Sleeping in the tall grass

How victims of the Zanu-PF countryside purge pass the night

Mercy Chiusaru is six years old. When I meet her she is settling down for the night in the tall grass by the side of a road in Muzarabani. It is a chilly night, and her father, Clever Chiusaru covers her with a thin sheet.

Her sister, Taizivel, aged eight, left the family farm to go to school that morning. Then the Zanu-PF militia arrived, and drove the family out. Taizivel hasn't been seen since.

Clever Chiusaru tells me:  "I don't know if I will ever see her again. I dare not go back to the farm - they will kill me."

Chiusaru voted MDC in the elections.

A few yards away Mbuya Manjazi, who is a frail 74, wraps herself in a threadbare towel before trying to sleep. She too was driven from her home.

"I don't have anywhere to go," she says, shivering visibly. "I have lived at the farm for my whole life. This cold will kill me tonight."

A few yards away Tendai Meza is crying. She is two months old, and has spent the day on her mother's back. Now she is tired and hungry.

Tendai's mother, Tracy, tells me: "Of course she is hungry. My breasts have no more milk for her. We have had nothing to eat today."

I count 60 people who will spend the night in the tall grass. Most of them want me to go away, in case I draw attention to them. They are very frightened.

This is Zimbabwe today. This is the country where we are asked to take part in the re-run of an election that has already been fairly won.

This is the country whose neighbouring states know how we suffer, but cling to ancient loyalties and do nothing to help.

This is the country where,despite vivid evidence of cruelty and murder, the United Nations refuses to intervene.

Tracy and baby Tendai, grandmother Mbuya Manjazi, and Clever Chiusaru and his daughter Mercy, are on their own in the tall grass tonight. And no-one knows if eight-year-old Taizivel Chiusaru is alive or dead.

Comments

[Alisdair Budd]

We know this already. And have been trying to do something.

Our charity is stolen by the ZRB fiddling wih NGO's foreign currency, and our protests are met with race hate, accusations of neo-colonialism and SA stating to the UN that we are interfering because Brown is the great Satan.

Only the people of SA can help you on the ground, and they are fighting Mbeki and the ANC, whilst the Angolans cover up their importing of arms.

Whilst SADC whitewash your suffering we try to remind you of how many White Europeans members of the Anti-Apartheid movemment they were and what they think now under their new name of Action for Southern Africa www.actsa.org .

We are still waiting for when the Black South African Govts, Zanu pf and Black fascists stop ranting about neo-colonialism from those who grew up in a country that didn't have an empire for all of my life;

And let us help, with what we have learned from the ethnic minorites in our mutlicultural society with the biggest Hindu temples and Buddhist Monasteries outside of Asia, for we are that ignorant.

And then the Zimbabwean bird will be a African Phoenix where the poor no longer hide from a Black govt that makes the Colonialists look good and no longer survive on roots and food aid whilst their MPs wave machine guns and drive Toyota 4WDs.