Given that President [should that read Dictator?] Mugabe has banned all foreign journalists it is near-enough impossible to find out what is really happening in Zimbabwe.
This week, Newsweek carries an article on what life is like inside Mugabe's near-enough collapsed country:
"In response to his critics who say Zimbabwe cannot much longer withstand the failed economy, the million percent a year hyper-inflation, the food and political and diplomatic crises, Robert Mugabe has defiantly said, "Countries don't collapse." So far he's been right; reports of his regime's imminent collapse are at least six years old now. Here in Bulawayo, the nation's second-largest city, there is at first glance proof of that. It's in a region plagued by drought, following a winter harvest in the southern Matabeleland region that nearly completely failed; unemployment is 85 percent, while relief groups with few exceptions have been ordered to cease their activities. And yet there are no crowds of hungry people on the streets, which are clean and tidy, nor even many beggars. It's something of an illusion, of course; there are no traffic jams because there's only scant traffic, and the chief forms of activity are lines, bread lines before every bakery, and bank lines in front of every bank. But still, you'd expect it to be far worse than it is, and somehow it doesn't seem to be.
Because Mugabe has banned all foreign journalists, I was obliged like many of my colleagues to make my way here by a route which I'm unable to specify, linking up with an underground network that has promised to make sure I can travel wherever I need to go in Zimbabwe. There is, so far as I know, not a single Western journalist here legally; and it's explicitly against Zimbabwean law for us to come. And though Western journalists are regularly rounded up and expelled, most are able to report in the country so long as they exercise reasonable care. In large part, that's because so many of Zimbabwe's people are fed up with Mugabe; polls taken before opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai pulled out of Friday's runoff election put him ahead 63 percent to 37 percent against the man who has ruled the country since its first free election in 1980. So in Bulawayo, one of the most impressive revelations is how easy it is to move around openly, even for a white foreigner, and even, so long as no police are around, to talk to people. Our contacts urge us to use cellphones only in coded text messages, or guarded voice calls, and on the Internet, resort to a secret e-mail service that disguises and encrypts messages, but it hardly seems necessary. We are fish, swimming in a friendly sea."
Read on here. It makes for devastating reading.
This week, Newsweek carries an article on what life is like inside Mugabe's near-enough collapsed country:
"In response to his critics who say Zimbabwe cannot much longer withstand the failed economy, the million percent a year hyper-inflation, the food and political and diplomatic crises, Robert Mugabe has defiantly said, "Countries don't collapse." So far he's been right; reports of his regime's imminent collapse are at least six years old now. Here in Bulawayo, the nation's second-largest city, there is at first glance proof of that. It's in a region plagued by drought, following a winter harvest in the southern Matabeleland region that nearly completely failed; unemployment is 85 percent, while relief groups with few exceptions have been ordered to cease their activities. And yet there are no crowds of hungry people on the streets, which are clean and tidy, nor even many beggars. It's something of an illusion, of course; there are no traffic jams because there's only scant traffic, and the chief forms of activity are lines, bread lines before every bakery, and bank lines in front of every bank. But still, you'd expect it to be far worse than it is, and somehow it doesn't seem to be.
Because Mugabe has banned all foreign journalists, I was obliged like many of my colleagues to make my way here by a route which I'm unable to specify, linking up with an underground network that has promised to make sure I can travel wherever I need to go in Zimbabwe. There is, so far as I know, not a single Western journalist here legally; and it's explicitly against Zimbabwean law for us to come. And though Western journalists are regularly rounded up and expelled, most are able to report in the country so long as they exercise reasonable care. In large part, that's because so many of Zimbabwe's people are fed up with Mugabe; polls taken before opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai pulled out of Friday's runoff election put him ahead 63 percent to 37 percent against the man who has ruled the country since its first free election in 1980. So in Bulawayo, one of the most impressive revelations is how easy it is to move around openly, even for a white foreigner, and even, so long as no police are around, to talk to people. Our contacts urge us to use cellphones only in coded text messages, or guarded voice calls, and on the Internet, resort to a secret e-mail service that disguises and encrypts messages, but it hardly seems necessary. We are fish, swimming in a friendly sea."
Read on here. It makes for devastating reading.
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