resolution, e.g. the agreements that allowed Charles Taylor and Idi Amin to flee their respective countries, would go a long way toward ameliorating the problems faced by the people of Zimbabwe.
Let's not forget, this is the same regime that still-to the best of my knowledge-harbors the man known as "The Ethiopian Pol Pot."
I don't think many people, outside of his cronies in the ZANU-PF, would shed a tear if Mugabe were to leave office.
It's getting desperate there.
To reiterate what my daughter told me after visiting Zimbabwe last year; there are few young people between the ages of 18 and 30.
There is no future in that country.
!!!!!!!!!!
There must be de-ZANUfication in Zimbabwe. Get rid of Mugabe, and another with his mindset will replace him, unless there is a Night of the Long Knives.
Mengistu.
He has a boulevard named after him in Harare.
AAARRGGHH!
November 23, 1974-"Bloody Saturday"
It still grates on me that those vermin who rule Iran actually have a "Khaled Islambuli" street in the middle of Tehran, named in honor of the cockroach that assassinated the late President Anwar Sadat of Egypt.
Of course, they renamed it "Intifada" street when Hosni Mubarak threatened not to travel to Iran on a state visit.
What a wonderful bunch they are.
His assassination was evidence of the illegitimacy of the Islamacists' claim to doing the work of God on Earth.
Thank God that his widow, Jehan Sadat, is still alive to carry on his legacy.
I'm afraid it follows the now established pattern in many African countries of naming streets or buildings after tyrants, former tyrants, assassins and other assorted filth. I presume these act as "reminders" to make the
rulers of the countries concerned feel more confident about not being alone in their perpetration of atrocities, intimidation or corruption.
>I don't think many people, outside of his cronies in the >ZANU-PF, would shed a tear if Mugabe were to leave office.
They are precisely the people who - should they see him get away with his unforgiveable actions - will continue to carry his torch in the belief that they, too, will be immune to retribution. He has long been training kids as young as 12 in his "torture training camps".
Some of the younger politicians and the African public wanted rid of Mugabe LONG before he started his land-grab. This in itself was partially a device to whip up nationalist emotions in an attempt to shore up his sagging popularity, at the same time diverting attention from his disastrous, outmoded policies which already had the country running rapidly downhill.
I really appreciate the fact that there are people here on FR who are just as exasperated at this situation as we seem to be.
I'm also glad that Cathy Buckle's story has been related to people living in the United States, or at least those of us living here who routinely access FreeRepublic.
This situation really is a tragic waste of human life.
-good times, G.J.P. (Jr.)
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