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afrol.com, 21 October - Three day of riots in Harare, crushed by the police and army, document the desolate state of affairs in Zimbabwe. They were hunger riots. Reports show that Zimbabwe, due to mismanagement, is well on its way into starvation. Even if the National Bank has been mass-producing Zimbabwe dollars, soon there is nothing left to fill up the warehouses and local shops. There are no more foreign exchanges, fuel has almost run out and the foreign aid has been curbed. More important, the bread prices have increased threefold only this year, enough to sparkle riots even without opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai's appeal for "mass action" against the Government. The riots were brutally crushed on Thursday. "As far as we know, and from the reports we are getting, the situation is quiet today," police spokesman Wayne Bvudzijana told the press, after having more than 70 people arrested since protests broke out on Monday. Police and military patrolled the streets and suburbs, and there have been extensive reports of beatings and assaults. - Youths set fire to a bus and sealed off the two adjacent townships with barricades, including three blazing cars. Police used armoured vehicles and fired volleys of tear-gas canisters into houses, David Blair from The Telegraph described the situation from Harare amidst of the riots. "For far too long, an oligarchy of geriatrics has been allowed, and has ensured through brutal force that it is allowed, to run this country as it sees fit," the independent Daily News described the root problems of the present situation. The UN predicts shortages of the national staple, maize, towards the end of the year and severe shortages of food no later than February 2001and not to speak of private or public transportation. The prices still inevitably will have to increase a manifold, and that cannot mean anything else than hunger for the poorest. The social consequences of the political crisis are already visible in the increasing amount of homeless in Harare and the numbers of children suffering malnutrition reported by aid organisations in rural areas. Usually, Zimbabwe is able to produce enough maize to export parts of the production. This year, however, there was not even enough for the local population. And even if neighbouring countries should produce enough corn and grains, Zimbabwe will not have the foreign exchange to pay for imports. Finance Minister Simba Makoni counts on the tobacco harvest in November to be a turning point. With the same foreign exchange earnings as other years, this would be enough to cover the most urgent expenses in food and fuel importations. However, there are every sign of the same failure within the tobacco harvest as within the maize harvest. The reasons are obvious, and have been pointed at for at least half a year. The violent actions of the "war veterans" have prevented many farmers from growing crops this year - or has dismotivated them. Farm occupations have hindered very much of the commercial farming, the backbone of tobacco exports. Tobacco harvests, though, are expected to become a record low. Zimbabwe and Mugabe has had a great credit in the international society, especially in Europe, based on the (deserved) bad conscience for the partial responsibility of the racist government in ex-Rhodesia. Mugabe gave the African majority its liberty from white racists, and for that he has gotten an indulgence for two decades. That was until the oppositional MDC told Europeans and Americans what they had not want to listen to for years, that Mugabe was running a corrupt dictatorship. As the election violence and Mugabe's private engagement in Congo Kinshasa proved the MDC's allegations, the substantial foreign aid was stopped. With even the Scandinavian nations pulling out of Zimbabwe lately, and South Africa silently distancing itself from Mugabe, the old dictator slowly is loosing the grip. The question is, how much more Zimbabweans will have to endure with Mugabe, an economic disaster and a foreseen hunger before change will come. Several observers rightly have called Mugabe Zimbabwe's Milosovic, and the word is spreading in Zimbabwe.
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