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Date Posted: 10:42:48 03/13/02 Wed
Author: Buffy's vampire
Subject: Zimbabwe Ruins

Like thousands of others, Diana Mitchell has packed what she calls a "gap bag". Containing her most precious possessions, it stands in her Highlands home, ready if she and her husband, Brian, have to leave Zimbabwe in a hurry.

Mrs Mitchell, 70, a historian and veteran civil rights activist, does not fit the mould of most white Africans. She was among the handful who opposed Ian Smith's Rhodesian regime and she welcomed Zimbabwe's birth, with Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF party at the helm, in 1980. But, like thousands of others, she has laid plans to leave her homeland at a moment's notice.

Mrs Mitchell has been bitterly disillusioned by Mr Mugabe's rule and expects the official terror campaign and electoral chicanery to deliver another victory for him. Then she fears a backlash against the white community.

"I don't trust them not to make an example of white people, which will be a total confirmation of their racism and that they have squandered all the ideals they fought for," she said.

"It's the ZANU-PF leadership which has made the name of Zimbabwe stink in the nostrils. Those excuses about colonialism won't work. It's all about a hunger for power among those who have made an investment in this evil regime."


In Harare's northern suburbs, inhabited by most of the 50,000 remaining white Zimbabweans, destitute people, the casualties of economic collapse under Mr Mugabe's rule, are systematically stripping the capital of everything that can possibly be sold. Street signs have been torn down and hammered into coffin handles - greatly in demand due to an AIDS epidemic - or petrol funnels, made necessary by fuel shortages.

Many traffic lights have stopped working because their coloured bulbs have been prised out and sold to discotheques. Hardly any street lights now function because the bulbs have been stolen.

Unlike the whites, most black Zimbabweans will not have a chance to leave the country and for them life is grim. Supermarket shelves are empty of bread, milk, sugar, cooking oil and maize meal, the staple food.

More than 75per cent of the black population live in absolute poverty.

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