ZIMBABWE - LETTER FROM THE DIASPORA !

12th December 2008.

Dear Friends,

Perhaps it is the tinted glasses that Mugabe is wearing these days that blind him to what is going on in the country he purports to rule. His declaration that "Cholera has been arrested" - nice choice of words there! - flies in the face of the facts. "If anything is certain in the chaos of Zimbabwe today it is that the cholera outbreak is not under control" says Save the Children Director. As the WHO announces the death toll from cholera at nearly 800, Mr Mugabe blithely assures the crowd gathered for the funeral of Elliot Manyika - another 'Hero' for Heroes Acre - that the cholera cause doesn't exist anymore. What is more he claims, it is his government, his doctors who have worked this miracle with the help of WHO. But it is not the appalling suffering of the people that is of paramount concern to Mugabe; what is really worrying him is the threat of military intervention. No cholera, no cause for invasion goes his argument.

Zimbabweans would not have been surprised by Mugabe's rhetoric at the funeral for the late unlamented Manyika. All week long his side kicks in government have been telling anyone who would listen that the situation was under control. "We have enough chemicals to purify the water. We have got enough foreign currency to buy pipes" announced Sikhanyiso Ndlovu on Wednesday. If that is true then why don't they just go ahead and do it we wonder? Why was the regime trying so hard to conceal the terrible truth of the cholera outbreak from the world. They know only too well that once the pictures of children playing in raw sewage and cholera victims with drips attached in dirty clinics and hospitals were beamed round the world, the international community would respond. It was not compassion for the victims, not pity for the dying children that the regime was concerned about, it was the world-wide call for military intervention that had the Mugabe regime rattled. With the usual breath-taking Zanu illogicality Ndlovu went on to claim, "After squeezing and strangling the country with sanctions and contaminating it with cholera and anthrax, the west is seeking to use the window of opportunity provided by the disaster to justify military intervention." Ndlovu was simply laying the ground for his master. Even the eventual declaration of cholera as a National Emergency had little to do with stopping the people's suffering; above all it was a way of getting the international community to fund the government's absolute failure to care for their own people. Cholera does not respect political divisions, it does not discriminate between Zanu and MDC supporters' it targets the poorest of the poor, the malnourished, the already sick from Aids and above all the children. Yet Mugabe says nothing of them; it is the attack on his own power base that worries him when the call goes out for military intervention. Watching him speak at Heroes Acre, seeing the banners proclaiming 'Brown's Cholera' it was not hard to sense his terror at what it would mean for him if the west carried out their threats. The very real prospect of his own downfall is staring him in the face; compared to that not even the prospect of hundreds of cholera deaths matters. He is fighting for survival and like a cornered rat he becomes ever more vicious as the end comes nearer.

Mugabe's problem is that no matter how hard he tries he can no longer conceal from the world the depth of the suffering his regime has wrought on the Zimbabwean people. Not a day has passed this week without the world's media covering some aspect of the Zimbabwean tragedy. The plight of the missing MDC activists and Jestina Mukoko in particular has featured in mass appeals to human rights activists around the world to raise their voices in protest at Mugabe's appalling human rights record. His regime may ignore court orders to the police to mount a search for the disappeared; the ZTV may ignore a court order to flight adverts showing Jestina as a Missing Person but he cannot hide the tragedy from the world. Only last night on British TV we saw Zimbabwean lawyers marching with their banners to protest the political abductions. We saw the brave Woza women once again demonstrating in Bulawayo and Harare where they managed to surprise the police who arrived too late with their water canons. Water! Now where did that come from we wondered and had the water been treated or was this yet another diabolical plot to rid the country of these troublesome Woza women. Imprisonment doesn't stop them from coming out on the streets, why not spray them with cholera infected water? Is that possible even for Zanu PF, I wonder? I keep thinking about Didymus Mutasa's words when the SADC Tribunal found in favour of the 75 white farmers . "There is nothing special about the 75 farmers" he said. But there is something special about them, not because they are white but because they are human beings. It is that basic humanity that seems to have been lost in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe where people have become no more than pawns in his political power games and not even children are exempted. What other explanation is there for the government's decision today, Friday, to refuse visas to a group of French water specialists if it is not that President Sarkozy has joined the chorus of world leaders calling for Mugabe's ouster if necessary by military means?

Yours in the (continuing) struggle PH.