Euan Ferguson (London Observer): Welcome to Mugabeland

From the London Observer (Sunday supplement of the Guardian Unlimited)
Dated Sunday March 20

Welcome to Mugabeland, where hope wilts in the sun
The rains have failed, the crops are dying. As Zimbabwe prepares to vote, Euan Ferguson, in this secret dispatch, explains why the prospect of change still seems agonisingly remote
By Euan Ferguson

It was laughter, actually. Tired and terribly fed up laughter, pupping away inside me like lazy glue on a stove. It wasn't, honestly, the reaction I had meant to bring to famine.
But last week, in a fairly filthy bar in Bulawayo, it finally got to me. Second city of Zimbabwe, where the ridiculously wide avenues lie in cloying darkness all night, holding their breath, because there's no money for light bulbs. They're running out of blood in Bulawayo and, with HIV running through 25 per cent of the nation's veins, new supplies are hard to come by. They've run out of petrol. They've run out of doctors: there are three surgeons left for a population of just over 800,000. They're running out of food. Ten starved to death in the city suburbs last month, seven of them children under five: and now the rains have stopped, and the harvest has failed, and it's going to get one whole medieval lot nastier very soon.

They're not, yet, out of Castle beer, which is why I have some in front of me as I wait. It has taken a little while to persuade Bulawayans to talk. Two weeks before the national elections, friends are wary of talking to friends, so mouths snap shut before strangers. It is an offence to hold a meeting without police permission, an offence to criticise the government, a jailable offence to criticise Robert Mugabe: effectively, talk of politics is outlawed.

Even the regime's sternest critics, in the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), are trying to distance themselves from anyone white, as Mugabe loses no opportunity to taunt them about links to Tony Blair and accuse them of being puppets of white neo-colonialism. So I'm not sure if young Jimmy and Joy, whom I'd met earlier in a more public (thus less safe) bar, are going to turn up, but they do, and without thinking I wave. Mistake. They're not really worried, it's fine here, but they advise me to keep the waving to a minimum elsewhere. An open hand is the symbol of the MDC. Flaunting it can get you noticed.

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