IWPR - June 30th, 2005

While the spotlight has been on the destruction of homes in the cities, people are being displaced all across the country.

By IWPR staff in southern Africa

Most stories about Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe’s campaign to clear and destroy whole swathes of “illegal” housing have come out of the capital Harare and the other major city, Bulawayo.

But Operation Murambatsvina (Drive Out the Rubbish) has been countrywide, affecting small towns as well as cities.

An IWPR contributor who visited Victoria Falls in the northwest of the country heard the same kind of stories from dispossessed people now struggling to survive.

In Victoria Falls, once a major attraction for foreigners, the owner of a tourist craft village who wante only to be known as “F” told IWPR of troops in armoured vehicles destroying homes and small businesses.

“Some of you have heard about [Operation Murambatsvina] on the news, but others didn’t realise it hit our little town too,” said F.

“On a Friday, our African townships were invaded by armoured vehicles and dozens of troops with metal helmets and batons, and they burnt every single house that was not concrete – wooden houses, lean-tos, shacks – smashing windows as they went,” he said.

In particular, F told how the authorities destroyed homes built for the traditional dancers who entertained tourists who once flocked to the region. He said that five years ago, the village had paid the local council to connect it to the water and sewerage networks and build wooden houses for the dancers, who had no homes of their own.

Though they were able to halt the demolition after appealing to the council, and began repairing some of the damage, several days later the police came back.

“One of the dancers rushed to the shop to say two armoured cars and 20 police were smashing… and burning everything,” said F.

“Naturally we couldn’t get hold of the police chief or anybody in council, so we just took our truck and tried to salvage as much as we could. Now we sit with 80 or so people with no roof over their heads and nowhere to go.”

Commenting on the wider campaign of demolition he saw in the Victoria Falls area, F said, “I wept to see such utter destruction. To see thousands of homeless in this cold winter of ours, with their belongings piled up alongside somebody’s home, mattresses, blankets, furniture, stoves, fridges, wardrobes and hundreds of small children all staring wide-eyed at what was happening – it was all too sad even to describe.

“What is so sad is to buy a wooden home costs millions [of Zimbabwean dollars]. To replace the glass in windows smashed and the roofing asbestos sheets smashed – we are looking at about 80 million per home, which we don’t have.

“Why they had to smash and burn everything, nobody knows.”

F once again set about making repairs to his village, and soon everyone at least had a roof over their heads, though with some sharing. Some staff, however, had to be sent back to their rural homes, F said, and one older woman was put into a home for the elderly.

If Operation Murambatsvina continues, F fears that everyone will eventually have to return to their native villages.

“We will have no traditional village and no traditional dancing for the tourists, who we hope will return soon. Now we hear the police are chasing people away who are sharing accommodation, and even if you are staying in somebody’s kitchen you have to go.”

Eight hundred kilometres away, high in the eastern highlands on the Mozambique border, Mutare provides another case-study of the many small towns where homes have been torn down and livelihoods destroyed.

Mutare is one of the coldest areas in Zimbabwe and the Red Cross of Zimbabwe is setting up tents for the estimated 120,000 people who have been displaced there.

The Standard, an independent weekly, described how ten-year-old Takudzwa Taroyiwa died of pneumonia after spending nights in the open following the destruction of his family home by police in Mutare.

Enock Nhongo told the paper how his wife Chido also died of pneumonia, leaving behind a five-month-old baby, after her home was flattened. Nhongo said although his wife had not been feeling well, her illness worsened after she was exposed to the winter temperatures.

“My baby son is now surviving on bottled milk and sleeping in the open like us grown-ups,” he said.

The destruction of homes in Zimbabwe’s cities is the finale to the government’s long-held plan to crush the opposition.

By Dzikamai Chidyausiku in Harare

With humour born of desperation, Zimbabweans are wryly suggesting that President Robert Mugabe, is trying to “Make Poverty History” by simply eradicating the poor through his campaign to demolish their houses.

In Operation Murambatsvina, police and soldiers have flattened the homes of up to two million of Zimbabwe’s 11 million people.

This programmed destruction is widely seen as retribution by Mugabe’s ruling Zanu PF government for losing the urban vote to the opposition, and a culmination of its five-year plan to wrest control of the cities from their elected mayors and councils.

A commission made up of Mugabe loyalists has been imposed on Harare, the capital, to replace the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, MDC, mayor and his council. This commission has overseen a collapse in city services and remained silent as police bulldozed and sledgehammered homes in the capital’s poorest suburbs.

“They can just go back to wherever they came from. We must clean the country of the crawling mass of maggots bent on destroying the economy,” said national police commissioner Augustine Chihuri.

Among the cruel ironies of Operation Murambatsvina is that many of the people now being forcibly removed to the countryside had responded to Mugabe’s call in 2000 to join the mass invasion of white-run commercial farms. Their hope that they would become the farms’ new owners was dashed when they were driven off the properties into poor city suburbs, and Mugabe’s top ministers, civil servants, military officers and judges took the properties for themselves.

Now these people are on their way back into the countryside, where there are no jobs, agriculture has collapsed and distribution of scarce food aid is controlled by ZANU PF loyalists.

With hindsight, Mugabe seems to have set the scene for Operation Murambatsvina in early March this year – prior to 31 March parliamentary elections - when he pleaded with the people of Harare to vote ZANU PF. Mugabe made the appeal at the funeral of one of his closest aides, Witness Mangwende, whom he had imposed as governor of Harare in 2003.

“What wrong have we done you, Harare? Think again, think again, think again,” Mugabe implored mourners at Heroes Acre, where politically correct loyalists are laid to rest.

Visibly agitated, Mugabe said he would not be happy to lose Harare’s parliamentary constituencies yet again to the MDC. He also said he was displeased that the town councils of Harare, Bulawayo and other major urban centres had MDC majorities.

Despite what can now be seen as an ominous warning, the people of Harare again rejected Mugabe and ZANU PF overwhelmingly in all but one of the city’s parliamentary constituencies. ZANU PF failed to win any seats at all in Bulawayo, the country’s second largest city.

It was this continued rejection, despite the presidential warning, that seems to have triggered Operation Murambatsvina.

Mugabe insists the programme aims to remove illegally built homes and trading premises, clamp down on money launderers and drug dealers, and clean up unsanitary and unsightly squatter camps.

However, the sheer vindictiveness and brutality of the destruction and forced removals suggests another motive, not least because no provision has been made for alternative housing.

Many people were given just ten minutes to vacate their houses before they were razed by bulldozers. In some homes, babies were crushed to death as the demolition squads moved in. Even buildings registered and licensed by city councils were not spared.

Cabinet members like local government minister Ignatius Chombo, who has been at the forefront of the clearances, actually inaugurated some of the same working class suburbs that have now been declared illegal and destroyed. Officially registered housing cooperatives, some with thousands of paid-up members, had long been established in the poor quarters of the cities, and Chombo and others from the government attended ceremonies to mark the laying of foundations of new dwellings funded by the cooperatives, frequently named after ZANU PF liberation war heroes.

In the Harare suburb of Hatcliff, householders paid the equivalent of four British pounds a year in rent to the Harare administration for their plots.

“The World Bank even paid for the sewerage and water services to be put in,” said the local MDC member of parliament, Trudy Stevenson, surveying the devastation left when police bulldozers moved in. “Look, you can see the remains of the piping on the ground.”

Among the legally registered buildings flattened in Hatcliff was a Catholic refuge for AIDS orphans, a secondary school, a World Bank-funded public lavatory and a Sunni mosque.

Chombo has been used by Mugabe as his key weapon to harass and undermine the authority of city councils which had fallen to the MDC.

Harare city council went to the opposition in 2000, and then in 2002 voters elected Elias Mudzuri, the MDC’s candidate, as mayor. All efforts by Mudzuri to run the city efficiently were blocked by the central government, which last year dismissed him and appointed its own ZANU PF commissioners, handpicked by Chombo, to run the capital.

Mugabe had earlier already introduced governors to oversee the affairs of Harare and Bulawayo, a move seen by residents and analysts as an early attempt to supersede mayors. Where it could not find fault with the MDC administration, as in Bulawayo, Chegutu and Masvingo, the central government withheld funding for capital projects in a bid to discredit the councils.

Mike Davies, chairman of the Combined Harare Residents Association, CHRA, an organisation grouping housing associations in both upmarket and poor districts, said, “The Mugabe government has done everything in its powers to control Harare. In so doing they are violating the democratic right of the people to elect their own people.”

Davies believes that Mudzuri’s dismissal and the appointment of hand picked commissioners showed that Mugabe had no respect for the will of the people, and he blames it for the demolition programme.

“Chombo’s commission itself is illegal according to the Urban Councils Act,” he said. “It does not have the mandate to undertake such a campaign. This whole thing is a total disregard of the rule of law. The most illegal structure in Zimbabwe today is the government.”

He said that before councils demolish houses, the act says they must first issue cessation orders, which have to be followed with a succession of further warnings about when work will begin.

CHRA has filed an urgent court application seeking the abolition of Harare’s commission, but in the meantime conditions are deteriorating. Burst water and sewerage pipes and broken street lights are everywhere, while many areas have gone months without drinkable water. Mountains of rubbish pile up on street corners following the collapse of the garbage collection system.

“Mugabe’s governors are not elected, the commission was not elected,” said Davies. “I don’t think Mugabe and his ministers care at all. They simply feel they don’t owe anything to the people. Even people with employment in the city have had their structures destroyed and been told there is no place for them here in the city and that they must go back to their rural homes.”

Professor Brian Raftopoulos, director of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Zimbabwe, said, “The clean-up operation is an extension of the assaults of the ruling party on a sector of the population considered the enemy. The Harare commission, appointed by the responsible minister [Chombo] to do the dirty work of ZANU PF, is an absolute disgrace.

“At no time in the post-1980 [independence] period - and perhaps even before that - has the capital city been so badly run and with so little regard for the majority of its citizens.”

Dzikamai Chidyausiku is a pseudonym for a journalist in Zimbabwe.

Paranoia reigns in Harare where the government is jumping at shadows.

By Josphat Gidi in Harare

A nervous Zimbabwean government has put its opponents under siege in what analysts believe will be a futile effort to thwart swelling public fury over Operation Murambatsvina (Drive Out the Rubbish) and the current economic crisis.

Armed police forcibly broke up a public meeting in central Harare organised by the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, MDC, on June 16.

Police insisted the meeting, being held to commemorate the Day of the African Child, posed a threat to public order. Several MDC activists including some of the party's parliamentarians, as well as journalists covering the meeting, were beaten during the raid.

Analysts say further proof of the government’s mounting sense of insecurity was the reaction when University of Zimbabwe students in Harare decided to celebrate Liverpool Football Club’s victory in the European Cup. Armed riot police, assuming the students were protesting against the government, descended on the campus.

Similarly, police also broke up a meeting of university students who had gathered to elect a new leadership. Then, a few days later, they dispersed a crowd watching a local soccer match in Harare's Mabvuku township, suspecting that the event was an MDC meeting to mobilise for mass action.

"Every little thing is a cause for strong reaction from the authorities. It just shows how insecure the government feels," said Professor Brian Raftopoulos, director of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Zimbabwe.

The MDC has threatened mass protests to force President Robert Mugabe to halt the demolition of millions of shack homes around the country.

In a show of force unprecedented since Mugabe and his ruling Zanu PF party wrested power from Ian Smith’s white government 25 years ago, armed police have in the past few weeks swooped on opposition strongholds, destroying homes and arresting more than 30,000 people, mainly opposition supporters.

University of Zimbabwe political scientist Eldred Masunungure said by publicly wielding the iron fist, Mugabe is sending a clear message to ordinary Zimbabweans about the price they will pay if they join any protest against his government.

As he scatters some two million people to the rural areas, the president is intent on banishing the biggest threat to his 25 years of autocratic rule as poverty, unemployment and mass hunger reach record levels.

"The strategy is to thoroughly terrorise the population into submission as a way of neutralising any impending mass action," Masunungure told IWPR.

Raftopoulos believes the government's high-handed approach is also an admission it does not have any solution to the deepening political, economic and food crisis. "They see suppression of all voices of dissent as a way of consolidating their hold on power. What we are seeing are the typical signs of dictatorship."

Nearly half of Zimbabwe's remaining 11.5 million people (an estimated 3.5 million have fled into exile) face starvation, partly because of poor rains last season but mainly because ZANU PF supporters destroyed agricultural production when they seized land from large-scale white commercial farmers.

International isolation of Zimbabwe's government, which intensified following ZANU PF's controversial parliamentary election victory in March, has accelerated the meltdown of an already rapidly declining economy sapped by lack of foreign aid, international investment and hard cash, runaway inflation, 80 per cent unemployment and mass poverty.

Masunungure insisted that strong-arm tactics amid worsening social and economic conditions would not be enough to silence opposition. "It can only achieve the opposite," he said. "We have seen this in other countries where governments have attempted to quell discontent by using force against the people.

"In the long run, these governments have failed and there is no valid reason to believe the government of Zimbabwe will succeed where others have failed.”

Josphat Gidi is the pseudonym of an IWPR contributor in Zimbabwe.

With their homes and livelihoods destroyed, the future looks bleak for the victims of the government’s mass demolition project.

By Absolom Chidzitsi in New Caledonia

Twelve-year-old Russel Magodo waits in a queue for the single pit latrine shared by 100,000 people at New Caledonia, a temporary camp about 30 kilometres from the Zimbabwean capital Harare.

The temperature is dipping towards zero in southern Africa’s short but sharp winter, and it is drizzling with rain. Russel has ended up in this camp because like everyone else here, the Magodo family have seen their home demolished on the orders of Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe.

Mugabe turned on the poorest of the poor in late May, bulldozing, sledgehammering and burning their homes on the margins of Zimbabwe’s cities and towns before forcibly removing them to so-called “transit camps” in the countryside. These sites dot the entire country and, in another time and place, might have been described as concentration camps.

A Zimbabwean reporter for IWPR evaded armed police guards to enter New Caledonia, established on a confiscated and now unproductive commercial farm, and spoke first to Russel Magodo as he stood patiently in the 40-metre toilet queue.

Increasingly, the refugees do not bother to wait, relieving themselves in the surrounding bush and adding to the already imminent health hazards. There is no clean water at New Caledonia. For washing and drinking, the new residents have to make do with a small stream that runs past the camp.

Russel Magodo and his three sisters are among 300,000 children who humanitarian organisations estimate have been forced out of school as a result of Mugabe’s blitzkrieg on their homes in Operation Murambatsvina – “Drive Out the Rubbish” in the Shona language.

The Magodos and hundreds of others watched government bulldozers wreck their homes and trading stalls in Harare’s working class suburb of Hatcliff, before they were herded on to government trucks and taken to New Caledonia, where they live under 24-hour police surveillance.

Russel’s father, 39-year-old Tonderai Magodo, is in tears as he describes how police and officials ordered the destruction of his house. He had used the proceeds of a retrenchment package from a once-permanent job to build the home.

The houses destroyed by Mugabe’s soldiers and police are described as shacks. But “shack” is sometimes too grand a term to describe the corrugated iron, plastic, asbestos and cardboard shelters that house the majority of Africans south of the equator, covering entire landscapes.

Enter a shack and it is like walking through the looking glass. Interiors are immaculate, the dirt floors covered with lino, kitchens lined with units and gas-fired stoves, beds in the back rooms, the walls papered and lined with posters of footballs stars and religious icons. All of it - everything the owners possess from a lifetime of struggle - kept spotlessly clean by “mamas” who often spend their days working as domestic staff for better-off black and white people.

“It was a nightmare,” said Tonderai, putting the final touches to a primitive wood and plastic shelter for his young family at New Caledonia. “They demolished the house and they loaded us on to the trucks and took us here. There is no water, no school.”

The future looks bleak for Tonderai. The small food stall he ran was demolished at the same time as his house, which had brick and concrete foundations and five rooms. Police stole his entire stock, including precious cooking oil and sugar supplies.

“We are not allowed to do any business here and soon we will run out of food,” he said. “The nearest school is six miles away and there is no clinic or medical service.”

All the time, fresh arrivals are being dumped at New Caledonia and other camps after their homes have been wrecked. Women are giving birth on sheets of cardboard without medical attention.

Another New Caledonia arrival, 67-year-old Never Panganga, is diabetic but can no longer attend hospital for regular check-ups, and his medicine will soon run out. “I can’t walk seven miles [to the nearest hospital], I’m too old,” he said. “Besides I have been too busy building the shack and trying to get food.”

Pangana survives on a pension which, because of Zimbabwe’s rampant inflation, allows him to buy only one loaf of bread, a small sack of ground maize and a bottle of cooking oil each month.

He compares his present situation with the days when the white government of Rhodesia established camps called "keeps" to stop people from supporting liberation fighters. “I lived in the keeps during [Prime Minister Ian] Smith’s time. To me, it is the same life that we are living here, if not worse,” he said.

Like other people evicted from their homes, Pangana cannot understand the logic behind Operation Drive Out the Rubbish, nor does he know how or when it will end.

Most analysts believe Mugabe is punishing urban dwellers for having supported the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, MDC, in the parliamentary election in March. By driving them into rural areas he can both punish and control them.

There is no living for them in the countryside. Following Mugabe’s destruction of Zimbabwe’s mainly white-run commercial farming system, rural people are jobless and entirely dependent on food handouts, controlled through a system of chiefs and village headmen in government pay.

The situation of the people of New Caledonia is hopeless. The MDC for which they voted is nowhere to be seen, and Mugabe has banned humanitarian organisations from distributing food, clothing and medicines in the camps.

A group of Zimbabwean Catholic, Anglican and Evangelical church leaders has condemned the clearances as “dehumanising” for the whole nation. In a joint statement, the churchmen said, “A manmade humanitarian crisis has been created. People urgently need shelter, food, clothing, medicines and transport. Physically, these people suffer greatly. Deep within, a psychological scar has been created. Their essential nature as spiritual beings has been grossly denied and their humanity reduced to the rubble that surrounds them."

An aid worker based in Harare, whose organisation has been denied access to New Caledonia, said, “I have been on many missions before, but this is the first time I have seen a government doing this to its own people. Our major worry is the small children and the sick. It’s horrifying.”

Absolom Chidzitsi is the pseudonym of an IWPR contributor in Zimbabwe.

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - A U.N. report on Friday called Zimbabwe's bulldozing of urban slums a disastrous venture and blamed the government for the demolition campaign but avoided putting responsibility on President Robert Mugabe.

The report's author, Tanzanian Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka, executive director of the Nairobi-based U.N.-Habitat agency, which deals with urban slum dwellers, said the crackdown was ``carried out in an indiscriminate and unjustified manner, with indifference to human suffering.''

Tibaijuka's report said some 700,000 people had lost either their homes or livelihoods or both in demolitions that affected another 2.4 million people in one way or another.

She and Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in his own statement, called on the government to stop evictions immediately and to ensure those who orchestrated the policy be held accountable.

At a news conference, Tibaijuka, sent to Zimbabwe for two weeks by Annan, stressed, however, that the world needed to help the southern African nation recover and send aid to humanitarian groups and the government.

She said it was not up to her to assign blame, especially against Mugabe. The 81-year old former revolutionary leader has many friends in Africa as well as in China, which supported him in the war for independence from Britain in the late 1970s.

``President Mugabe was obviously concerned about what happened,'' said Tibaijuka. ``It was very clear that here was a leader who wanted to leave this behind him.''

Her report said the government was collectively responsible for the action but evidence suggested the operation was based on ``improper advice'' by a few people.

BREAKS SILENCE

Still, the tough report, the first detailed survey of the destruction, breaks the silence in the United Nations over Zimbabwe. The African Union has not commented publicly and the United States, Britain and European countries have tried without success to put the crisis on the U.N. Security Council's agenda.

The current council president, Greek Ambassador Adamantios Vassilakis would like Tibaijuka to brief the 15-member body on Tuesday or Wednesday but China and Algeria said they had to ask their governments first, council members reported.

The Zimbabwean government has dismissed criticisms of the crackdown, officially dubbed ``Operation Restore Order,'' saying it was intended to fight black market trading and lawlessness in unplanned communities around the country.

On Friday, Zimbabwe Foreign Minister Simbarashe Mumbengegwi called the report biased, hostile and false, saying it ``described the operation in vastly judgmental language which clearly demonstrates its inbuilt bias against the operation.''

He told a news conference in the capital, Harare, that to allege that the action violated national and international legal frameworks ``is definitely false.''

But Tibaijuka said that regardless of the motive for the evictions, the end result was a ``disastrous venture'' in the cities in the depth of the southern Hemisphere winter.

The ill-conceived action, she said in the report, put an additional economic burden on Zimbabwe, where more than 70 percent of the population is unemployed, and food is scarce.

Zimbabwe is saddled with foreign debt of about $4.5 billion and has been seeking a $1 billion loan from South Africa. But Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, South Africa's deputy president, is believed to have refused the loan unless the demolitions stop.

Mugabe says Zimbabwe is being punished by opponents of his land reform program in 2000, in which the government seized white-owned farms to give to landless blacks. Britain withdrew aid to the program, accusing Mugabe of giving land to cronies.

But Zimbabwe's opposition contends the campaign is aimed at breaking up its strongholds among the urban poor and forcing them into rural areas where they can be more easily controlled by chiefs sympathetic to the government.

By MICHAEL WINES

JOHANNESBURG, July 23 - His new 25-bedroom palace is clad in midnight-blue Chinese roof tiles. His air force trains on Chinese jets. His subjects wear Chinese shoes, ride Chinese buses and, lately, zip around the country in Chinese propjets. He has even urged his countrymen to learn Mandarin and nurture a taste for Chinese cuisine.

That President Robert G. Mugabe rules Zimbabwe, which resembles China about as much as African corn porridge tastes like moo shu pork, is irrelevant. Tightening his embrace of all things Chinese, the 81-year-old Mr. Mugabe, Zimbabwe's canny autocrat for 25 years, arrived in Beijing on Saturday for six days of talks with China's leaders, led by President Hu Jintao.

If this all seems nonsensical, however, it is anything but. Shunned by Western leaders and investors for his government's human rights policies, Zimbabwe has begun a determined campaign to hitch its plummeting fortunes to China's rising star.

Mr. Mugabe calls the policy Look East and has relentlessly promoted it as another way to thumb Zimbabwe's nose at its old colonial ruler, Britain, and Britain's allies, like the United States. The sheer intensity of the pro-China drive has stirred resentment among average Zimbabweans and raised eyebrows among the elite, some of whom question whether Mr. Mugabe is simply replacing British political domination with a more up-to-date Asian economic rule.

But it is a hand-in-glove fit for the Chinese, who are steadily extending their political and economic influence across Africa, particularly in regions rich in oil and minerals.

The Chinese are widely reported to covet a stake in Zimbabwe's platinum mines, which have the world's second largest reserves, and Mr. Mugabe's government has hinted at a desire to accommodate them. The mines' principal operator denies being pressured to deal with the Chinese, but negotiations are under way to sell a stake to as-yet-unidentified Zimbabweans. The operator has postponed major spending on the mines, citing political uncertainty.

Meanwhile, from Angolan oil to Zambian copper mines, China is investing billions of dollars securing access to resources for its fast-growing economy. And because they show few scruples about their partners' human rights policies, the Chinese are becoming entrenched in some states, including Zimbabwe and Sudan, that bridle at Western criticism.

While the talk is of democracy sweeping the continent, some experts believe that China's rising influence here may power its blend of free-market dictatorship, particularly among African leaders already reluctant to turn over power democratically.

"We might see the Chinese political system appealing to a lot of states whose elites and regimes are more in line with that sort of thinking," said Chris Maroleng, a Zimbabwe expert at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria. "It's really a conflict of two systems, one based on regime security and the other, almost Western, which talks of human security - good governance and human rights."

The Chinese have been friendly with Zimbabwe since 1980, when they and Mr. Mugabe, who led the newly independent state, shared much the same Marxist ideology. But in the last two or three years, as Zimbabwe's economy has edged ever closer to collapse, the friendship has turned on investments and goods that Mr. Mugabe's government was increasingly unable to find elsewhere.

Some exchanges amount to good will: China, for example, donated the blue tiles adorning the $13 million palace Mr. Mugabe is building for himself in Borrowdale, a comparatively wealthy Harare suburb.

Others are more significant. Chinese companies have won contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to provide hydroelectric generators for the national power authority, run by Mr. Mugabe's brother-in-law. China's AVIC aircraft plant has sold or given three 60-seat propjets to the beleaguered Air Zimbabwe, replacing aging Boeing 737's that were regularly grounded due to mechanical problems. China's First Automobile Works has agreed to sell the Zimbabwean government 1,000 commuter buses to upgrade its falling-apart municipal fleet.

China won a contract last year to farm 386 square miles of land seized from white commercial farmers during the land-confiscation program begun by Mr. Mugabe in 2000. Zimbabwe's air force has bought $200 million in Chinese-made Karakorum-8 trainer jets, a copy of the British Hawk trainers that the air force has had to ground because of parts shortages.

Rumors abound that China has sold Zimbabwe's internal-security apparatus water cannons to subdue protesters and bugging equipment to monitor traffic on the nation's three cellphone networks.

Still, the full extent of the investments is unknown - and, in some cases, is a state secret. Zimbabwe says trade with China amounted to $100 million in the first three months of this year. Mr. Mugabe says China is close to becoming the nation's leading foreign investor, a claim that seems likely given the headlong flight of Western capital.

Mr. Maroleng and others say that many deals are hidden in a welter of barter arrangements and front companies, reflecting Zimbabwe's inability to pay China with hard currency. China is widely reported, for example, to have taken a share of Zimbabwe's tobacco harvest in exchange for equipment.

What the ordinary Zimbabwean reaps from this relationship is also unclear. Visits by Asian tourists to Zimbabwe leapt by one fourth from 2002 to 2004 - thus Mr. Mugabe's exhortation to Zimbabweans to learn Mandarin and cook Chinese-style - but overall tourism remains well below peak years because Zimbabwe long ago lost its popularity among Europeans.

Zimbabweans complain, sometimes bitterly, that their new Chinese buses break down with alarming regularity and that the Chinese goods that flood stores and roadside stalls are so shoddy as to be worthless. Indeed, they have coined a term for the phenomenon: zhing-zhong.

"To call something zhing-zhong means that it is substandard," said Eldred Masunugure, the chairman of the political science department at the University of Zimbabwe in Harare. "The resentment of the Chinese is not only widespread; it's deeply rooted. It's affecting even other Chinese-looking people, like the Japanese."

Professor Masunugure and others say that Harare's few Japanese residents complain of being taunted and called zhing-zhong. Harare newspapers report that high-yielding robberies of Harare's Chinese residents are on the upswing.

A solution, however, is in the wings: in a meeting last month, China and Zimbabwe signed a letter of intent to cooperate in law enforcement and the judiciary. Atop the list is a plan for China to train Zimbabweans in managing prisons.

"They have a fairly advanced prison system," Zimbabwe's justice minister, Patrick Chinamasa, told reporters. "We would also want to tap into that expertise."

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) -- Riot police turned an urban township into a ghost town Wednesday, rounding up the last residents in defiance of a U.N. call to halt a demolition campaign that has left 700,000 without homes or jobs.

After emptying the Porta Farm township -- where some 30,000 people lived just days ago -- earth-movers were seen lumbering into the area to finish clearing debris from destroyed homes, cabins and shacks as part of what the government calls Operation Drive Out Trash. Police armed with batons and riot shields barred aid workers and residents from entering.

The latest demolitions came as President Robert Mugabe paid a state visit to China, which is building a track record of willingness to do business with African leaders others shun.

Mugabe is confident China will use its veto power in the U.N. Security Council to protect Zimbabwe from any U.N. censure following the U.N. report denouncing the campaign as a violation of international law, a state-owned Harare newspaper, the Herald, reported Wednesday.

China, which has expanded business and diplomatic contacts in African trouble spots like Congo and Sudan, has not joined Western condemnation of Zimbabwe's human rights record.

In fact, China has become a key source of loans and supplies for Zimbabwe. Most recently, Beijing agreed to a loan to expand a power station and to supply a third Chinese-made MA60 commercial aircraft to Zimbabwe, state media in Beijing announced Wednesday. No details of the terms were reported.

Opposition leaders claim Operation Drive Out Trash is intended to break up their strongholds among the urban poor and drive their supporters into rural areas, where they can be more easily controlled by government-allied chiefs.

Zimbabwe's government argues the campaign is aimed at reducing crime and restoring order in overcrowded slums and illegal markets, and has pledged to build new homes for those uprooted. But independent economists argue the government cannot afford the $325 million it has promised for reconstruction.

The U.N. report says the demolitions ''unleashed chaos and untold human suffering'' in a country already gripped by economic crisis. In addition to those who lost homes and jobs, a further 2.4 million people have been affected by the countrywide campaign that began May 19 with little warning, the report said.

The government opened the Porta Farm township in 1991, moving in thousands of people from squatter camps in Harare so Britain's Queen Elizabeth would not see them during her visit. Now, Mugabe wants to build a sewage plant there, officials say.

Huts built by farmworkers also were being demolished on the outskirts of Chipinge, about 375 miles southeast of the capital, witnesses said. The workers were among 500,000 employees of whites whose farms were seized by the government.

Covering the seizures and demolitions has been difficult because of desperate gasoline shortages and tough Zimbabwean media laws which prohibit reporting on stories the government believes would bring it into disrepute.

The United States and Britain on Tuesday demanded a Security Council briefing on the U.N. report on Zimbabwe's demolitions, but China has voiced objections to the possible meeting.

Mugabe, meeting with the country's No. 2 leader, Wu Bangguo, paid tribute to China as a ''great friend, historical friend, brotherly friend.''

South Africa also has stood by Zimbabwe, insisting quiet diplomacy is the best way to help the Zimbabwean people.

South Africa has indicated it may take over some of the country's huge foreign debt. The ruling African National Congress urged other countries Wednesday to act on U.N. recommendations to increase international assistance to the most vulnerable in Zimbabwe.

The ANC also appealed to people to support the efforts of the South African Council of Churches, which plans to send a container of blankets, food, water and medicine to Zimbabwe next week as part of its ''Operation Hope for Zimbabwe.'' The church group said the relief effort was being coordinated with church groups and charities in Zimbabwe rather than the government.

After seven years of unprecedented economic decline, 80 percent of the work force is unemployed and 4 million of Zimbabwe's 16 million people have emigrated. Agriculture, once the mainstay, has been hit hard by Mugabe's seizure of 5,000 white-owned farms.

Mugabe alleges the country's current economic and food crisis, with up to 4 million people needing urgent famine relief, is a result of Western boycotts and sanctions imposed in revenge for redistribution of whites' land to black Zimbabweans.

LONDON (AP) -- Zimbabwe's government cleared out camps for those it made homeless in a so-called urban cleanup campaign, then secretly moved their inhabitants to the outskirts of the capital in even worse conditions, a human rights group said Saturday.

Amnesty International released footage it said had been smuggled out of Zimbabwe. The footage showed people sheltering in an area known as Hopley Farm under little more than blankets and sheets of plastic and lining up with buckets at a mobile water tank.

According to the human rights group, the government moved the refugees to the area the same day a U.N. investigator condemned conditions in the camps where they had been living before. Amnesty said there was no shelter or toilets at the camp and limited access to running water.

The human rights group called on the Zimbabwe to say if other areas like Hopley Farm existed and ensure aid agencies had access to them.

''Once you scatter throughout the country victims of this operation, it becomes much harder to find them and give them assistance,'' Audrey Gaughran, a London-based Amnesty researcher who was in Zimbabwe in late July and early August, said Saturday.

Gaughran added that the campaign the government has dubbed Operation Murambatsvina, or Drive Out Trash, should be seen in the context of wide-ranging human rights abuses under Zimbabwe's increasingly autocratic President Robert Mugabe. Security laws have outlawed basic freedoms of association and speech. Independent journalists have been jailed and their publications shut down.

Operation Murambatsvina ''is the latest manifestation of a massive human rights problem in Zimbabwe that's been going on for years,'' Gaughran said.

She said Amnesty obtained the Hopley Farm video shot earlier this month from a source it would not name for fear of repercussions in Zimbabwe. A week ago, Zimbabwe's security forces prevented Tony Hall, a Rome-based U.S. ambassador to the U.N. food agencies, from making a scheduled visit to Hopley Farm. Hall said he was quietly told the government did not want him to see conditions there, but that the official reason given was that the military ran the site and his delegation needed a special visitors permit from the information ministry.

Gaughran said a group of the homeless had been left at Hopley Farm July 22, the day the U.N. released a report by Anna Tibaijuka calling the clean-up campaign a ''disastrous venture'' that left 700,000 people without homes or jobs and violated international law.

The Zimbabwean government has accused Tibaijuka of bias and said the clean-up campaign was meant to stem ''chaotic urbanization'' and improve the lives of city dwellers. Opposition leaders claim the campaign is aimed at driving their supporters among the urban poor to rural areas where they can be more easily controlled.

The U.N. report described dire conditions at what the Zimbabwean government had called ''transit camps'' for those affected by the campaign. Clearing the transit camps appeared aimed at removing ''this visible evidence of what had happened,'' Amnesty's Gaughran told The Associated Press. ''This may be an attempt to hide people away.''

''It's just transferring people from a pretty dire camp to a camp that is even worse,'' Gaughran said.

Gaughran said aid groups had not been told of the moves and those who were able to find the twice-displaced were at first barred from Hopley Farm. She said that since the footage was shot Aug. 4, aid groups had been able to persuade the government to allow them inside.

Zimbabwean officials have said Operation Murambatsvina has been completed and they are now moving onto a rebuilding stage. Critics, though, charge the government does not have the $171 million it has pledged for reconstruction.

Gaughran said she had seen houses under construction during her trip to Zimbabwe, ''but nothing on the scale that will be needed to address the scale of the homelessness that's been created.''

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) -- Fewer than 50,000 whites remain in authoritarian governed Zimbabwe, down from a peak of nearly 300,000 under white rule, according to recent census data published Monday.

The number of white Zimbabweans has continued to drop since the census was conducted in August 2002 amid the seizure of thousands of white-owned commercial farms for redistribution to black Zimbabweans, analysts said. Some independent experts estimate fewer than 30,000 whites remain.

The so-called fast-track land reform, coupled with years of drought, has crippled Zimbabwe's agriculture-based economy. Inflation and unemployment have soared and an estimated four million people are in need of food aid in what was once a regional breadbasket.

Initial results of the 2002 census published in December that year showed that 3 million to 4 million Zimbabweans had fled the country as economic refugees, bringing the total population down to below 12 million.

Adding to the problem has been widespread allegations of human rights abuses leveled as President Robert Mugabe's authoritarian government. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently labeled Zimbabwe an outpost of tyranny, while world governments and human rights groups have accused his party of rigging elections, repressing opponents and driving agriculture to the brink of collapse.

A detailed analysis of the results of the latest census was completed recently and published Monday in the state-owned Herald newspaper.

Among the findings were that whites numbered just 46,743 in 2002, The Herald reported. Nearly 10,000 of them were over the age of 65, and less than 9,000 were under 15.

The white population peaked at 293,000 in 1974. White rule ended six years later.

Other African nations, including Mozambique and Nigeria, have welcomed Zimbabwe's experienced white farmers in the hopes they can help boost commercial agricultural production. But Zimbabwe officials have appeared undisturbed by the dwindling population.

Didymus Mutasa, now head of the country's feared Central Intelligence Organization, told the British Broadcasting Corp. at the time of the census that he would be happy to see Zimbabwe's population halved.

''We would be better off with only 6 million people, with our own people who supported the liberation struggle. We don't want all these extra people,'' he said.

Last week, Finance Minister Herbert Murerwa slashed spending on health and education even further to fund the reconstruction of homes and businesses destroyed in a widely condemned slum clearance campaign.

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) -- Dancing and cheering, lawmakers approved sweeping constitutional changes Tuesday that prominent lawyers have called the greatest challenge yet to Zimbabwean civil liberties.

Ruling party representatives erupted into celebration after Parliament voted 103-29 to endorse the constitutional overhaul that sharply restricts private property rights and allows the government to deny passports to its critics. The 22-clause Constitutional Amendment Bill now goes to President Robert Mugabe to sign into law.

The slate of amendments, the 17th since independence from Britain in 1980, strips landowners of their right to appeal expropriation and declares that all real estate is now on a 99-year lease from the government.

Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa said this would stop 5,000 evicted white farmers from frustrating land redistribution to black Zimbabweans.

''It will close the chapter of colonization,'' Chinamasa said during a stormy half-hour debate that preceded the vote.

The bill also gives the government authority to deny passports if it is deemed in the national interest.

''This will take away the right of those people to go outside the country and ask other countries to impose sanctions on Zimbabwe,'' said Chinamasa, who is among 200 of Mugabe's elite barred from traveling or owning bank accounts in the United States and European Union countries.

The overhaul also calls for a new 66-seat Senate to be formed, which critics charge the ruling party will use to increase its patronage powers.

Lovemore Madhuku, whose National Constitutional Assembly reform alliance mobilized opposition to Mugabe's attempt in 2000 to entrench his rule indefinitely, predicted swift implementation of the changes.

''I think (Mugabe) is likely to sign the bill into law in the fastest possible time -- even within four days or so,'' Madhuku said. ''He wants to have elections for the Senate by October.''

Madhuku said the amendments add to a host of repressive measures already imposed by Mugabe's 25-year-old regime.

''But in time, it will eventually collapse,'' he said. ''Do you think the people are going to accommodate this for all time?''

There had been concerns within Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front that the party might not mobilize enough support to pass the bill after it cleared a preliminary ballot with 61-28.

Twenty-eight members of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, which has 41 seats in Parliament, voted against the bill. The lone independent legislator, Mugabe's former propaganda chief Jonathan Moyo, faced a barrage of catcalls from his former colleagues when he, too, opposed the changes.

The MDC says approval of the amendments will destroy any hope of agreement with Western donors for desperately needed aid.

A team from the International Monetary Fund wraps up a two-week visit Friday to reassess Zimbabwe's economic crisis ahead of a Sept. 9 board meeting that could expel the country for failing to make payments on $295 million in debt.

The seizure of white-owned commercial farms, combined with years of drought, have crippled the country's agriculture-based economy. Some 4 million are in urgent need of food aid in what was once a regional breadbasket, according to U.N. estimates.

CANBERRA (Reuters) - Australia and New Zealand are lobbying the United Nations Security Council to indict Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and his government in the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said on Tuesday that, because Zimbabwe was not a party to the International Criminal Court, Mugabe could only be indicted with a reference from the U.N. Security Council.

``I very much hold the view that as a country which is party to the International Criminal Court and bearing in mind the simply horrific things that have happened in Zimbabwe ... that it's worth a try to get an indictment,'' Downer told Australian Broadcasting Corp. television.

Mugabe has led a drive to confiscate white-owned farms to give to majority blacks. He says this is necessary to right the wrongs of colonialism, which left the bulk of Zimbabwe's fertile land in the hands of minority whites.

More recently his government has cracked down on what it calls illegal settlements in a move that rights groups say has left up to 300,000 homeless. The official figure is 120,000.

Downer admitted that getting a resolution to indict Mugabe through the U.N. Security Council would be difficult.

``We've started a process of talking with some of the members of the Security Council ... I think it's best to describe the response as cautious,'' Downer said.

``I think the U.S. position, the British position and the French position is one of wanting a bit more time to consider this issue. Nobody has given a commitment yet to take this forward ... I know it's going to be very difficult.''

Relations between Australia and Zimbabwe are frosty. In 2002 Zimbabwe was suspended from the Commonwealth -- a group of 53 mostly former British colonies -- after Mugabe was accused of rigging his re-election.

The country withdrew from the group in December 2003 when its suspension was extended.

HARARE (Reuters) - Eight Zimbabwean soccer players and two officials deserted their teams after a tour of Britain, joining thousands of fellow citizens who have sought refuge abroad over a serious political and economic crisis at home.

Zimbabwe football officials confirmed on Saturday that six players and two officials from premier league champions CAPS United and two players from Highlanders FC had ``disappeared,'' some at Heathrow airport just before their return flight home on Thursday night, and are seeking to stay in Britain illegally.

``Yes, I can confirm that we are worried that some players and officials who did not return on their scheduled flights have actually joined those in the diaspora,'' a Zimbabwe Football Association (ZIFA) official said.

Some 40 CAPS and Highlanders players and officials traveled to Bradford a week ago for a friendly match between the two clubs organised by some Zimbabweans there, but which the local media said was not sanctioned by the English Football Association.

The two teams were scheduled to return home in batches over the past week, but their program was thrown into disarray last Saturday when some of the players disappeared from camp soon after their match, officials said.

An estimated 3 million Zimbabweans -- a quarter of the national population -- have sought jobs and homes abroad, many of them illegally, as a result of a political and economic crisis blamed on President Robert Mugabe's increasingly controversial rule.

Hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans are living and working illegally in Britain, Zimbabwe's former colonial master.

One-third of Zimbabwe’s teachers are infected with HIV, but there is little medical help available for them.

By Tino Zhakata in Harare

Looking dehydrated and dejected, Tarisai Marikopo mumbles to herself as she struggles to pick her way out of Mukwati Building, a complex that houses Zimbabwean government departments in central Harare.

Her umpteenth visit to the Public Service Commission at Mukwati to have her pension processed has failed yet again, eight months since she had to quit her teaching job on health grounds.

At 34, Marikopo, whose emaciated frame and pitted skin tell of her long illness, fears she will eventually have to surrender in the battle with HIV, as her hope of getting money to buy essential anti-retroviral drugs - which delay the onset of AIDS, but do not cure the killer disease - fades with each passing month.

“With each visit to the pensions office, I’m losing hope of surviving,” Marikpo told IWPR as she adjusted the wig she now wears to disguise her hair loss. “I’d hoped to get my money which I badly need to buy myself drugs every month.”

Marikopo said she been trying to soldier on with teaching English and history classes at Mutoko High School, 150 kilometres northeast of the capital Harare, but had to stop when a serious bout of malaria degenerated into an unidentified illness. After missing about six months’ work because of ill health, she was advised to quit and take time out to recover.

In a rasping voice interrupted by sporadic coughing, Marikopo explained, “At first, doctors thought I had problems with chalk dust as I suffered chronic coughs as well as serious chest pains. But when I started losing weight and sweating a lot I decided to have an HIV test.”

Trying to force a grin, she went on, “I didn’t want to believe it and even wanted to kill myself when I tested positive.”

Marikopo’s husband had married a “new wife” in the United Kingdom, where he fled in 2000 after quitting his job as a manager at a fast-foods outlet in Harare.

He still sends money to Marikopo, but she is left to take care alone of their two children, Tanatswa and Tonderai, 13 and eight years old, who stay with her in the tiny home she shares with her aged parents in Chitungwiza, a dormitory town southwest of Harare.

“It’s been hell trying to fend for the children alone, especially now that I’m not well. For the past eight months I have not had my pension since I quit teaching,” she said.

Marikopo is one of hundreds of teachers who have been forced out of work in Zimbabwe by the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

According to a new survey by the Progressive Teachers’ Union of Zimbabwe, PTUZ, nearly 600 teachers are known to have died of AIDS-related illnesses in 2004, while 362 teachers have died in the first six months of this year.

“Many more are infected [with HIV] and are suffering in silence,” said the report. “The majority of schools in Zimbabwe have lost at least one teacher to the disease and at least two or three teachers [per school] are on AIDS-related sick leave.”

The government estimates that some 27,000 of the country’s 80,000 teachers are HIV-positive.

PTUZ secretary-general Raymond Majongwe told IWPR, “A lot of teachers are dying of [AIDS]. It’s just a big scandal that no one seems to care about. The [government-run] National AIDS Council has released funds for HIV/AIDS antiretroviral drugs for the army, the police and the prison services, but there are no specific funds or programmes for teachers.”

Zimbabwe has one of the highest HIV infection rates in the world. Nearly three million people in a population of 11.5 million are HIV-positive, with more than 4000 people dying each week from AIDS-related infections. Human rights organisations estimate that some 1.5 million Zimbabwean children have lost one or both parents to the pandemic.

The World Health Organisation says about 300, 000 of those infected by the virus urgently need anti-retroviral drugs, but fewer than 20,000 are receiving the treatment.

“To date, there is not a single teacher who has received anti-retroviral drugs from the programmes the government claims to have embarked on,” alleged Majongwe. “As teachers, we are enlightened about the disease, but it’s sad we have nothing to do about it at the moment.”

The PTUZ report said, “The increasing levels of poverty among teachers have contributed to the high level of attrition [from AIDS]. It is unfortunate that whilst teachers are the engine room for social behavioural change, the National AIDS Council and the Ministry of Education continue to sideline us in the battle against HIV/AIDS.”

Marikopo tried to seek help from a clinical research programme run at Parirenyatwa Hospital in Harare which offers free anti-retroviral drugs, but she was told the programme could not accept any more people. Parirenyatwa and one state hospital in Bulawayo, the country’s second city, are the only centres offering free anti-AIDS treatment. Teachers working in rural areas have no access to treatment.

Antiretroviral drugs are available for sale in selected Zimbabwean pharmacies, but the country’s spiralling inflation has put the price of medication beyond the reach of most people with HIV. For example, a monthly course of Stalanev - a combination of three essential drugs - which in June this year cost 400,000 Zimbabwean dollars, now costs 1.5 million, nearly the entire monthly salary of a junior teacher.

Marikopo said, “I had been hoping to get a lump sum from my 13 years of service, but the usual bureaucracy in government departments is letting me down. We can’t expect anything from the Public Service Commission. The problem is nobody there seems to know what they are supposed to be doing. There’s so much confusion there and it takes ages to have the simplest thing done. There are a lot of retired teachers who have died without getting their pensions.”

Even if Marikopo had remained at work, the 4.4 million Zimbabwean dollars that senior teachers like her take home each month is not enough to make ends meet, for one person let alone a family. Junior teachers are far worse off with take-home pay of about two million dollars. The Consumer Council of Zimbabwe estimates that a family of six needs at least 9.6 million dollars each month for a basket of basic food and household goods.

Western countries and donor organisations are reluctant to help Zimbabwe fight the AIDS epidemic, as they are doing elsewhere in Africa, because of President Robert Mugabe’s poor human rights record and autocratic tendencies, the lack of transparency in accounting for AIDS fund donations, and the politicisation of distribution of essential food and medicines.

The average amount of international funding each year in southern Africa is 74 US dollars per person infected with HIV, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund. But in Zimbabwe that figure is just four dollars a head. Critics say the Zimbabwean government has not been doing enough to make sure anti-retroviral drugs reach the infected, and that distribution is skewed by political preferences.

“Teachers are going into prostitution because they can’t sustain themselves,” said an angry Majongwe. Noting that President Mugabe was himself once a schoolteacher, Majongwe said, “As a product of this profession, [he] must go back to basics and improve conditions of the profession that made him what he is today.”

Tino Zhakata is the pseudonym used by an IWPR contributor in Zimbabwe.

As the economy continues to crumble, the poor have become poorer, with very few able to afford a decent meal a day.

By Dzikamai Chiyausiku in Harare

Thomas Zhuwao is one of the many people whose lives have been shattered by Mugabe’s policies. In an interview with this reporter, he explained how he survives under the gruelling conditions that Zimbabweans have become accustomed to in the past five years, each of which has seen an absolute decline in the country’s gross domestic product.

IWPR: How old are you and where do you live?

Zhuwao: I’m 57 years old and I live in Epworth (A squatter camp about 50 kilometres southeast of Harare). I am married with three children.

IWPR: Your house in Epworth, was it demolished under the government’s Operation Murambatsvina [Operation Drive Out the Rubbish], which was launched last June?

Zhuwao: Yes, I had three rooms but the police condemned it saying it was an illegal structure, so they razed it with a bulldozer. They left one room for me where I now stay with my family. I took out the roofing sheets for the destroyed rooms and piled them in the yard but they were stolen the same night.

IWPR: Is there running water and a toilet at your house?

Zhuwao: There is no water. I used to have a well but it has dried up. I get water from neighbours. I have a pit latrine. I wanted to connect potable water but I can’t afford to do so anymore. I don’t think I will ever again afford to do that.

IWPR: And your children, do they go to school?

Zhuwao: My first-born son is 24 years old. He stays with me because he can’t get a job. [Zimbabwe’s unemployment rate is about 80 per cent]. The second one is a girl and she is 16. She dropped out of school because I could not afford to keep her there. The youngest is 12. I’m not sure whether she will finish school because as it stands we are struggling with school fees.

IWPR: When did you come to Harare?

Zhuwao: I came from Mozambique in 1965 and started working as a gardener in Marlborough [a Harare upmarket suburb] until 1973. I later went to work in Borrowdale [another upmarket suburb], again as a gardener until I retired in 1999.

IWPR: Did you get a pension?

Zhuwao: No I got nothing.

IWPR: So how do you survive now without a pension?

Zhuwao: I work at night as a guard and then during day I sell cigarettes and sweets in town.

IWPR: But vending is illegal. Do the police arrest you?

Zhuwao: Yes, we are arrested every day. Sometimes, we bribe the police to release us before we reach the charge office. Sometimes, they take everything you have and then let you go. The cheeky ones would give you a few slaps before they take your things. But most of the time we just bribe them and they leave us alone.

IWPR: How much do you pay them?

Zhuwao: The last time they caught me I paid 60,000 Zimbabwe dollars (enough to buy two loaves of bread). Sometimes they demand more, but we stand our ground because we know they are also desperate for whatever bribe they can lay their hands on.

IWPR: How many meals does your family eat each day?

Zhuwao: It depends if I have money, but on a good day they have two meals, although we can’t afford bread. Instead of having breakfast in the morning, we save money for lunch and sometimes for supper.

IWPR: You have lived under Ian Smith’s colonial government and then after Independence you have lived under President Robert Mugabe. Which era would you say was better in terms of quality of life?

Zhuwao: Well, under Smith there was racism and segregation. But to be honest I think the quality of life was better. As a gardener I used to eat bread every day. But under Mugabe things are really bad. I can't afford to buy bread. This shirt I have was a uniform at my last work place where I was a tea boy. Since then, six years ago, I have not bought a shirt. Under Smith prices did not change drastically as they do now. If I had 50 pence I knew that would buy the same thing I used to buy last week. Now I am not sure whether 50,000 Zimbabwe dollars in my pocket today will buy the same things tomorrow.

IWPR: Which one would you say was the hardest year in your life?

Zhuwao: 2005. This is the worst year in my entire life. Things are going up in price every week and my house was destroyed.

IWPR: Where do you think you will be three years from now?

Zhuwao: I don’t know. I just hope things will be better then, but what I see is that things might get worse. I pray that things will be better. I just pray because this is not life we are living.

IWPR: But why don’t you go back to Mozambique? I hear things are better there.

Zhuwao: I have been thinking of that but I now have a big family here and I don’t think I would manage. Even if I wanted to go back, after forty years here, I don’t have any money to travel or start a new life there.

IWPR: And what are you going to have for lunch today?

Zhuwao: A bun. I survived the police today.

Dzikamai Chiyausiku is the pseudonym used by an IWPR contributor in Zimbabwe.

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) -- Police on Tuesday detained the entire leadership of Zimbabwe's trade union umbrella organization to muzzle protests against worsening economic conditions, union officials said.

News of the arrests of all the top leaders of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trades Unions, representing 30 worker organizations with 1 million members, came in a statement expressing ''utter shock and dismay'' by the trade union congress in neighboring South Africa.

The Zimbabwe Congress of Trades Unions had scheduled a midday march to ''remind government and employers that workers are hungry, angry and tired.''

The South African statement said that those arrested included the president of the congress, Lovemore Matombo, and his secretary-general, Wellington Chibebe. The statement said at least 200 people were reported arrested in Harare alone.

Ahead of the planned march, police mounted roadblocks on all routes into Harare, stopping any vehicle having more than one passenger. Paramilitaries with dogs, shields and batons were conspicuous throughout the capital.

Witnesses said about 10 trades unionists were arrested and hustled away by police in downtown Harare at lunchtime as they prepared to deliver a petition to the Labor Ministry demanding new minimum wages, improved conditions, and free treatment for millions of HIV and AIDS sufferers.

Union officials said police swooped overnight on leading activists in several parts of the country and detained them even though the union had notified police of the marches, as required under new security laws.

Nicholas Goche, minister of labor and social welfare, had denounced the protest as ''a political gimmick'' but stopped short of declaring an outright ban.

In recent years, police have moved without warning to break up any critical demonstrations.

Zimbabwe's economy has been in a tailspin since the government in 2000 began confiscating formerly white-owned farms, decimating agricultural production in what used to be southern Africa's breadbasket.

Unemployment is 80 percent, inflation 359 percent, and U.N. agencies say 4.2 million Zimbabweans, mostly in rural areas, urgently require food relief to survive until the next harvests in spring.

Zimbabwean government officials often blame drought and Western-imposed sanctions and boycotts for the crisis.

But in a speech in Zimbabwe last week, U.S. Ambassador Christopher Dell said that gross mismanagement and corruption had wrecked the once prosperous economy. He also challenged the government to admit that the demolition of thousands of homes, shacks and market stalls earlier this year had left a humanitarian crisis.

''Mr. Dell, go to hell,'' state radio quoted President Robert Mugabe as saying Tuesday.

State Department spokesman Adam Ereli on Tuesday said the United States would not shy away from ''speaking out on behalf of the poor and downtrodden and disenfranchised'' in Zimbabwe.

HARARE (Reuters) - President Robert Mugabe told the U.S. ambassador to Zimbabwe to ``go to hell'' on Tuesday, after the envoy blamed the country's economic and political crisis on mismanagement and corrupt rule.

State media said the ambassador, Christopher Dell, risked expulsion from the southern African country for his ''undiplomatic'' criticism of the government in a public lecture.

The Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) said it had asked Mugabe for his reaction to the comments.

``The president said the ambassador must go to hell. The president said: 'I cannot even spell the word Dell with a ``D'' but an ``H'' and that is where Dell should go','' a ZBC correspondent said during a news bulletin.

Dell said last week that Mugabe's government was responsible for plunging Zimbabwe into a crisis which had left it with soaring poverty and chronic food shortages.

Mugabe, 81 and in power for 25 years, embarked on a controversial drive of seizing and redistributing white-owned farms to landless blacks in 2000, and earlier this year tens of thousands of people were made homeless after the government ordered the demolition of shacks and ``illegal houses.''

In Washington, State Department spokesman Adam Ereli backed the ambassador's comments and said the Zimbabwean government had not lodged a complaint. Zimbabwean state media said the Foreign Ministry was dealing with the matter.

``I think our ambassador and his comments very fairly and accurately reflect the policy of the United States,'' Ereli said.

Mugabe's relations with many Western powers, including the United States and the European Union, have soured in the last few years over charges of human rights abuses and vote-rigging.

But Mugabe says he has been targeted by foreign opponents led by Zimbabwe's former colonial ruler Britain for his nationalistic policies and says most of Africa is on his side in which he describes as a struggle against imperialism.

HARARE (Reuters) - More than 150 international rights groups petitioned African governments and the continent's main political union on Wednesday to act on what they called a humanitarian crisis in Zimbabwe.

President Robert Mugabe's government drew global criticism over its demolition of urban slums this year. The United Nations said Mugabe's Operation Restore Order has destroyed the homes or jobs of at least 700,000 people and affected the lives of 2.4 million others.

``Today's mass letter-writing appeal highlights the ongoing human rights and humanitarian crisis in the country and the failure of African states and the AU (African Union) to address the situation in any meaningful way,'' a coalition led by Amnesty International and the Center on Housing Rights and Evictions said in a statement.

``The silence of African leaders on Zimbabwe represents a failure to honor their commitments to the human rights of ordinary Africans,'' a spokesman for the groups said.

The United Nations meanwhile protested Zimbabwe's eviction earlier this week of hundreds more people from a slum in the capital city of Harare that previously had been cleared of residents.

Agostinho Zacarias, the top U.N. official in Zimbabwe, sent a protest note to the Foreign Ministry expressing his deep concern over the new evictions, which he said ``make it hard for the provision of humanitarian assistance to the affected populations,'' U.N. spokeswoman Marie Okabe told reporters at U.N. headquarters in New York.

CHIVHU, Zimbabwe (Reuters) - The ``highway girls'' wave at truckers while teenage boys in tattered clothes hold up fuel cans to passing motorists. Zimbabwe's major roads these days are littered with people trying to eke out a living any way they can.

Rising poverty in the southern African state has forced thousands of young people in the countryside to work either as prostitutes or vendors, selling everything from scarce commodities such as fuel and sugar to firewood, wild fruit and twists of marijuana -- which thrive in the local climate.

Some have nothing to offer but their bodies.

Day and night, young women -- many just out of their teens and invariably wearing skimpy dresses or clinging pants -- line up at bus stations outside towns big and small, offering sex to motorists for ``a little fee.''

The women, popularly known as ``the highway girls,'' are generally picked up by crossborder truck drivers, who regional health officials say are fuelling an AIDS/HIV pandemic said to be killing 2,500 Zimbabweans each week.

``I have to do this because there are no jobs, and the income is a bit higher than selling vegetables,'' said Rumbidzai, a 20-year-old woman who has been working as a prostitute from the central town of Chivhu for two years.

``I know there is AIDS, and I insist on condoms,'' she added.

The work of the highway girls has been immortalized in a popular song entitled Madhara Egonyeti (Elderly Truckers), which pleads with drivers to desist from sleeping with young girls.

While the women parade and wave down potential customers, further down the road a group of scruffy teenage boys are waving fuel cans, saying they have the scarce commodity for sale at blackmarket prices of up to four times the official rate.

Joshua Masarakwedu, 16, said his trade was quite profitable. ``We buy from truckers or other dealers and we hold back and sell during dry days when there is no fuel and prices are good.''

The highway girls and the fuel traders vie for a living on Zimbabwe's roads alongside fish and fish-worm sellers, beggars and drug peddlers who offer potential customers marijuana.

The problem has got worse since the government demolished shantytowns and thousands of ``illegal'' houses in a controversial campaign early this year, which the United Nations said left about 700,000 people homeless and destroyed the informal sector.

Zimbabwe is struggling with a severe economic crisis which many government critics blame on President Robert Mugabe, in power since independence from Britain in 1980.

Mugabe's policies have seen a former food exporter holding out a begging bowl for the last five years as people grapple with rising poverty and unemployment of well over 70 percent, the critics say.

But the 81-year-old Zimbabwean leader says the economy has been sabotaged by domestic and Western opponents seeking to oust him over the controversial seizure and redistribution of white-owned farms to his black supporters.

An estimated 3.5 million Zimbabweans -- about a quarter of the national population -- have sought jobs and homes abroad, many of them illegally, as a result of a political and economic crisis blamed on Mugabe's increasingly controversial rule.

Hundreds of thousands live and work illegally in Britain, Zimbabwe's former colonial master.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush has widened economic sanctions against Zimbabwe, blocking the assets of an additional 128 people and 33 entities Washington says undermine democratic reform in the southern African state.

A statement posted on the White House Web site said Bush had issued an executive order allowing U.S. authorities to ''block the property of additional persons undermining democratic processes or institutions in Zimbabwe, their immediate family members, and any persons assisting them.''

The executive order, which took effect on Wednesday, expands sanctions imposed by the United States against 77 Zimbabweans in March 2003.

Earlier this month, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe told the U.S. ambassador, Christopher Dell, to ``go to hell'' after the envoy blamed the country's economic and political crisis on mismanagement and corrupt rule.

``The failed political and economic policies of the Robert Mugabe regime have succeeded in devastating Zimbabwe,'' the White House statement said.

Citing U.S. calls for the Mugabe government to stop harassing Zimbabwe's opposition and hold free elections, the statement said:

``The parliamentary elections in March 2005 were neither free nor fair. Recent demolitions of housing and informal markets have displaced 700,000 people at a time when Zimbabwe is already in the grip of a humanitarian crisis.''

The statement said Bush ``designated and blocked the assets of 128 persons and 33 entities.'' It did not list them.

Mugabe, Zimbabwe's sole ruler since 1980, rejects accusations his policies have brought the economy to its knees and instead says the country has fallen victim to sabotage by Western powers.

MBARE, Zimbabwe (AP) -- The smell of sewage and rotting garbage wafts into homes. Acrid smoke hangs in the air where families have tried to burn household waste. Dysentery, food poisoning and diarrhea break out.

With no foreign currency for gas and equipment, garbage collection is the latest casualty as Zimbabwe's economy crumbles.

The start of seasonal rains means the effects are becoming unbearable in this poor township in the capital, Harare. Trash is piled waist-high in the narrow streets, and reeking water stagnates in potholes, blocked sewers and drains.

''It is symptomatic of general decline and the national crisis as a whole,'' said Mike Davies, an official of the Combined Harare Ratepayers Association.

Zimbabwe is suffering its worst economic crisis since independence from Britain in 1980, blamed largely on the often-violent seizure of thousands of white-owned commercial farms for redistribution to blacks. Four years of erratic rainfall also have disrupted the agriculture-based economy, leaving up to 4 million people in need of food aid in what was once a regional breadbasket.

Before Zimbabwe's financial crisis began to really bite two years ago, garbage was collected weekly. Spiraling inflation and shortages of hard currency for spare parts have taken a toll on service. A boycott by people refusing to pay their utility bills because of poor service has added to the problems.

Last December, the government fired the opposition-dominated Harare city council for alleged mismanagement and appointed a state commission to run municipal services.

Three waste management firms have since withdrawn collection services across half the capital, citing acute shortages of gasoline, spare parts and equipment, and saying they get too little in fees from the city.

Most of the city's own garbage trucks have broken down. The few that are left service hospitals, shopping centers and areas close to the city center, Harare authorities said in a report Wednesday.

Already, there is concern about disease spreading in the city of 2 million people. Last month, health authorities reported outbreaks of dysentery and food poisoning blamed on frequent water and power outages that cause toilet and sewage blockages.

In Mabvuku township, in eastern Harare, residents scooped water from open drains during a seven-day outage earlier this month.

Hundreds of diarrhea cases have been reported in recent weeks, including at least 12 children who died of dehydration, said a Harare physician, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution in the increasingly autocratic state.

Executives at a Harare food processing factory told staff to filter and boil water after tests showed an increase in harmful bacteria. City authorities are believed to be using insufficient purifying chemicals in the drinking water due to shortages of hard currency needed to buy the materials.

Plumbing firms say blockages in the ailing water system have worsened due to the use of sand and soil as household scourers. The price of cleaning materials has increased about six-fold this year.

Faltering garbage collection is just one of the ways the economic crisis has hit daily life in Zimbabwe.

At public hospitals, families of patients are asked to bring their own drugs. In the maternity wing at the main hospital in Harare, expectant mothers are asked to bring their own umbilical clips. If they cannot get them, midwives use string to seal the umbilical cord.

The sale of wheelchairs and prosthetics for handicapped Zimbabweans has come to a standstill.

Court cases have been postponed because there is no gasoline to take the accused to court or money to buy food for witnesses.

The long-lamented lines to buy fuel at Zimbabwe gas stations have disappeared, however. There has been no fuel at all for at least 10 days, even at hard currency gas stations. The only fuel on sale is on the black market at exorbitant rates.

The accelerating economic decline means most people won’t even be able to afford the small luxuries of Christmases past.

By Dzikamai Chidyausku in Harare

There will be no real Christmas in Zimbabwe. Yes, December 25 will come and go in this largely Christian country. But there won’t be the kind of merry Christmas that Zimbabweans recall from earlier times, even in the pre-independence years of white minority rule. This Christmas, even though it comes at the height of summer will be bleak indeed.

In the old days, that is until about five years ago, families in the rural areas anticipated the return of fathers and uncles from work in the cities with bags full of goodies. Every child would get new clothes - colourful frocks for the girls, trousers and T-shirts for the boys - and a pair of trainers.You were a king if you received a pair of black BATA Tenderfoot trainers.

The atmosphere would be taut with anticipation. On Christmas Eve, the children would scrub themselves clean in the river and the soles of their feet would be cleared of the calluses from their long barefoot journeys to school.

In my village, welcoming father back home at Christmas was something akin to a celebration of manhood. Besides the clothes, there would be plenty of biscuits, sweets, fizzy drinks and the latest music cassettes.

On Christmas Day, we children would wake early and clean the yard before rushing to the river for another bath, while mother prepared tea in bucketfuls, with fresh milk from the cows in the pen and cupfuls of sugar. Everything would be plentiful on that day. Thick slices of bread, buttercup yellow with margarine and scarlet red with Sun Jam would be eaten as if there were no tomorrow. A goat and some chickens would be slaughtered, and both meat and rice – a luxury - would be plentiful. Then would follow the pilgrimage to neighbours to show off the new clothes. Guests would drop in and we would sing and dance until beyond New Year's Day.

In towns, the story was much the same, but perhaps with richer and more exotic fare than the bread and rice that meant so much to my family.

Not this year. Most of the 11.5 million Zimbabweans still in the country - some 3.5 million others have fled abroad - will sleep on empty stomachs this Christmas night.

The harsh impact of a crumbling economy, meagre salaries and food shortages will combine to ensure that Zimbabweans have the most miserable Christmas ever. Unemployment is approaching 90 per cent and inflation has topped 500 per cent, and there are now so many zeros on most price tags that calculators, designed for only eight digits, are useless for our daily calculations. Pickpocketing, once almost a national pastime, has gone out of fashion, as stealing a full purse will not buy you a single sweet or cigarette, and you need a carrier bag full of Zimbabwe dollars to buy a bottle of beer.

At the Christmas of 1980, the first after independence from Britain, a top-of-the-range shirt would have cost five Zimbabwean dollars. Now the cheapest costs in excess of 1.2 million. In just over six years, our currency has lost 99.9 per cent of its value.

In the past 15 years, average life expectancy has fallen from 60 to 30 years.

With the majority of people still battling to rebuild their lives after the disastrous effects of the ruling ZANU PF government’s Operation Murambatsvina (Operation Drive Out The Rubbish) six months ago, in which hundreds of thousands of people saw their homes destroyed by government police and militias, few can afford the goodies normally associated with Christmas Day. The situation is so desperate that even tea and bread have become luxuries for most Zimbabwean families.

“We have been selling the bricks from our destroyed homes to get food, but I don’t know what I will eat on Christmas Day,” said Norman Muchero, an unemployed labourer whose home in the Harare working class suburb of Whitecliff Farm was razed by bulldozers under the supervision of soldiers and police. He now lives in a cardboard, plastic and corrugated iron shack barely two metres high. He expects to spend Christmas desperately trying to mend the leaking holes in its roof to protect his family of four from the heavy rain of the summer thunderstorms.

Muchero remembers that, despite his poverty last year, he managed to buy his family new clothes and a treat or two to celebrate Christmas. “At least I bought a few drinks and bought some clothes for the kids from my odd jobs," he said. "They were happy. But this year I just don’t know what I will tell them, because there will be nothing.”

Life has always been hard for most ordinary Zimbabweans, but if they had tightened their belts in the months before Christmas, there would be enough to celebrate the holiday and hope for brighter prospects in the new year.

But Zimbabwe's desperate economic and political crisis, which began when President Mugabe ordered the invasions of prosperous white commercial farms in 2000, leading to massive food shortages, has changed all that.

Three meals a day are merely memories, and travel almost impossible, because when petrol is available, it is prohibitively expensive. So this year, even those who have jobs will be hard put to get back to their traditional rural homes. Most people in work earn less than 2.5 million Zimbawean dollars [25 US dollars] a month. The World Bank has dubbed the economic crisis the worst ever seen for a country not actually at war.

Even a highly qualified Harare schoolteacher like Munetsi Gobvu, a 35-year-old fending for his wife and four children, anticipates hunger for his family this Christmas. This month, Gobvu will get a “13th month” bonus payment, so he will have an extra 3.5 million Zimbabwean dollars to take home.

But the Gobvus are still close to destitute. “My children will be lucky if I have enough money to buy bread this Christmas,” said Gobvu, who has taught in government schools for the past ten years. “My first-born will be going to high school next year and they want 14 million Zimbabwean dollars for the boarding fees.”

What with other outgoings for school education and food for the family and medicine and doctor's fees for his sick mother, Gobvu’s finances are in deep trouble. “Don’t insult me by talking of a Christmas party or toys for my children," he said IWPR. "I’m sinking further and further into debt. I’m totally disillusioned.”

The grim joke about inflation goes, "We're all millionaires now - Zimbabwe must be the richest country in the world."

The plight of people like Gobvu got worse when the pace of inflation accelerated in reaction to the government’s budget in late November, in which rates and other municipal tariffs were increased by up to 2,000 per cent.

Before Operation Murambatsvina, some 70 per cent of all able-bodied people were unemployed. That figure has leapt to nearly 90 per cent because the “clean-up” operation all but destroyed the informal sector - small carpentry businesses, roadside shoe repairers, barber shops on upturned beer crates, fruit stalls - where people earned small livings.

The economic crisis has not even spared the army, which Mugabe relies upon heavily to suppress discontent. A private soldier earns only 2.5 million Zimbabwean dollars a month.

“I won’t be taking my normal Christmas off this year, because I have nothing to bring my mother,” said Thomas, who became a soldier two years ago. Almost all of his salary goes on the rent of a single room in an outer suburb. “To think of the Christmases that I used to enjoy when I was young pains me," he said. "Now I am working, but can’t afford all that.”

Dzikamai Chidyausku is a pseudonym used by a journalist in Zimbabwe.

Impoverished students try to escape hardship and hunger by selling sexual favours.

By Benedict Unendoro in Harare

Young men in Zimbabwe are angry, very angry. They have lost their manhood, and are liable to resort to anything in attempts to regain it. This - in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe - includes beating up their wives.

It's a few days before New Year and in the spirit of the festive season men are carousing in a sports bar playing pool and watching European soccer on pay TV. Despite the biting hardships endured in a country with the fastest declining economy in the world, the mood in the pub (and the country as a whole) is genial.

But the geniality is superficial. It masks a huge and simmering crisis that is deeply affecting young men.

Joseph Bhobho is seated at the counter nursing a beer. He is neither watching TV nor playing pool. Next to him is his friend Patrick Dube. They are both young and intelligent and should have very bright futures, given the level of their education. Both have just finished post-graduate studies.

"I think I should just go back home and beat the daylights out of her," said Bhobho to Dube. A middle-aged man, also seated at the counter drinking a beer, overhears him. From experience, he knows the young man is having a domestic problem. And he asked, "What the hell is the matter?"

Bhobho is keen to talk. He tells of how he and his newly-wed wife went into town that morning to do some shopping. They had passed through an internet café to check their mail. His wife had opened her mail while he watched. There, in front of him, was a message from her university lecturer. It read, "I'm missing sex."

Bhobho, 26, is distraught. The middle-aged man offers sympathy because he knows that prostitution in his country's institutions of higher learning is virtually out of control.

There are two main reasons.

First, students, like millions of their countrymen, are going hungry on campuses. Universities and colleges simply cannot provide enough food for them. The government is broke and the meagre allowance it doles out to students is not enough to supplement the miserable food provided, let alone to buy books. Grant payments are frequently made months late because the government is cash-strapped and inefficient.

Second, students feel they have to pass at all costs, even if it means sleeping around with lecturers. According to a social studies lecturer at Harare's University of Zimbabwe - where sexual harassment of women students is rife - this has turned the whole concept of manhood upside down. "Young women at campuses want men who can provide for them," she said. "They want men who can supplement the little food provided on campus. They want men who can take them to movies. They want men who can pay to have their hair done at the hairdressers. They want men who make them feel like ladies."

Such men are known as “sugar daddies” and are deeply resented by other male students.

The social studies lecturer recalls a tragic incident not so long ago when an impoverished female first year undergraduate, Tecla Tom, committed suicide in a student hostel as an apparent way out of entrapment by a "sugar daddy".

She left a note for her husband, which said in part, "It does not matter, Innocent, my husband, the time had come.”

When students subsequently went on the rampage against the hold of sugar daddies on women students, 20-year-old science undergraduate Batanayi Madzidzi was beaten up and killed by police.

The massive economic crisis gripping Zimbabwe - with inflation approaching 600 per cent and eighty per cent of the population living below the poverty line - has not spared the education system, and students are the chief victims of the malaise.

"A real man is no longer judged on his potential," said the social studies lecturer. "In our day we looked at the potential a male student had - what he could do when he left
university. We looked at the degree programmes the young men were reading and simply from that we chose our future husbands."

But the situation is completely differently now. "A 'real' man has to have money, and money now," said the lecturer.

"Then there is the question of 'sex for exam and course work marks'."

Most of the country's talented lecturers have left the country for greener pastures. The average age of their successors has dropped to below thirty. Often people who have just completed their Master's degrees are immediately co-opted into the system as assistant lecturers. They are poorly remunerated and are very short on self-esteem. They know of no standards since they themselves are products of a weakened education system.

"They will sleep with female students and pass them without any qualm," said the social studies academic. "Like everyone else, female students just want to get the hell out of university. They cannot contemplate being failed and having to spend another year at the institutions."

So, she says, it is common practice for female students to have a sugar daddy as well as a regular boyfriend. After finishing college, they quickly want to erase the memory of the sugar daddy and marry the young boyfriend.

"But sometimes it is not easy to make the transition from the sugar daddy to the boyfriend because the boyfriend is still a young man struggling to get his feet squarely on the ground," she continued.

In Bhobho's case, his wife is still a Master's degree student, and that gives him sleepless nights. "I've already paid 120 million Zimbabwe dollars (USD 1500) in lobola (bride price), and I deserve respect," he told his older fellow drinker. "But look at the messages her lecturer is sending her. It means she is sleeping around with him."

Nor are male students exempt from prostitution. They hang around with "sugar mummies" - older women who are either divorced or widowed but who have the means to maintain a “toy boy”.

"It is common for older women to drive into campus and pick up these young men. The situation is desperate," said the social studies lecturer. "Campuses have become the epicentres of the spread of diseases such as AIDS."

There are wider social consequences. Increasingly, young men are unwilling to marry college graduates and the divorce rate among graduate couples has risen
astronomically.

The toy boys have become social misfits and rarely socialise with young
women of their age. With AIDS rife in Zimbabwe, affecting an estimated quarter of the population aged 15 to 49, their sugar mummies are often HIV-positive, and the boys themselves are left to die lonely deaths from AIDS after the women have passed away.

There is no easy answer for Bhobho. His friend, Patrick Dube, says he has been luckier than his friend, "I introduced my girlfriend to my family when we were still kids and both our families saw us through college. We never really had any reason to prostitute ourselves."

But until the economic and political situation changes and parents can earn enough money to give their children decent allowances, the decline in education standards and the high level of prostitution among Zimbabwe's students will continue.

Benedict Unendoro is the pseudonym of an IWPR contributor in Zimbabwe.

Is the groundwork being laid to bring Zimbabwe’s president to The Hague?

By Tino Zhakata in Harare

Zimbabwe's beleaguered non-governmental organisations and charities have appealed to the International Criminal Court, ICC, to prosecute President Robert Mugabe and government officials who they say have been responsible for widespread crimes against humanity over the past six years.

The plea by the National Association of Non-Government Organisations, NANGO, coincides with a call by the London-based International Bar Association for the United Nations Security Council to authorise an ICC investigation into Mugabe's alleged crimes.

But calls for the prosecution of Mugabe, widely seen as the supreme architect of Zimbabweans' unprecedented suffering, have done little to provide hope to the country's impoverished and embittered populace.

"I don't believe anyone can do anything to Mugabe, so talk of him being arrested [for human rights abuses] might just be a waste of time," said Sifundiswa Ndlovu, an unemployed man whose five-room home in a Harare working class suburb was destroyed last year in Mugabe's notorious Operation Murambatsvina [Operation Drive Out the Rubbish]. "That man is arrogant, and I think the international community fears him as well."

Ndlovu, 57, has suffered several times over. First, he survived Mugabe's Operation Gukarahundi, in which more than 25,000 civilians were killed in Matabeleland and buried in mass graves by Mugabe's special army unit, the 5th Brigade. The latter was trained by North Korea following an agreement between Mugabe and the late North Korean dictator Kim Il-Sung. Gukarahundi is a traditional term in the Shona language, which translates as, "The early rain that washes away the chaff before the spring rains."

Ndlovu, who belongs to Zimbabwe's minority Ndebele ethnic group, then moved to Harare in 1989 for greater safety and for a job as a foreman with a construction company. He became unemployed when the construction company folded and he eked out a meagre living selling second-hand goods at a flea market. Then the home he shared with his wife and four children was destroyed in Operation Murambatsvina.

Similar ordeals experienced by millions of Zimbabweans led to the appeals from Zimbabwe's civil society and the International Bar Association for the ICC to open a criminal investigation against Mugabe alongside those it has already begun in northern Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo's Ituri province and Sudan's Darfur region.

Mark Ellis, executive director of the International Bar Association, the global organisation for law workers, said in a recent article for the Paris-based International Herald Tribune, "Mugabe's state machine is simply too powerful and corrupt to be defeated by weakened and demoralised citizens. The escalating humanitarian crisis in Zimbabwe requires an immediate and forceful international response.

"Mugabe must be held accountable for the crimes he has committed. A UN Security Council referral to the International Criminal Court - similar to the [Security Council] referral over the Darfur situation - is the most appropriate and effective response."

NANGO, calling for Mugabe's prosecution in The Hague, pointed out that UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan had sent a special envoy, Anna Tibaijuka, to Zimbabwe to investigate the human costs of Operation Murambatsvina. In her 100-page report, Tibaijuka told Annan that although Mugabe claimed that the operation was designed to target illegal dwellings, "it was carried out in an indiscriminate and unjustified manner, with indifference to human suffering".

Tibaijuka estimated that more than three million people had been directly affected by the mass destruction of the homes of Zimbabwe's poor.

"Immediate measures need to be taken to bring those responsible to account," she advised Annan. "The government of Zimbabwe clearly caused large sections of its population serious suffering that must now be redressed with the assistance of the United Nations and the broader international community."

Zimbabwe's outspoken Roman Catholic Archbishop Pius Ncube and South Africa's Cardinal Wilfred Napier have both branded the Mugabe administration guilty of crimes against humanity, particularly by withholding food aid from large sections of the population, and urged the Security Council to take responsibility for the situation and take action.

George Charamba, Mugabe's press secretary, poured scorn on the calls for ICC action against the Zimbabwean president. Since Zimbabwe was not a signatory to the Rome statute, it was not therefore legally bound by its dictates, said Charamba. He dismissed the International Bar Association as just one of a raft of bodies around the world that are trying to put pressure on Zimbabwe's ruling ZANU PF party in the hope of reviving the troubled opposition Movement for Democratic Change.

However, Charamba was making a common error about the powers of the fledgling ICC, which has powers to investigate a case beyond the countries which have signed up to it.

Although it is true that Zimbabwe, like the United States, has not signed the Rome statute, it is a fact that the UN Security Council can refer a case to the ICC, as they did with the government-backed militias in the Darfur area of Sudan, which could lead to an investigation and to Mugabe's arrest if he sets foot in any country which has signed the treaty . "Exercising its wide discretionary powers, the Security Council could specifically name Mugabe as an ongoing threat to the peace of the [southern African] region and authorise an ICC investigation, even though Zimbabwe has refused to accept the court's jurisdiction," said Ellis.

The groundwork for a possible indictment of Mugabe at The Hague is perhaps at last being laid following a scathing report by a commission of the African Union, grouping all Africa's states except Morocco, which strongly condemns Zimbabwe's president for abusing his people's human rights "with impunity".

The African Commission for Human and People's Rights, ACHPR, at its latest meeting in the Gambia, said the AU is not doing enough to force Mugabe to address "a very desperate situation in Zimbabwe". The commission, whose chairman is former Mali President Alpha Oumar Konare, will present its report at the AU summit in Khartoum on January 23 and 24.

The AU and its predecessor, the Organisation of African Unity, have long been accused of ring-fencing Mugabe from domestic and international criticism.

Following the breaking of silence by an important commission of the AU, Zimbabwean analysts and human rights activists see a glimmer of hope that concrete international action might be taken against Mugabe.

"This will place a lot of pressure on Zimbabwe," said Arnold Tsunga, director of Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights. "This is the first time such a significant body, so close to African heads of state, observes and condemns such defiance of human rights compliance. It gives the African Union heads of state an opportunity to show they have the ability, and are committed to deal with, such issues."

"For the first time, we might now be seeing the ICC finally moving on Mugabe," a University of Zimbabwe political scientist told IWPR. "It's crucial that Africa has spoken out against what's going on in Zimbabwe."

But Lovemore Madhuku, chairman of the National Constitutional Assembly, Zimbabwe's largest civic group, said it was useless to expect that the resolution would spur AU leaders into changing their docile approach to Mugabe.

"As has happened in the past, the latest ACHPR report might not even get a mention at the AU summit," said Madhuku. "It is futile to expect anything serious from these African leaders." He said they would be eager to avoid offending Mugabe and would probably play down the commission report as the work of technical people, which does not reflect the AU's political sentiment

"How can you expect a club of leaders, which include the likes of Omar Bongo and Yoweri Museveni [the long-serving presidents of Gabon and Uganda, both accused of human rights abuses], to censure Mugabe when they are changing their constitutions to do exactly what Mugabe is doing, if not worse?" asked Madhuku.

Mugabe's human rights record has been under the international spotlight since 2000 when he began seizing white-owned commercial farms in a violent exercise that left dozens of people dead. He also unleashed violence on opposition groups by government-trained youth militias and liberation war veterans in the prelude to 2000 parliamentary and 2002 presidential elections, widely condemned as having been heavily rigged. Mugabe's government has banned four newspapers since 2003, including the Daily News, the country's only independent daily.

Western governments have been outspoken against Mugabe's excesses, but until the ACHPR spoke out against Mugabe African states had maintained silence out of a sense of "brotherhood" with Zimbabwe's leader.

In a possible omen of things to come for Zimbabwe, the ACHPR expressed solidarity with the ICC on its investigations in northern Uganda, Darfur and Ituri.

Of course, no one knows if an ICC investigation for crimes against humanity would bring an end to Mugabe’s regime. But Ellis said, “We have to try, because the Zimbabwean government's systematic human rights abuses have reached staggering proportions.

"A referral to the ICC would also send an unmistakable message to the beleaguered citizens of Zimbabwe that Mugabe will ultimately be held accountable for his crimes. There is no statute of limitations for those, like Mugabe, who commit atrocities against their own citizens. It is time to bring him to justice."

Tino Zhakata is the pseudonym of an IWPR contributor in Zimbabwe.

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) -- In Zimbabwe's capital and in need of a bath or a hot meal? Call a friend, though it'll likely take several attempts to get through. ''We call it social bathing,'' said James Martin, a businessman who visits friends across Harare during extended water outages after making sure their taps aren't dry.

When the electricity is out, as it often is, he also invites himself over for dinner, bringing supplies from his thawing freezer and warm beer to be chilled.

This week, there was less cheer in the beer: With inflation spiraling, its price rose by 40 percent, the fourth increase since October.

The nation is suffering its worst economic crisis since independence from Britain in 1980, with acute shortages of food, gasoline, medicines and other essential imports. The crash has been blamed on disruptions in the agriculture-based economy caused by drought and the seizures of thousands of white-owned commercial farms since 2000.

Martin buys scarce gasoline on the black market at five times the official price. Fees for phone calls have increased by at least 1,000 percent in the past year, even though service has deteriorated. Water shutoffs are blamed on pump failures and shortages of water treatment chemicals.

One Harare entrepreneur with a well has begun advertising deliveries by truck.

Last month, Martin's neighbor paid $150 to replace a car tire slashed open by the razor-sharp edges of a pothole in a main street in the capital. Zimbabweans now joke that sober drivers steer in a zigzag pattern to miss the holes, while drunks foolishly drive in a straight line.

City authorities say they lack the manpower, vehicles and gasoline to mobilize sufficient road repair crews.

Potholes deepened by seasonal rains have even inspired a painting by Zimbabwe artist John Kotze. He said his pothole-in-oil symbolized the nation's economic and political decline.

But ''water in the pothole represents life. Blue sky reflected in the water signifies better days to come. I'm trying to be optimistic as well,'' he said of his painting.

The state power utility has warned that electricity outages will persist, saying it lacks the money to import more power from neighboring countries and the spare parts to fix and upgrade its aging equipment. Even now, Zimbabwe imports 40 percent of its power.

Sydney Gata, head of the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority, noted in a recent report that the cost of monthly power imports rose from $4.5 million to about $9 million since October.

Gideon Gono, governor of the Reserve Bank, last week predicted that by March, the official inflation could reach 800 percent, the highest in the world. Currently, inflation is nearly 600 percent.

The power utility has proposed a threefold increase on its fees this month, and sales of home generators from China, heard rumbling in well-to-do suburbs and office compounds, already have surged.

Accidents have increased sharply at blacked out traffic signals. An experimental solar powered signal was reportedly too expensive and a target for thieves.

Shortages of new bulbs means many traffic signals have only one working light.

''You take your life in your hands when you think the lights are down but there's an oncoming green on the other side and people are speeding through thinking you are on red,'' said Harare driver Jonas Mashu.

It took Mashu a week to find imported brake and clutch fluid for his van. He said he used a viscous mixture of soap and water as a temporary measure, something he learned from a mining prospector in the bush.

''Hardship teaches us unusual lessons,'' he said.