Chibanda made it to safety in South Africa last week. As she sought political asylum and a job in the port city of Durban, pro-Mugabe hardliners continued their crackdown on their political opponents in neighboring Zimbabwe. Yet, even while the violence continued, reports of an anti-Mugabe faction within the ruling ZANU-PF Party left some analysts cautiously optimistic that their 83-year-old ruler may finally be on his way out of power. “People have begun to fight back, which has never happened before,” Professor Lovemore Maduka, a legal scholar and head of Zimbabwe’s National Constitutional Assembly, a civil-society group whose resistance to constitutional changes triggered the birth of the opposition movement seven years ago, told NEWSWEEK. Maduka was one of three men—along with Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the political opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), and Arthur Mutambara, head of a splinter MDC opposition party—whose bloodied and battered bodies were photographed and flashed around the world last week as they left a hospital in Harare. The three political leaders had been arrested and assaulted by security forces after a March 11 protest, leaving Maduka and Tsvangarai with deep head injuries and broken limbs. In spite of his injuries, Maduka says he is encouraged by the growing resistance and the new unity between political- opposition groups in Zimbabwe. “People are hugely determined to fight brutality by a government that has become desperate,” he said.
Regional resistance to Mugabe—long sheltered by his iconic status as an anti-colonial liberation hero—is growing, too. Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa yesterday described Zimbabwe as a “sinking Titanic whose passengers are jumping off in a bid to save their lives,” and urged African leaders to intervene in the crisis. “Quiet diplomacy has failed to help solve the political chaos and economic meltdown in Zimbabwe,” Mwanawasa said, in what appeared to be a veiled criticism of the South African government’s refusal to publicly criticize its erstwhile ally in the anti-apartheid struggle.
The latest trouble in Zimbabwe began some six weeks ago, when a protest rally in Harare was disrupted by police and degenerated into a near riot in one of the capital city’s “high-density”—a euphemism for poor—neighborhoods. On March 11, a demonstration held by antigovernment groups under the umbrella of the Save Zimbabwe Campaign, was crushed by riot police using tear gas, water cannons and live ammunition. A young activist, Gift Tandare, was killed: his body was bizarrely “confiscated” from a funeral parlor by state agents in order to avoid a high-profile political funeral that could prompt more protests, and was buried by the government. At least 50 people were injured during or after that rally.
Last Saturday, three of the opposition activists who were allegedly assaulted on March 11 were re-arrested at Harare airport. MDC Secretary for International Affairs Sekai Holland, 64, and her deputy, Grace Kwinje, 30, were severely injured while in police custody after the protest—Holland suffered multiple fractures, including broken ribs and a broken arm and leg. But the women were prevented from leaving for Johannesburg to receive specialist medical care. An ambulance transporting them from a private clinic in Harare to the airport was stopped on the tarmac by security forces, their passports were taken and they were told they needed a clearance certificate from the health department. They later returned to the clinic and are under police guard. Arthur Mutambara, leader of the MDC splinter faction, was later also arrested at the airport, en route to Johannesburg where his family lives. He has been held at Harare central police station.
The following day, Nelson Chamisa, Tsvangirai’s spokesman, was assaulted at the airport and beaten on the head with iron bars by eight unknown assailants as he arrived for a flight to Brussels. He was en route to a meeting of the European Union and Africa Caribbean Pacific, but instead ended up back in a critical condition in the private Avenues Clinic—from which he had just been released following injuries sustained during the March 11 rally. The assault on Chamisa prompted Glenys Kinnock, co-chair of the EU-ACP parliamentary assembly in Brussels, to unsuccessfully call for officials of Zimbabwe’s ruling ZANU-PF to be banned from the meeting, and for the EU to “strengthen existing sanctions on Zimbabwe and impose new, effective targeted personal sanctions against ZANU-PF and its business associates.” The 27-nation EU last month extended for a year its sanctions on Zimbabwe, including an arms embargo, travel ban and asset freeze on Mugabe and other top officials.
Mugabe remains defiant, telling critics to “go hang” and accusing opposition groups of “terrorist” violence sponsored by former colonial power Britain and the United States. “We have given too much room to mischief-makers and shameless stooges of the West. Let them and their masters know that we shall brook none of their lawless behavior,” he was quoted as saying by the pro-government Sunday Mail. On Sunday the Zimbabwean government threatened to expel Western diplomats, whom, it accuses, of supporting the opposition—the first time that it has issued such a threat. U.S. ambassador Christopher Dell, who walked out of the meeting with the Zimbabwean foreign minister after he refused to take questions, later told The Associated Press that Mugabe was “far from giving up.” Still, said Dell, “he is weaker than he’s ever been before, because the economy has simply made him weaker and because everyone recognizes that he’s 83 years old.”
Mugabe’s policies have left the country with the world’s fastest-shrinking peacetime economy. Inflation is running at 1,700 percent and the International Monetary Fund predicts that it will rise to 4,000 percent this year. Savings have been wiped out, and 56 percent of Zimbabweans earn less than $1 a day. Many with the means and education to rebuild the country have fled: estimates put the expat Zimbabwean community at some 3.4 million—members of a diaspora that has stripped Zimbabwe of around 70 percent of its skilled workforce. Development gains have been eradicated: according to the United Nations Children’s Fund, life expectancy has plummeted from 60 years in 1990 to 37 now—partly as a result of AIDS—while the infant mortality rate has risen from 53 to 81 per 1,000 live births. Land-seizure policies have destroyed commercial farming, causing severe drought-exacerbated food shortages and leaving 1.4 million of this formerly self-sufficient country’s 12 million people dependent on food aid. Zimbabwe’s next elections are due in 2008. Mugabe wants to extend his own term by a further two years after that. Even if the autocrat is ousted sooner, the damage to Zimbabwe will likely linger for decades.
