Death list an elegy to democracy in Zimbabwe

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa – Zimbabwe’s shattered opposition released its roll call of dead last week.

The list, e-mailed to the international media, was clearly prepared in haste. It contains the kind of typographic errors that arise, one imagines, from taking fast dictation. The language is as flat and terse as a small-town police report. Still, for the first time, people who died in Zimbabwe’s recent political agonies now have the decency of being named.

The chilling details of these largely invisible murders – in which all but four of the 85 victims are members of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, while most of the alleged killers belong to President Robert Mugabe’s youth militias – is as good an elegy as any for the death of a democracy.

“Was abducted and later found dead.” That is the most common form of execution on the list.

But the brief descriptions of other political killings – a man assaulted while sitting down to eat dinner, others attacked while tending their shop, working in a flour mill, or puttering in a garden – hint at the strangely workaday, domestic quality of life in Zimbabwe even as it morphs into what now more resembles a bald-faced dictatorship.

The final blow to democratic hopes came Friday, when a widely condemned runoff election promised to reinstall Mugabe in power. Diplomats now predict that up to a million new refugees, hungry and desperate, may flood out of the free-falling wreck called Zimbabwe in the coming year. On the dead list are some who won’t get that chance.

“Edna Lunga … they locked her in a room at the shopping centre and made a fire outside the door (then) they started burning her with plastic all over the body and in the mouth.”

Nobody knows what will happen next in moribund Zimbabwe.

Some analysts say that if Mugabe’s record holds, the wily, 84-year-old president may throw a bone to the opposition, perhaps by offering to share power or recognizing its gains in Parliament, as he has done in previous rigged elections. Then he’ll quietly renege.

Whether such old tactics can work today, in the face of growing international outrage at Mugabe’s brutality, remains to be seen.

“I think he’ll try and hold on for a year, then hand-pick a successor inside ZANU-PF,” said David Coltart, an opposition senator, using the acronym for Mugabe’s ruling party. “He’ll pretty much do anything to keep real power out of the hands of Morgan (Tsvangirai), whom he loathes.”

Tsvangirai, the opposition leader who withdrew from Friday’s runoff after thousands of his followers were beaten and hundreds of thousands more were driven from their homes, appears to be counting solely on foreign intervention to force a political dialogue. In an election-day message to his demoralized supporters, most of whom sat out the voting, he said: “Be not afraid, the Lord is with you.”

“I don’t know what we made our sacrifices for,” said a bitter MDC activist, speaking by telephone from Zimbabwe’s rural Masvingo province, where Tsvangirai’s campaigners have been shot, burned and beaten to death. “It’s all over here. Zimbabwe’s finished.”

He choked back tears of fury. Agents from the Central Intelligence Office, Mugabe’s feared secret police, were outside his business office, he said, stripping the inventory from his farm supply store in retaliation for his opposition sympathies.

“Owen Hativagone … they tied and suspended a brick to his testicles for two days after which he passed out and died.”

Unfortunately for 12 million Zimbabweans – citizens of one of the prettiest nations in Africa, a place once known more for its safari lodges and thundering waterfalls than for corpses abandoned at roadsides – there is more than political terror to survive in the days ahead.

With erratic rains this year expected to shrink crop harvests by at least a third, humanitarian experts warn that the fertile country, which once fed the rest of the continent, faces mass starvation.

“As of August, we’ll have a major food crisis,” said Clever Maputseni, a spokesman for the U.N. humanitarian affairs office in Harare, the capital. “This country has a crop deficit of millions of metric tons of grain. Where are we going to get that food on short notice?”

Maputseni noted that 2 million to 4 million Zimbabweans depend on U.N. food aid, according to the seasons. More than 200,000 are HIV sufferers who require supplemental food packets just to stay alive.

But no food is being distributed. Mugabe banned all foreign humanitarian operations in Zimbabwe two weeks ago, after accusing aid groups of meddling in politics.

Asking not to be named for fear of government retaliation, one aid worker in Harare said the ban would likely last for weeks, in order to prevent outsiders from witnessing an expected new wave of revenge attacks on communities that sat out Friday’s elections.

“Temba Muronde … taken to Magwada torture base where they gave him rat poison but he did not die, they then gave him pesticide (rogo) and when he did not die they then killed him with an axe.”

In the end, many experts believe it will be hunger and economic devastation that brings a defiant Mugabe to the negotiating table – not pressure from the West, the U.N., or the African Union.

Zimbabwe’s shelves are bare. With inflation now orbiting almost meaninglessly at more than 2 million percent, the country has become a surreal land of 16 billion-Zimbabwe-dollar chicken legs. Whole chickens aren’t available. And Mugabe exhausted his meager treasury by handing out a last few mini-buses and farming tools to sway his cowed and slat-ribbed electorate.

The United States has promised to lobby for yet more sanctions against Zimbabwe in the U.N. Security Council, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday. How this will affect a country that cannot even issue passports to those who want to flee – there isn’t any paper to print them on – is debatable.

“I guess that’s one way of being positive,” joked Marco Ndlovuan, orphanage manager in Zimbabwe’s second largest city of Bulawayo. “Things cannot stay this way. And they cannot possibly get worse. They absolutely cannot. So something must change.”