From ZWNEWS, 24 August

Broken toys and broken lives: a tale of wanton destruction

An eyewitness account from Chinhoyi and other districts attacked by Zanu PF militants

Despite a broken arm, the man had cycled several kilometres when he flagged us down on the dirt road in Doma.. He was stuttering, could hardly get the words out. "They are coming," he said , "there is a big gang heading towards that farm. We must tell the police." Radio messages from spotter planes and vehicles on the ground had already told us that invaders were on the way, the police had been told and had once again refused to react. And yet this poor guy, still with faith in law and order thought that if he got on his bike and pedalled ten kilometres to the police post at Doma, maybe he could stop the wanton destruction and violence that was sure to follow the arrival of the group. We hadn't the heart to tell him his trip was in vain, and thanked him for the information. When we drove off he resumed pedalling valiantly toward the police post.

The man is one of ten of thousands of farm workers whose lives and livelihoods, along with those of white commercial farmers, are being wrecked in the latest wave of pillage and looting by militants of President Robert Mugabe's ruling Zanu PF party. Since the new attacks started Aug. 7, at least 4,000 black farm workers and their families have been made homeless, no one is helping them, and the Mugabe regime has reportedly refused to let non-governmental agencies assist.

Human rights organisations and others struggle to compile the statistics. The Amani Trust, which monitors human rights abuses in Zimbabwe, recorded 11 political murders, 61 disappearances, 104 cases of unlawful detention and 288 incidents of torture last month alone - and that is just a small, confirmed part of the picture. Behind the figures lie stories of personal pain, tragedy and immense bravery by political opponents of the Mugabe administration, by rural school teachers and health professionals, farm workers, commercial farmers and anyone else caught in the wave of state-sponsored terror.

For example, an elderly female domestic worker came across her employers' goods hidden in the bush. She ran to Mhangura, the nearest town, and with her own money hired a vehicle to collect the property, transported it to the Mhangura police station and asked officers there to keep the goods safe. She was arrested for theft and, despite her employers' efforts, remains in jail. I think her name is Janet Zuze. The Herald says that because farmers are paying fines for workers like her, and other workers who were forced to loot, the farmers (and the British Government) organised the looting themselves.

Along the road, we met farm workers fleeing from the invaders. They did not want to be involved. The pattern is that a core group of Zanu PF militants shows up at a white-owned farm, has a look round and then goes off to collect people to loot. Often they will use the next door farm workers who are forced to steal and take the goods to their compounds. In some cases, the farm workers have risked beatings and worse by returning looted goods to the owners after the invaders have left. Others go along with it. We passed many people collecting on the roads, waiting to be picked up by already overloaded vehicles that Zanu PF militants had ordered farm drivers to steal. When you have nothing, and you see you neighbour acquire a TV set, it must be difficult to resist.

In the past week, as attacks spread to the Hwedza and Marondera districts, Zanu PF militants displayed a gruesome version of image-making. On six farms in the Hwedza district, the invaders first herded the workers from their houses into areas near tobacco barns. The farm owners were forced to pay the workers, some of whom then dispersed with their families into nearby communal peasant farming areas. Others just sat on the side of roads alongside bundles of belongings and their chickens. The Zanu PF militants told them that was ``bad publicity'' and forced them into the bush. Their fate is unknown.

And then there are the animals. On one farm in the Mhangura district, the pen foreman was beaten up after trying to protect the cattle. He failed, and Zanu PF thugs slaughtered the cattle by hacking off their heads with axes - often making several attempts before the writhing animals died. In some cases, cows, horses, chickens and other animals have not been fed or watered since the start of the new attacks. From a razed farmhouse, a pet dog escaped, spent a couple of days roaming the bush, before finding his owner at a neighbouring farm. The dog, which had been beaten, is almost all the owner has left. Man and dog sat on a neighbour’s lawn - a grown man with a huge Ridgeback cross practically sitting on his lap, the owner weeping while stroking his dog.

A boarding kennel in Harare has offered to take in for free domestic animals from the abandoned farms, but it is difficult to get them out. Many dogs are locked in neighbours' garages (so they don't fight with the dogs living on the property), and larger animals cannot be moved in the rush of departure. Chinhoyi vet Rob Gordon sewed up a Staffordshire terrier which had been almost chopped in half with an axe. Then Gordon headed to Lomagundi College, a local private school whose future looks grim, to put down the two dogs of a childless couple who have fled the country, leaving him with a request to destroy their beloved pets.

Many of the wives of white farmers sent to town for safety have no idea of the extent of the damage. I heard husbands breaking it to them on the phone that they had lost everything. Without their wives, the men cook awful meals, and occasionally find something to laugh about, like one man spending ages going through cupboards looking for the salt. I flew to the Mhangura area, with a couple of men who had no idea what they would find at the other end, if there was anything left at all. One was a missionary who runs an orphanage. He had gone to Harare not knowing there was any trouble a few days before, and had not been able to return. I saw domestic workers trying to restore their employers' homes, pathetically sweeping up the remains of children's jigsaw puzzles, sifting through fires to find unburned books, picking the glass from family photos. But no amount of clearing up is going to make this all right again.

As the Amani Trust's Anthony Reeler puts it: ``The rule of law has been replaced by the rule of thugs.''

African analysts expect Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe to come out fighting against his critics at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Brisbane in October - and Australia is likely to be one of his main targets.

Following Canberra's rejection of calls for Mr Mugabe to be banned from the conference, political observers in southern Africa see little prospect of Mr Mugabe staying away to escape growing condemnation for stoking political violence in his own country.

"Yes, absolutely, he will go," said Iden Wetherall, a senior journalist for the local Independent newspaper. "It (CHOGM) provides a platform for him to lecture the world and wag his finger," he said.

"He's going to use it as a propaganda platform. He's going to speak out on Aboriginal land rights... He will mobilise his friends in the Commonwealth - Malaysia, certainly, and some of the African states - and he will attack Britain and Australia."

An Africa analyst with a South African think-tank agreed. "He has a very strong desire to thumb his nose at the world and he has a great deal of fondness for these Commonwealth things. The thought of Aboriginal land rights people asking for his advice on land reform will deeply appeal to him," he said.

"He relishes the role of pitting himself against the colonial power of whites."

John Makumbe, a political scientist at the University of Zimbabwe, laughed when asked if he thought that the likelihood of diplomatic controversy and public demonstrations would deter Mr Mugabe from travelling to Brisbane. "If people in Australia think that, they don't know the size of his ego," he said. "Turn up at Brisbane and be the centre of the process? He loves that. He will be the centre of international media attention."

However, Dr Makumbe did not believe that Mr Mugabe would be able to act as aggressively as he would like to against the wealthier and predominantly white Commonwealth states such as Australia, Britain and Canada.

Dr Makumbe said Mr Mugabe was still smarting from the diplomatic rebuff he had received at a meeting of the Southern African Development Community two weeks ago when he was removed as the head of its security organ and a tri-nation commission was appointed to investigate the Zimbabwe crisis.

Following a wave of state-orchestrated attacks on white-owned farms in the Chinhoyi region west of Harare, African heads of state for the first time expressed concern about Mr Mugabe's plans to seize 95per cent of his country's white-owned land. Previously, they had expressed varying degrees of solidarity with his claim that he was merely seeking to correct colonial-era injustice.

"The Chinhoyi situation really cost him a lot of face with the international community ... He has a lot of repair work to do and I don't know if he has the capacity to do it," Dr Makumbe said.

"He's praying that he will be able to make it to Brisbane. Then he will be able to say he's never missed a Commonwealth meeting, and we are still a democracy. He will then next year run the least democratic election you've ever seen."

From The National Post, (Canada), 24 August

Ottawa may back move to ban Mugabe

Australia wants to exclude leader from summit

Edmonton and Johannesburg - Canada may back a move to ban Robert Mugabe from a summit of Commonwealth leaders in Australia in October, John Manley, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, told the National Post yesterday. This follows suggestions by John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister, that his government would back moves to exclude Mr. Mugabe, the Zimbabwean President, from the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Brisbane, and signals from South Africa's top banker that his country was losing patience with the continuing chaos and mayhem in Zimbabwe.

Mr. Manley said Canada is concerned about the steady deterioration of law and order in Zimbabwe, where government-backed militants have launched violent attacks against white farmers, political opponents and other critics, destroying the economy and prompting widespread international criticism. The Canadian government suspended direct aid to the African nation in May. The Foreign Minister said the matter will be high on the agenda when the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group (CMAG), to which Canada belongs, meets in London next month.

Mr. Manley said he expects his Australian counterpart to make the case for excluding Zimbabwe from the Brisbane meeting when the ministers gather in London. "Our first task will be to deal with it in that context. I know the Australian Foreign Minister will certainly have some clear views. Of course, it's been a matter of concern for the British as well," he said. Concerns have also been aroused by Mr. Mugabe's refusal to allow a surveillance mission of representatives from Australia, Barbados and Nigeria to tour his country. "Zimbabwe has very insistently taken the position that they don't fall under the mandate of CMAG. We will have to deal with that too," Mr. Manley said. Moves to exclude Mr. Mugabe from the meeting are gaining momentum as his government intensifies its campaign of terror against whites, journalists, opposition Members of Parliament and judges.

In Johannesburg on Wednesday, Tito Mboweni, South Africa's Reserve Bank Governor, told investors it was "time to call a spade a spade" because Zimbabwe's leaders appear not to understand diplomatic language. "The situation has become untenable when it is seen that the highest office in that land seems to support illegal means of land reform, land invasions ... beating up of people, blood flowing everywhere," Mr. Mboweni said. "I am saying this as forcefully as I am because the developments in Zimbabwe are affecting us and are stressing us unnecessarily ... the wheels have come off there."

As Mr. Mboweni spoke, the South African currency, the rand, hit a new low, driven down by the continuing uncertainty. There is also concern the Zimbabwean crisis is damaging tourism throughout the region, scaring off investors and creating a flood of illegal migrants. The central banker's hard-hitting speech was the toughest heard from a senior South African official on the topic of Zimbabwe. The government has finally lost patience. In a TV interview three weeks ago, Thabo Mbeki, the South African President, admitted for the first time that his efforts to reason with Mr. Mugabe had failed, although he continues to mute criticism of his old comrade in an effort to maintain open lines of communication.

It was also clear yesterday Mr. Mbeki was pleased to hear Mr. Mboweni making the kind of statements that other officials cannot. "Why should we be angry?" asked Bheki Khumalo, a spokesman for the President's office, regarding Mr. Mboweni's statement. "We are indeed very concerned. We want to avoid an economic meltdown in Zimbabwe. That is why we are sending a task force there to see how we can resolve the crisis." Ten days ago, 13 southern African leaders took an uncharacteristically hard stand against Zimbabwe when, at South Africa's behest, they appointed a committee of presidents to try to resolve the crisis.

The country has been in an uproar since February last year, when self-styled "war veterans" began to invade white-owned commercial farms so the properties could be redistributed to landless black farmers. Mr. Mugabe has ignored pleas to end this program of land seizures and his anti-white rhetoric becomes harsher by the day. "They will not be treated like special creatures," he said this week of the 21 white farmers who had been in prison since Aug. 6 for allegedly inciting violence by war veterans. "Why should they be treated as if they are next to God?" he asked on state television. "If anything, they are next to he who commands evil and resides in [the] inferno." The farmers were released on bail this week, but forbidden to return to their farms. Yesterday, the Zimbabwean government issued yet another threat to journalists.