http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/2157949.stm

As aid agencies warn of the growing threat of starvation to millions of people in Zimbabwe, the BBC has uncovered evidence of political interference in the distribution of food by President Robert Mugabe's supporters.

Food aid has been blocked in some areas which voted against Mr Mugabe during elections in March.

Opposition supporters have also been prevented from buying commercial stocks of grain.

Last week, President Robert Mugabe said claims of political interference came from the opposition and were without substance.

The signs of food shortages and hunger are everywhere in Zimbabwe.

Groups of villagers wait for days at a time by the roadside for deliveries of scarce supplies of the staple food, maize.

In towns and cities, long queues form outside supermarkets when stocks arrive.

The shelves are bare of basics such as sugar and salt.

Foraging for food

Many people in urban areas are reduced to eating a single meal a day, but the hardship is most severe in villages.

"From six o'clock in the morning, up to late, no food," 80-year-old Anderson Mudimba told me.

"We don't know... who will help us to have food, because we've waited and waited, and no assistance at all is coming."

I met families surviving on leaves and wild fruit.

They should be receiving food aid, but say it has been blocked by government supporters who accuse them of voting for the opposition.

Numerous interviewees said they had been refused permission to buy food from government grain depots unless they produced a ruling party membership card.

Prosper, a former teacher from Buhera, who fled his home after being denied food because he was an MDC supporter told me:

"There was a war veteran who said, 'You MDC, you are not going to buy this food, to buy maize, go back to the back of the line.'"

"So when you reach the number, they start taking you back again."

Children dying

Hospital officials in the north-western town of Binga, where the aid effort is being held up by Mr Mugabe's followers, say nearly 30 children have died in recent weeks from malnutrition-related illness.

Others have died after eating poisonous roots.

Many children no longer attend school as their days are spent searching for food, those that do make the journey to the schoolhouse are severely weakened by hunger.

"They don't concentrate and they are weak and they are always complaining of hunger," a schoolteacher told me.

"They also talk about ... [how] there's nothing at home to eat."

She said the children's hunger means it is impossible for them to concentrate on their work.

"[After school break] They don't faint as such, but they will be sleepy, which really shows signs of hunger," she said.

"You can't learn on an empty stomach, you can only concentrate if you have had enough."

Government control

Aid agencies complain that the government is trying to control the relief effort at every level.

One local charity official, who did not want to give me his name for fear of retribution, said that the situation was especially terrible as it need not occur.

"For us it is sad, especially when we have food around and we have people who are starving in the communities," he said.

"But the war veterans are not allowing us to distribute the food there."

Zimbabwe has suffered two poor rainy seasons in a row, but the crisis unfolding now is as much man-made as natural.
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More at the link about south africas similar situation.apartied is gone and so is the food.:mad:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old&section=current&issue=2002-07-27&id=2092

Evil under the sun
It?s nearly too late to save Zimbabwe, says Michael Ancram. The world must intervene to stop Mugabe Blantyre, Malawi

It is not often that you see a human face devoid of hope. Last Wednesday morning in a dusty wood outside Harare in Zimbabwe I looked into many such faces. These were the forgotten victims of Robert Mugabe?s regime in Zimbabwe, just a few of the 85,000 ?displaced? black workers thrown violently off their farms. Their few possessions have been taken from them, and most will never find work again.

Among them are frail and elderly men and women, retired after a lifetime?s work, and children whose worlds have been turned upside-down, hanging around in the sun with no prospect of an education. I saw about 100 such people. A 45-year-old foreman had been forced to leave behind the beef herd he had worked with for 15 years. He was a skilled stockman of the sort highly valued in any agricultural economy. He is unlikely ever to tend cattle again. A 54-year-old farmhand, whose father and grandfather had worked on the farm before him, had lost the only home and working environment he had ever known ? and Zimbabwe had lost another skilled hand. An 80-year-old wizened and lame retired worker, expecting to live out his declining years in relative tranquillity, was stumbling around the tents and the open fires, lost. A mother pointed to her ten-year-old child and said, ?No school now. No more school ever.? From what I heard she is probably right.

The numbers are rocketing. If the land grabs continue and the 2,900 white farmers are required to leave their farms on 9 August, the number of ?displaced? black farm workers could rise to 300,000. Robert Mugabe couldn?t care less. His government sneeringly describes the victims as Malawian or Mozambican, ignoring the reality that they have been in Zimbabwe for generations.

My colleague Richard Spring, MP, and I arrived at an almost empty Harare airport at about 9 a.m. Because the Zimbabwean authorities did not know we were there, we were able to see troubling sights. A whistle-stop tour of the farmlands north-west of Harare showed us that hectare after hectare of highly productive farmland is lying unprepared, unplanted and vandalised. The sheer evil of this deliberate waste, at a time when six million Zimbabweans are malnourished and the threat of famine is just around the corner, was made starker by the evident success of the few farms still in production.

We returned to Harare to meet politicians from the opposition MDC party, including the leader, Morgan Tsvangirai. The meeting was held on neutral ground to avoid inviting undue attention. Tsvangirai is a big man in every sense. He has a large physique, a big presence and a broad smile. In conversation he was frank and to the point. There was a sense of leadership in the room, and his very able colleagues were evidently proud of him. In fact, all these politicians are remarkable. Their refusal to be cowed by constant threats and harassment, their determination to fight the corruption which is the Mugabe regime, their faith that in the end the democratic system and the rule of law will come good, deserve the fullest admiration. Amid the gloom of despair they remain a guiding light.

So do the representatives of Civil Society whom we met next. These are the uncoverers and publishers of the disgraceful human-rights abuses, of political ?cleansing?, of the rule of law ignored. We met them behind barred and barbed protection. They, too, are brave ? many of them are young black Zimbabweans, desperate about their country, prepared to speak out. They believe that Mugabe?s government is without legitimacy and they are setting out to prove it.

We were given chapter and verse on the violations, the violence, the contempt for the law and the abuse of authority, including the chilling fact that many of the political assaults are carried out by the police on people in their custody.

We visited the British High Commissioner, both to report and to be briefed, and then returned to Harare airport and left. While the day had passed without any specific cause for alarm, I have to admit that as the plane took off the relief was palpable. It was, however, mixed with a great sadness at what I had seen and heard, and a renewed determination to help.

A crisis is already engulfing Zimbabwe. I believe that it is about to implode into full-blown disaster. In a world where there are too many natural disasters it is almost a blasphemy to witness one that is deliberately politically engineered. Each of the elements ? the displaced, the crop failures, the impending famine, the undermining of democracy and the rule of law ? is the direct product of Mugabe?s despotism.

While I welcome the fact that, late in the day, the British government and European colleagues have extended the travel ban on the Mugabe regime, which I have long called for, the ban does not include business associates and all spouses and families of those on the expanded list. The targeted sanctions still do not go far enough if they are to be genuinely effective. The lesson of the last six months is that it is not just the announcement that matters but a rigorous implementation of the ban, with loopholes closed, in order to show that Europe matches words with actions. This is because we have now seen the official press release, which upon closer scrutiny is quite weak. Only Grace Mugabe is included as the single spouse on the list.

The tragedy of Zimbabwe is that disaster has been coming a long time, yet so little has been done internationally to avert it at an early stage when pressure could have had a much greater effect. Foot-dragging and ?mental imperialism? prevented it. They must not be allowed to prevent it any more.

The international community must come together in an effective coalition and ensure that whatever it takes to secure fresh elections in Zimbabwe is brought to bear now. Soon it will be too late.

Speeches about healing the scars of Africa are not only worthless if they are not accompanied by action, but are also positively damaging because they raise expectations only cruelly to dash them. If Tony Blair meant it when he talked about a moral duty to act, he must show that he meant it.
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Its blacks as well as white being starved to death by this animal

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=28457

CAPE TOWN, South Africa ? Observers of Zimbabwe's recent spring election saw a new wave of intimidation tactics employed by dictator Robert Mugabe's henchmen ? including the arrest, beating, torture and even murder of opposition members.

Over 1,400 supporters of the Movement for Democratic Change, or MDC, who opposed Mugabe were arrested, along with MDC election observers. Various human-rights groups documented more than 70,000 human-rights abuses.

Mugabe's election victory was celebrated with an "anti-American" march in which a coffin of the MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai was paraded through Zimbabwe's capital with an American flag draped over it.

Sheila McVey, a white Zimbabwean farmer who observed this celebration, told WorldNetDaily, "It was frightening and disgusting. Zimbabwe has gone mad. Where are the Americans and Brits when we need them most? Where is the United Nations?"

Mugabe's ruling ZANU-PF militia beat several MDC supporters to death. Darlington Vikaveka and farm manager John Rutherford were beaten to death on a farm near Mrondera. In Kwekwe, Mugabe troops killed Funny Mahuni at a torture camp in the Mbizo township. Witnesses said Mahuni's stomach was slit open with a knife. Many street vendors in Bulawayo were beaten and had their "for sale" items taken away by the Mugabe militia when they were suspected of voting for the opposition.

During the election, Mugabe's militia ? bolstered by 20,000 new recruits based at 23 posts in Mugabe's tribal homeland of Mashonaland ? spread out around the nation and prevented at least 500,000 registered MDC voters from turning in their ballots, about 15 percent of all registered voters. The militia set up roadblocks all across the nation and would allow only passengers with ZANU-PF membership cards access to voting stations. On one Zimbabwean farm, where a poster of Mugabe was ruined with graffiti, the militia reportedly threatened to send the black workers on the farm to one of Mugabe's "re-education camps."

Philip Chiyangawa, a ZANU-PF member of parliament was captured on videotape telling one Mugabe youth militia member to "get a hold of MDC supporters; beat them until they are dead. Burn their farms and their workers' houses, then run away and we will blame the burning of the workers' houses on the whites. Report to the police, because they are ours."

Mitchell Gammonds, a British expatriate who was hunting on safari in Zimbabwe during the election, told WorldNetDaily, "Zimbabwe has been ruined. The scene was one of pandemonium. God help the MDC."

Almost 50 percent of the voting stations went unmonitored. Zimbabwe's former head of military intelligence, Col. Sobusa Gula-Ndebele, was put in charge of the Electoral Supervisory Commission overseeing the election.

Because of his tactics, Mugabe "won big" for the first time in Matabeleland, where he brought in North Korean mercenaries in the early 1980s to slaughter 20,000-30,000 Matabele tribesmen who opposed his dictatorship.

The army and police in Zimbabwe reportedly were forced to vote for Mugabe. Many troops were brought home from neighboring Congo and told to prepare for a coup against the MDC if in fact the MDC won the election.

Didymus Mutasa, the ZANU-PF politburo secretary for external affairs told the South African Broadcast Commission "mayhem" would result if the MDC won the election. "Under these circumstances, if there were to be a coup, we could support it very definitely," he commented.

Comrade Zhou, a leading war veteran in Mugabe's militia, told the South African media, "I do not understand why Comrade Mugabe has to have an election. Who said we had to have elections? The colonialists. We will know if there is a single vote for the colonialists, and that person will regret it. There is no law in a war. You try to kill your enemy, he is your enemy and you must kill him, not put him on trial. We had to beat one man because people heard him say it was the president's fault 'there is no food.'"

Rhodesia (the former name of Zimbabwe) was a net exporter of food and the breadbasket of Africa under Ian Smith's white government. Today, Zimbabwe has declared a famine, confiscated all white-owned farms and threatened to place any white farmer who dares to plant new crops in prison.

Mugabe, alarmed by the drought and famine in the nation, staged a witchcraft ceremony asking for rain. At this ceremony, Mugabe claimed he was possessed by the spirit of "Murenga," a witch doctor who inspired a revolt against white settlers building Zimbabwe/Rhodesia back in 1896. At the ceremony, Mugabe praised the 10,000 Libyan mercenaries who are helping to prop up his rule and warned that anyone who voted for the MDC would be cursed and hounded by "evil spirits."

Two million Zimbabweans eligible to vote ? those living overseas ? were prevented from voting, while many deceased Zimbabweans somehow "voted." Mugabe received 5 million votes in a country with a total of 12 million inhabitants. Two million citizens out of the nation could not vote, and 60 percent of the residents in Zimbabwe are under the legal voting age of 18.

Still, South Africa's ANC endorsed Mugabe's victory. In the March 14 Cape Times, the ANC was quoted as sending "warm congratulations" to Mugabe for "a convincing majority win. Indeed, the people of Zimbabwe have spoken and let their will be respected by all."

Sam Motsuenyane, the leader of the South African Observer Mission to the Zimbabwean election said that the violence, murder, abduction and torture of other election observers was "an administrative oversight."

Afterward, under pressure from the Labor Party in the UK and the threat that the European Union would not fund South African President Thabo Mbeki's NEPAD economic initiative for Southern Africa , Mbeki took back his endorsement. The International Ecumenical Peace Observers hailing from the All Africa Conference of Churches also rejected the outcome of the election, as did Zimbabwe's Council of Churches.

Inkatha, South Africa's Zulu party, rejected the result, saying, "Yes, he (Mugabe) did win, but it was a muddied and bloody train to victory." Tony Leon, the Democratic Alliance leader in South Africa and a major political player, said, "The election was characterized by fundamental violations. If we again fail to act, our region will be written off by the developed world. The South African government should align itself on the side of human rights and democracy."

Rev. Ken Meshoe, the president of the African Christian Democratic Party also rejected the results and singled out "pre-poll violence and intimidation targeted at the members of opposition parties." Eleven Christians and several pastors in Zimbabwe were arrested for organizing an interdenominational prayer meeting to ask for peace in Zimbabwe before the elections. Catholics, Methodists and Anglicans, among others, were arrested.

Several South African newspapers chastised the ANC for endorsing Mugabe and thus scaring off foreign investment.

The European Union, British Commonwealth and U.S. all rejected the election results as a fraud. The UK threatened to expel Zimbabwe, the former British colony of Rhodesia, from the Commonwealth.

Mugave is another tin horn dictator. I hope the bastard dies!