Helpless, As A Dictator Lays Waste

Sydney Morning Herald

Thursday April 5, 2007

Miranda Devine

For thousands of Zimbabwean exiles in Australia - black and white - it is excruciating to watch the tragedy unfolding in their homeland. The former Zimbabwean soldier Irvine Ndou, 30, whose nine-year-old daughter still lives there, can only watch in dismay from his new home in Perth, and write impassioned articles on his website ZimbabweDemocracy.org.

"I fear Zimbabwe will become like Rwanda, where everyone knew what was happening but turned a blind eye," he said on the phone yesterday. "[Atrocities] are still happening in Zimbabwe right now."

The former Rhodesia, once Africa's breadbasket, is a basket case. But the man responsible, the 83-year-old dictator Robert Mugabe, was last week endorsed by his party to stand again in "elections" next year, even while the world protested, albeit feebly, at his regime's escalating human rights abuses, such as the violent crackdown last month on the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai.

The New York Times reports hyper-inflation in Zimbabwe at 1700 per cent and tipped to rise to 5000 per cent this year, unemployment at 80 per cent, life expectancy at 36, the lowest in the world, and malnutrition and starvation as orphaned children scavenge in rubbish heaps for food.

Ndou was detained and tortured by Mugabe's henchmen after the rigged elections of 2000, when he refused to help drum up support for the Government and was accused of working for the opposition. He and a friend escaped by foot into Botswana - walking all night in dark bush, frightened half to death by the "sounds of the lions and elephants" - and then came to Australia in 2003.

He grew up at a time when the one-time militant Marxist Mugabe was being feted by the West, loaded up with honorary degrees from international universities, and called a good friend by the then Australian prime minister Malcolm Fraser, who helped propel him to power, but is now uncharacteristically quiet on the subject. Meanwhile, back in reality, Mugabe's North Korean-trained soldiers were murdering as many as 25,000 people in the southern province of Matabeleland in 1984 and 1985.

As the Rhodesian-born journalist Peter Godwin wrote this week in The New York Times, the massacres rated "barely a peep out of the international community. Somehow, to attack Mr Mugabe was to appear to be giving succour to white South Africa, and Zimbabwe's strongman was a master at spinning it that way."

Growing up in Matabeleland, Ndou remembers classmates coming to school having been raped and bashed, relatives disappearing. Outside his school, he says, he saw the body of a pregnant woman whose child had been sliced out of her.

He remembers a disused mine into which 2000 people were herded and buried alive. "African leaders were complaining but unfortunately Britain and America looked the other way and said Mugabe was a good leader."

Ndou says the West really only became concerned about Mugabe when white farmers started being murdered. "If the West wants to help Zimbabwe it must first acknowledge [the Matabeleland massacre] ... They have never actually condemned him for that."

Sharing Ndou's sorrow is the Sydney filmmaker Chloe Traicos, 29, who documented his story in A Stranger in My Homeland, which won the best director award for an international documentary in the 2005 New York Independent Film Festival. When her white Zimbabwean family fled the country in 1998, "we thought it couldn't get any worse". At the time, the morning newspaper was fat with the names of farmers whose properties were being confiscated.

Her mother's family had arrived in Zimbabwe from Russia a century earlier bringing the first tobacco plants. Her father, John, a lawyer, had played cricket for Zimbabwe, and leaving their home was a wrench.

Most of her friends in Zimbabwe were black and they, too, have fled, an exodus of educated youth Zimbabwe couldn't afford. She remembers growing up under Mugabe's rule, suffering a bit from Stockholm syndrome - a psychological defence mechanism in which captives identify with their captors. "When you grow up under a dictator and elections are being held every year and he always wins, you can't imagine who else could be leader other than Mugabe."

She and Ndou form part of an enormous opposition in exile, doing what they can to pressure the international community to exert more pressure on Mugabe. But the news is not good.

A planned two-day strike in Zimbabwe organised by trade unions this week was deemed a flop after police and soldiers, with helicopters, roadblocks and water cannon, intimidated people into business as usual.

A crisis meeting in Tanzania between Mugabe and southern African leaders last week achieved little. It publicly backed Mugabe, who blames Zimbabwe's economic crisis on so-called "smart" sanctions imposed by the West; he claims he is being punished for seizing white-owned farms.

The meeting also appointed the South African President, Thabo Mbeki, as a mediator between Mugabe and the opposition. Mbeki is regarded as having influence over his landlocked neighbour, and has told reporters he believes Mugabe will step down peacefully before next year's elections.

But Mbeki's reassurances have been wrong before, his previous softly-softly mediations have failed and he shows no indication of toughening his stance.

Mugabe "is a disaster, his country is just a total heap of misery", the Prime Minister, John Howard, said on radio last month. "It's time that the neighbouring African countries, particularly South Africa, exerted political pressure on Mugabe to go."

If diplomacy has any value in high-risk situations, now is the time to prove it. But Traicos and Ndou remain pessimistic.

devinemiranda@hotmail.com

© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald

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