American Aid Is Seized in Zimbabwe

JOHANNESBURG: June 12th. (NY Times) — Zimbabwean authorities confiscated a truck loaded with 20 tons of American food aid for poor schoolchildren and ordered that the wheat and pinto beans aboard be handed out to supporters of President President Mugabe at a political rally instead, the American ambassador said Wednesday. “This government will stop at nothing, even starving the most defenseless people in the country — young children — to realize their political ambitions,” said the ambassador, James D. McGee, in an interview. The government ordered all humanitarian aid groups to suspend their operations last week, charging that some of them were giving out food as bribes to win votes for the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, in a June 27 presidential runoff against Mr. Mugabe.

But political analysts, aid workers and human rights groups contend that it is, in fact, Zimbabwe's governing party that has ruthlessly used food to reward supporters and punish opponents in a country where agricultural production has collapsed over the past decade and millions of people would go hungry each year without emergency assistance. The seizure of the truck laden with food aid is a case in point, Mr. McGee said. It occurred Friday in an area called Bambazonke near the town of Mutare in eastern Zimbabwe. The truck was hired by one of three nongovernmental organizations - CARE, Catholic Relief Services and World Vision — that form a consortium and contract with the United States Agency for International Development to distribute food aid in Zimbabwe. Its cargo of wheat, beans and vegetable oil was intended for 26 primary schools, American officials said, part of a school food program that provides hungry children with one solid meal a day.

Misheck Kagurabadza, a former mayor of Mutare and a newly elected member of Parliament from Manicaland Province, said the cutoff of food from aid groups was devastating. The government has a monopoly on buying corn, Zimbabwe’s main staple food, from farmers and will sell it only to those who hold ZANU-PF party cards, he contends. “The relief agencies stopped distribution of food a few days ago,” said Mr. Kagurabadza, one of many opposition leaders who have gone into hiding to avoid being beaten or arrested in a sweeping crackdown by ZANU-PF, the governing party. “I don’t know how we’ll survive until the next harvest.” The Famine Early Warning System, an operation that forecasts global hunger emergencies and is financed by Usaid, put out an alert on Thursday warning that Zimbabwe’s corn harvest this season is less than half of last year’s. The cereal production this season will amount to only a little over a quarter of the food needed to feed the country, it said.

Last year the United States, the world’s dominant food aid donor, provided about 175,000 tons of food to Zimbabwe, worth $171 million, American officials said. It already has about $96 million worth of food in the pipeline for Zimbabwe this year, with more on the way, they said. The food aid that was confiscated was on a truck that began its rounds last Thursday, but it had a mechanical breakdown and wound up seeking a safe haven by parking overnight at the Bambazonke police station, American officials said.. It had been a very eventful day. American diplomats who had gone to investigate political violence north of the capital were detained for five hours at a police roadblock after a six-mile car chase and threats to burn them alive in their vehicle, American officials said. That evening, a government released a letter ordering the suspension of all field operations by aid groups, but it reached many of the groups only last Friday — too late to head off the truck on its rounds.

At one of the schools, the truck’s driver, a Zimbabwean, was approached by police officers and war veterans led by an army colonel. They informed him that they had been sent by the governor of Manicaland Province, Tinaye Chigudu, and accused him of trying to bribe people with food, Mr. McGee said. “The group threatened the driver and forced him to return to the Bambazonke police station,” Mr. McGee said. In the meantime, Mr. Chigudu and other ZANU-PF officials organized a rally near the police station. There “the governor instructed the war veterans to distribute the food to ZANU-PF supporters at the rally right down the street,” Mr. McGee said. “Some police officers tried to intervene to stop the looting. The governor told them, ‘Stand down.’ Those were his exact words.” Mr. McGee said officials with the nongovernmental organization, which he declined to name publicly for fear it would be harassed, arrived within hours of the episode at the police station. They were not allowed into the station until the rally was over. They were not allowed to file a report either, but were instead referred to the Mutare rural district police headquarters. At that station, the officials told the police what had happened, but were not given a copy of any report to document their complaint. The food delivery waybills were confiscated, American officials said.

Wayne Bvudzijena, spokesman for Zimbabwe’s national police, did not respond to the substance of Mr. McGee’s charge when contacted on his cellphone on Wednesday, but instead contended there was no place named Bambazonke in Zimbabwe. “If you can go back to the honorable ambassador and verify your facts, madam,” Mr. Bvudzijena said, then disconnected the call. In an interview, Mr. Kagurabadza, the former mayor of nearby Mutare, confirmed that Bambazonke did exist. It also appears on a recent report of parliamentary constituencies by election monitors. But when the American ambassador, Mr. McGee, and Karen Freeman, the Usaid mission director in Zimbabwe, met Tuesday with a senior official at the Foreign Ministry, they were presented with a similar denial. Mr. McGee said the official told them, “I’ve never head of this place Bambazonke. Are you certain this even happened?” The ambassador added, “At the end of the argument, he promised he would look into the situation and get back to us.”
by Celia W. Dugger
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