The Zimbabwe Situation

      Harare - Nurses at some Zimbabwe government hospitals have gone on
strike for the second time in a month, claiming the government has reneged
on promises to raise their wages, press reports said on Sunday.

      Some senior doctors have also gone on strike, the state-run Sunday
Mail reported.

      The private Standard newspaper quoted one unnamed nurse at Harare's
largest hospital as saying nurses felt "cheated" because the government had
not kept its promise to respond to hefty pay demands.

      "Our pay day was on Thursday and we were really shocked to find out
that nothing was added on our November salaries," she told the paper.

      Zimbabwe's public health service has been severely hit by a series of
strikes in recent days, mainly over pay.

      In October the army had to be called in to care for patients after
doctors and nurses went on strike for pay hikes of up to 8 000 percent.

      Nurses returned to work after the government promised to respond to
their demands, but doctors have remained on strike.

      Last week seven doctors were arrested for joining the strike, which
had been declared illegal.

      The Sunday Mail said senior doctors had now joined the strike in
sympathy with their more junior colleagues. The paper said patients were
being turned away from major city hospitals.

      Inflation in Zimbabwe is currently running at more than 526 percent,
eroding wages to below sustainable levels. - Sapa-AFP

Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe may or may not have squeezed his way into
the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (Chogm) set for Abuja, Nigeria,
early next month after talks with Chogm host President Olusegun Obasanjo
this week.

But his attendance is irrelevant to the real struggle going on inside the
country, say Mugabe watchers.

A day after Obasanjo’s visit, the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU)
and its civic partners took to the streets to protest continued human rights
abuses and the deteriorating economic situation — one that has seen
inflation rise to 525% (see story below), unemployment to 80% and a foreign
currency crisis that has led to a clampdown on illegal forex and gold
dealers but without netting sufficient forex resources for fuel and other
requirements. A paltry $2-million worth of forex is said to have been
received in early November, while about 40% of the gold being produced is
currently coming in.

The demonstration led to more than 400 arrests, including those of top ZCTU
and civic group leaders who were charged with violating the notorious Public
Order and Security Act, which seeks to stifle perceived anti-Mugabe protests
by requiring that they receive police sanction. There were reports of
beatings by police during the arrests and these, the ZCTU said, demonstrated
the continuing internal crisis.
Said Colin Gwiyo, the deputy secretary general of the ZCTU: “The demo takes
our message further. Abuja is not a big issue. With or without Obasanjo,
human rights are being violated. Whatever happens, the situation is here,
now.”

The ZCTU has called for a two-day strike on November 21 and 22 to demand the
release of those arrested. The start of the strike will coincide with
Finance Minister Herbert Murerwa’s Budget speech.

More protests are planned for Human Rights Day on December 10, when the
crisis is expected to have worsened. The protesters are also expected to
target the National Youth Service Programme believed to be churning out
youths responsible for much of the election violence.

Zimbabwe was suspended from the Commonwealth for a year after Mugabe’s March
2002 presidential election victory, dubbed fraudulent by the opposition
Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and the Commonwealth and Western
nations, but largely endorsed by Asian and African countries.

The suspension has remained in place because of reports of continued human
rights abuses such as those reportedly perpetrated against demonstrators
this week. However, Mugabe still views Zimbabwe’s suspension as “a racist
plot” cooked up by the white Commonwealth because of his seizure of
white-owned farm land.
Mugabe’s attendance at Chogm is still far from certain, however.

Although he confidently informed the state media “we look forward to
attending Chogm, Abuja”, Obasanjo was more circumspect. After talks with
Mugabe and MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai he announced that he would seek
wider consultation before a decision could be taken on Zimbabwe’s
attendance.

Professor Heneri Dzinotyiwei of the University of Zimbabwe said: “It’s not
obvious, really, that he [Mugabe] will be invited. It’s still very much
hanging in the air, but [President Thabo] Mbeki and Obasanjo would wish for
Zimbabwe’s problems to be settled internally rather than externally.” He
added that it would be to the MDC’s advantage to focus on the internal
crisis.

MDC party spokesperson Paul Themba Nyathi said Mugabe’s attendance at Chogm
was of “no consequence”, that the real struggle the MDC was concerned with
was “for the people of Zimbabwe” and the “piles and piles of applications”
it was receiving daily were testimony to the party’s growing popularity
among the people.
He said the MDC was continuing as before and nothing had changed. “Mugabe’s
attendance is not the issue [the issue is] rather the inflation, the
unemployment, the fact that one in three have no access to anti-retrovirals
and the government’s failure to provide maize seed. These are the issues of
immediate concern, not Abuja, which is 6 000km away,” he said, adding that
his party had in no way been weakened by the Obasanjo visit.

The state-owned Herald newspaper reported that Obasanjo had in talks with
Mugabe mentioned that he had witnessed a “changed, mellow” Tsvangirai.
However, when contacted for comment, Tsvangirai denied that he was softening
towards the idea of a government of national unity and insisted that the MDC
would continue as before with its court challenge: “How can there be a
government of national unity when we have not negotiated?” he asked.

The MDC’s court petition against Mugabe’s 2002 election victory began on
November 3, but was temporarily put on hold the following day to give the
judge time to study the initial submissions.

David Coltart, the MDC secretary for legal affairs, believes that it was
placed before the courts “overwhelming arguments. There is no other peaceful
lawful action at our disposal. As we’ve said in the past, if there’s
meaningful progress, we will consider suspending the court proceedings, and
if the discussions yield a final agreement which is irreversible and
endorsed by the international community”. — Africa Media Online

Terror on the veld
More than 1,000 South African farmers have been killed since the end of apartheid: Andrew Kenny stares into the heart of darkness

Cape Town

Heart of Darkness has claim to be the most famous novel of the 20th century. Conrad, whose writing is often boring, often obscure, but often filled with passages of breathtaking beauty and surprise, is the most piercing of novelists. Nothing more acute than Heart of Darkness has ever been written about colonialism. To my mind, it has this central thought: if you look too deeply into the dark heart of an alien, you will find yourself looking into your own dark heart and discovering all sorts of nasty things there.

Nasty things are happening in the South African farmlands 2,000 miles south of Conrad’s horror. South African farmers and their families are being slaughtered. The murders are accompanied by torture and rape. The sadism of the attacks suggests either dark perversion or systematic terror. Dr Gregory Stanton of Genocide Watch has even suggested that the killing could be classified as genocide.

The numbers are these: in the entire Mau-Mau emergency in Kenya in the 1950s, fewer than a dozen white farmers were killed (32 white civilians in total, fewer than those who died in road accidents in Nairobi in the same period). In the entire 14-year civil war in Rhodesia, which ended in 1979, the number of white farmers killed was 269. In the three years of Mugabe’s terror since 2000, it was 11. In South Africa, in the nine years following the end of apartheid and the ‘miracle’ of South Africa’s democratic election in 1994, more than 1,000 farmers have been killed. The death rate by murder for South African farmers is 313 per 100,000, perhaps the highest for any group of people on earth who are not at war.

In 1997 four young men invaded the farm of Beatriz and Jose Freitas in the north-east of South Africa. Jose, who is disabled, was tied up while they ransacked the house. They asked Beatriz where her iron was. Then they dragged her to the laundry, took off her clothes, kicked her to the ground, raped her, poured oil over her, switched on the iron and applied it to her body. Her skin came away in flaps. Three years later Jose was shot dead. This attack, reported by the South African TV programme Carte Blanche, is not unusually gruesome. There are hundreds that are as bad or worse. Old men are forced to watch their wives being raped before the couple are painfully killed. Farmers and farmworkers are tortured over many hours. What is happening?

There are two opposing theories. At one extreme, these attacks are seen as being directed as part of the ‘Second Revolution’. The First Revolution was the takeover of South Africa by a black government. The Second Revolution, using terror, is the establishment of a radical black communist society and the expulsion of whites. Driving the white farmers off their land is part of this process. At the other extreme, the attacks are seen as being purely criminal and without political guidance or motives. The white farming lobby is inclined to believe the former; it points to Peter Mokaba, a prominent young ANC politician, who chanted, ‘Kill the Boer! Kill the farmer!’ to cheering black crowds. The ANC government says that it believes the latter.

I have no experience or knowledge of farming or farm murders, but looking at the problem from the outside, with my experience of living in South Africa and my observations of human nature, I do not doubt that the latter theory is right and that the attacks are essentially criminal. However, this needs to be qualified.

To explain the sadism, violence and the rape in the farm attacks, you need to understand only two things: the attacks are happening in an extremely violent country with very high unemployment, and the attackers are poor, ill-educated, fatherless, jobless, rootless young men — who happen to be black. South Africa’s murder rate is 58 per 100,000, perhaps the world’s highest. (The rate for England and Wales is 1.3.) I have lived a sheltered life, but a man was shot dead across the street from me; a motorist was clubbed to death with a hockey stick by another motorist at a crossroads near me; in the bushes outside the nearest pub, a young girl was gang-raped, had one of her nipples bitten off and her mouth wedged open with a wooden stick so that they could rape her again in the mouth; I saw the mortuary photograph of a young man who had been tied to a railway line by two friends so that the train had cut off his legs at the shins and his head between the upper and lower jaws. Every South African can give a similar account.

Why is South Africa so violent, far more so than, say, Zimbabwe? I do not know. The violence predates apartheid by at least 100 years, and probably reached its nadir in the appalling Mfecane massacres between black tribes in the early 19th century, before the white man arrived in those parts. During apartheid, criminal violence was at very high levels, but it was under-reported because of the attention paid to political violence, which actually claimed far fewer lives. The violence seems to have increased somewhat as apartheid fell away, probably because the confident and oppressive police force was replaced with a fearful and inadequate one. The murder rate in the 1970s and 1980s was about 30 per 100,000, and from then rose to its present levels. (Since the start of the Iraq war in March this year, between 7,000 and 10,000 Iraqi civilians are reckoned to have died. In the same period more than 15,000 South Africans have been murdered.) Farm murders have certainly increased dramatically with the ending of apartheid, but brutality in South Africa existed before, during and after apartheid.

In such a bloody atmosphere, imagine a gang of aimless, hopeless young men stumbling into an isolated farm, where they will not be resisted and can do what they want. The rape scene in A Clockwork Orange gave a convincing picture of unleashed male adolescents enjoying themselves with sex and violence. We are ordered by the feminists to believe that rape is only about power. Nonsense. Rape is sex, and sex is fun (for men, anyway). Other things, such as revenge and dominance, may well come into it, but no man can commit rape to the point of ejaculation without pleasure. The lingering violence and torture? Again, I am afraid, this is part of our dark nature. English schoolboys thought it fun to stick a pipe up a frog’s anus and blow it up until it burst. No doubt those young men applying a hot iron to a naked woman thought that was fun too. In the old days, we loved public executions, including drawing and quartering; today we love violence in the cinema.

But of course there is a political background. Three hundred years ago, black people owned all South Africa north of the Fish River. White people invaded and took it from them. Black people living around the white farmlands have been brought up with assorted facts and legends of the dispossession of their ancestors. To give a poor historical analogy, picture yourself as a native Briton living in desperate poverty in a fetid slum in Roman-occupied Britain in the 2nd century. In the distance you can see the magnificent farm your family owned before the Romans stole it from them. Today you see the Roman owner and his wife living in luxury. Occasionally, as she passes by, she gives a patronising smile and throws you a crust. What would your feelings be if a gang of young British thugs murdered the Roman and gang-raped his wife? Would you help the Roman authorities to catch them?

The young black attackers imagine that the white farmers are all very rich and that their farmsteads must be bulging with good things. So robbery is a major motive, although it can be displaced when they discover that the farmer has not got much to steal. A rarer motive is grievance, real or imagined, against the farmer. The surrounding black community, desperately poor, might know the killers but it seldom volunteers information to the police. Both the white farmers and the poor black families see conspiracies from the other side; both imagine things in the shadows. The best account of this is Midlands by Jonny Steinberg, a farm-murder investigation converted into a novel to provide anonymity to witnesses and to allow Steinberg to speculate, which he does mainly with interesting effect. In a newspaper article Steinberg wrote, ‘The profile of the typical perpetrator was that of a young drifter; he was generally born in the district where he committed the crime, migrated to the city in his late teens, failed there, and drifted back to his ancestral home. He had seldom met his victim before the robbery.’

The ANC government’s reaction to the farm murders is uncertain. On the one hand, it just loves stories of evil white men persecuting innocent black men and getting their just deserts. This is why the South African government supports and applauds Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. The fact that Mugabe has killed, raped and tortured tens of thousands of black people means nothing to it. The fact that he has killed a small number of white farmers and seized a few white farms delights it. But, on the other hand, the ANC wants white investment, expertise and trade. Essentially it is saying, ‘Please invest here, you white bastards!’ So while it might be tempted to pander to the killing of white farmers, while Peter Mokaba may have chanted, ‘Kill the Boer! Kill the farmer!’, while the South African Human Rights Commission (whose main job is to promote the ANC’s racial ideology) may thunder against cruel, patronising and exploitative white farmers, its official position is to support the rule of law, condemn farm attacks and declare them to be purely criminal.

But it does not do much about enforcing the law. The police force, especially in the rural areas, is woefully incompetent and there are precious few signs of improvement or any will to achieve it. Combating crime is very low on the ANC’s list of priorities. This month the ANC made Robert McBride the chief of a metropolitan police force. McBride has no experience or qualifications in policing, but in 1986 he murdered three innocent women by placing a bomb in a Durban restaurant (at a time when apartheid was in retreat). This makes him an ANC hero and explains his appointment. Senior ANC politicians protect themselves against violent crime with fortified houses and phalanxes of bodyguards, but do nothing to protect the ordinary people of South Africa. Mention of South Africa’s appalling crime levels just irritates them and any opposition politician who brings up the subject will be called a racist.

Ideologues try to make farm murders into an issue of land rights. There is little evidence of this. No black killer, to my knowledge, has expressed a desire to run a farm of his own. In fact, very few South Africans, black or white, want to farm at all. Migration from the countryside to the cities continues apace (and should be thoroughly welcomed). However, it is certainly true that land reform and property rights for everyone are of fundamental importance to South Africa’s future prosperity and stability. Every black adult in South Africa should be given full, tradable rights to a piece of land. There is plenty available. If a black man wanted to sell his land to a white property developer for the price of a crate of beer, well, that would be for him to decide. That is how liberty works. Such sentiments are anathema to the government, which hates the idea of individual black men controlling their own lives, and this probably explains the dreadfully slow pace of land reform in South Africa.

I have heard only one first-hand account of a farm attack, a mild one. It happened to two white friends, George and Jenny, who had a small farm near Bronkhorstspruit, east of Johannesburg. They had some cattle and grew indigenous plants for nurseries. Both are gentle liberals in their late fifties. They had black families on the farm and looked after them well. At 8 o’clock one morning, as Jenny was opening the gate to leave the farm, two black youngsters, aged 19 and 13, both known to her, attacked her. The 19-year-old grabbed her from behind, forced her to the ground and twisted her jaw, pulling it out of its socket (she could not recognise herself in the mirror afterwards). She screamed. The 13-year-old leant down to her and pleaded gently, ‘Shhhh, Jenny, don’t make so much noise!’ Then they ran away and left her.

They were arrested and explained that they had wanted to kill George. They were going to smash in his skull with a four-pound hammer which they had left in the bushes. But when George drove by at 7 o’clock, his car had tinted windows and they were not sure if he had other people with him. So they left him and attacked her instead. They had intended to steal the car, but neither of them could drive so they had arranged for two accomplices to join them, but these had not pitched up. The 19-year-old had been in trouble in the past and George had warned local farmers against him, perhaps a motive for the murder plan. The parents of the two attackers were distraught.

The sheer vagueness of the murder plot, its woolly motives and its haphazard enactment are probably typical. With a slightly different sequence of events, George could have had his brains dashed out and Jenny could have been raped. Indeed, just such murders and rapes have happened in the locality in recent years. There’s no conspiracy; just feeble human beings following dark and incoherent urges amid grinding poverty in a lawless land.

The faltering Zimbabwe public health system has been further reduced as
nurses and senior doctors join junior and mid-level doctors on a month-long
strike.
The nurses briefly joined the doctors striking last month for higher pay.
They returned to work after being promised an 800 percent pay rise.

But the strike was on again after paychecks on Thursday showed no increase.
It is reported that all nurses except those in intensive care and operating
rooms are on strike at all government hospitals in Harare.

One nurse said that the situation is so bad that patients are being turned
away and relatives who can afford it are taking their sick to expensive
private hospitals. The state-controlled newspaper, The Sunday Mail, reported
that even desperately ill patients are being turned away from hospitals.

One senior doctor who asked not to be identified said she and her colleagues
decided to join the strike after a number of meetings on the pay issue
yielded no positive results.

Doctors' pay in Zimbabwe dollars has been decimated by the currency's
plunge. They say to restore their normal pay would require a salary increase
of 8,000 percent.

A labor court has ordered the doctors back to work, but they say they will
comply only if the government makes a written undertaking to address their
grievance. The government has responded by arresting the leadership of the
striking doctors for engaging in an illegal strike and for contempt of
court.

A spokesman says it is illegal in Zimbabwe for doctors to go on strike
because they provide an essential service.

Zimbabwe's public health-care system, once one the best in sub-Saharan
Africa, has deteriorated badly. The chronic shortage of foreign currency for
equipment and essential drugs has worsened the situation. Doctors, nurses,
and other health professionals are leaving the country in large numbers.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
--

Mr Mbitiru, a freelance journalist, is a former 'Sunday Nation' Managing
editor

Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)

November 22, 2003
Posted to the web November 24, 2003

Maputo

A leading human rights NGO, the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI),
has called on Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, not to invited
Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe, to the Commonwealth summit due to be held
in Abuja in December.

A statement from CHRI, received by AIM, notes recent reports indicating that
Mugabe is putting pressure on Obasanjo to send him an invitation to attend
the Abuja gathering.

Mugabe's request, it adds, "comes despite the fact that the Commonwealth has
unanimously agreed that Zimbabwe be suspended from the Commonwealth because
of the failure of the Zimbabwean Government to uphold the principles of the
Commonwealth's Harare Declaration, including respect for democracy, the rule
of law and human rights".

The statement rejects the attempts by the Zimbabwean regime to turn the
issue into a racial one, and Mugabe's claim that the drive to keep Zimbabwe
suspended is spearheaded by Britain and Australia.

It stresses that the CHRI (which is based, not in Britain or Australia, but
in New Delhi, India) is "committed to working for the practical realisation
of all people throughout the Commonwealth", and does not support racial
interpretations of the dispute.

The CHRI, the statement continues, "maintains that Zimbabwe must remain
suspended until the Government demonstrates that it is committed to
upholding the principles to which the Commonwealth is committed, including a
commitment to the protection and promotion of human rights".

The Harare government's "continued disregard for the human rights of its
people, both black and white, is distressing and cannot be ignored", CHRI
declares. "To attempt to characterise the international community's
condemnation of the Government's actions as racially-based disrespect the
continued suffering of many millions of Zimbabwean's throughout the
country".

The CHRI lists some of the flagrant violations of basic rights committed by
the Zimbabwean authorities, including its attacks on independent media such
as the "Daily News", and the recent arrests of members of the Zimbabwe
Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) during peaceful demonstrations.

The statement calls on Obasanjo "to demonstrate his solidarity and concern
for the Zimbabwean people by refusing to succumb to President Mugabe's
cynical attempts to play the 'race card' and justify the suffering he has
inflicted on his own people on racial grounds"

It suggests that Obasanjo should "demonstrate his vision and commitment to
an Africa striving to better the lives of all its people and ensure the
practical realisation of their human rights, by supporting Zimbabwe's
suspension from the Commonwealth and declining to invite President Mugabe to
next month's summit.

The people of Zimbabwe deserve no less".