title: “Fighting For Survival” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-23” author: “Corey Elmore”
During the next eight hours they beat him, applied electrodes to his mouth and genitals, urinated on him and forced him to swallow poison.
Two days later they released him on bail, charged with sedition–an accusation quickly thrown out in court. During hospitalization, doctors confirmed evidence of torture. “It was a terrible experience, gruesome and horrendous,” he says. “This regime has lost control of its senses. It should not be recognized by anyone.”
Is Zimbabwe really on the way back up? Two of Africa’s most respected leaders say it is. At about the same time that Sikhala poured out his story in his lawyer’s Harare office, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo was arguing that Zimbabwe should be readmitted to the British Commonwealth on March 19 after a year’s suspension. The government of Robert Mugabe, Obasanjo said this month, had eased a brutal crackdown on the legal opposition and “substantially ended” the worst abuses of a chaotic land-reform program that has seen 4,000 white commercial farmers evicted by peasants and government officials. South African President Thabo Mbeki said that Zimbabwe had agreed to reconsider harsh new press laws. The two presidents could exercise a pocket veto on renewing Mugabe’s suspension from the Commonwealth, simply by failing to reconvene the “troika” of commonwealth countries–the third is Australia–assigned to monitor sanctions against the country.
In more good news for Mugabe, the ostracized president edged his way back onto the world stage this month. Last week, he was permitted to attend a recent Africa summit in Paris despite of travel restrictions imposed on him by some European countries. French President Jacques Chirac shook his hand rather than wrap him in the embrace reserved for other African leaders, but Mugabe was given a 33-room wing of the Plaza-Athenee hotel, where the fare can include $300 truffle dinners. Mugabe also received expressions of support at this week’s Non-Aligned Movement meeting in Malaysia, where the Zimbabwean leader lashed out at what he called the “born-again colonialists” of the United States and Britain. “Is it not ironical that [President George W.] Bush, who was not really elected, should deny my legitimacy,” Mugabe added.
For ordinary Zimbabweans, the daily struggle to survive overshadows such wrangling. Osborn Jambawo, 54, looks to the heavens, searching vainly for rain: “Without rain, I can’t hope to feed my family,” says the stick-thin father of five who works on a tobacco farm called Nicotina near Banket in northwest Zimbabwe. Jambawo considers himself lucky to still be receiving a salary of $146 a month–many of his colleagues lost their jobs after invaders took over parts of the farm and the white owner fled. They are among tens of thousands of farm laborers who have been laid off (and many displaced) from commercial farms. Aid workers consider these laborers as particularly vulnerable, since food aid has not been forthcoming from a government that sees them as loyal to whites, or from agencies scared off by the fraught politics of commercial farms. Jambawo says a woman starved to death there recently and that many children are too sick to go to school. The United Nations reports that 7.2 million Zimbabweans face starvation.
Life is not much easier in the towns and cities. Zimbabweans wryly wished each other “Happy Queue Year,” as 2003 ushered in ever-longer lines to obtain basic necessities–fuel, sugar, cooking oil, salt and corn meal. Most Zimbabweans are obsessed with finding food or fuel. Lines are everywhere and they are very long, stretching far down roads, some for miles. A man was killed recently when tempers flared in a maize queue, and police sometimes have to be called in to quell disorder. Riot police dispersed a line of thousands of people outside the Harare passport office earlier this month. At a gas station at the foot of Christmas Pass in Mutare recently, more than 200 cars squatted in lines that snaked wildly in all directions, many of them spilling dangerously onto the highway leading from the poor town in the eastern highlands to the capital of Harare. People of all races milled about, grumbling about wasted time and the state of the country, sharing water and helping each other push the cars that ran out of fuel before reaching the station.
Pressure on Mugabe’s political opposition–which failed to win power in the 2000 and 2002 elections that foreign observers described as rigged–has been unremitting. In the past three years, some 100 party supporters have been killed. Thousands have reported a wide range of abuses by militia members who support the governing ZANU-PF party. Far from dialing back, say critics, the Mugabe government has steadily ratcheted up the pressure. This year scores of people, including even more senior officials previously off-limits to torturers, have been caught up in the growing web of oppression. At least a dozen opposition members of Parliament and city council members as well as the mayor of Harare, have been arrested on charges later thrown out of court. Many say they were tortured. Mugabe’s government is also denying opposition supporters food aid aimed at offsetting a regionwide drought. Meanwhile, opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai is facing the death penalty in a trial on dubious charges of plotting Mugabe’s assassination.
With regional leaders hastening to the sidelines, the courts may eventually provide the only redress for Zimbabwe’s dalliance with radical misrule. “African leaders have betrayed us,” says Job Sikhala, lighting up another cigarette. He and four others arrested with him will sue the government, he said, for the abuse they received in custody. In Paris, Chirac invoked the increasingly effective International Criminal Court to help distance himself from his pariah guest. “The days of impunity, or when people were able to justify the use of force, are truly over,” he said.
Indeed, even the most pessimistic Zimbabweans may draw some encouragement from events in neighboring Zambia, where former president Frederick Chiluba appeared in court Monday on charges of more than 50 counts of corruption. Considered untouchable during his term of office, Chiluba was arrested after Parliament lifted his immunity from prosecution last week. “Zimbabwe’s ordeal is never going to end,” says Nhanio Nkomo, a magician who plies his trade to entertain those waiting in a long fuel line north of Mutare. He may be wrong. But for hungry and demoralized Zimbabweans, a day of reckoning can’t come soon enough.
